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CHAPTER 1
METAPHOR AND MATERIALITY
Disability and Neo–Slave Narratives
"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm" (Butler, Kindred 9). Octavia E. Butler's Kindred opens with this line, with the amputated arm of a speaker whose gender, race, sexuality, class, and other identities are not yet known. What readers first know about the narrator of Kindred is that they are a disabled person.
In her analysis of the opening of the novel, Katherine McKittrick writes that this lost arm is "hauntingly reminiscent of Sojourner Truth's working arms, through which Truth claimed her black femininity to white slave abolitionists" (35). McKittrick's connection between Kindred's narrator, Dana, and Sojourner Truth is apropos, but perhaps not — or not exclusively — in the way she intends. McKittrick connects Dana and Truth as two black women who experienced slavery and whose arms are a reflection of this experience: Truth's "working" arms and Dana's disabled one. "Working" here can be read as suggesting arms that are able to perform manual labor and arms that "work" in the sense of being able to function in the socially expected way. Dana's amputated arm could indeed be read as an allusion to Truth who infamously bared her arms and supposedly asked "Ain't I a woman?" in order to challenge the notion that women are weak and therefore undeserving of the vote. But Dana is also more literally similar to Truth in that they were both disabled. Truth's hand was disabled in an accident, and she often hid this hand in photos and paintings and never mentioned her injury in speeches (Minister). It is possible, therefore, to follow McKittrick's reading metaphorically and interpret Dana's missing, disabled, or non working arm as symbolic of Truth's visible, able, working arm that helped suffragists gain the right to vote. It is also possible to read the connection between Dana and Truth more literally and materially as two black women disabled in slavery. Is it possible, however, to read disability in Kindred as simultaneously metaphor and materiality?
In this chapter, I argue that disability can take on both metaphorical and material meaning in a text — an argument that provides an important foundation for the entirety of this book. Reading for both the metaphorical and material significance of disability in a text allows us to trace the ways discourses of (dis)ability, race, and gender do not merely intersect at the site of multiply marginalized people, but also how these systems collude or work in place of one another. In this chapter, I argue that within the historical and cultural context of American slavery, ableism worked for racist ends against all black people, not merely the ones disabled in ways we would now consider disability. Understanding how the collusion of oppressions plays out in various historical and cultural moments — and the representations which emerge from or about these moments — is key to integrating disability into black feminist theory and vice versa. For these reasons, then, this broad theoretical argument about reading disability as both metaphor and materiality is foundational to this book's specific arguments about how black women's speculative fiction reimagines body minds and changes the rules of interpretation as well as its larger intervention into my two main fields of research.
By making this argument about interpreting disability metaphors, I challenge the "methodological distancing" from disability that occurs in much scholarship on black women's writing (and on racial and ethnic literatures generally) through critical interpretation of disability as metaphor (Mitchell and Snyder 2). I also, however, critique the disability studies position against most metaphorical uses of disability. I argue that refusing to read disability as a metaphor ignores the mutual constitution of (dis)ability, race, and gender as social categories and cultural discourses which have material effects on people's lives. Reading disability as both metaphor and materiality, therefore, is essential to a black feminist disability studies approach to analyzing texts, especially those produced by people of color. Using the history of slavery as my example, I contend that scholars must read representations of disability in neo–slave narratives as constitutive of both the discursive use of (dis)ability to justify the enslavement of black people and the physically and mentally disabling repercussions of racism for black subjects in the antebellum period and beyond. I argue that neo–slave narratives allow for an understanding of the representation of disability as simultaneously material experience and as metaphor for other mutually constitutive and intersectional experiences of oppression, both in the past and today. I develop these arguments through an analysis of Butler's Kindred.
Kindred is the story of Dana Franklin, a twenty-six-year-old black woman living in California in 1976. While moving into her new home with her white husband, Kevin, Dana feels dizzy and is inexplicably pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland where a young white boy is drowning. Dana saves the child only to be threatened by his father with a gun, the sight of which causes Dana to pass out and return to 1976. Throughout the novel this pattern continues: whenever Rufus Weylin, whom readers eventually learn is Dana's great-great-grandfather, feels his life is in danger, Dana gets pulled back in time; whenever Dana feels her life is at risk, she inexplicably returns to 1976. This bond is complicated by the fact that despite Rufus's position as a slave-owner and future rapist of Dana's black great-great-grandmother, Alice, whom she befriends, Dana feels she cannot kill Rufus or allow him to die before the birth of Alice's daughter, Hagar, who will continue Dana's family line. To do so would potentially alter the future and risk the lives of Dana and her forbearers, according to the time travel logic to which Dana adheres.
