Introduction Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (bio) and Khairani Barokka (bio) WHEN AUDRE LORDE was faced with the possibility of a new tumor in her liver in November 1986, she went to Barnes & Noble for more information. "In those hours in the stacks of Barnes & Noble, I felt myself shifting into another gear," she writes in A Burst of Light. "My resolve strengthened as my panic lessened." There were few first person accounts of living with cancer available to her, a fact that spurred her to publish The Cancer Journals in 1980. Any knowledge about her condition was mediated by doctors and scientists. These tomes were filled with medical fact—notorious for its coldness and lack of regard for the patient as an individual, as a human being in need of empathy during a frightening time. In publishing The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light, Lorde created a space for the patient to speak up, talk back, and represent themself to an audience of people who may or may not understand the situation at hand. The Cancer Journals would be followed by books from other poets who critically considered illness, such as Essex Hemphill's Ceremonies and Constance Merritt's Protocol for Touch. More recently, OwnVoices work like Keah Brown's The Pretty One, Kay Ulanday Barrett's When the Chant Comes, and Alice Wong's Year of the Tiger would crystallize the arrival of a more defiant brand of sick and disabled literature. These books form part of the foundation of intersectional disability literature, the tradition that the works in this issue celebrate. We are elated to present writing by disabled authors that pushes back against dominant depictions of disabled people as helpless, minor, or merely as patients and nothing more. The rise of OwnVoices literature in the United States is mirrored not only in other Anglophone countries, but is a movement spanning [End Page 600] languages and nations. This issue is a reminder that disabled writers have always been present everywhere and have produced writing of great merit. Salma Harland's translation of Abū al-`Alā´ al-Ma`arrī, a 9th-century blind poet born in present-day Syria, is one such example you will encounter in this issue. The international scope of this issue is a reminder that D/deaf and disabled writers inhabit all aspects of the literary arts, including as translators. We are, after all, the largest minority in the world. The work in this issue reclaims the narrative of illness and disability from medical experts and scientists. It centers the wisdom and expertise of those living painful lives, sick lives, disabled lives, neurodivergent lives. It insists that such lives are worth living, are beautiful, are deserving of documentation. It brings our universes into being and our bodies into focus. We are lucky to live in a time where first-person and artistically rendered accounts of living with illness and disability are available to us. Yet the idea that disability and illness are private experiences to endure silently persists from Lorde's time ("Cancer survivors are expected to be silent out of misguided concern for others' feelings of guilt or despair … we are invisible to each other, and we begin to be invisible to ourselves") to our own. This is why having a D/deaf and Disabled Special Issue of Massachusetts Review is so vital. We chose pieces that together form a hope for disability justice in the world. We are proud to present an issue that shows the depth and breadth of literary and artistic work from our communities. [End Page 601] Cyrée Jarelle Johnson cyrée jarelle johnson (he/they) is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson's writing has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Prompt Press, Apogee, Boston Review, The Root, and the New York Times, among other outlets. In 2020, Johnson received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Khairani Barokka khairani barokka is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta whose work has been presented internationally. Her work centers disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She is currently Research Fellow at...
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May 6, 2024
Wendy Keyser + 1
Open Access