Of Foreign Countries and Archipelagos of Pain: Metaphors of Exile and Emigration in Disability Poetry

Abstract

Emigration and exile, though powerful metaphors in poetry on disability and illness, have long been overlooked by literary scholars and researchers of disability literature. Yet the connection between the experiences of emigration, an often painful, forced and frightening transition, of being uprooted, alienated from one’s surrounding, resonates quite strongly with the experience of disability, of inhabiting a body that is simultaneously one’s home and, in the most extreme, one’s prison. At the same time, however, emigration can also be a self-determined, conscious and joyful experience, and this more positive aspect of what we might call self-exilement is reflected in much writing on disability, too: Raymond Luczak’s assertion that “[a] deaf man is always a foreign country” (l. 15) is uttered with pride, and the idea of the immigrant uprooted and stranded in a strange land is reserved for the deaf person’s hearing counterpart in his poem “Instructions to Hearing Persons Desiring a Deaf Man.” The “paradoxical fusion of the two seemingly opposed notions of exile and entrapment” (76) that John Ower proposes in his evaluation of home and exile in Canadian poetry, “a double dislocation of sensibility that in turn produces an intense desire for a home which constitutes at the same time a freely chosen and protective center, and a place of escape from exile” (76), also resonates in some disability poetry’s more ambiguous reflections of the body as a simultaneously familiar and alien space, such as when Sheila Black talks about the body she was born in with its “familiar lay of the land, the unkempt trees” (l. 28) as a beloved homeland from which medical treatment has exiled her. The disabled body, it seems, can be imagined as both: haven and prison, exile and home, and it is an ableist assumption that disability automatically equals the denial of access to what Fiser imagines as a land “across the border.”

This paper will examine the way in which exile and emigration can be configured and connoted in disability poetry. Discussing two poems about disability—Raymond Luczak’s “Instructions to a Hearing Person Desiring a Deaf Man” (2003) and Sheila Black’s “What You Mourn” (2007)—it will argue that disability poetry’s use of metaphors of exilement can challenge ableist assumptions of the disabled body as prison and of disability as entrapment.