The Other Senses

Preeti Monga. Roli Books, New Delhi, 2012, 228 pages, Paperback, ₹335

Abstract

The word autobiography was coined by William Taylor in 1797 in The Monthly Review. This genre maps the recollection of truth, episodes, thoughts and experiences in the writer’s life. However, an autobiography coming from a disabled person encompasses much more than life experiences, as disability aggravates the challenges faced by a disabled individual. A. V. S. Jayaannapurna states that the “onset of 21st century brought to limelight the dreams and ambitions of individual,” and people began to express their subjectivity. This gave the individual a “spiritual space of freewill,” which Jayaannapurna describes as a “retrieval into self” (28). A psychologist can use the work as a guide to the writer’s mind to understand how disability and the dominant discourses about it may have direct or indirect bearing on the writer’s mind. Disability autobiography acts as an effective way of counter-discourse. It challenges the dominant ableist perceptions of that disability narrative that have contributed to portraying the negative somatic experiences in literature. It unveils or illuminates various issues that beset people with anomalous bodies, like human rights violations, stigma, and social and financial barriers. According to Causer, people who returned from wars and life-threatening diseases like polio and breast cancer spurred the autobiographical writings in such a way that nothing like this had happened before (1997). Until the 1950s, disability narratives were scant; whatever literature on disability was available was written by non-disabled writers based on their limited second-hand knowledge derived from myths, fiction and medical treatises. “The testimony of disabled people includes gritty accounts of their pain and daily humiliations — a sure sign of the rhetoric of realism” (Siebers 65). Autobiographical writing by disabled writers can inspire many disabled people to come out of their closets to share and assert their identity with pride. People, for a long time, relied on information about disability either in medical science or literary works, which was highly biased and heuristic. According to Thomas Causer, misrepresentation of disabled people could also be the cause of the lack of writing by the disabled about themselves. Thus, it becomes imperative for the marginalised to come up with transgressive autobiographical writing (Causer 5).