Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

WHEN I WAS ABOUT NINE OR TEN YEARS OLD, MY BLIND grandfather on my father’s side came to live with us. I recall him as a tall man who always walked with his back straight despite his blindness. From time to time, Nana would scream that soldiers were coming to get him, and my father would reply that he had soldiers stationed at the gate and at all four corners of the house. Nana was calmed by this reassurance for a while, but it didn’t take long for the entire ritual of alarm and reassurance to have to be repeated. With time, my siblings and I were put in charge of what we then thought was a fun game. We ran out of the house each time Nana had his anxiety attacks and came back with elaborate descriptions of what the guardian soldiers were wearing and what they told us to tell him.

Nana stayed with us for the better part of two years before returning to the coastal fishing village in which he had spent much of his life. He spoke of the sea with much fondness. Some time after his return to the village, a distraught messenger came bearing tragic news. Nana had been found hanging from a beam in his dark room. He had taken his own life.

It was only some twenty-five years later that I came to understand a little bit of what Nana must have been going through. I recalled that in those days, whenever he was in a good mood he would gather the children together and tell us stories. Often in telling them he broke spontaneously into song, his favorite of which we mistook for something from a folktale:

This with energetic swinging of his arms interspersed with booming commands to turn left, turn right, about turn, and stand at ease. My sisters and I marched delightedly to the song. It was only many years later that I realized that Nana had fought for the British in World War II and been sent to East Africa. When he came to live with us, and apparently from a long way back, he had been suffering from post–traumatic stress disorder. Being a mere soldier in the colonial army, Nana, like most other such soldiers, did not have the benefit of the diagnosis and treatment that European soldiers received. Rehabilitation for colonial war veterans was practically unheard of, and most veterans ended up being the responsibility of their families. Thus Nana’s anxiety attacks were not just brought on by his blindness but by the fact that his darkened world was populated with traumatic images from the war.

It is my father, however, who provides the more complex enigma and trigger for my interest in literature and disability. His right leg was shorter than his left, and when he walked, his body leaned sharply to his right side and back. It was never clear to us what the cause of the limp might have been, and being from a culture that never discussed impairments for fear of causing offence, we never spoke about it. He never told us about it either, but we learned from other members of the family that he had suffered a nasty accident in his childhood and broken a bone in his thigh, which had set badly. This accounted for his unusual gait.

My father was unusual in other respects too. After the breakup of his marriage to my mother when I was about seven years old, he became a fugitive from matrimony, a condition that several women tried to cure him of with no appreciable success. He was universally acknowledged to be a strange man. He had a ferocious temper that often flared up unpredictably. He was also the only man I know of his generation who regularly went out to the market to buy foodstuffs for cooking at home. He was an indifferent cook, but he took the feeding of his children very seriously. Many a time my two sisters and I were roped into the kitchen to be engaged in collective attempts at divining whether the food was actually cooked or merely edible without causing food poisoning. The debates were often inconclusive, the idea being that the proof of the cooking had to be in the eating itself. My own love of cooking dates from this period, when I often saw my father “steering” fufu with one hand while trying desperately to keep the soup placed precariously on the coal fire from boiling over. Yet it was really my father’s incredible flair for storytelling that defined for good or ill the way in which I was to remember him. Often, on a Saturday evening, he would invite the children on our street for a meal of fufu and fish or meat soup, after which would follow the most amazing and colorful stories. Many of these featured Ananse, the trickster spider of Akan folktales, along with ghostly sasabonsam tales and a variety of stories from other traditions. He leavened all his stories with a good number of parables, jokes, and moral puzzles. Later on, we children came to realize that his diehard optimism sometimes led him to confuse fact with fiction in real life, thus making it difficult to know whether he was really serious or just making things up. With time I came to see him as existing in his own fantastic story, in which he was sometimes the epic hero and sometimes the victim of others’ machinations.

