Leona Godin:
 I often joke that this book is sort of my humble attempt at dealing with two and a half thousand years of blindness in Western culture.

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. We've come a long way in understanding what blindness means. Throughout history, blindness has been revered and reviled. It has been the source of fear and fascination. Blind people themselves have been viewed either as pitiable or helpless, or if not that, then they believe to be blessed with spectacular gifts or skill sets. Blindness is shaped by technology and accessible aids, be it the invention of braille, the development of the white cane or accessible computer software. In fact, each technological evolution has shaped what blindness means. Beyond the midst, though there are real blind people who live rich lives and thus reinvent blindness.
Today we discuss the cultural history of blindness. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI-audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you today from the Accessible Media studios in Toronto, which is subject to the Dish With One Spoon treaty. We're talking about blindness today, not just blindness as a disability or impairment or individual condition, but blindness as a cultural idea or a phenomena that exists in all of our minds. We're talking about the myths, the stereotypes, and the perceptions of blindness and blind people.
I want to know from you in the comments below what you feel some of the popular myths about blindness are that you've encountered, and whether you've done anything to either educate yourself about the myths or to get past them. You can always subscribe to this YouTube channel, or as a podcast, the show is available to you in many formats. It's a good idea to subscribe just so you're notified of future videos.
My guest today is Leona Godin, who is a writer, performer, educator, and editor. She is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, which the New Yorker called a thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy. She has produced two plays, is a speaker and writer, and she teaches English literature and disability studies at New York University. Leona, hello and welcome to the program. It's great to have you with us today.

Leona Godin:
Oh, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.

Joeita Gupta:
I normally start the interview by asking what draws you or what drew you to the topic of blindness as your subject matter. But you write fairly early in your book that blindness isn't just a subject, it's a perspective. What do you mean by that?

Leona Godin:
Oh, well, thank you for asking that question. It has so much to do with the idea that blindness tends in our media and our cultural imagination to be a plot device. And so it makes that it's very easy to dismiss. If it's a subject, it's something that you can talk about and then get over and move on to something else. But I believe, and I actually didn't even come up with that myself. There's a few of us that subscribe to this idea that if blindness is understood to be a perspective, then it's something that's going to inform everything that we do. But not completely. Just like being a woman or being a person of colour is going to inform your perspective on the world not completely, but certainly in a way that's going to change everything that you see about the world. Sorry, I'm getting all flustered.

Joeita Gupta:
No, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder for those of us who don't have a background in English literature, if you could talk to us a little bit about the title of the book, where that comes from, and what it's meant to signify about some of the themes that you cover in the book.

Leona Godin:
Sure. There Plant Eyes is stolen from blind poet extraordinaire, John Milton in his poem, Paradise Lost. He wrote that as a blind person, he had spent much of his life as a sighted person and lost his vision in his early forties. And the poem is famously about the fall of Adam and Eve tempted by Satan, the serpent. But there's a moment in which the narrator who we take to be John Milton himself, calls himself out as a blind poet and establishes himself as in the lineage of, say, the Blind Bard or like Homer.
And so There Plant Eyes is this moment at which he is moving from the darkness of hell to the light of heaven but he wants us to know that this is a metaphorical turn, and that even though he is a blind poet, he's perfectly able to describe these events because they're not really seeable to the human eye. And so he's suggesting that you plant the eyes inside, so for inner vision, in order to see the truth of the story that he's telling.

Joeita Gupta:
It's an interesting contradiction. I mean, on the one hand, we often hear phrases like seeing is believing, being bandied about, but on the other hand, there's almost a sense that being blind gives you access to an inner vision which is free from distraction, dare I say it. And so you're more able to access philosophy or thought, or hence the Blind Bard that you're talking about. How do you reconcile that seeming contradiction?

