Presentation transcript: Stories and Disability
This is the transcript for a presentation I gave over zoom on disability in stories. There was a visual presentation attached which I refer to a few times. The second part of the assignment was to collate a series of short stories into an anthology. Mine was a collection of stories about illness and disability written by sick and disabled writers called “Under The Weather”.
Before I start, the story I’ll be talking about very briefly mentions suicide and suicidal ideation so please feel free to mute me if you need to. It also contains spoilers.
I decided to do my anthology on disabled writers with disabled characters and when I did some research I found that it had already been done with this anthology series Nothing Without Us and Nothing Without Us Too which are a collection of multi-genre short stories with disabled main characters written by disabled writers. It was created to amplify disabled voices and was published by Renaissance Press in Canada, the first in 2019 and its sequel in 2022. The title comes from the slogan that is used by disability activists which is “Nothing About Us, Without Us.” Meaning that government decisions about disabled people should be led by disabled people, and that disabled people should have medical autonomy over their own bodies. The Anthologies are edited by Cait Gordon a “writer of speculative fiction that celebrates diversity” and Kohenet Talia C. Johnson who is “an ordained Kohenet Hebrew Priestess and spiritual leader and activist”. They say that the unofficial tagline for the books are “We are the heroes, not the sidekicks.”
Disabled stories are severely lacking in the media and amongst writing communities. It’s estimated that 16% of the world’s population is disabled yet according to a diversity survey carried out by Lee & Low Books only 11% of the publishing industry are disabled and other surveys show 93% of writers rooms don’t have a disabled writer on their team. It’s unknown what percentage of characters are disabled because that study has never been done.
In most disabled characters storylines one of three things will likely happen:
1 they are miraculously cured
2 they overcome a barrier and act as inspiration for a non-disabled character or the non-disabled reader or
3 they die.
In the foreword for Nothing Without Us, Derek Newman-Stille refers to 6 overused disabled tropes: the Tiny Tim, The Inspiring Mentor, the Crazy Woman in the Attic, the Disability That’s Really a Superpower, the Person Who Fakes Disability and the Self-Loathing Cripple. It is also rare to find a disabled character where their disability isn’t the story or a central plot point. This anthology aims to throw out these tired tropes and open up a new era of literature that includes disabled people. In these stories the characters disabilities affects the story, and interacts with the story but it ultimately is not the story.
The story I want to focus on today is from Nothing Without Us Too and it is Crow’s Hoard by Jayne Barnard. Barnard is a multi-award winning Canadian writer who writes both children’s books and adult crime novels. According to her biography she is lives in a vine-covered cottage between two rivers, keeping cats and secrets, which is my new life goal.
She has a medical condition known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis or M.E, which is the same condition that myself and the character in this story has. At her worst she was bedbound and struggled to compose even a few sentences. As Barnard recovered from this period she had to relearn how to eat again, then talk again, and eventually how to write again. Out of all the stories in both of the anthologies, this one stood out to me because of how represented I felt with this character. It is the first fictional story I’ve read where a character has M.E.
The story centres around Carmel, who becomes trapped in her upper floor apartment after a flood tears through her town.
I found this summary on the editors website that I felt summed it up nicely. “Trapped in her small apartment after a flood forces everyone else to evacuate, chronically-ill Carmel expects to die, even welcomes it. But when she tells the crows, who trade her their treasures for snacks that she won’t be there tomorrow, they bring her a choice she could have never predicted.”
The story opens with this line a few days after the flood, “Dawn came to the drowned city as a watercolour wash of lavender sky atop the muddy brown water.”
We are introduced to Carmel and learn that she is trapped in her upstairs apartment, the water almost reaching her on the second floor. Her apartment is owned by Mr. Ambadi the owner of the grocery store that is below her. We find out that a few days previously as the Ambadi family was evacuating they invited Carmel along with them. But the family only had 30 minutes to evacuate and she knew it would take her too long to reach the bottom of the stairs. So she told them not to worry, soldiers were coming to help her evacuate. But this was a lie and no one was coming. That family was long gone now, as were all her neighbours. It was only her that was left behind. Carmel is ok with this because she has figured out her own way out by collecting all of her remaining pills together.
But before she takes that step she takes the last of the stale bread and opens her front window to feed the crows, as she does every morning. They don’t immediately fly up to her as they usually do, they are busy crowding around a floating table on top of which is something that Carmel at first mistakes for a dying cat. The table is slowly floating down the flooded plaza across from her house. She gets the crows attention in the hopes of saving the cat and it works, they fly over to her window and she hands out the small pieces of bread.
