I just finished the book Exile and Pride by Eli Clare. I know that when I finish a book in a weekend that it is good. I forget the reading too much makes me tired sometimes. That I need to have “breaks” as though I am working or at the gym. When I can’t stop reading, that is the best.
The book description is the following:
Exile and Pride explores the landscape of disability, class, queerness, and child abuse, telling stories which echo with the sounds of an Oregon logging and fishing town and with the lively political debates of crip crusadors and transgender warriors.
Clare, who has Cerebral Palsy, is a lesbian, was abused as a child and comes from a working-class rural background, has a unique on many things. For example, from an environmental point of view, she can see things from both the leftist-urban point of view as being educated with an arts degree in the city, but also from the loggers point of view from her rural roots. In one of her many essays on clear-cutting, she talks about how environmentalists going after loggers is like pitting sister against brother, and suggests looking at the root cause (our consumption and market forces) at the core of the issue instead.
Also, as both being a gay transgender and disabled at the same time, she has a unique view of what it means to be singled out by society, and cleverly compares the slang “queer” to the slang of “crip” (for cripple) or freak. In a very pragmatic way, she discusses how some groups can take ownership of certain words, but some can’t.
She discusses about the medicalization of disability, and compares the pity associated with the sickness model compared to the freak show, where people would flaunt their disabilities, and be stared at, but at least they would be able to make a living.
I guess statistically, it had to happen that someone would eventually have the combination of experiences that Clare has had. It just seems like just one or two of them is enough to write a book about – and in the end, you feel pretty amazed by what she did. I kept asking myself – what is most important in who she is: herself as an individual, her disability, being transgender, being a survivor of child abuse?
A couple of years ago, I would have said individual, because that is what gave her the drive to achieve what she has. But now I think that everything has an effect. Let’s face it – able bodied and disabled people live different experiences on earth. So do straight and gay. So do beautiful and not beautiful. So do rich and poor. So let’s stop pretending that we are all created equal, because we aren’t.
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