Leona Godin:
This is the prevailing movement of this book, is that on the one hand we have this mythological idea of the blind poet or prophet, even say like a Tiresias. And so you're absolutely right that we're somehow connected with an inner truth. But the problem is that when we have those kinds of myths, we're not really thinking about accessibility. And one thing to think about is the fact that the Blind Bard is a wonderful idea, but it was also part of an oral culture. And so as soon as the poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down, it negates the importance of that morality of the poem and the possibility of a blind poet all the way really up until the days of braille when you could actually participate in literacy.
Now, Milton was an interesting case because of course he had this incredible education behind him as a sighted person. It's hard to imagine him being able to lay down every night and compose in his head the intricate lines of Paradise Lost had he not that amazing education, which he couldn't have gotten as a blind person. I think we love these ideas, and yet we don't really think about the realities of education until really the 18th century. But even today, there's a lot of people that still are assuming that, say for example, my sighted partner writes for me or assumes that I don't work, and things like that. We have, on the other hand, these practical barriers that seem insurmountable in the minds of many sighted people I think.

Joeita Gupta:
As you said, blindness almost seems like it's a bit of a shortcut in a sense, where we pin all of these ideas about all these cultural notions on blindness. But your book doesn't actually start out talking about the Iliad or Odyssey. It actually starts out talking about your own experience as a young person where you realize you gradually see less and less, and you are perplexed as to why you can't see the blackboard anymore, and you start to go to different appointments and meet with different doctors. What role does your personal narrative play in the book?

Leona Godin:
Yeah, I've been going blind pretty much my entire life. I started out life with normal vision, and as you say, when I was about 10 years old, I couldn't read the writing on the blackboard, which was not a huge deal. My vision was probably 20/30, 20/40, something like that. But the doctors couldn't get it down to normal and they were quite perplexed. There was quite a number of years where we weren't really sure what was going on with my eyes. From that moment up until now, and up until about maybe five years ago I would say, now I am a totally blind person and I have really no more perception of the world outside. I can't say that I don't see light because oddly enough, the way that my blindness presents is full of light. That's another sort of stereotype that you think that blind people live in darkness, but that's actually not true for a lot of us.
But the idea is that in the book, I'm very interested in this vast middle ground of blindness that is almost always incomplete. There are very few people that were born with absolutely no sight. I mean, it's a really tiny percentage of blind people. Most blind people that you're going to run into on the street probably have some level of vision. Maybe it's just light perception or perhaps it's just central vision, or perhaps it's just peripheral vision. It's really complex. There was a nice analogy between my incomplete vision and trying to break down this dichotomy that you're either blind or sighted.

Joeita Gupta:
Give us a general overview of the book. There's obviously an aspect of the book which is a memoir, but you are also getting into talking about literature technology. It feels like the book covers a lot of ground. Can you give us I guess, I can call it a brief synopsis?

Leona Godin:
Yes. Well, I often joke that this book is my humble attempt at dealing with two and a half thousand years of blindness in Western culture. I start with Homer just because those ideas and misses we've been talking about seem so prevalent with us still. You can't really read a book of science fiction or fantasy without running into a blind character. But I very swiftly move to what I think is a really important moment in Western history where the philosophy, say of the enlightenment, led almost directly to the education of the blind and then therefore the invention of braille. That's the middle part of the book, and then from there I take chapters, so the chapters have a very essayistic feel to it, and we move upright to a modern day.
I take some key figures. I do, for example, spend a chapter on Helen Keller, but probably a different take than most people are used to. I'm thinking about her life performing in vaudeville and what that means to say be a blind actor or a blind spectacle as I put it. And then always making connections with today, with our present day, for example, the need for representation in our movies, in our culture, that are authentic, that you want to have an actual blind actor playing a blind person in a movie. There's a chapter on being a blind writer and the idea that there are so many blind characters and novels, but there are very few blind novelists and trying to unravel what that is about.
The later chapters take a few key examples of how some of these longstanding ideas are still with us today in these different aspects. For example, writing or acting or science being a blind scientist for example as well.

