Ep 6 – Green Book Revisited, Care Work and Disability KidLit

We revisit Green Book, and discuss how marginalized people—or parts of a marginalized existence—are left out of mainstream stories told from a more privileged perspective.

Lin rejoices in the rich conversations about disability at the launch of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Margrit brings up some middle-grade novels featuring disabled protagonists. In some of them, living with disability is the main plot point, e.g., El Deafo by Cece Bell, Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper, and Wonder by R.J. Palacio. In The Magisterium series by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, the protagonist’s disability is neither easy to overlook, nor an impediment in the adventures he lives through.

Question of the episode: What do you think about the pressures on marginalized people to constantly explain their marginalization?

Join the conversation on Twitter at @World_ofStories or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

Margrit 0:00
Welcome to World of Stories. I’m Margrit and my pronoun is they.

Lin 0:01
I’m Lin and my pronoun is she and we are here to talk about diversity in storytelling. I have a bit of a cold so I’m going to be doing this podcast with my sexy bedroom voice. So please excuse me if I dissolve into a coughing fit. Excuse me.

Margrit 0:08
You’re fine, you’re fine.

Lin 0:10
I wanted to start this podcast or this episode by going back to a movie that I talked about in episode one called the Green Book, or sorry, Green Book, no “the,” starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen. And if you haven’t heard of the, of the movie, or if you haven’t heard the episode in which I talked about it, it’s a movie that won the Viewers’ Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. And it’s based off a true story about a Black musician who hired a white driver to chauffeur him around when he’s doing this tour in the south of the US.

Margrit 1:19
In the 1950s? or 60s?

Lin 1:21
In the 1960s, or 70s, or something like that. And so, you know, lots of racism and all that stuff. So, in episode one, when I was talking about it, I really did enjoy the movie. Recently, since it’s come out in theaters, there have been more criticism about the movie, and I wanted to make sure that I addressed that.

So when I first watched the movie, I did not take the time to like, look more into these characters or these people, because it’s based off a true story, and to understand who these people were. I was just like, oh, entertaining movie, interesting themes, and sort of like moved on. But now, the criticism that’s come out is, I think, very valid and has helped me understand or view the movie through a bit of a different lens. So the story is told primarily from the white driver’s perspective, and it is, it totally is. The movie starts off with the white driver and his ordinary life, and then it shows how he’s been called into this interview for this job. And then at the end, the story ends at the white driver’s house.

Margrit 2:43
So if this had been a book, it would, it could have been in first person told by the white driver.

Lin 2:48
Totally, yes. So it’s from the white driver’s perspective, you know, and so then that colours all of the interactions, right? From the racism–

Margrit 2:56
No pun intended?

Lin 2:58
Yes, no pun intended. I didn’t realize I said that. But it’s, yeah, so all of the issues like the racism and the, you know, interaction between Blacks and whites and everything is through the lens of the white character. And it also has this sort of white savior trope, where in the movie, the Black musician is portrayed as someone who is estranged from his family, he’s sort of out of touch with Black culture and the Black community. And it is the white driver who introduces him to things like fried chicken and like other black musicians and all of these things, right? And so it’s like, oh, the white driver has redeemed somehow the Black musician.

Margrit 3:51
Right. It mediates his return to the original culture.

Lin 3:57
Yeah, or like bringing him in from the cold somehow, you know. And then I think the most important criticism was that the movie doesn’t present an accurate picture of what the Black musician’s life was really like. So Dr. Don Shirley is, you know, was a real life person. He’s passed away. Now he was a musician and members of his family–I think his brother and his niece–have come out publicly and said, this movie doesn’t, isn’t true. Like that’s not what Dr. Shirley’s life was, like. Like he was not estranged from his family. He was not out of touch with Black culture. He had eaten fried chicken before, you know. So, it’s like it’s not, it’s not accurate. And the criticism is that it is a story that’s told from the white perspective.

And so the screenplay for the movie was written by the son of the white driver. And so you know, the guy, I don’t know his name but he’s, you know, writing it from the white perspective. He’s writing it from the perspective of his father and the stories that his father told him. And none of Dr. Shirley’s family members were consulted during the making of this movie. They claimed that they couldn’t find any family members that they didn’t think that any of the family members were still alive.

Margrit 5:27
Wow.