In what follows, I first provide an overview of the neo–slave narrative genre, especially in regard to nonrealism and (dis)ability. Second, I discuss how disability studies scholars have critiqued metaphors of disability before then arguing for the importance of historicizing metaphors, especially in regard to race. In this second section I also survey the historical relationship of (dis)ability and slavery in order to provide the foundation for my literary analysis. In the third section, I examine how disability in Kindred has been previously interpreted and then go on to provide my own reading of the text, one that acknowledges the metaphorical power of disability as well as the more concrete meanings and implications of disability in the book. Finally, in the conclusion, I reemphasize that representations of disability must be read as metaphorical and material in an overlapping fashion, an argument that provides a theoretical foundation on which I build later arguments in this book. This proposed approach is important for analyzing the relationship of (dis)ability, race, and gender, especially in black women's literature and literature from other marginalized groups.
The Neo–Slave Narrative Genre
In order to understand the neo–slave narrative, one must first understand traditional slave narratives as the genre which neo–slave narratives respond to, revise, and expand on. Traditional slave narratives were texts written by former slaves with the specific purpose of trying to convince readers to oppose slavery. Narrators of these texts attempted to do this by insisting on the humanity of black people and revealing the inhumanity of the slave system. In order to achieve this goal, slave narratives were typically preceded by letters of support from white benefactors who assured readers that the writer was a truthful person who indeed wrote or dictated the story on their own. In the narratives themselves, former slave authors often avoided topics which would upset or offend readers, gesturing toward the horrors of slavery without providing too much detail. Ultimately, slave narratives were used to support abolition and encourage others to support it as well. They were not intended to be particularly literary or radical because their central purpose would be undermined by such qualities. Many authors of neo–slave narratives based their work on slave narratives and other historical records of slavery. Butler's papers at the Huntington Library reveal that she read numerous historical monographs about slavery and the antebellum South as well as the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Charles Ball, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Tubman (Octavia E. Butler Papers, "OEB 274," 1975; "OEB 3036," 1993).
I use the term neo–slave narrative to refer to a broad range of post-Emancipation fictionalized representations of slavery. Unlike traditional slave narratives, which sought to use consciously constructed personal narratives to promote the abolitionist cause, neo–slave narratives are often viewed as attempts to recover or rediscover aspects of slaves' experiences that were not included in traditional slave narratives. Neo–slave narratives, therefore, use history to (re)construct experiences of slavery and affectively (re)connect contemporary individuals to slavery in ways that the less literary, nongraphic, and highly pragmatic traditional slave narratives often cannot. Despite this recovery element, neo–slave narratives also recognize that due to the marginalized position of slaves and lack of access to independent publishing and education, traditional historical methods of archival research do not necessarily produce new information. As Madhu Dubey argues, neo–slave narratives "situate themselves against history, suggesting that we can best comprehend the truth of slavery by abandoning historical modes of knowing" ("Speculative Fictions of Slavery" 784). In fact, many neo–slave narratives blur fact and fiction in order to comment on and challenge our ability to read any history of slavery — including slave narratives — as unadulterated truth, encouraging us instead to consider history, especially histories of marginalized people, as inherently partial, flawed, and filtered through human interpretation. The use of metaphor and nonrealism are both essential to this counter- (rather than anti-) historical task of the neo–slave narrative genre.
Since the publication of Kindred in 1979, which "set the tone for much subsequent fiction about slavery," this reconstructive task of reading against the historical grain is often performed through a variety of nonrealist devices, including the disruption of traditional linear narrative, ghost stories, and time travel (Ryan 18). The change to nonrealist representations of slavery is an important difference between neo–slave narratives and traditional slave narratives because the traditional narratives relied on realism to underscore the authenticity, truthfulness, and trustworthiness of the narrative and narrator. Hayden White writes that both history and fiction depend on the distinction between the real and the imaginary. She contends that in order for a text, like a traditional slave narrative, to be understood as true and real in modern discourse, it must "possess the character of narrativity" (H. White 10). As a result of this connection between traditional forms of narrative and truth, our notions of the real, both in historical and fictional texts, depend on concepts of continuity, chronology, and causality. Neo–slave narratives, however, use speculative fictional devices to refuse traditional narrative modes and thus also reject traditional notions of what constitutes the real. These literary devices that disrupt temporality and narrativity "are designed to convey certain truths about slavery that are inaccessible through the discipline of history" (Dubey, "Speculative Fictions of Slavery" 791). Speculative fictional neo–slave narratives therefore work to reclaim lost voices, to critique traditional historical methods associated with white, nondisabled men, and to use fiction and nonrealism to expose many of the untruths and absences of the historical record and cultural memory of slavery.
