Book review: Laura Hershey: on the Life and Work of an American Master, edited by Meg Day and Niki Herd. Pleiades Press, 2019

(cover image not yet available, this is the photo on the cover)
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Three presses (Pleiades Press, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel) have collaborated to produce the Unsung Masters Series of books about the life and work of unjustly forgotten authors, presenting their writing, and biographical and critical essays about their lives. Laura Hershey was a poet and fierce disability rights activist who died in 2010 at 48. I had never heard of her. One of her themes in these selected poems is the invisibility of disabled people, how others choose not to see them, not to know of their lives.

We define some disabilities as “normal.” I’ve been wearing eyeglasses since I was ten, but nobody considers me “disabled” or different. In part disability resides in the individual; in part it is created or defined by society and custom.  Why was my 1960’s house built in such a way that my friend in a power chair cannot reach the bathroom? Why are there raised curbs and thresholds everywhere? Why don’t movies all have closed captioning, and live theaters show dialog on a screen?

 

Yummy! (but inaccessible). image by lisa fotio from pexels.com

 

Those of us who are not now disabled are likely to age into various degrees of disability. Despite the losses – loved ones gone, activities I can no longer do – I love getting old because my thoughts are much more interesting than before. But I don’t like the pain: I’m always hurting somewhere. In his 90’s, with relatively minor disabilities, my father told me that when he was in his 70’s he thought he wouldn’t want to live like that, but he found that he still looked forward to each day.

I have read a few books* focused in part on disability. They make me think about things I never considered, see the world through a different lens. I hope I understand the limits of my own understanding.

Laura Hershey was physically disabled – she retained vision, hearing, speech, sensuality, and intellectual ability, but was unable to move most of her body. She needed a personal assistant to position herself, to feed, bathe, and dress her. She wrote on a computer, using voice recognition.

She wrote poetically or plainly, or even in doggerel. The subjects vary: poetry, sex, Robin Stephens, her lover for over twenty years, her own body. Most of the poems selected in this book are about disability, addressing two audiences – activists, and ableists. But the collection also includes a few lyrical love poems from a long relationship. Her disability poetry outrages me, and it makes me laugh and cheer.

Hershey and Stephens devoted their lives to fighting for the rights of disabled people, especially the right to live outside institutions and receive the services that would make that possible. Before a demonstration against institutionalization she wrote nine stanzas of simple doggerel.

 

Special Vans

The city’s renting special vans
the daily paper reads
The cops are getting ready
For special people with special needs

…

They put up special barricades
To try to keep us out
Still we’re in their face
Still we chant and shout

What’s so special really
about needing your own home?
If I need pride and dignity
is that special, just my own?

Are these really special needs
unique to only me?
Or is it just the common wish,
to be alive and free?

 

An arresting picture – Washington DC 2017. Image: adapt.org

 

Hershey confronted the notion of independence, a concept so glorified in our country that many refuse to see that we are all interdependent. They ignore the assistance that we all need, but only some receive – from families, community, government. In an interview she said, “I do need a lot of help. But I consider myself independent…That doesn’t mean I’m totally self-sufficient. That means I have control over the choices I make, what I do with my life.”

In the poem In the Way she recognizes how people in wheelchairs can use their disability as a weapon in the fight. It’s thrilling, as though we are watching the birth of a movement. She had been apologetic when her bulky chair took up too much space, got in the way. And then she realized

                    If I alone can be so much
                    and so often in the way
                    if I can create such worry among waitpersons
                    such consternation in concert halls
                    such alarm in the aisles of grocery stores
                    just imagine the aggravation a dozen
                    or two dozen
                    or three hundred
                    people using wheelchairs can cause people
                    who would rather not see our needs
                    or hear our demands
                    or acknowledge our rights!

                    Just imagine!

 

 

image: Action for Access

She and Stephens are both in wheelchairs and both leaders in the fight. In A Day, Hershey wishes for a day together free of the struggle, and dreams of a victorious future.

A day, Robin,
Just one single day out of the future
we hope we are building
…
A morning waking slowly – taking our time
to get into our chairs and get the motors going
– not urgently,
with no demonstrations to prepare for,
because justice demonstrates itself these days;
no meetings,
which have mostly been replaced
by simple understanding;
not even a conference to attend,
because issues like caregiver abuse
and work disincentives
were settled long ago.
I’d give us
a quiet afternoon among trees, Robin,
…
Or we’d take poles to a mountain river.
Fish surface as rain begins to fall. Huddled together
in the rain, we draw out enough rainbow
to satisfy two
stomachs and two clear minds.

image by emre can from pexels

Is there a ‘me’ apart from my body? Age, illness and disability may cause us to think more about that puzzle. In Monster Body Hershey plays with language to figure it out.

My back’s shell-sharp curve, my thin wrist bone,
limbs that do not twitch beyond the digits;
right lung so different from left – the leader, thrust
forward, fuller-breathed,
pushing against ribs; while its more delicate mate
shrinks,adjusts inside a smaller collapsing cage…
Monster mine, monster body,
one I would not trade.
Not for gold, not for leading roles,
not for promise of perfection, the protection it affords.
…

but the pronoun ‘my’ distorts the relationship; the
   spaces
imply a separation that does not exist.
‘Have’ stands too distant.
MonsterBodyMine, instead –
this makes am true….
MonsterBodyMine.
With my body, in my body, as my body,
by my body I journey.
It is my medium for learning, for love.
It is my lens, my light.
MonsterBodyMine

 

I myself have been only an intermittent activist, a little writing, a little marching, a lot of teaching and preaching, mostly to the choir. I’m proud of what I’ve done, but most of it has been working to boost one person up over the wall rather than tear down the walls, to make systems a little fairer, rather than attacking their rotten roots.

I’ve learned that calling disabled people courageous, inspirational, is as offensive as unwanted pity. But I am always moved by the courage of those who fight for civil rights. They fight against the odds, persistently, for an imagined future which is long in coming if it comes at all. They are the outsiders, the unseen, and they pound relentlessly on the doors of power. These are my heroes, and I call them courageous.

 

image: nat endowment for the arts  from pexels.com

 

*BOOKS I RECOMMEND (links are to my reviews)

Good Kings, Bad Kings, by Susan Nussbaum (novel) click

Too Late to Die Young, by Harriet Johnson (memoir)

A Certain Loneliness, by Sandra Gail Lambert (memoir)click

Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin (memoir)