#eddiendopu

“Late night thinking through: Perhaps the reason why non-disabled people can’t seem to comprehend the violence of ableism and why disabled people ourselves have enormous difficulty articulating the trauma produced by that violence is because ableism operates as a force field of bio-power that ontologically structures the way in which bodies experience the world. Put another way, ableism can be genealogically understood as a coloniality of embodiment." - Eddie Ndopu

This Facebook status by crip comrade Eddie, during the wee hours of last evening, was met by a few amens as well as a request to explain some of the more academic vernacular - which was an exercise I took up & enjoyed over my morning coffee. Not just because I fancy myself as something of a translator, but because Eddie had already put (snazzy) words to what I have been meditating on all weekend, quite palpably.

To break this quote down (as i interpret the thought), he is referencing the Foucaultian analysis of the government’s concern with management/regulation of populations, and what implications this has had on ‘disablement’. he sees this as an integral part of the emergence and success of capitalism.

An entire system of regulation of bodies is supported by the notion of ‘protection of life’; a body, a life is understood to be a means of production (the worker). the unsuccessful body is rejected, and ‘fixed’ or discarded, in order to not drain the machine. this is an era that created power structures to colonize (as edie phrased) corporeal and metaphysical bodies (so ‘real’ and also transcendent ideas of the body) without which, capitalism as we know it cannot exist.

With that in place, the daily and historical experience of ableism-trauma then becomes one that is near-impossible to define, because it is not an autobiography, but in fact, a single key note on an accordion playing a tune. by which i mean, that trauma does not actually exist (on its own); it is not to be understood at all.

This is the fabric that makes the administration of justice on crimes of ableism impervious - these acts can not be convicted as wrong if the society (as product of the system) cannot observe these acts. justice then, always already evades.

I went on to site the tragic and unnecessary death of Robert Saylor, and the lack of indictment of his murderers, as a good example of what is being discussed. Of course, more largely, and historically, we can look to eugenics and other such movements in various nation states.

The thing is, my disabled life and my crip existence are equally challenging to elucidate. Not to suggest ‘crip existence’ is under anything of a "banner of a collectivized ontology of identity," to borrow another Eddieism, but rather the communion present in spaces where the majority experience a disabled embodiment.

The truth is for me, it has never been a process of very much speaking. As Eddie rightly points out, the trauma is such that its very reality evades, therefore any procedure through which we are trained to assess trauma, is likely flawed by the same system that creates ableism-trauma in the first place. As in, what the fuck can I even say? Was it even real?

Kristeva is another wonderful theorist to approach here, and her Theory of the Abject. When I first began studying this French philosopher, alongside psychoanalysist Jacques Lacan, and two queer literary works that broached the mechanism of heteronormativity in structuralism, I was inevitably led in my learning to a reflection on actual life events, called from my memory at the point of defining of abjection.

‘The abject’ exists in a liminality between the concept of the object and that of the subject. The explanation of abjection is given through metaphor - the visceral reaction that all humans innately possess towards surreal and ‘disgusting’ things: the sight of a ghastly wound, a dead body, biotic decay, etc., the way we gut revolt, or shudder at things once subject, now cast outside of the symbolic order. The act of being made to face the abject, Kristeva presents, is inherently traumatic.

Trauma.

When I first read this theory, I understood it to name perhaps what has existed so far in my life as unnameable. I cannot help but refer to these events as dual traumas, as I understand myself in those situations to have embodied both the ‘witness’ and the ‘mangled corpse.’

It was a Thursday evening in the summer of 2008. I was stepping onto an elevator after visiting a friend in an apartment complex called the Charlotte Towers. The doors closed behind me in the empty moving box, as it began its descent toward the lobby.

The momentum was interrupted as the elevator stopped after the 8th floor to pick up someone on the 6th. The doors opened to a man who was mid-twenty-something who looked up at me just before stepping in.

And shrieked.

Now, I don’t mean yelled or shouted. I mean, blood-curdling, terrified scream. He was looking right at me.

I had not even processed the noise before he shook and mutter ‘oh sorry’, while remaining immobile. The doors eventually closed, resuming the metal threshold between us, as well as the elevator’s lobby-bound journey.

The whole walk home I felt an dissociation overtake my body, not even certain if the encounter had even been real.