Sometimes, the stories provided him the opportunity to give us a memorable take on what passed for the ordinary. One such instance that I remember quite clearly occurred when I was about eleven or twelve years old, just before I began attending secondary school. He often took us on walks. Sometimes we all went together, but at other times he took one or the other of us three for a treat. This time it was my turn. We started kicking a particular stone. He kicked it, and I kicked it; he kicked it, and I kicked it. After about ten minutes of this, he asked me, quite unexpectedly, “How old do you think that little stone is?” I was taken completely by surprise, having never thought of a stone as having an age before. But then followed the most breathtaking story of the formation of the earth, of volcanoes and avalanches, of magma and igneous rocks. The lesson: every stone you kick has come a very long way, both geographically and in terms of time. I have never looked at a stone the same way since.

My father was also an avid reader of all things written. These included newspapers, Buddhist texts, novels, women’s magazines, refrigerator manuals, and Shakespeare. There was no knowing what he would be found reading next. This meant that reading became a natural part of the domestic environment in which we grew up and also that our early reading was completely eclectic. I used to spend many secret afternoons after school in his bedroom, rifling through his books and documents. He also had a peculiar talent for picking quarrels, both on his own behalf and on behalf of others. This frequently led to impassioned letters to various civil-service departments. Being a civil servant himself, he had mastered what I later came to recognize as a peculiar form of “bureaucratese,” but one which he often personalized with the odd literary inflection from his varied reading. For a while, he was with the Ghanaian Foreign Service, having to leave it as part of the purge of the service that was undertaken by the government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A period of uncertainty followed, during which he launched a massive and ultimately successful challenge to his dismissal. He was reinstated after five or so years, but to a different branch of the civil service, and he spent many years as a dutiful upholder of its values. He was a model of efficiency and also highly competitive by nature. Dad took early retirement in the late 1980s and relocated to Brazil, where he had enjoyed a pleasant Foreign Service posting earlier on and where I had spent a part of my childhood with my very young siblings. He spoke impeccable Brazilian Portuguese and had so fallen in love with the country that he decided to spend the rest of his productive life among the people he so loved and admired.

The first immediate trigger for my interest in representations of disability in writing and culture came with an innocent question asked by Jo Emeney, a student taking a set of supervisions (tutorials) with me on postcolonial literature at Cambridge. This was in the 1995–1996 academic year. After six weeks of supervisions, she mused aloud as to why nearly all the texts I had assigned for discussion had disabled characters in them. Her question came to me as a complete surprise, for the simple reason that I had not noticed the disabled characters myself. I reread the texts, and sure as anything, they were populated with disabled figures in casual and not-so-casual roles. Moreover, figures that did not initially appear as disabled suddenly took on a more significant hue when read through a prism of disability. This fascinated me greatly. I had been trained in a tradition of close reading, so the obvious question that struck me was what could account for my blindness to the presence of these characters. As I began research for the project, I also began to think more and more about my father and grandfather. My interest at this time was not so much to learn how they got their impairments as it was in finding out how they felt being persons with disability in a culture that did not speak about disability as such. This was even more pertinent to understanding my father than my grandfather. Several questions I wanted to ask him pressed themselves on my mind: What was it like growing up in a coastal fishing village where a particular form of masculinity and masculine prowess was the norm (swimming, fishing, weaving nets, and so on) when, as far as I could ascertain, he did not even know how to swim? What was it like going to school in the 1940s and 1950s and imagining oneself as one of the inheritors of the independent nation when there were so many subtle and not-so-subtle prejudices against people with disability? Why was he so absolutely driven and such a perfectionist in all things? And why did he sometimes surrender to sputtering anger when he felt himself contradicted on what seemed to everyone else quite minor details? And what about women? What did he think women thought about him that made him such a difficult person to please? In short, what did it feel like to be a highly intelligent and articulate man with a physical impairment in a postcolonial African setting that promised opportunities to its elites but that implicitly conceived of these elites as “perfect” beings without physical blemishes?

Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to ask my father the many questions that swirled through my mind. He suffered a massive heart attack and died in Rio de Janeiro in May 1996. This was during my first year as a Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge. The impulse behind writing this book is to pose to the universe the inchoate but pressing questions I had wanted to ask him. To answer them, I have had to go through a diverse and varied corpus of texts and ideas, for even though I see my father in every person with disability I meet, I also know that each person perfects their own inflections of how to negotiate the fact of impairment; they each bear the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (one of my father’s favorite lines) within the world that shapes and often misunderstands them.