In addition to being nonrealist, contemporary neo–slave narratives also have a different relationship to (dis)ability than traditional slave narratives. Sherryl Vint writes that traditional "slave narratives aimed to show their black protagonists' humanity, they required the demonstration of bodily suffering to guarantee authenticity and to spur the reader into sympathy, yet they also needed to avoid reducing the narrating subject to his or her suffering body" ("'Only by Experience'" 244). The desire to demonstrate suffering without being reduced to such suffering in a traditional slave narrative depends on keeping the possibility of recovery, healing, and redemption (through the ending of slavery) open and viable. This distinction between the suffering, but recoverable black subject versus the suffering black subject reduced to a suffering (and thus irrecoverable) bodymind can be read as a distinction between nondisabled and disabled black people. Here, only a nondisabled slave narrator presents the possibility of recouping black subjects by ending slavery because the suffering and otherwise disabling circumstances are represented as solely resulting from the slave system. A disabled narrator could easily be interpreted by readers as evidence of the permanent damage done to black people by slavery (or their inherent inabilities regardless of enslavement or not) and the impossibility of incorporating black people into full citizenship, a concept that is traditionally imbued with assumptions of ability. A traditional slave narrative could not, therefore, fully detail the violence of slavery, which disabled so many people without jeopardizing its pragmatic purpose.
In the antebellum period, a slave narrator could not, within the discursive limits of that sociopolitical context, make a claim to rationality, morality, and citizenship while also claiming disability. Since disability and intellectual and moral capacity were viewed in opposition, even if an author had a disability it would not be represented in a traditional slave narrative as central to their personhood or experience. The two major exceptions to this representational absence are, one, when disability is represented as an effect of slavery on another person who is not the author and is then used as an example of the evils of the slave system, and, two, when disability is represented with the narrator, but cured, erased, or overcome in freedom. Even then, however, such representations had to be limited since emphasizing the disablement of black people at large could, once again, limit collective group claims to the rationality, morality, and citizenship denied black subjects during this period. Contemporary neo–slave narratives do not have the same pragmatic, discursive, or editorial limits and are therefore able to represent disability both as part of the reality of slavery and as a central aspect of an individual's lived bodymind experience. In addition to Kindred, other neo–slave narratives that represent disability include Alex Haley's Roots, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Edward P. Jones's The Known World, James McBride's Song Yet Sung, and Marie-Elena John's Unburnable. Despite the fact that disability in neo–slave narratives could be read as evidence of the violence against black people in the antebellum period, representations of disabled bodyminds in neo–slave narratives are primarily interpreted as metaphors for the impact of racism, whether historically, contemporarily, or both.
Critiquing and Historicizing Disability Metaphors
The relationship of (dis)ability to race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social systems of privilege and oppression is often explored in scholarly writing as symbolical rather than literal, in the form of what I refer to as ableist metaphors, oppression analogies, and disability metaphors. Ableist metaphors, also sometimes referred to as ableist rhetoric, are common phrases and sayings, such as, "She is blind to that issue" or "Their call fell on deaf ears," which use disability to imply limitation, damage, or other negative concepts. Ableist metaphors, especially within feminist writing, have been critiqued by a number of disability studies scholars. Oppression analogies, on the other hand, compare experiences of, for example, racism and ableism. These analogies have typically been regarded as problematic linguistic moves that attempt to validate one oppression while devaluing or distorting another. Scholars have argued that rather than dispose of oppression analogies altogether, however, we ought to be specific about where these comparisons fail. Critics of oppression analogies encourage scholars and activists to recognize, in Chris Ewart's words, "the importance of considering their constitutive, imperfect parts," and to use this recognition, as Mark Sherry puts it, "to unpack the power dynamics which link the two experiences [of oppression], both in practice and in rhetoric" (Ewart 153; Sherry 16). Ableist metaphors and oppression analogies are different from what I call disability metaphors, which have been the subject of much criticism and debate in disability studies.
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Excerpted from "Bodyminds Reimagined"
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