Lin 5:27
And so I mean, who knows how much–they said they tried to find family members, but they couldn’t.

Margrit 5:34
Really? In the age of Google? How hard is that?

Lin 5:38
I know. And then as soon as the movie comes out, there’s like at least two people who have come forward and said, “we are his family members.” But anyways, I just, I wanted to say two things. One is that it really matters who tells the story, right? Because–

Margrit 5:53
Oh, God, yeah.

Lin 5:56
Arguably, I mean, so like the premise of the movie really did happen. Like Dr. Shirley was a bBack musician. He was wealthy, he was very well established. And he did go on this tour of the South. And he did hire this white driver, Tony Lip, and they did develop a friendship and there was, you know, racism and other things addressed in the movie that were part of the real life dynamic of their relationship. But, I mean, you can imagine that if it was one of Don Shirley’s family members who had written the screenplay, it would probably have looked very, very different.

Margrit 6:35
This is fascinating, and I don’t mean to derail you, but it reminds me on the other side of–there’s a nonfiction book written by a researcher. Her name is Rebecca Skloot, and she wrote this book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Have you heard of it?

Lin 6:53
I have, yeah. But I’ve not read it.

Margrit 6:55
It’s just basically trying to recover and memorialize this Black woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had I think ovarian cancer and whose cancer cells had been harvested without her knowledge and obviously without her consent back in the 50s. And basically all of the research that has been done on this type of cancer and all of the tests and everything have been based on the work that has been done on Henrietta Lacks’s cells.

Lin 7:35
Wow.

Margrit 7:36
And so it was just tremendous, super interesting juxtaposition again, from the point of view of who is telling the story and who gets to be part of the narrative and how easy it is to erase, you know, important things. And especially, you know, marginalized people and racialized people, right?

Lin 8:00
Of course. Yeah. Because like in your example, I mean, I have not read this story before, but it sounds like it could be about, look at all of these amazing medical advances that we benefit from. But does it touch on the violation of this woman who like, you know, had part of her body removed and tested upon?

Margrit 8:03
And she died shortly thereafter. And her family has never had reparation in that time, and it’s just–you can imagine how many scientists have made their name in sort of, in the medical field based on the science and on the experiments and everything that was done on the tissues harvested from this woman, right?

Lin 8:48
Yeah, it really does matter who tells the story. And I think the other thing is that I don’t want to say that I now dislike the movie. I think there certainly are problematic elements to it. But I mean, if listeners are interested, I still encourage them to go watch it, because I think even stories that have–that are problematic can teach us something and we can learn something from it. And so, you know, it’s up to everyone’s individual choice. If viewers are still interested in watching it, I still think that it’s worthwhile to check it out.

Margrit 9:35
And it’s interesting because there’s sort of, at the same time, the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, biopic of Freddie Mercury… life has come on and I adore Freddie Mercury and I adore Berkeley. And the same kinds of critiques have been leveled at this movie as well because it paints Freddie Mercury’s life in a very sort of melancholy tone and it kind of glosses over his long term relationship with his male lover. And it’s just–the criticisms that I’ve read of it, make it seem like it’s a very sort of, I don’t know… it is told from a very heteronormative perspective.

Lin 10:27
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard that same criticism, too. I’ve not watched it. To be honest, I probably won’t because I’m not really a Freddie Mercury fan.

Margrit 10:37
What? What?

Lin 10:39
I know.

Margrit 10:40
I don’t think we can be friends anymore, Lin! This is terrible.

Lin 10:46
Okay, okay, I’ll watch it.

Okay, so the other thing I wanted to talk about today was a book launch for a book called Care Work. And it was written by–I’m sorry if I pronounce her name wrong–but it’s written by Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha. I think I’m so sorry. I butchered that. But she is a activist and author. And this book is about disability justice. And so it was a book launch. She read a number of excerpts from the book and then there was a panel discussion with a couple of guests. One of whom is Cyrus Marcus Ware, and the second person was Wy-Joung Kou. And I went to this event because–all I knew about it was like, it’s about disability and arts and I was like, oh, interesting. I’m gonna go see what it’s about. And so the book is about Disability Justice, and honestly, I know absolutely nothing about Disability Justice, or any of the work that the disabled community has done to raise awareness about their issues or to fight for their rights. And so a lot of the time I spent there was just listening and trying to follow along with what they were saying because honestly, like, a lot of what they said just went like straight over my head. Like I didn’t even understand some of the terminology they were using.