Instead of eating the bread however the crows return to the floating table. She watches as the table moves closer, lost in her thoughts about how her life will soon end. She knows that even if she is rescued, any camp or makeshift dwelling she will have to live in will not be suitable for her illness and she can either die somewhere unfamiliar slowly, or quickly at home. Not wanting her landlord, who she always liked, to have to come back and find her body she decides she will use her last bit of strength to throw herself into the water below. She will drift away on the current, letting the water hold the weight of her body so she didn’t have to anymore. She momentarily contemplates a jar that is sitting on her shelf. It was full of trinkets brought to her by the crows in exchange for food every morning. Bottle caps, paper clips, things like that. She wonders that since she soon gets to be free, shouldn’t the trinkets too? Should they be returned to the crows? But then she notices that the table has moved closer and it didn’t look like it was a cat on top of it at all. It looked more like a bundle of clothing. She watches as it flows towards her and up to her window. She can see now that it wasn’t a bundle of rags but a child. It ends with the child looking up at Carmel with the bread from the crows in her hand and saying, “I am strong. I can help you.”
This is a very timely story as we experience more and more natural disasters and it raises the important question of whether we have any action plans in place to help evacuate disabled people in times of disasters. If Ireland flooded tomorrow, how many disabled people would be similarly be trapped in their homes? During emergencies hotels and apartments have a system where the elevators are automatically shut off. This is to stop the possibility of anyone getting trapped in them at a time when they may not be able to be rescued, but this poses a threat for people who cannot get down to lower floors another way. More often than not in these situations they will be left behind. It is another side of disasters stories that we don’t get to see and hear. It’s putting a spin on the dystopia genre and asks us to question where disabled people fit in to those types of stories. Were disabled people evacuated when Godzilla came tearing through the city? How does a wheelchair fare against zombies? How might a blind person navigate a sinking boat?
Carmel experiences inner conflict throughout this story as her acceptance of death and her will to live battle against each other. She says “Any animal that had survived through last night’s torrent, and a morning of drifting in circles at the mercy of bored crows, deserved a bit of help to go on living. If she’d had more help, just a bit, maybe she’d want to go on living too.” She wants to live, but knows in her current circumstances it is impossible.
The crows play a very important part in the story, They visit her every morning and trade bread for trinkets. She hasn’t left her apartment in 15 years and the crows act as her link to the outside. Every day they bring her a little piece of the world, she is like The Little Mermaid, with her throve of treasures untold from a world she can’t be a part of, and just like Ariel rescues Prince Eric on the night they meet when he falls off the boat and into the sea, Carmel saves this child of the crows from the water.
There are many other mythical element to this story. Birds are often messengers and there is the old story of the stork bringing new born babies to their parents. The child acts as not just a link to the outside world but also as a link to the living world that Carmel can now hold on to.
I find it interesting that Mr. Ambadi has provided both the housing for Carmel, and the jars for the crows trinkets. It shows him as a protective figure, giving her and the trinkets a home. In wanting to empty out the jars as well not leaving a body behind for Mr. Ambadi, she is giving permission to him to let her go. He has done all he can for her and now she must go. She might also be underestimating how much she means to him and his family, yet they were close enough for him to invite her along with them to wherever they were evacuating to, and she’s lived there for over 15 years. She overlooks the fact that it is her absence that will be left behind because she is so clouded by being seen as only a burden. When the child comes she learns that she can do the saving too.
This is also a story about community and how important it is for us to help each other. Carmel has helped those crows and they come back to her every day. They go on to help the child by feeding her. Then the child, nourished, can approach Carmel to help her. Here I believe Barnard is saying that community and care is cyclical. Helping one person helps everyone. Helping others helps you yourself. One small act of care can have a huge impact.
Jayne Barnard and the rest of the Anthology’s authors are really paving the way in opening up the writing industry to more diverse voices in Canada, and are hopefully leading the way to a similar movement outside of Canada too.
For your prompt I want to do something a little differently. I want you to take a story you already have, maybe one you wrote for a sketch last year and see how the story changes when you give a character a disability. Think about how it changes their day-to-day as well as the plot and character development. Write a scene where something would be changed if the character was disabled. I’d just like you to start thinking about disabled characters and where they might fit into your stories. Don’t change the story to be about the disability. Make it as natural as describing their hair or how they put on their shoes. Normalising having disabled people in any type of story will help to normalise disability in society and the barriers we face will start to fall away.
