Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

ON JULY 6, 2006, THE CENTRE FOR DEMOCRATIC DEVELOPMENT (CDD) in Accra organized a public lecture as part of events to celebrate the passing of Ghana’s Persons with Disability Act. It had taken twelve years of active work by various disability advocacy groups and the CDD to get the relevant parliamentary committee to consider the bill. It had been a long struggle full of unanticipated twists and turns. Chaired by renowned Ghanaian Professor of Linguistics Kwesi Yankah and arranged under the general rubric of “Language and Attitudinal Change: Beyond Disability Legislation,” the event gave me the opportunity to share some of my work with a mixed audience composed of members of the Ghana Federation of the Disabled and various disability advocacy groups in the country as well the Parliamentary Committee on Employment, Social Welfare, and State Enterprises, the media, and people with familial interest in disability issues.

My talk focused mainly on outlining the salience of insights from the social model of disability and linking these to a discussion of the endemic cultural and linguistic attitudes that had served to demean persons with disability and often render them either invisible or easily assimilable to negative cultural and social stereotypes in the country. Among Ghanaians in general, three elements have underpinned such negative attitudes. First is the cultural correlation drawn between notions of physical wholeness, beauty, and cultural status. In Akan culture, for example, it is often insisted that an aspiring chief or queenmother must be one “without blemish.” This translates into an infrangible barrier against persons with disability ever becoming chiefs or queenmothers irrespective of their other cultural qualifications. It is also not unknown for families with persons with disability to suffer in the marriage market because of the stigma attached to severe impairments. The second element underpinning such cultural attitudes is the link drawn between bodily wholeness and economic autonomy. In a city such as Accra, this idea is given visible propping by the fact that the vast bulk of beggars on intersections and street corners are persons with various kinds of disability, thus making the link between the two almost natural in the minds of the nondisabled. Indeed, a local Akan saying, “e ti se bafa ne fom” (it is like the cripple [sic] and the ground), which is used to convey the inseparability between two entities, derives from the observation that persons with severe motor impairments are often seen dragging themselves on the ground, begging for alms at street corners and elsewhere. Thus the impairments are naturalized as part of the social landscape and given validation through the implicit prejudice contained in such sayings. Another Akan proverb, recalled to the audience by Kwesi Yankah, has it that “Onyakopon nim odwan a o be ye dwan tro enti na omaa no eni baako” (God knew the goat that would be a bully, that is why he gave him only one eye). This proverb suggests that disability is an insignia of moral deficit and is a signal of divine providence in providing a warning for the nondisabled. Again, the process of negative stereotyping is impossible to miss. The third pertinent factor underlining attitudes toward disability in Ghana is the quick and unexamined connection that is often made between disability and an invisible metaphysical order of things. Sometimes this has an unusual articulation, such as when nondisabled people going to engage in a major business deal stop to give alms to a disabled beggar with the injunction to “bring me luck.” In other words, it is okay to extend a few pesewa of charity to a disabled beggar so long as that guarantees the success of a major project for the person extending the charity. The disabled beggar is thus seen as a talisman of fortune that may also be blamed for the collapse of good luck in such an eventuality. As we saw in chapter 1, all the foregoing attitudes have been pertinent to how persons with disability have been treated in various cultures. The interesting thing in the Ghanaian scene is how the particular collocation of such attitudes had combined to frustrate the passage of a comprehensive Disabilities Act for so long.

The occasion at the CDD was celebratory but also quite sober, for the questions that followed the talk showed that there were various areas that despite having been covered by the Act would need a great deal of cultural sensitivity to be fully actualized. What were mothers with disabled children to do when their neighbors accused them of witchcraft, for example? Sections 4 and 39 of the Act make discriminatory treatment and derogatory remarks against persons with disability a criminal act punishable by a fine, a stint in prison, or both. But how was this provision to be implemented when accusations of witchcraft were directed at anyone that appeared socially marginal, such as old women, children brought into households as servants, and cultural outsiders, as well as persons with impairments? How could accusations of witchcraft against disabled persons be separated from the social containment and disciplinary implications of such accusations that derive from the severe incoherences of the sociocultural realm in the first place? What about disability conscientization of public servants? Were they all obliged to know about the social model of disability? The Act stipulated that public workers in the education, health delivery, and police sectors would be educated and sensitized on disability issues. But what about the judicial system, as one questioner interrupted in the course of the discussion. What about the judge who was to set an interpretative precedent on a delicate disability-related case that might have implications for the future implementation of provisions of the Act? What about chiefs? Yes, the chiefs who, through the regional and national Houses of Chiefs had historically wielded so much influence on both cultural and political questions? Was it not time for the chiefs to be brought to acknowledge that they had been unwitting guardians of prejudice toward disabled persons? These and other questions made for a very lively debate and served to show that the treatment of disability issues was of major concern to a wide range of people in Ghanaian society.

