Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Crip Time

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2810062

2164-0041

Petra Küppers,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

I live life in slow motion. The world I live in is one where my thoughts are as quick as anyone's, my movements are weak and erratic, and my talk is slower than a snail in quicksand," writes Australian author and activist Anne McDonald, reflecting on her perception of time. "I have cerebral palsy, I can't walk or talk, I use an alphabet board, and I communicate at the rate of 450 words an hour compared to your 150 words in a minute — twenty times as slow. A slow world would be my heaven. I am forced to live in your world, a fast hard one. If slow rays flew from me I would be able to live in this world. I need to speed up, or you need to slow down."In this way McDonald explains the difference between her time and "normate" time (to use a term coined by disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson, making "normal" a little more strange). Many disabled people will recognize this "crip time," the traces of temporal shifting, in their own lives. There is the day we lie in bed, the time of pain blooming in our bones, the end of the street impossibly far for limping legs, the meeting and its noise assault set against the reassuring tick of the wall clock at home.To many disabled writers, writing in crip time becomes a sanctuary. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands, "It is dark and damp and has been raining all day. i love days like this. as i lie in bed i am able to dive inward. perhaps today i will write from the deep core." Diving inwards. Deep core. Sanctuary. A snail in quicksand.These moments out of time, out of productive, forward-leaning, exciting time, can become moments of disability culture politics. As McDonald reminds us, these time experiences might be born out of pain and frustration, and these moments shouldn't be romanticized. And yet, many disabled people speak or type or gesture to the blossoming of attention in attenuation, in waiting, in abeyance. To the other side of crip time.Many spiritual traditions know these times out of time, these nondriven moments that turn their back on modernity's insistent tick. Meditation and prayer bring many people to a welling of empty time, to a fulfillment, in halting.I am a disability culture artist, and as an artist, I find studies that focus on the wellness aspects of prayer to be very seductive. I wish for artful self-care for disabled people, and the work of the collective I lead, The Olimpias, often starts from this premise. Drawing on this vision, my partner, Neil Marcus, and I have initiated a practice called Helping Dances.Marcus's spasticity influences his communication: he speaks very slowly, and his speech difference can be hard to listen to by people who want to communicate in nor-mate time. My own disability is pain-related, and at times it can immobilize me, leaving me momentarily breathless, retracted — a large woman caught in her wheelchair, turned inward.Here is our Helping Dances invitation:Neil and I love each other, and we love to move. But we can no longer move the way we used to — our bodies are getting older, more painful, less flexible. So we would love to ask for your help. Can you lend us your strength, your ability, your care, your attention?Every week or so, in public places, parks, street corners, join us as we enact interdependence. Together, we activate thoughts and emotions about the network of helper economies we are part of, and their relations to issues of class, age, ethnicity, race, disability, and sexuality. Experience the joy of helping, respectfully.Helping Dances started a few years ago, and the dances are still going on. If you follow the invitation and join us, you will find yourself in a public site, often an outdoor park, and you will sit in a circle with others, and us, giving thanks to people who have helped you on this particular day. The circle is slow and relaxed, and you might lean back on colorful cushions and lushly textured spreads. You will hear people give thanks to their helpers, to strangers in the street, to their families and loved ones, to God, and to other entities. And the world settles around us as we speak our thanks out loud, leisurely, in our own specific rhythms. Likely, you will support people speaking: Marcus might shift out of his wheelchair, arranging his limbs and torso into the best way for him to address a crowd. He'll likely stand on his twisted leg, hopping a bit, and cast his magnetic blue eyes around the circle. He will sway, reach for us, and rely on all our support to come to voice.In the second part of Helping Dances, circle members get to ask for what they want. Marcus and I have asked many times for help to allow us to dance: to be supported, our limbs held, as we slowly move around each other, distributing the energies of our movement across a field of bodies. Others ask for what they need. Some have asked to be looked at with loving-kindness. To just stand there, seen. Others have asked for energy, for hands laid on them, to help feel themselves. Some like touch, others don't.What would you ask for?There is a politics of engagement here, a slow world, an attention to comfort that sometimes allows us to slip into a mourning, a keening, a sense of out-of-jointness that is part of the celebration of opening space.Is this what disability spiritualities might look like? Here is a sanctuary, created by nothing but bodies, attention, and soft fabrics — a holding place in the upright space of city life.We know that not everybody can get to the sanctuary: navigating any kind of space is hard for many disabled people, as well as for others excluded from the public. But there is a reaching here, outward and inward.We are not wholly with ourselves, and we try to stay porous. Our circle calls others into it, others who have touched our lives this day. We are not wholly open to all, either: sitting in the circle creates a boundary, even if it is a permeable one. This is sanctuary, for a time.Marcus and I are wheelchair users, but many of us are not visibly marked as disabled but have instead experienced exclusion on the grounds of cognitive or emotional difference. Our clustered wheelchairs act as visible signs, demarcating our space as disability-land, a flag seldom flown in public space. While we engage in our actions together, the outside world is still there — dogs bark, people come up and hover near us, and others pass by and wonder what is going on. Inside we sometimes float in each other's arms. Some of us cry when we touch each other both deeply and impersonally, when our vulnerable envelopes open themselves up, when we speak of our foremothers and forefathers, creating lineages and cross-currents.Some of us speak about being helpers. One woman talks about having lived the life of a Filipina housemaid and cleaner. Others talk about the racialized politics that they are facing as disabled and non-disabled brown people in the Bay Area.Some of us speak about being only able to live with daily helpers coming into the house, being privileged enough to gain In-Home Supportive Services' approval, something only really open to people who have the linguistic means to fight for themselves in our fraying social security system.All of us acknowledge living inter dependent lives, intersected and enabled by many, carried on the backs of infrastructural laborers of all kinds and touched by the kindnesses of strangers.And in every one of these circles, voices have lifted up to give thanks to something neither human nor animal, giving thanks to life forces, entities, and powers beyond the nameable. In one Helping Dance in Hawai'i, one participant sang for us, a gospel song that enveloped all of us as we rocked and held each other.How often are you touched by rhythm and melody in public, out in the open, your blood beating and heart compressing until tears flow, without being able to name what it is that touches you? Those moments in Helping Dances expand in time, shift into soft slow time, not hard fast time. They shift into crip time — the time of the and, rather than the or time of choosing and ordering.In my art life, I reach for these moments: come and sit with us, and we will attempt to find a time and space together in improvisation, without knowing each other, with some discomfort, with the giggles of uncertainty, with distances and their bridging. Without the fixed structure of known ritual, we attempt to touch the comfort that ritual has offered to so many for tens of thousands of years.In our Helping Dance, no matter what happens, we shift ourselves from our own certainties. We shift from our boundaries, our little selves, and our own heartbeats, into wider rhythm.