Les Damnes et Les Douens

[Excerpt from Disability Studies talk at UWI, 2009]
I want to turn now to one of our most cherished folkloric metaphors for disability and our ability to disable our selves in Trinidad & Tobago, the tragedy and fear of the return of the souls of Caliban’s neglected and rejected, dead, un-baptized children, Fanon’s damnes de la terre, dis-embodied in the form of the “deformed”, “twisted” and “obzocky” Douens that haunt and hunt us. Douens, those deformed liminal “creatures” with feet pointing “backwards” the embodied receptacles of our collective fears and failures. Why do we say that their/our feet point ‘backwards’, who says that the head points the way ‘forward’? Who says that they are deformed and obzocky? Why are they monsters and not men? They/we are the result of a different, parallel, developmental pathway to that which took place in the European hinterland, the other, ‘dark’ side of the modernity-colonialism project (Mignolo) in which man was given value based on hue/hew and Wynter’s Man rose to rule. Our/their difference is not deviance or abnormal. It is part of a continuum of global capitalism’s imperial evolution and development that began over 500 years ago.

We Douens perform our disability daily. We refuse to learn new ways to walk, more than this we continue to refuse to be taught by the relationships, the ongoing, unfolding conversations among our differently designed bodies (biology), our environments (eco-geography), and our hys-stories . We attempt to mimic the gaits of bodies not our own, to walk as if on lands not separated by seas and suffering and silences. Seduced, we continuously stumble into each other, gyre (gaia) hating, reducing the truth, beauty and wisdom of the statement, ‘the movement is the mas, the mas is the movement’; the moment is the mas, the mas is the moment, to mono-manic-monument – mere masturbation.

Can we claim our othering other, our ‘obzockiness’ as our own beautiful, differently, not-half, made, whole selves? How can we learn to walk when our feet point and carry us away from the future that our eyes and heart bring us a longing for? A culture cannot escape itself! There is nothing and nowhere for it to escape to. Indeed, a culture cannot escape itself it can only dynamically transform itself, moment by moment in a developmental timescale, and in doing so, transforms itself, its context, and its knowledge about the relations between itself and its context. How can it do so? A philosopher will answer that he needs new concepts…
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In the society of Douens which now admits a historical global dimension of wasted lives (Bauman, 2004) and waste-as-way-of-life, an awareness of intervulnerability and interdependence is one way for all to move forward. One keeps an eye firmly on the future, the other leads in the choreography, the mas, moving the two together in a direction which one cannot see, except perhaps in glimpses and glances, seashells of amnesia, but who must trust the fidelity of the one who describes the course, the, Curriculum Vitae, the course of Life, that they both take, negotiating the terrain, their roles and each other through dialogue. Both teaching and learning from and with each other and from the journey undertaken.