Disability Culture Watch

On the first spring evening that sitting at an outdoor café is pleasurable, I do that with my dear cripmates, Lawrence Carter-Long and Lezlie Frye. Our conversation rambles into the terrain of our bodies. This is a pick-up conversation, like the informal, spontaneous basketball games that happen on a neighborhood playground. We don’t complete a game, we just dribble and shoot, dribble and shoot, and at some point the ball rolls off the court till we are ready to pick it up again.

So we were not discussing our bodies, consciously at least, because of the event we were going to that evening, but just falling into our usual patter about our tendency to disavow our bodies, working the head part and dragging our bodies around so the head-work can get done.

After dinner, we were off to a book reading by Matthew Sanford, a wheelchair-using yoga master, from his book Waking: A memoir of trauma and transcendence at the Iyengar Yoga Institute.

I approached the evening with skepticism, adverse as I am to words such as “transcendence”, “spirituality”, “inner voice.” Even the term “energy” applied to anything metaphysical makes me twitch. Further, there was nothing in the advance materials that showed the author to be versed in social and political approaches to disability. (For more information on this, go here and here on my website.)

But I had convinced Lezlie and Lawrence that we should show up there and check this guy out. I was as curious about the audience as the writer.

The large room was packed. With a minor exceptions, white women and men, thirty somethings to sixty somethings. Most were seated, cross-legged on mats on the floor. They had long taut torsos and upright posture. A smattering of those of us with non-conformist bodies rolled and limped into the room. We were welcomed graciously, and shown to places near the front. Matthew Sanford wheeled to the front in a sporty manual chair, and two strong men hoisted him onto an elevated platform.

He had a friendly, tousled look, and an easy smile. He read passages from the book, beginning with the story of the accident that resulted in spinal cord injury, paralysis, wheelchair - the whole nine yards. In subsequent passages he described his many hospitalizations, and multiple surgeries and procedures.

I began reading the book while waiting on a long line to have him sign it, and finished reading it in two days. Waking has more graphic description of medical procedures and hospital business than any book I would willingly read. I avoid explicit descriptions of trauma, surgeries and pain, not only because they disturb me and bring up memories of my own such stuff, but, as I would reflexively declare, they are largely irrelevant to the work on disability that my colleagues and I do. In my own memoir, I consciously kept those descriptions to a minimum in order to focus on community, social agendas, disability rights, identity and, particularly, cultural formations and the arts.

Yet, in the two days I was immersed in Waking and in thinking about what Sanford had to say, I recognized something I avoid in my own work, and is too often absent in the conversations we have in disability circles - how much disabled people ignore and push away from our bodies.

Sanford describes how as a thirteen-year-old, newly disabled boy, he learned to distance his mind from his body as a way to protect himself from the pain, the loss, and the changed sensations below his chest. We then follow his story, through subsequent major surgeries, due to broken bones and various difficulties, to the point in his twenties when he discovers yoga. It is in that discovery that he learns a way to reclaim his lower two-thirds and reintegrate his body and mind.

Though he focuses on his very personal mind/body reunion, the ideas he articulates about disabled people’s repudiation of the impaired parts of our bodies is part of a much broader conversation. Sanford describes how doctors repeatedly tried to talk him out of the sensations he described to them. When he said that he did indeed have feelings in his legs, and elsewhere below the level of his injury, they claimed this was not sensation, but phantom feelings akin to what an amputee feels when they report “feeling” the leg that is no longer there. Sanford tried to get them to listen. These are real, I feel them, he said. No, you don’t, they would reply, fearful that if he believed there were real sensations, he would develop false hope that he would someday walk again. And that is how the boy began to disown and disavow his legs and lower torso.

It was yoga that brought this man together. And the guy is so charming, wise and convincing, that, gosh darnit, he may be right when he claims it will work for us all. But, even if it is not the way I or other readers of Sanford’s book wind up going, there is a great deal to be gained by reading it. It is a beautifully written book, instructive, vibrant and moving. I think it can help any reader be more conscious of the body that takes you around, more prepared to touch that body, feel it up, have your way with it. Yoga may or may not be the answer for any one of us - it may be sex, swimming, massage or rock and roll that brings all of your various parts in harmony.

Sanford is devoted to yoga, and I am delighted that it works so well for him and, it seems, for the disabled and nondisabled people he teaches. Though there are differences in our approach to disability, I loved particular ideas such as when he finds the nonsense in that notion that it is somehow possible or desirable to “overcome” a disability (for more on this perspective, check out my Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity). His descriptions of the sensations in his legs is vivid, and as I read them, I felt ever more acutely the tingles in my legs (I too have a spinal cord injury) and appreciated his willingness to talk about his body and its meaning for him.

The book had me until near the end, when he begins talking about yoga philosophy and practice. In part that is because I found it less meaningful for me, but also because, despite a powerful story, and some good writing, the end of the book does not carry through in describing how the mind-body connection happened for him through yoga. And, except for one great example, does not give much indication how his method works for the disabled people he teaches. I was also startled by his seeming lack of connectedness, beyond teaching, to other disabled people, and to disability rights. He speaks of his teaching as “helping” others who live with disability and talks about his work and future plans as “giving back.”

The day after the reading, Lawrence, one of my outdoor dinner companions, said of Sanford: “He does subvert standard ideas about disability, but not in the way we are used to.” Indeed, Sanford challenges the medical authority over our bodies and experience of our bodies. It is a perspective we need to develop more in disability studies, and in disability rights rhetoric.

The yoga-driven audience was attentive and engaged. Lawrence saw it as a small moment of cripple cultural authority. There was not a drop of “inspiration” or “overcoming” commentary during the Q and A.

Yet Sanford, I think, as well as his audiences, would benefit from the approaches to disability in political, cultural, social contexts that have been done so well in disability studies. Disabled people’s repudiation of our own bodies and the distances we create between mind and body, are influenced not only by the medical establishment, but by all the other anti-pleasure-enforcing mechanisms in our society. Films, theatre, laws, TV, and educational practices force our bodies to either conform or be marginalized, and these forces inform and bolster medical authoritarianism. But there is no use dueling it out, there need be no dualism here, we should just get on board and dance. And, in my most transcendent moments, that is where it all gets brought together.