Interview with Poetry Wales: Poetry, Ableism and Bearing Witness
In an interview with Zoë Brigley from Poetry Wales, Bethany explores how her poem Cling Film challenges the reader to bear witness to ableism. The poem is available to read here.
Excerpt from Bethany’s poem Cling Film, available to read at Poetry Wales.
You have this incredible formal experimentation – so innovative and original – and I loved how the conversation goes back and forth on the page in this poem – a conversation about ableism. What gave you the idea to use this formal strategy?
Ableism is discrimination against disabled people in favour of non-disabled people.
Disabled people are forced to experience the disruptions and intrusions of an ableist world. Inaccessibility interrupts my every day; I don’t smoothly wheel down a street. As shattered glass and uneven pavements disrupt my pace, they disrupt my work. The poetic tradition of writing fluidly without interruption often represents how non-disabled people move through this world. By writing disrupted poems that don’t walk quickly in a straight line along the page I can write my reality.
You use strike through or crossing out quite a bit. Am I on the right track in thinking that this represents the ableist thoughts or speech that people might have?
As a young disabled woman, I exist within a crossfire of ableism. Ableist comments from strangers, from doctors and from wider society follow me through daily life. ‘Does she?’ is the questioning voice of the patriarchy intent on disbelieving women, questioning my experiences before the poem has even begun. As a young chronically ill woman, I have frequently experienced medical misogyny where doctors have dismissed me; young women are still viewed as hysterical if we discuss our symptoms. Meanwhile, ‘take a stand’ challenges the ableist language we use, such as ‘stand’ to imply both physically standing up and taking a moral stance, that excludes so many people without thought. Comments like these threaten to erase my voice and decontextualise my experience. Through acknowledging these intrusions in the poem before striking them out, I reclaim my power.
That line about “the poems you’ll demand” is interesting. Could you say a bit more about the kind of poems that you think are demanded or required from disabled writers?
There is still an immense pressure to either live silently or to overcome your disability: ‘ableism is the marathon you’ll want me to run one day to prove how far I’ve come.’ Society often ‘demand(s)’ disabled poets to write poems about recovery, poems saturated with hope and poems that do not make them question their own mortality. Some non-disabled people may expect me to lament how my wheelchair is a burden and how I dream of flying from its seat. However, I am disabled by society’s inaccessibility and ableism, not my impairment. Instead, I write about what it’s like to have strangers interrogate me for standing up or how my beautiful wheelchair is my ‘wings.’
Confronting non-disabled people with their own ableism is challenging. Ableism is often subtle, unconscious and ‘hard to tear.’ Due to the systemic silencing of disabled voices, many people will not realise that they are being ableist. For example, ‘the job that doesn’t want part timers’ and ‘the dog shit you didn’t pick up that I am forced to wheel through’ are just as much acts of ableism as ‘the absent ramps that stop me taking off from the pavement and soaring up, up above Cardiff.’
Other comments are more overtly ableist but are hard to call out due to well meaning yet ignorant intentions. For example, the nurse who told me “you’re too glam to be in a wheelchair” meant well, as did the taxi driver who offered to pray for me. Poetry provides the space for readers to bear witness to ableism. This calling out of ableism in poetry can be unsettling for audiences if they recognise their own attitudes or behavior. My goal when writing is for other disabled people with similar experiences to know they are not alone and to unsettle non-disabled readers into confronting their own ableist attitudes.
We also live in a society that is deeply uncomfortable talking about illness. Chronically ill people are forced to be ill quietly. People do not want to entertain the possibility that one day they may wake up sick and not recover, nor that any condition can be chronic. This forced silencing perpetuates the lack of awareness and representation around chronic illness, resulting in little funding for research for many conditions. Chronically ill people are encouraged to only talk to other chronically ill people about their symptoms, maintaining the void where our voices should be. In Cling Film, I present the reader with the practical barriers to accessing the world with chronic illness: from the ‘chairless corridors that command me to wait at home quietly’ to society’s inability to believe in part time wheelchair users and fluctuating symptoms (‘the you look well on days I hang my wings at home’).
By writing with and to other disabled writers, I can share disabled pride and explore the beautiful, resilient and creative world that we discover on becoming members of the disabled community.
