“Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.” – Douglas C. Baynton.
The history of disabled people in the UK goes as far back as the history of humanity on these islands, but our modern understanding of ‘disabled people’ can largely be traced back to the passing of the Old Poor Law in the 17th century. This act marked the beginning of the forced institutionalisation of disabled people in “alms-houses” or “poorhouses”, where they would live off charity, beginning toxic narratives about us that are still present in popular discourse over four hundred years later.
Despite this attempt to simply lock disabled people up and out of existence, our voices have never really gone away. In 1976 the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) published Fundamental Principles of Disability,which argued that disabled people were an oppressed group in society. This led to the coining of the term “the social model of disability” by activist-academic Mike Oliver in 1983.
Oliver gave a name and thus new life to UPIAS’ pre-existing argument that, on top of the limitations caused by one’s impairment (e.g. deafness, blindness, etc.), disabling social barriers excluded certain people from full, equal participation in society.
The work of the early Disabled People’s Movement, inspired by the social model, managed to vastly improve the lives of disabled people, culminating in the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995. Unfortunately, progress is seldom static, and in the New Labour era disability rights began to be eroded once again. This slide into oppression has only intensified since the Tories have returned to office, resulting in the UN’s Committee on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) issuing a damning report in 2016, which condemned the government for “systematic human rights abuses against disabled people”, and a further UN report in 2018 about dangerous levels of poverty in the UK, owing to the Tories’ austerity programme.
Where does a literary journal by a fledgling organisation such as LDPO fit into this rather grim picture?
Disabled people have always been in the stories we tell as part of our human culture. According to oral tradition, the legendary Homer, attributed with creating the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, was blind. However, while we have always been there, usually in the periphery, but sometimes centre stage in films, novels, plays, poems, television series etc., often these depictions are given life by the non-disabled. Of course, non-disabled writers inventing disabled characters is not an inherently bad thing, but it is a problem that they dominate our narratives about disability, and that the lived experiences of actual disabled people are often ignored.
Therefore this journal aims, just like previous works such as Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction (2017) and Anne Finger’s short story collection of revisionist literary and historical works Call Me Ahab (2008), to give disabled people the opportunity to tell our own stories. If indeed the pen (or keyboard) is mightier than the sword, then we are in need of some mighty pens today in the UK to give voice to issues facing disabled people the length and breadth of the country.
Within the pages of this journal you will find an essay on breaking down the disabling social barriers that visually impaired people face in museums, expertly dealt with by Gill Crawshaw; a poem about the frustration and dread of having to contend with the UK’s toxic benefits system by Jonathan Eyre; a whimsical, thought-provoking and uplifting retelling of Humpty-Dumpty by Leo Gunn; a poem relating to depression by Mark Wilson; a piece about getting over a bad relationship by F. R. Kesby; and perhaps one of my favourite pieces, by Emma Roberts, which I will take the liberty of quoting two lines of within the introduction:
“They call it Disability, I call it ability.
An ability to keep going within a broken world.”
These are only a few examples of the works you’ll find. Please note that, while we are a Leeds-based organisation, not all the writers whose work has been published in the journal are from Leeds. This decision was made to allow for as wide a range of works as possible, and to amplify the voices of as many disabled people as possible.
There are twelve entries in total, some relating to themes surrounding disablement, and others about broader issues, but all of them are bound together by the fact that they offer the reader a chance to step into the shadows and see that they do not harm, and that we disabled people merely request that you lend us an ear and you will hear our voice.
References
Alston, Philip (2018): Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23881&LangID=E
Baynton, Douglas C. (2001): “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33-57 (New York: New York University Press), 52. Quoted in Audra Jennings’ “Introduction: Disability and History” (2008) Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol, 28, No. 3. Available at: www.dsq-sds.org
CRPD (2016): Inquiry concerning the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland carried out by the Committee under article 6 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CRPD/CRPD.C.15.R.2.Rev.1-ENG.doc
Oliver, Mike (1983): Social Work with Disabled People.
UPIAS (1976): Fundamental Principles of Disability. Available at: https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/library/UPIAS-fundamental-principles.pdf
© 2019 P.B. O’Dea. All rights reserved.
Leeds Disabled People's Organisation (LDPO) 