Margrit 12:22
So it was not Disability Justice 101 kind of a thing.

Lin 12:25
No, it was like, yeah, it was advanced. It was like for their community. The book was for their community, it was to start discussions about some of these very important issues that they care about, and I think to make it more nuanced was that it wasn’t just Disability Justice for the disabled community writ large, but it was for queer people and Black and Indigenous people of color and so these intersections of different kinds of marginalization with the disabled community and how queer people and Black and Indigenous people of color experience marginalization, to multiple degrees than white disabled people, right? Like they can be marginalized because of their disability but also because they’re queer and also because they’re not white.

And so the additional things that they have to deal with, on top of being disabled, and there was one interesting thing that–one example that was brought up during the talk was about Cyrus Marcus Ware. He was asked to put together this art exhibit and he chose to bring together Black disabled artists. So he was very purposeful in selecting Black disabled artists to be showcased in this event. And it went very well. And then after the event, a bunch of his colleagues came up to him and said, oh, this was such a great event. The next time we should do the same event for disabled artists. And he was like, well, that’s that’s what we just did. You know that all those people were disabled in some way. They were also Black, butthey couldn’t–like in the eyes of his colleagues, they couldn’t be both, right.? They could either be Black or they could be disabled. And they were seen as Black but not disabled. So it’s like an understanding that people can be marginalized in multiple ways.

Margrit 14:57
Right and the ways in which intersectionality has to be a way of life and not just a theory.

Lin 15:01
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think that was what, like, I took away from it because I think on an intellectual level, I can understand the difficulties the disabled community faces, but to hear them talk about it made it real, you know, that a lot of the examples and the stories they told was like, okay, like, I can see now exactly what it means when it’s–what does accessibility mean? And how do you make events and spaces accessible?

Margrit 15:40
For example?

Lin 15:41
Yeah, so for example, well, two examples. One is ironic because the event was held in this space that was supposed to be accessible, but then on the day of the event, the elevator broke. So then there were like all of these people who had wheelchairs and needed an elevator to get to like the second floor where the lecture hall was, and the elevator was broken. So actually, I’m not sure how they got in and out of that space. So you know, like ironic.

But the second example that they gave was two disabled people decided to put on this event about something. And they were just talking about all the ways that they had to troubleshoot to make sure that the event was accessible. You know, they’re talking about having to get vans that were like wheelchair vans, and then the one that they arranged broke down. So they had to like scramble and had to find a second van and find parts and fix the van and just like, all of the things that they had to troubleshoot to make sure that the event that they were putting on was accessible. And you know how they’re saying that when there’s an event that an abled person puts together, they’ll make it accessible if it’s convenient. But if it’s not convenient, they’ll often be like, sorry, it’s too difficult. We can’t.

Margrit 17:00
Which kind of hits home to us, in a way? Because since we started thinking about this podcast, and you came up with the idea, and we were discussing it, we talked about how to make a script available.

Lin 17:13
Yeah, transcripts.

Margrit 17:14
That’s something that we’ve looked into. And we’re still unable to provide, right? And so it’s something that we ourselves are not, sort of, going through with, at the moment.

Lin 17:28
And I, yeah, so I do feel really terrible about that. And I think we need to revisit this offline again and see what we can do to try to get transcripts for the show.

Margrit 17:41
And the reality is that right now, it’s just beyond our means. And we have to find a different alternative. Hopefully, I’m looking into this, but yeah, unfortunately, it is not fully accessible.

Lin 17:55
Yeah, so we’ll have to be a little creative. And so for listeners who might have some ideas about how to do this, if you know of any resources that we can utilize, let us know. Because, yeah, it is important for us to, to be able to get transcripts.

Yeah, so I think it was, it was really good for me to sort of dip my toe into that community and to get just like a very brief glimpse of, okay, this is what they’re talking about. And these are the issues that they care about. And, and even like, this is the language that they use to describe what’s going on in their community.

Margrit 18:37
Right. And this is super important because language carries respect or it can inflict damage, right? So yeah, being aware of the language that is used within the community is the first step to being inclusive.

