Creating a New Language of Our Own

I want to talk about language. As a writer, I spend my life in the thrall of words. Language has power. If it didn't, billions of dollars each year would not be spent on the manipulation of language and certainly we would not have needed a First amendment to protect our right to express ourselves. Why would so many people spend so much time, energy and money trying to control what we see and hear if they didn't believe in the power of language? Whoever controls the creation of language has the power. Period. And in the good old USA, who creates the language is the able-bodied white man. He's the Big Kahuna and everything that is named as right and good and just and wonderful is described in his language. All the "others" are described in a language of less. That's what we're up against. Is it any wonder we're in such deep shit.

I make no apology for the fact that I am in love with words. Their danger, their magic. The first time I uttered the word "Fuck" at the age of five and saw the reaction of all the adults around me, you'd of thought set off a bomb, I got hooked on their power. The first word I loved totally was "Cheryl". The first time I felt real pride was when I said my name: I'm Cheryl. It was a major deal. Everybody in the family applauded.

By the time I started school I already had a sense of Cheryl. She was a whole person. My name was a powerful identification of my wholeness. The word symbol of the unique me. The teacher, a no doubt well-meaning person, who viewed her job as shaping me into a proper girl, which could only be done by reigning in the unique me, could only be done by narrowing my wholeness by chipping away at me with the language of less, begins calling me Cherie. It's Cheryl, I'd say. At the time, of course, I had no idea that this was the beginning of a lifelong power struggle, that I was fighting against an identification in the language of less. What better way to diminish my power than to distort my very name. All I knew was it didn't feel right. Cheryl was a true word to who I was; I could feel it in my bones. Cherie was a lie. It wasn't me. It's my belief that if I had lost this battle over my name, I would be a very different female today than I am. All through my life I have had this steel rod word Cheryl as my core identification. I have often been in situations where I felt the need to cling to that word as if my life depended on it because I believe in a very real sense, my life did depend on it. No matter what other language of less that was heaped upon me: deformity, helpless, pathetic, bitch, cunt, freak, special, very special, those people, at the center was this steel rod word of wholeness, of the unique me: Cheryl. That is not to say that all the other words have had no power in my life. These words and thousands of other words wounded me, they scarred me, the burned gaping holes into my heart and spirit. At times I felt they would destroy me. I firmly believe that one of the main things that made it possible for me to survive the assault of all these words was the word Cheryl, and more precisely, the symbolism of wholeness, of the unique me that I had imbued this identifying word with.

So what does all this have to do with creating a new language for ourselves? What we need is language that can provide for us disability identification of wholeness. I want language that allows me disability identity as powerful as my own name. Think about the dominant language of disability, which with all the efforts of disability activism is still medical. Every disabled person enters the world of disability through medicalspeak. And what could be a better example of the language of less than medicalspeak: rheumatoid arthritis, neuromuscular spasticity, optical degeneration, hemiplegia, aphasia, psychosis. It's not even human. What could be more of an assault on the identity of wholeness than language that is not even human. That's powerful language. At the same time that it makes the "damaged goods" body all important, it renders the person invisible, nonexistent.

Unfortunately, disability rights activists have not been able to come up with a language of disability identification of equal power to take over the dominant medical language. We've used political language and that just ain't good enough because political language is not who we are wholly any more than medicalspeak. Whereas medical language makes the body all important, political language states the body is insignificant to disability identity. In our recasting ourselves in political terms, we've said, individual disabilities aren't important. This most surely is denial. And what is the language of disability identification that's emerged from this denial: differently abled, physically challenged, able disabled. When I try to wear those words as my disability identification I feel the same way I did when that teacher called me Cherie.

I believe that any language we create to identify ourselves, to be powerful, must come from a true esteeming of the disabled body. And I'm not sure we're really there yet. But language can help us get there. I know it can. I've experienced it in my own life when I created a stage persona called "The Woman With Juice". The more I played her, the more I was her. So the challenge is a language of disability wholeness, a language that provides as true an identification as our own name. A language that comes from the acknowledgement and respect of our pain, our loss, our sorrow as fully as our beauty, our abilities, our individuality.