Disability Memoirs Have a New Purpose
Helen Keller opens her 1903 autobiography with a confession. “It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life,” the deafblind author admits. She wants to avoid imposing a sense of “fantasy” on the events that shaped her: Though any memoirist might wrestle with how to accurately recount the past, Keller also likely knew that readers expected an inspiring tale of a young woman surmounting adversity by sheer force of will.
This is indeed how Keller’s The Story of My Life—one of the first and most influential memoirs of disability—and numerous personal narratives since have been packaged and sold. As a result, Keller gained a reputation as a “paragon of cheerfulness and industry,” writes the blind scholar Georgina Kleege, who grew up despising the disabled icon. But she eventually had a revelation: “It occurred to me,” Kleege writes to Keller in Blind Rage, “that I should not hold you responsible for the use others made of your life story.”
Writing about disability can be fraught, not least because the category is so broad, an expansive umbrella under which many disparate conditions may fall. Despite the variety of experiences they catalog, disability memoirs have often been marketed and read for narrow purposes—as dutiful tools of education or empathy building. The most visible books tend to fit one of two molds: inspirational stories of overcoming (whose subtitles might include words such as conquered, hope, or resilience) or activist calls to action (see: fight and ableism). They seem intended mostly to make disability more palatable and coherent.
[Read: Society tells me to celebrate my disability. What if I don’t want to?]
That’s changing. In the past several years, a new kind of memoirist has emerged, transforming and advancing the genre. In pathbreaking books such as Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind, a rigorously researched and reported account of progressive visual impairment, and Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty, a profoundly philosophical travelogue about moving through the world with a visible and sometimes painful disability, readers can see authors thinking on the page: asking questions and wrestling with ideas, plumbing the past and probing their own minds.
By taking this searching approach, writers can more fully capture the experience of disability—its gradations and contradictions, its gifts and its burdens. Such recent works are, in other words, memoirs of ambivalence, in which imperfect narrators don’t overcome impairment but learn to coexist with it, however uneasily. Further, these books present disabled experience as worthy of study and analysis, and deserving of the same care and attention that any literary work demands.
The slipperiness of disabled identity—and the inadequacy of so many categories that define people—is the subject of a new entry in this growing canon, Raymond Antrobus’s The Quiet Ear. The British poet’s account of growing up and, later, growing into his deaf identity works to untangle his knotty relationship to his hearing impairment, which is both partial and, by nature, invisible. If Antrobus overcomes anything in the course of the memoir, it’s not the specific challenges of living with deafness but the shame that had long festered around his condition.
Antrobus wasn’t diagnosed as deaf until he was 7 years old, when his mother “bought a large, exceptionally loud, cream-colored telephone” and discovered that its shrill rings were imperceptible to her son. He recalls taking a test that “revealed the hidden nuance of my hearing”—namely that he was “missing” high-pitched sounds: alarms and whistles, teakettles and birdsong, the spoken sounds sh, ch, ba, and th. He was largely able to pass as hearing, even if it meant pretending to register more than he could. The ruse often landed Antrobus in hot water; as a teenager, it cost him both a girlfriend and a job. He had been fitted with hearing aids when he was first diagnosed as deaf but disliked wearing them, and often opted not to.
Antrobus tracks his childhood attitude toward his deafness by referring back to an old diary, which he regards as a record of his own denial amid the pressure to conform. (According to that diary, he feared that his hearing aids marked him—and marred him—as “disabled.”) But an early journal entry, from an 11-year-old Antrobus, undoes that perception: “I really can’t hear and no one seems to be adjusting to my needs,” he acknowledged, lamenting that “people think I’m faking.” Like Leland and Jones, who frequently find themselves manhandled and patronized by passersby, Antrobus considers how the actions and assumptions of others pose a bigger threat to his dignity than his deafness does.
Antrobus spent years living in the borderland separating the worlds of the deaf and the hearing, able to sign only “basic” British Sign Language with his deaf peers while struggling to comprehend his hearing ones without accommodation. This alienating sense of in-betweenness also extended to his racial identity. As the light-skinned son of a Black Jamaican father and a white British mother, he knew what it meant to pass in more ways than one. Just as he felt unable to fully lay claim to being deaf or hearing, Antrobus writes, “I had no stable view of my race either, but I picked up on the anxiety my racial ambiguity caused others and played into whatever perception kept me safest; black, white, whatever they wanted to see.” Time and again, the available binaries failed him, but he still felt forced to “pick a side.”
The simple act of writing about one’s disability also can feel like picking a side. And in doing so, Antrobus rightly observes, one risks becoming an object of “pity and tokenism.” As a young poet, he avoided writing about his deafness “for fear of being simplified and pigeonholed.” This apprehension dogs many disabled writers. Disability is just one facet of who we are, but when we write publicly about it, it seems to become all we are. Just as the young Antrobus figured that wearing hearing aids would define his identity in the eyes of others, he knew that writing about deafness ran the risk of “limiting my potential crossover appeal to the mainstream world.”
This new generation of disabled memoirists isn’t interested in pleasing the “mainstream,” even if their works inevitably broach the universal quandary of what it means to be human. Instead, they ask hard questions with thorny answers. In The Country of the Blind, for instance, Leland considers what it means to be a sexual being in the absence of visual stimuli, or to be a father whose capabilities as a protector are limited. In Easy Beauty, Jones confronts how a lifetime of ableist encounters has inculcated her with a cynical detachment that she worries might rub off on her son. Antrobus, for his part, sensitively surveys the challenges and privileges that come with having an often-invisible disability.
The Quiet Ear lacks the intellectual rigor and finely wrought prose of Leland and Jones’s memoirs, as well as other works such as Jan Grue’s I Live a Life Like Yours and Emily Rapp Black’s Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. But the tact and tenderness with which Antrobus writes about his wounded younger self and his deaf coming-of-age make the memoir a notable addition to the subgenre.
All of these books, in one way or another, quietly undermine assumptions that some readers may bring to them. Antrobus does this in the very first scene of The Quiet Ear, when a journalist brusquely asks him how he’s able to talk if he’s deaf—a “question,” he writes, that “felt like an indictment.” Throughout the book, he pushes against commonly held notions of what hearing impairments look like and stresses that deafness, like all disability, is “an experience rather than a trauma.”
[Read: I’m disabled. Please help me.]
Disability follows no narrative arc, has no inherent meaning, confers no moral high ground, and is meted out at random. This is perhaps not the story some readers want; they may go searching for a neater one. The deafblind poet John Lee Clark once joked in an interview that playing the “Helen Keller Card” is one way to bring people to his work. “I am aware that some readers come to my work for ‘wrong’ reasons,” he said. “Instead of fighting against this, I work with it in the hope that they will soon have better reasons to like my work.” At one point in The Quiet Ear, Antrobus looks to his fellow disabled writers, poets, and artists and wonders “who might we be if we lived in a world of understanding ourselves first” rather than trying to perform for others. We cannot control how others perceive us, but we can at least read ourselves closely and carefully.