Lin 18:53
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And they were using a lot of terms that I was like, I need to go look that up. I don’t know what that means.

Margrit 19:00
So get the book. You need to get the book, called Care Work?

Lin 19:05
Yes, it’s called Care Work. Yeah. So what have you been reading?

Margrit 19:09
Um, well, I thought it would be a good moment to talk about sort of, synthetically some of the books I’ve read in children’s literature that have to do with disability. Just to keep that theme going. And one of the things that I’m sort of wrestling through, conceptually, is the inherent contradiction in, you know, the own voices hashtag that is happening in, in publishing, which is a truly significant push to have representation of all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of abilities and, and people with different marginalizations. And one of my issues is the pressures that we put on marginalized people to constantly explain their own experience, right? And so it’s a tension that I have that I can’t resolve, because honestly, I would rather–if a book deals with a certain marginalization, I would rather it be written by somebody who has lived that experience. But at the same time, I understand how much emotional work goes into it. And a lot of the times, I’m not sure that there’s enough of a recompense or enough remuneration for that kind of emotional work that is necessary to create that.

So I was really interested in looking at how KidLit–children’s literature–deals with that. And so I was looking at middle grade, and there’s a ton of books with protagonists with disabilities and one of my things is that I’m not a big fan of didacticism. So I don’t look for, what is the moral of the story? You know. What can we learn from this? And there are a number of middle grade books that managed to present empathy without being overly didactic, if that makes sense.

Lin 21:17
Yep.

Margrit 21:18
So, so for example, one of the books that I read a while ago, is a graphic–an autobiographical graphic novel. That is a mouthful. It’s called El Deafo and it was written by Cece Bell and it’s about her growing up deaf in the 70s and 80s. And her deafness was due to having contracted meningitis at four. And so she had hearing before that and all of a sudden after meningitis, she became completely deaf and it chronicles her adventures in wearing all kinds of hearing aids and having to go to school. And it balances that with a lot of humour and a lot of sort of gentleness because Cece, the protagonist of this book, is very fashion aware. And so the hearing aids that she has to wear are very bulky and it kind of cramps her style, literally.

Lin 22:22
Just as a side note from that, I find it interesting how glasses, like eyeglasses, have become fashion statements, even though they’re technically like a disability aid, right? I mean, like, it’s for people who can’t see. This thing you wear on your face allows you to see, but because it’s become this like fashion thing, we don’t look down on people who wear glasses. We aren’t like, oh, that’s weird, you’ve got this like thing on your face. But that doesn’t really apply to almost any other kind of disability aid that I can think of, right?

Margrit 23:00
No, not at all.

Lin 23:02
So I have seen on social media and I think on Twitter, people who are like blinging out their hearing aids or like blinging out their, like wheelchairs or their canes and other things like that. And just like reclaiming, if that’s the right word, or just saying like, yeah, I need this thing to, to live my everyday life and I’m not going to be ashamed. I’m not going to try to hide it. You know, and I’m going to make it look cool. And it’s going to be part of my personality.

Margrit 23:33
Right. Absolutely. So you can accessorize your aid. Absolutely. Yeah. So that’s an interesting point, to pair with this story on Cece’s fashion sense and her desire to be fashionable at all times. And it’s a really lovely book to read.

Another book that I read is called Out of My Mind, by Sharon M. Draper and it’s a New York Times bestseller many, many years in a row, I guess. And it’s about this really super intelligent girl with a photographic memory with synesthesia, and she’s just in love with words and loves to be surrounded by stories and she has severe cerebral palsy, which manifests in her very reduced mobility and capacity to vocalize. So she cannot talk. She can vocalize a very limited amount of sounds, and she cannot move very well so she cannot feed herself or groom herself or anything like that. And so she’s very dependent on other people’s support for everyday needs. And the book chronicles–it’s written in first person and it’s just so well written.

And Melody the protagonist is so–what is the word–articulate. And so, you know her, her story comes alive and through that, you know, the capacity to understand what somebody in this position might go through is really vivid because Draper does a fantastic job of just showing, you know, illustrating the frustration of, you know, having to live with people around you who don’t understand or who make assumptions and just project their assumptions upon you. And that’s the trap, basically. It’s people’s assumptions, it’s not Melody’s inability to move or her inability to form words by vocalizing because once she has the proper aides, she’s absolutely capable of moving. And so, you know how the cliche about a lot of people with disabilities and especially motor disabilities is that they’re, quote unquote, trapped. And so I think this book really shows that the trap is not–has nothing to do with the people who have disability, but with the society around us, right?

