Taking Action Without Help

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours,” says the character of Mr. Hector in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys (2004). From my late teens, this line taught me why I needed to keep reading and writing and I have kept it even more strongly in mind since I began writing about my disability in earnest and, consequently, saw the need to find my place in an existing continuum of poetic voices.

There is no one, universal disabled experience, and it occurs to me that in disability activism, goals are more difficult to set because the needs of so many people of such variant experience must be addressed. We must try our best to work with and for each other. So, those moments in poetry where a hand takes mine and is able to articulate something about my experience being a disabled woman, it isn’t just preaching to the choir. It teaches me how to be more honestly articulate in my own work. If the author doesn’t share my diagnosis or exact symptoms (most of the time this is the case), I can better learn their needs. Reading Kathi Wolfe’s chapbook The Uppity Blind Girl Poems was looking to an elder. Her character Uppity did reach out and take my hand, but only because she’s damn tired of sighted people taking hers and trying to help her without asking. She wants to lead. We’ve got that in common.

Uppity, born Elizabeth, and I are both in our mid twenties. We both blog professionally. We’re both queer New Yorkers (she, a fortunate Manhattanite, where I’m living in a Long Island suburb with my parents.) We both have great moms. We’re both on the hunt for love (she finds it) and love glittered heels (she can wear them; I can’t.) We both go on dates where the server asks our lovers what we’ll have instead of looking at us and we both really enjoy making them uncomfortable about it. I have Cerebral Palsy while Uppity is completely blind, both of us from birth.

I learned a lot from Uppity. I won’t say about courage because courage is one of those words able-bodied people throw at the disabled just for existing and doing ordinary things, like inspiration. Rather, it was the courage of self-aggrandizement. Uppity has named and fashioned herself a self-named “Braille Carrie Bradshaw, a blindista!” wielding a white cane like a wizard. Her mother recalls her as “a rogue laser” who insists, “I’m not a Helen wannabe.” (This is a thought most disabled people have had, so ubiquitous is Keller’s cultural presence.) “I’m going / to map the Twitterverse like explorers / of old named the constellations.” Her sister recalls a trickster and rival. “Yet there would be no light / if not for your dark coven.” Her lover remembers her, “walking Broadway as if you owned this town—you knocked my terrors (smack!) onto the ground.” Uppity’s presence is seven feet tall and her influence over those in her orbit is enormous.

Wolfe has stated that in no way is Uppity an alter ego and, I admit, it was my first assumption; that she might be everything Wolfe wished she might be or that she represented the best in the author or someone she knows. I certainly envied her. It’s possible that she would be a more fully fleshed out character if she’d been presented as more flawed. She seemed almost like a superhero: broad and colorful as comic book illustration. I thought she needed more ugly, or more confusion, especially for someone so young. It’s not...