Transform/ability and the Talking Tomate: Fruitful Discourses and Performances of Bodily Abilities

In Aesthetic Nervousness (2007), Ato Quayson addresses the transformative nature of bodily abilities when he revisits one of the key tenets in disability studies: that all individuals in all societies will at one point experience "the provisional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness" (14). Quayson's observation suggests how constructs of disability, and of abilities broadly conceived, inform human lives. As a result, Quayson helps us think of how individuals' bodily abilities might exist not in binary opposition, but across a range: as one can acquire a disability, one can also re/acquire an ability, re/acquire a disability, or lose a dis/ability.

In many cases, however, although an individual will at some point encounter such transformation, contemplation of it does not often precede the transformation. How, then, might we engage in a relevant discourse about the nature of bodily abilities? One way is through the argument that this essay puts forth: discussion and performance of La survivante (2004), a short play by French playwright Jean-Michel Ribes. This dramatic text contains highly ability-charged characters and produces an awareness of both the ideological perceptions and the transformative nature of bodily abilities. It recounts the dialogue between a talking armless and legless tomato, La Tomate (The Tomato), and a police officer, Le Policier (The Police Officer), who composes an accident report based on The Tomato's words as the sole survivor—la survivante—of a vehicular accident. In addition to revealing the characters' attraction for each other, the text also offers philosophical discussions on the ways in which bodily abilities are perceived and associated with bodies.

This article shows how increased understanding of bodily abilities and their transformative state is approachable through the reflection upon and performance of such characters. Although I conducted this activity in the original French and in an upper-division foreign-language literature classroom setting, it may be modified to any other course where dramatic works are studied in the original language or in translation.¹ Engaging with a text such as La survivante and taking part in subsequent performance activities—influenced, for example, by the work of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Werewere Liking—the students begin to understand more extensively the ways in which their bodily abilities change by making their bodies temporarily transform. Performance is most acutely—especially for students who are not studying dramatic performance and who do not self-identify as disabled—a means by which they come to engage and understand the discourses of bodily abilities. And playing as or with a talking tomato such as the one Ribes offers us in his text becomes one of the means by which we can explore Boal's goal of "fruitful" dialogue (19).

Normality, Bodily Abilities, and Performance

To begin to think how bodily abilities are addressed in Ribes's text, as well as how they are transformative, requires first a critical consideration of theories of disabilities, the normative construction of disabilities, and related discussions of the transformative nature of abilities. Such clarification becomes necessary with respect to Ribes's text where the notion of a tomato's somatic form and its ability to talk are remarkably abnormal and extraordinary. The field of disability studies becomes immediately relevant, as it is in this increasingly transcultural field where discussions of bodily ability have primarily materialized.² The present discussion seeks not to emphasize one sociocultural context over another (including that within which Ribes works), but instead to serve of the productive means by which the texts call for questions of the constructions of normative, as well as fixed, states of bodily ability.

In Bending over Backwards (2002), Lennard Davis writes that "the examination, discussion, anatomizing of … 'difference' [disabled and able-bodied] is nothing less than a desperate attempt by people to consolidate their normality" (117). Davis more specifically associates the development of normality with the development of the novel, and he discusses how nineteenth-century British and French novels embraced a vision of the "normal"—what he also calls the "average" (93). Certainly, Davis's reading speaks in ways to the socioeconomic context...