Response to "trauma" and disability

This is a response to Dodie's blog post on the Bhanu talk (Sept 20)

Thank you for this Dodie. I believe the talk was an important one to have and was hugely meaningful to me on a personal level because of my connection to Bhanu’s work, but I think there were conflations that I would not want to see become permanent for some of the very reasons people mention in the preceding comments. (See Dodie's personal blog and cooments to the Trauma entry based on the disability community's take on trauma....http://dodie-bellamy.blogspot.com/2008/09/trauma.html)

As a body worker, Bhanu talks of her work as “a space for healing” and much of in relates to the wounded body in relation to ethnic displacement. Grosz talks about literature as a rarefaction of sensation, either as pleasure or pain. And I was trying to gesture towards ideas of a body (starting with my body I guess) in language, when I spoke of “the compacted”. I was speaking as someone with a disability, but in talking of trauma, I was also in conversation with Bhanu. Throughout the talk, I was aware that what I said could be construed as flattening the one into the other, disability and trauma, but this was not my intention.

Had I been speaking on my own, I probably would have gone the direction of the body, language, sensation and the self in real time (which can sometimes be painful) which for me is a less loaded look at an identity category. Which is not to say my experience at times, has not been linked to trauma, but more truly, it can be categorized as an ambient discomfort.

So yes, in a way, this was a public sharing between me and Bhanu which turned into a talk about trauma, more so than it was a furthering of the discussion on disability. Trauma relates to disability for some people certainly, but I do not think it is the only or even the most clear lens with which to continue looking at formal aspects of the disability experience and the potential for new forms in writing. I think trauma is exceedingly important to talk about in terms of the body and language, but it does not delineate disability.

Oh and also,Dodie, I am intrigued by what you say about resisting the urge to empathize. I don’t think it is a goal I can forgo in my writing entirely, but other, more immediate goals certainly would be to fascinate, to make the strange mundane and the mundane weird in terms of the disabled subject in language. I want to think about it more.