Who gets to determine whether another person is disabled or not? That is the question raised by a poet who is herself disabled from birth by Cerebral Palsy, Molly McCully Brown.
Her new book of poems The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017) imagines what life is like for those who were born with her condition and others, many decades before her own birth. Many were considered feebleminded because their bodies were distorted by uncontrolled muscle spasms. Molly explores her own advantages as child of enlightened understanding of the medical issues regarding CP and contrasts this with the lives of those who were shut away.
Hers is an essential voice for the disabled who are often the most invisible and unseen members of our society. She was interviewed by Terri Gross on Fresh Air recently and she could not be more eloquent about what it meant to be defined by her own body from an early age and yet how she managed to articulate and define meaning for herself in a way that presents a beacon for all those who are born with "difference" whether it is neurological or not. She notes that if she had been born in an earlier era she might have been placed in an institution herself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/review-virginia-state-colony-for-epileptics-and-feebleminded-molly-mccully-brown.html?_r=0
Her new book of poems The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017) imagines what life is like for those who were born with her condition and others, many decades before her own birth. Many were considered feebleminded because their bodies were distorted by uncontrolled muscle spasms. Molly explores her own advantages as child of enlightened understanding of the medical issues regarding CP and contrasts this with the lives of those who were shut away.
Hers is an essential voice for the disabled who are often the most invisible and unseen members of our society. She was interviewed by Terri Gross on Fresh Air recently and she could not be more eloquent about what it meant to be defined by her own body from an early age and yet how she managed to articulate and define meaning for herself in a way that presents a beacon for all those who are born with "difference" whether it is neurological or not. She notes that if she had been born in an earlier era she might have been placed in an institution herself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/books/review-virginia-state-colony-for-epileptics-and-feebleminded-molly-mccully-brown.html?_r=0
A Prayer for the Wretched Among Us
Always, they tell you to go
where God calls you.
What they don’t say is that, sometimes,
God will call you to the wilderness,
gesture toward the trees, and then
hang back and wave you on alone.
This is how I wound up granting absolution
to low-grade idiots and the worn-out women
who turn them over in bed at night and,
at dawn, go home to their own families,
try not to think of ghosts
wasting away in this world.
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