For all its famous compatibility with solitude, reading remains a deeply social act; becoming a writer can expand this convivial, networked aspect of reading. This feeling grew in me at the end of 2022, when I was finishing the editorial process on my first book and beginning the hypersocial process of promoting it. I interviewed Namwali Serpell about her incredible novel The Furrows at Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Mass. That evening, Namwali introduced me to her fiancé, Jesse McCarthy, whose essay collection’s title, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, was arresting enough to make it the first book I read in 2023.
So much about McCarthy’s essays struck me, beginning with his “Note on Style and Usage,” which explains why he chose to lowercase “black” (contrary to many contemporary style guides) in his book. “I believe the spirit of the people resides in the word—majuscule or not—as long as it is used wisely, considerately, and with care,” McCarthy wrote. As I read, I was in the midst of finalizing the text on my own book, which included a contentious decision (at least among blind cognoscenti) to lowercase braille. (After publication, one blind podcaster gently chided me on this point—“that was disappointing,” he said). I was reading McCarthy’s book with a screen reader, which is to say my ears, and thus the orthographic-aesthetic politics of his prose were largely lost on me. If I’d read it in braille, the lower-case would have been legible.
McCarthy’s essays are in conversation with (and, indeed, extend) what he calls “the long and distinguished tradition of black criticism, black thought, and since 1968, of Black studies.” This phrase—black thought—suggested another parallel with my own work: can there be such a thing, I wondered, as blind thought? The phrase—like “blind cognoscenti,” above—will unfortunately strike many readers as paradoxical at best. Blindness (like blackness) is historically far more likely to be equated with ignorance than anything resembling a distinguished intellectual tradition. But the research and reporting I’d been engaged in for the last few years had introduced me to a rich and understudied body of blind inquiry. As I inched closer to publication, I found myself in touch with an active community of blind intellectuals: Georgina Kleege, whose books (particularly Sight Unseen and More Than Meets the Eye) I have returned to again and again as models for writing about blindness and culture; M. Leona Godin, whose 2021 There Plant Eyes feels like a sibling—or perhaps a brilliant, generous aunt—in conversation with my own personal and cultural history of blindness; Stephen Kuusisto, whose 2006 memoir Eavesdropping carried me through a difficult week with its joyful, lyrical, meticulous attention to sonic detail.
I stomped in delight when I learned that the DeafBlind writer John Lee Clark’s How to Communicate was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award in poetry, securing his place as our nation’s tactile poet laureate; the poems, which do many things, are especially good on the hidden affordances of touch all around us (“How about the sun smiling / In my hair”?).
Clark is absurdly productive, and this year he also published Touch the Future, an absolutely pathbreaking collection of essays. Like Jesse McCarthy, Clark places himself in an intellectual tradition of his forebears, and finds meaning in the stylistic minutia of how one’s identity is rendered on the page. In an essay on “A Brief History of Our Name,” Clark describes the debates in his community about how to render the word DeafBlind. After decades of work to jettison the damaging “mute” and “dumb” appendages, some in the DeafBlind community (which at that point was commonly rendered deaf-blind) wanted to follow the emergent capital-D Deaf culture, rendering the word Deafblind. But, Clark writes, “in this they were being too Deaf-minded. The idea of capitalization needed to be more finely filtered through our collective thought.” (Here I was again reminded of McCarthy’s black thought—another emergent and contested intellectual tradition.) Clark describes an electric scene of DeafBlind people at a town hall in Minnesota passionately arguing for how to describe themselves. Not just Deaf, but Blind, too, ought to be capitalized—and while they’re at it, it’s high time the hyphen be expunged. “By capitalizing it, are we establishing that ours is a cultural identity?” Clark asks. “Yes, but not because we have a textbook version of it.” DeafBlind thought and culture must distinguish itself from the traditions of Deaf and blind history. “By removing the hyphen, are we stressing that it’s not deaf plus blind but something more?” Clark asks. “Yes,” he concludes, “but not because ‘more’ means ‘worse.’”
In recent years, there’s been an explosion of writing by blind and other disabled people; this year I also read superb books by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, James Tate Hill, Greg Marshall, John Cotter, remy yergau, Eric Garcia, and Alice Wong. In each of these cases, the author has control over how they’re described, down to the level of punctuation and capitalization. These fine details may seem like the domain of the style guide, but as Clark and McCarthy demonstrate, the miniscule can express majuscular ideas about identity and value. “Language,” Orwell wrote, is “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” In increasing numbers, disabled writers are seizing the controls of that instrument, and recalibrating them for our own ends.
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