Tag: disability

Culture by Su Zi
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A stylized shot of the brick city gates of St. Augustine, Florida, as discussed by author and critic Su Zi.

Disabled Girl At The Waterworks (St. Augustine, Florida)

Sometimes, Disabled People are seen in public. That they exist is usually reinforced by signage and the arrangements for public biology stations we call rest rooms. After that, we might encounter an occasional wheelchair. Whether or not people who stumble about with their dog or pony on a lead in public spaces are disabled or not, they do not throng normatively, and public spaces are about normative gathering. One of the jokes that circulates the disabled community is that line about how you can join us at any time. Indeed, disability—the medical conditions of the human body that don’t fit the bell curve of human activity in modern society—crosses the typical social boundaries of race, class and gender. Thus, seeing a disabled person in public might be so rare for some that children are told not to stare.

Public event spaces were, for a generation, required to provide access to disabled people: some of these efforts are visible to the public by curb cuts, ramps to buildings, wheelchair accommodating elevators, braille signage, and sign language interpreters alongside public speakers. Of course, these architectural modifications to public spaces are predicated upon the notion that the disabled person can physically get to those public spaces, and transit problems abound. That transit problems are a typical issue in the disabled community is not part of public discourse, but an obvious factor on why disabled people are not a common sight, especially since a good third of the population has some sort of limiting physical condition.  It’s big work to attend events. Humans are hardwired to herd up, and deprivations—solitary confinement that is so typical of disabled life—are seen as a form of torture, psychologically; therefore, disabled people too must sometimes attend some kind of gathering. […]

Music by Su Zi
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A classic, sepia-toned photo of The Rolling Stones in 1963, with the text "deaf girl listens...Rolling Stones", from Su Zi's essay on a disabled author listening to classic rock.

Deaf Girl Listens To The Rolling Stones

There’s music that we find personally significant, and then there is music we have in heavy rotation—over and over again.

It ought to surprise no one that any playlist would include the Rolling Stones, for theirs is a lifelong output, and many of their compositions have found their way to accompany a variety of circumstances. The list of significant songs is a long one, spanning in length that of those cultural revered in more classical canons. Everyone has a favorite Stones song.

There are those who might minimize the musicianship, even while acknowledging the solid ear of each of the core band. Nonetheless, the architecture of each song is held together, most of the time, by the steady hoofbeats of Charlie Watts: there is always some mathematical grounding based in a beat of four. […]

Book Review by Su Zi
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The stylized cover of Jillian Weise's poetry colleiction, "Pills and Jacksonvilles", which touches on disability concerns.

Ultimate Marginalization: “Pills and Jacksonvilles” by Jillian Weise

Social erasure is the aim of marginalization, and there’s no greater social erasure than disability. Recent folk heroes notwithstanding, in the exhaustively annotated essay “No Planet Without Us”, Anna Landre states “…we need to become comfortable with the fact that disability will become part of all of our stories. Every single person will become disabled…Disability is as universal and inevitable as our changing climate.” And while a Rolling Stone article gives the aforementioned folk hero his disability card in the essay title (“Luigi Mangione Wrote Online about a Spine Disorder. Other Patients Say It’s Hell: Spondylolisthesis, or a slipped vertebra, can have devastating effects on the body—and the US health care system often makes things worse”), being disabled often results in erasure; reports from disaster areas highlight failures in disaster management that are often fatal to the disabled. And while current mob-think scapegoating has bubbled into bloodthirst, the institutionalization of the eugenicist view has resulted in denial of care and medical execution. […]

Poetry by Su Zi
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Three photos of poets Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose work appears in A $6 Story's poetry anthology, “Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope”.

A $6 Story: Reviewing “Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope”

The anthology is a desirable volume for publishers, as it has appeal to both educators and general readers of a particular genre. For an editor, the creation of a successful anthology means steady groceries—an atypical situation in the literary arts—and as a required textbook, a volume will show financial reward. For an author, inclusion in a successful anthology (especially in a genre that is not high-dollar) might be akin to sainthood, as it is certainly a form of canonization. Anthologies are intended as a high visibility variety show, a silent festival. However, some anthologies are offered for thematic reasons within an area of interest, and the economics of publishing become tangled with altruism. The concept of the common good is not central to all cultures, and anthologies that are thematic can appeal to the isolated. When the theme is one of social justice, the entire structure of publishing an anthology might be perused for philosophical consistency. […]