I kept asking myself both then and afterward: what is the relation between Aesthetic Nervousness and an occasion such as this, between a discussion of the representation of disability in literature and the condition of the lives of disabled persons on the streets of the city where I grew up? What, in short, is the point? A subtle turn in Tobin Siebers’ The Ethics of Criticism (1988) helps shed some light on what the point might be. He writes, concerning violence:

It is the force of Siebers’ unremitting impulse to demonstrate how literary theory and criticism cannot be separated from ethical questions that makes his book so attractive to me. And yet, as I have tried to show throughout Aesthetic Nervousness, the ethical core that disability implies within literary representation is rarely if ever clearly evident on casual reading. It is only a rigorous set of reading practices alive to the implications of disability that would help to give space to that ethical core. Each chapter in the study has been an illustration of what such a reading practice might look like. Among other things, it entails reading disability not as a discrete entity within the literary aesthetic domain, but as part of the totality of textual representation. In this totality, everything is linked to everything else such that in isolating a detail of disability for analysis we take it not merely as a particular detail, but as a threshold that opens up to other questions of a textual and also ethical kind. Often, this threshold effect is also the precise point at which the short-circuiting of the dominant protocols of representation reveal itself. Thus disability-asthreshold is also a signifier of textual tension. In my critical practice I have given different names to this threshold feature of disability: fulcrum, pivot, radiating point. Thus in the chapter on Toni Morrison I showed how disability acted as the hinge upon which various textual negotiations in her work take place. It is with respect to Morrison’s work also that we saw the necessity for delaying final judgment on the status of disability, given the insistent invitation in her work for us to always anticipate alternatives in coming to any such judgment.

The delay in passing judgment, however, must not be taken as an excuse to defer such judgment indefinitely, for ethical questions hinge even on the process of delay. Thus it is that in discussing Samuel Beckett I suggested that the play of negation and deferral implied in his writing might be seen as being constructed around an absence, an absence discernable in the ambiguous status he gives to pain in his work. For pain, as we noted, requires a witness for its epistemological verification. All the many slips of language, the talking at cross-purposes, and the difficulties in establishing a clear frame of reference for his many impaired characters ultimately hide the fact that they ought to be in pain but are patently not. The identification of this absence of pain essentially means that we are reading against the logic of his texts themselves so as to discover where their ethical implications might reside. With the range and nuance of Beckett, this reading against the grain also means reading his work not as autonomous and disconnected from the real, but as part of the construction of reality, despite its strenuous efforts at distancing and detachment from any putative reality.

The unknotting of Beckett’s textual turgidities is also pertinent to a reading of Wole Soyinka, despite the fact that he has always been one of the most explicitly political writers in African literature. For in Soyinka we saw how the force of ritual served to assimilate the disabled characters in his work to a domain of the metaphysical, thus leading to a gap being instituted between ritual and politics in the writing. Yet this gap is shown to be unsustainable, since his disabled characters are as much implicated in the process of the denomination of violence and victimhood as they are themselves objects of such violence. Their ritualization is then also a process of their romanticization as avatars of superior insight not dissimilar to the playwright’s own. In this instance, the reading of disability in the work of such a highly political writer was designed to show how central disability is to his political project. This serves to correct the heavy emphasis that has been placed on the Ogun cycle in commentary on his work.

J. M. Coetzee’s writing acted as a means of tying together various critical vectors that had been opened up in the three earlier writers. Of particular note is the concept of the skeptical interlocutor, first introduced in the discussion on Beckett but later elaborated in Morrison and Soyinka. For Coetzee also allowed us to raise a critical theoretical point about the nature of narrative as such: what is the link between speech and silence when silence is practically abrogated by the very ontological nature of writing? And what does it then mean when, in reading an autistic character, we are invited by the nature of narrative to read echoes into their elective silence via our shifting identification with the implied interlocutor, which is an inescapable aspect of narrative as such? How do we know when the autist is being spoken for? Thus, though the study by no means followed a teleological trajectory, it still managed to foreground a steady cluster of issues that seemed to be incrementally repeated by the various writers and that allowed particularly productive theoretical insights for the nature of narrative to be drawn from the work of Coetzee.

The shift to Robben Island and the lives of various disabled persons that had dotted its history was designed to show how much features of a critical literary reading might be used for understanding disability issues in a nonliterary context. But in this chapter, the other, larger objective was to animate these historical personages and to imagine what it might have been like to have suffered prejudice that was produced at the intersection of colonialism, class, disability, and, in the case of Krotoa, gender. How, in other words, might a reading of the fertile history of a place such as Robben Island generate a radically different perspective when pursued from the coupling of literary disability studies and history as opposed to plain history?

These and the many other questions that arose over the course of Aesthetic Nervousness help us ponder what its relationship might be to disability issues in places such as Ghana and elsewhere. For me, what emerged quite clearly from the deliberations at the CDD event was that language and cultural stereotypes are the most deadly instruments for denying the humanity of people. To provide the tools for unmasking the essentially violent dimensions of such stereotypes from a close reading of literary texts is to go some way toward at least rectifying the attitudes behind such stereotyping practices. More important, it helps to show that our ultimate obligation as literary critics must be addressing the particularities of injustice of the world in which we live. Abstractions may be necessary to school our moral sense, but in the final instance it is the nature of the social world we imagine and work for that validates our ethical dispositions. Let me close with the opening paragraph from Siebers’ book, pausing