Review: Raging Grace (edited by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway and Kerri Shying)

This collection from 23 writers with disabilities and neurodivergence grew out of an RMIT Writing the Future of Health Fellowship. Many address the future of health directly and are accounts of the writers’ experiences with the medical system. “You survive this medical system by pretending, going along,” write Jasper Peach and Rachel Wenona Guy in Selections of Memory from Double Pneumonia / Selections of Memory from the Psych Ward, “You crawl deep inside some cavern of yourself and wait it out like a wounded animal”. Esther Ottaway asks for research that addresses the gender data gap: most research is done on men; autism, heart attack symptoms, medication’s impact, menstruation and perimenopause are scientifically poorly understood in women and nonbinary people, with devastating outcomes.

“All we are searching for is someone who can do their job with compassion,” writes Anna Jacobson in Grace: Gardeners and Listeners, and suggests the exciting field of Narrative Medicine, in which “patients’ own writing, artwork, and storytelling expressing lived experiences is the answer to creating understanding and empathy”. Sanya Rushdi suggested similar in her extraordinary novel Hospital.

The medical system’s approach to disability is “all about normalisation” writes Kit Kavanagh-Ryan. Playful, thrilling, discomfiting, this collection takes normality to task and asks what is lost in its pursuit. Interspersed throughout are reflections entitled Rage and Grace, the two sides of the phrase coined by Jasper Peach to describe the experience of disability. “The world seeks to erase us,” Beau Windon, Andy Jackson, Michèle Saint-Yves, Robin M Eames and Ruby Hillsmith write in Coalescent. Normal is “annihilation” write Gaele Sobott and Jackson in a helix of a poem whose structure suggests its two authors’ voices braiding together as much as it does heredity:

illness / abnormal

wellness / we are

custodians / continuous realms

of blemish all this / our power is bruised

endangered infinite / and sweet as a persimmon

entangled for the helix there is no outside and no other

The pandemic has brutally exposed this underlying logic. Before the pandemic, Kerri Shying and Sam Drummond write in Raging (rage, their “lipstick lately”, they write), they were “disabled”. But the lacklustre and ongoing attitude to mask-wearing, ventilation, vaccinations and social distancing revealed they are “lesser being[s]”, as suggested by the Orwellian and chilling phrase “underlying conditions”, to which many COVID-19 deaths were attributed. “You dropped us in a heartbeat,” they write, “It’s your world, apparently”.

Even so, the pandemic offered opportunities, respite from the normal that we’re so desperately trying to return to, enabled new ways of living separately-but-together to flourish. Katerina Bryant and Jackson describe how illness receded in Pensive Air: An essay in two voices:

those of us whose bodies confound our society’s definition of normal — who get stared at, who get overwhelmed — have always retreated, to breathe a more pensive air, to write and imagine.

For Bryant, the pandemic offered an opportunity to embrace uncertainty and the present. “I stopped thinking about the future at all,” she writes. Throughout this collection writers express day-to-day living with disability. “I’ve always had a body that found it excruciating to carry the frequency and volume of feeling,” write Sarah Stivens and Peach in Crack and Burn. Heather Taylor-Johnson and Wenona Guy’s My Raucous, Singing Ear is an aching portrayal of moving through a “sensorially taxing” world, which also describes the looks they receive, “staring is what’s done when people are afraid of someone like me”.

Words wound as much as looks, “in school yards and doctor’s offices/new names for old insults,” Stivens and Alex Creece write in You can find her. Kavanagh-Ryan and Jackson address some very annoying advice in Touch some grass, directed at people who “quiet too loudly”, but remind us that “grass is further away than ableds think”. In Perennially gaslit, the disabled reject humanity, Ottaway describes the intrusive questions:

Everyone so nosey to know

why-can’t-you, demanding

tabloid drama, that I bare my underbelly

and let them test it with a foot. Why aren’t we terminal

and concludes with the imperative to “go to the insects, plants, land, sky”. But it’s here that the collection’s collaborative, conversational ethos comes to the fore, as Jackson follows in the next exquisite poem, Instructions for the broken:

Go to the insects, plants, land, sky …

let the pardalotes and silver-eyes adjust

to your presence, resume their grazing

on psyllids and larvae. Soon you’ll become

only another human, as abnormal as anyone else

Words can be tools as much as weapons. Jackson’s Dis-topia playfully reclaims disabled language, creating a world where models with “their smooth, songless bodies” can only long for bumps and lumps, where “crippled” means “abundant, brilliant”, and “maddening” is a synonym for “intensifying, glittering, honeying”. There’s so much on offer, these writers remind us, if only we should choose to listen. “Is it shame or awe?” Peach and Jackson ask in wonder in Stealth Mode. “Sensitivity isn’t a game to be played — it’s how leaders are chosen,” Stivens and Creece write in Our Pain, Our Whimsy. Then you come to Shying, Sobott and M Eames’ Criptych, an embracing of contradiction, desire, rage and, yes, grace. The poem’s triumphant third section, Joyride, has something of the cadence of Beyonce’s delicious Thique:

yeah I’m that scream queen

that in-between seize the means

that high-risk heart disease

uncomfortable mortality

that eugenic disposability

emergency ward striptease

hospital glam night shift

that fall risk that plot twist

stuck in the hydraulic lift

the grift the grind the grand design

see u on the picket line

Angela Costi imagines a future where “the dis is no longer a point of reference” in Rage: Therapeutic Future – ReQuesting the Beast. Unfairly burdened with living in a world that privileges the abled, marginalised by the medical system, this collection nonetheless offers such expansiveness. The forms are as inventive and prolific as the richness of human experience. The collaborations offer the exponential combinations of the spark that jumps across the meeting of minds. 

Gay rating: 3/5 for numerous queer writers and themes.