Lin 26:26
Right, like our brains can’t comprehend how somebody who moves differently from us can still move.

Margrit 26:35
Right. Yeah, so it’s all about the social constructions of what it means to be disabled and what it means to be abled, so it’s just an ablest view of humanity that traps people with disabilities into these roles and incapacitates them artificially.

Lin 27:00
Yeah, yeah.

Margrit 27:02
Um, the other book that I wanted to talk about is super, super well known. It’s Wonder by R.J. Palacio. It’s just recently made into a movie, I think a year or two ago. And it’s about a boy with a facial disfigurement and all of the again, like, what that means for this boy to go through school and how, in spite of his very varied abilities, he’s still again under the gaze of all this abled and ablest society and group of kids who are just putting him in a box, basically.

So these are the books that are, that have–I’ve mentioned these three books because they have disability as sort of the major plot point. But I really like to find books about, you know, with marginalized people as protagonists, whose marginalization are not the major plot points?

Lin 28:16
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Margrit 28:18
And, you know, I just, you know, want to see marginalized people going on adventures and doing, you know, stuff that people in fiction have been doing forever, irrespective of their marginalization, right.

Lin 28:31
Yeah. Because they’re just normal people. And they can have adventures just like everybody else.

Margrit 28:38
This is the thing, right? Like, I want to see all kinds of people having adventures and doing stuff that is not just circumscribed by whatever makes them different. So, one of the books that I’ve read in which the protagonist has a disability, but this is not the major plot point is The Iron Trial which is the first novel in a middle grade series called The Magisterium by Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. And this is a sort of fantasy fiction about a boy whose leg has been severely broken when he was a baby. And now he’s 12 when the first book starts, and is shown to have lasting pain and other symptoms from that injury. But this is part of his regular life, and what makes him special is that he has magical powers. And so he enters the magisterium after a series of tests, which he tries really hard to botch. Because his father who also has magical powers is telling him that he has to fail them because otherwise the big bad magical teachers will just exploit him and exploit his magical powers. But in spite of his trying his best to botch these tests, he still enters the magisterium, which is like a Hogwarts like school for kids who have magic powers. And he finds two friends there and proceeds to have adventures with them. And it’s a really exciting fantasy along the lines of Harry Potter. With similar problems as Harry Potter. But the idea is that Call–I’m not sure if I mentioned that the name of the protagonist is Callum Hunt, also called Call. So his disability stays with him and it’s always present and he always has to make allowances for it. Like when they have to go somewhere, he has to be careful of the terrain. You know, if he walks for too long, he’s in pain. But it’s not the major thing. It’s not what the book is about and he is not hindered in adventuring by his disability, right?

So there’s a ton of interesting good books out there with disability representation, and I’m looking forward to reading more. So if anybody has suggestions, I’m very, very excited to give them a try.

Lin 31:21
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for these.

So we have a giveaway. It is open from now until Friday, December 10. And we are giving away a copy of Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is a book that Margrit had talked about last episode. And to enter, all you have to do is to follow us on Twitter @World_ofStories, and then answer our question. You can answer the question from last episode or you can answer the question from this episode, which we’ll share in just a minute. You can answer it on Twitter or you can email it to us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. And just make sure to include your Twitter handle so we can match up the Twitter stuff with the email stuff. And the winner will be drawn randomly and announced on our podcast on December 21. So I don’t know if we’ve had any entries so far, so your chances are good.

Margrit 32:31
Our question is, what do you think about the pressures on marginalized people to constantly explain their marginalization? Yeah, just tell us what you think. Or if you have good examples of fiction or nonfiction to go along, that would be amazing.

Lin 32:49
And so as always, you can comment on this or any of our previous episodes at Twitter or on Twitter @World_ofStories. Or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. And to support us, you can subscribe to our podcast anywhere that you listen to podcasts, iTunes and Spotify, Google Play wherever. And if you like our show, leave us a review. Give us some stars. We’d appreciate that.

Margrit 33:21
Totally, thank you so much for listening.

Lin 33:23
Thanks, everyone. And take care.