Michelle Burke

Writing the Other:
When the Other is (and isn’t) You

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important
to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk
of having it bruised or misunderstood.
-Audre Lorde

In this unpredictable life, it’s often true that when you figure something out, someone comes along and pops a hole in your understanding. Fresh out of the English undergraduate program at Loyola College in Maryland, I took a job in social services in Portland, Oregon. A well-educated liberal, I thought myself informed about the various faces oppression wears in our society—the unearned advantages afforded to members of certain socioeconomic classes, races, and genders. I’d been trained in race relations, educated in psychology, and had studied queer theory and feminist thought. I followed politics. I protested in front of the courthouse and worked forty hours a week in education programs that served teen parents, gang-affected youths, felons, and the homeless. I was, naively, taken with the thought that I had my politics down—I knew the issues and I knew where I stood.

Enter a graduate course in the Women’s Studies Department at The Ohio State University, “Gendering Disability.” The writings of Brenda Brueggemann, Georgina Kleege, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Nancy Mairs, Adrienne Asch and others opened my eyes to a new dialogue that I had not actively or knowingly engaged in previously (although how often we find ourselves butting our heads up against new ideas before we have the language to name the experience). I encountered new terms like “identity studies” and read personal narratives on disability and gender. It made sense. Of course ability was a continuum and not a binary construction—maybe it was even a five-pointed star or an entire constellation. Of course we are all one misstep, one car crash, one accident away from disability, and even if we live to old age—what do we have to look forward to except the loss of our senses and mobility? I had never considered disability located in the environment, being raised, like many, to consider disability a label one applied to people. Yet, it made sense that the person in the wheelchair was only disabled if the library lacked a ramp. If a ramp was provided, the individual in the wheelchair was every bit as able as I to enter the building.

And so delighting in this new way of thinking, enjoying the daily stretch and pull of my mind as I contemplated these intersections of gender and disability—I turned to the other pull of my life: poetry. My graduate study at OSU was in the writing of poetry, and I sought a way to integrate these interests—allow poetry and disability studies to speak to each other, enter into a dialogue.

I sat down to write and became aware of myself as a white, non-disabled woman. Hmm, I thought, what does this mean to write about disability when I am not disabled? And what does it mean to me, as a woman, to write about the intersection of disability and gender? These questions seemed overwhelming, so I put them aside for the moment and began writing.

My mind settled on a topic: Helen Keller and the “overcoming story” she came to represent (despite her long career as an intellectual, socialist, and advocate for such controversial causes as eugenics and euthanasia). I spent time reading and rereading Georgina Kleege’s letters to Helen Keller (collected in Blind Rage), and found myself in awe of Kleege’s audacity in addressing Keller directly. Before long all my fears came flooding back—Kleege wrote as a blind woman to a blind woman. She had the right to address Keller directly. Did I? Would there be an uncomfortable power dynamic if I wrote directly to Helen Keller? I became so concerned with the politics of the writing process that soon there was no process with which to concern myself.

Now, let me take a moment to say that I think it is important that men writing about feminist concerns not be allowed to supercede women writing about feminist concerns. Likewise, the able-bodied should not be privileged over the disabled in writing about (or legislating for) disability. Marginalized peoples of various backgrounds have fought long and hard to have a voice in society, and that voice must be defended diligently. But, I hope, the field is big enough for all to enter the dialogue. In fact, I dare say, it’s imperative we all enter—men, women, people of all colors, shapes, and levels of ability or impairment.

Since I was concerned with power dynamics, I thought one way to address this concern was to adopt various points of view in the poems I was writing—first person as Helen Keller, second person addressing her, and third person imagining what a day in her life might have felt like. I wanted to see how my experience changed from one point of view to another. What was my experience when I imagined myself as Keller verses my experience when I addressed her as myself?

My initial instinct was to start from the “I.” Most of the poetry I write uses the “I” as the center of experience, and so this seemed a natural mode of being. I wrote several poems from the “I” perspective, where the voice of the “I” was Helen Keller. I quickly found this to be problematic. As I tried to imagine myself as Keller, and as Medusa and other characters, the process felt conscious and forced. I was too keenly aware that I was not Helen Keller, and though I could read her own words and read essays and biographies of her life, I could not articulate her experience more truly than she could and had. I found I needed to bring myself, with all my contemporary concerns and opinions, into the poem in order to feel fully engaged.

Once I recognized this, the whole process became more complicated and more interesting. And since I had Audre Lorde and Georgina Kleege and Helen Keller all roaming around inside my imagination, this process allowed these people to talk to each other through me. What would Helen Keller say to Brenda Brueggemann? And what would Audre Lorde think about Freud’s theory on Medusa? And (more exciting still), what would I say to these people if given the chance?

And so this series of poems contains a poem that is written as a letter addressing Medusa. It includes poems written in the second person point of view, interrogating Keller directly. At other times, Medusa, Pliny, and the Venus de Milo all appear together. While this collection often only obliquely references the connections between countless theories and persons, all of these poems are a result of the conversation that is taking place right now between scholars of disability studies and women’s studies, and this current dialogue is built upon a discussion that goes back thousands of years. I have a very broad community to thank for the creation of these poems. And I hope that these poems will continue to grow, expand, bounce off each other, and prompt further fruitful discussion.

* * *

WORKHORSE

In 1909, doctors removed her [Helen Keller's] eyes and replaced them with glass eyes tinted blue. - Kim Nielsen

Funny that they would replace your real eyes with
glass ones. An eye for an eye, you've heard, but who
would trade anything for your dead organs?

Convenient how the horse is born with a gap
in its mouth, a place for the bit, and a back
so suited for riding. You want to take it

back now—the bit you'd said earlier
about money, equality, socialism. You'd used
words like hard and finished. Now Teacher

paces the next room, and the floorboards vibrate
anger. With your new blue eyes, they take
your picture head on. More speaking engagements,

fundraisers. Before, profile shots. You've heard
you're quite a looker. Day after day, strangers drop words
in your palm like charity, but if you weighed them all,

it would still amount to nothing.

DELICATE

In 1916 Helen Keller and Peter Fagan were briefly, and secretly, engaged.

Strange this August morning.
Fear unfurls in your throat
like mother's peonies--
how they open and close,
hands inside of hands.

And the heat curls your hair
into angry bees, leaves welts
at your jaw line. Your skirt,
layered like the peony, complicates
walking. Yet, you love
what is complicated:
dresses with masses of ribbon,
the hands of others at your
back,
the intricate wheels and rods
of the typewriter, keys
that fit your fingers like petals.

Your mother hates the machine--
its smells of oil and ink.
You told her once that you liked
the flowers with velvet tongues
best, left out that they leave
sex on your fingertips.
Pistil, pestle, piston.
You press your open palm,

You've ripped your dress again,
mother says, the words
on her lips like molting skin.
You take each in your hand
and imagine the crush
of pine cones, egg shells.

Michelle Y. Burke is currently in the MFA program at The Ohio State University. She has had work published in Hotel Amerika, The Grove Review, and Michigan Avenue Review. The poem included in this chapbook is part of a poem cycle based on her research on Helen Keller.