... so while you're here, check out our rants, ravings, snipes and gripes - and let us know what's on your mind.
What’s the Deal With Blind Authors?
What does it matter if a writer is blind? It shouldn’t, actually. Apparently it didn’t use to matter. But nowadays, the only contemporary blind writers I can find out about are writers who write about being blind.
Grant it, blind authors have a special perspective when it comes to the subject of blindness. But why limit themselves to that one topic? Sighted authors write about blind characters. Most authors write about other races and creeds. Peaceful authors write about great violence. Any decent author should be able to write beyond such a limited scope.
And are these people really authors? Aren’t they more autobiographers? Isn’t a book by a blind person about being blind more like a transcript from their therapy sessions?
Braille Keyboard - Wasted Potential?
How many blind writers today are writing mysteries and joke books and romance novels? How many blind people are self-confident enough to write mainstream books populated with sighted people? How many blind writers ever wrote popular fiction?
And let me quantify what I mean by “blind.” I mean the total inability to see light for most of your life. For example, Georgius Everhardus Rumphius went totally blind in his 40′s and went on to write well-respected botanical science books. I wouldn’t consider him a blind writer.
James Thurber was a very popular humorist who almost became blind, but close doesn’t count. For the same reason, the eventually-almost-blind James Joyce, author of “Ulysses,” doesn’t count.
Homer – not Simpson, but the 8th Century Greek – was allegedly blind. He allegedly wrote the epic poems “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” But he only allegedly existed, so he doesn’t count, either.
On the “does count” side of things, the 4th Century Greek writer Didim of Alexandrie went blind at age 5 and wrote many legal and philosophical books. However, like Rudaki Abu Abdalach Djafar, Francesco Landino, Francesco Bell, Nikazija, Vitas Stvos, Thom Blacklock, Conrad Theofilius Pfefel, Edward Rashton, Helen Keller… and dozens more all the way up to today’s Stephen Kuusisto, these writers wrote philosophy and poetry and sociological essays and autobiographies on – you guessed it – being blind.
[Just an aside: If a blind author dictates his or her copy, how much does the transcriber affect the final work? I mean, when Helen Keller made a speech and Annie Sullivan translated, how do we know that Sullivan wasn't putting her own spin on whatever Keller was trying to say? Hey, no disrespect meant; I'm just saying...]
So, if there are authors of non-blind-related popular contemporary fiction out there who happen to be blind (and “legally” blind doesn’t count, either), bravo! Good for you for being an integral part of literary society without limiting yourself to a stereotypical topic or resorting to gimmickry.
Six-Eye Jackson
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I could be off-base, but what I think you were trying to do in terms of defining blindness was not actually defining what terms should be used to refer to varying temporal lengths of blindness, but instead showing a distinction that is important to what you are talking about. I got here because I was wondering the same thing: are there blind-from-birth writers who write fiction? I don’t usually draw a distinction between blind-from-birth people or those who went blind afterwards, but in this case I feel as though it is important. People who were blind from birth have never seen the world in the way that seeing people do, so their descriptions would likely be very different and fresh, because their perspective is entirely different. I know one woman, a professor at my college, was blind from birth and she sees people as specific colors. I would love to read a novel by someone who sees the world in this way!
However, people who lost their sight later in their life have had a chance to see the world as the rest of us do, so their brain was molded around sight from the beginning. While their struggles are the same, their descriptions would likely be different because they would, quite literally, see the world in different ways.
Also, no offense intended, I feel as though the comments by both Keri and Six-Eye Jackson were both unnecessarily harsh. It seemed to me to be more of a lashing out than a polite explanation of what was bothersome. This doesn’t have to be a heated topic. I hope the explanation I provided above, which is what brought me to this article in the first place, will help smooth some bad feelings over.
I’ve just started working with a totally blind-from-birth young writer and I’m going to send her the link to this article. She’ll be delighted to read it as she says the same herself.
She can’t stand the way some blind people capitalise on their ‘handicap’ – she thinks they’re lazy or non motivated, relying on their blindness to see them through life.
She doesn’t need a lot of help; I think the same sounding words with different spelling confuse her a little, also she doesn’t space paragraphs too well.
I’m not sure if your ‘marginalising’ or not. I have searched for authors who are blind from birth and who write ‘mainstream’ fiction and I haven’t found any so far.
Authors depend on the Publishing company to pick up their work from Agents. This could be a further barrier to the blind due to the perceived extra work. Can I call it ‘subjective negativism’?
Good article, you said what you needed to say. I’m all for that, even if a few toes get crushed along the way.
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Thank you for commenting, Keri. You make a good point about not wanting your readers to know you’re blind. In fact, the publisher may make that decision for you based on their own economic or politically correct reasons, as misguided as those reasons may be. By the way, 1) I do get to define “blind” for my own editorial purposes, and 2) I never called blindness a disability.
I think you missed the point of my rant, which is to encourage ALL writers to broaden their scope to all genres and to spend less time wallowing in their own self-defined limitations. I happen to be Black, female, middle-aged and legally blind, and this is the first time in ages I touched on any of those subjects.
Could it be that there are many blind authors out there that just don’t broadcast the fact that they are blind? I would think that if I was a blind author of say, romance novels, I might not necessarily want my readers to know I was blind, especially if I wanted to “fit seamlessly into society”.
Another point – you don’t get to define “blind”. You have no right to tell people whether or not they count as having a disability. And I don’t care if you’re just doing it to prove a point, or if it’s just for the purpose of this article. You have no right. You are marginalizing and oppressing a minority by determining what they should be called- by telling them whether or not they “count” as blind. That may be harsh, but those kinds of statements deserve a harsh response. Nothing personal.