Joeita Gupta:
Do you think part of the issue is that a lot of what is written or known or discoursed about when it comes to blindness isn't really offered up for the most part by blind people themselves? That's not to say that blind people don't make contributions to the telling of our lived experience of blindness, but overwhelmingly, I feel as though it's sighted people who are making assumptions about blindness and assumptions about blind people. And that is what is informing for the most part, the cultural perception of blindness.

Leona Godin:
You have put your finger on the real issue. The problem is that our ideas of what blindness is have been constructed by sighted people. And it's a real problem because when we try and correct those really pervasive and what feel like almost insurmountable stereotypes, we get shut down. And I tell a lot of stories of that in different ways from, for example, my friend who's an opera singer, who's a blind opera singer, not being able to be on the stage and to even represent, say, a blind character. For example, opera loves the idea of blindness just like novels do, but not having that representation.
And the biggest one is really in movies and in novels of course. And so I talk about a friend of mine who just absolutely struggled to become a novelist, blatant ableism, blatant prejudices when she was meeting with agents who loved her writing and then found out that she was blind and just dropped her immediately. And even now after she's got 35 books under her belt in the romance genre, even now, she tries to write what she feels is a realistic blind character and is still really struggling to get editors to believe that she actually knows what she's talking about blindness. Because these stereotypes and these images are so pervasive and strong-

Joeita Gupta:
And so entrenched.

Leona Godin:
So entrenched, that's the word I was looking for.

Joeita Gupta:
Then what is the solution? I've been thinking a lot about the memoir as a way to promote the voices of people with disabilities. And over the years of hosting this show, I've actually talked to a number of blind people specifically who have written memoirs of their lived experience. And yet it feels as though, not to say that these weren't all excellent books and that they weren't all wonderful guests, but it almost felt like they were telling the same story. Blind person gets a diagnosis, feels overwhelmed, overcomes the odds, lives happily ever after. Do you feel that even when we use the memoir as a device to tell authentic stories about blindness, even there we're falling short of our potential because of cultural constraints on what kinds of stories about blindness are acceptable?

Leona Godin:
That is exactly right. And of course, I love memoirs and I quote many of them, probably some of them were even guests on your show. But I incorporate the voices of many blind memoirs in my book. And when I first started talking to my agent about writing this book, I was very adamant, I said, "I do not want to write a blind memoir." And that's not because I don't love them and think that they're wonderful and important, but I do feel like the mainstream reading public tends to want to just read maybe one blind memoir and then that like, "Okay, now I know what blindness is," and puts it aside. And it also tends to uphold a single blind individual as opposed to thinking about community.
And I've been thinking a lot about this lately where what it seems like you were hinting out a little bit about the idea of inspiration [inaudible 00:17:47], that one individual overcoming adversity is this feel good story that I think a lot of able-bodied people or non-disabled people feel like, "Okay, well that made me feel better," or, "That made me feel like, wow, if that person can do that, then I should be not complaining about my life." It's a very simplistic view of dealing with disability. And again, it's actually not really dealing with disability because all the systemic prejudices and ableist constructions of the built environment don't change.
I think that there are a few problems with memoirs and one is that this idea that it's sort of this inspirational tale that you can close the book on and not have to deal with it anymore. The other problem I think, is that blind people tend to not be allowed to tell anything other than their own story. A lot of us want to write novels, we might want to write other kinds of writing. Certainly, we need more blind journalists out there to unravel some of these stereotypical stories. And yet we tend to be pushed towards writing this singular memoir as if that's the only thing we can talk about that we wouldn't be able to have anything interesting or informative to say beyond ourselves, beyond our own story.

Joeita Gupta:
In the book that you've written, I wanted to take a minute to ask you about the process of narrating the audiobook, which you do yourself. And in the opening of the audiobook, you reference the fact that people might hear clicking or they might hear the screen reader that you use and you try to make normal or render normal the fact that that's a way in which many blind people, myself included actually, deliver presentations and content and it's just another way of reading. Tell me a little bit about your experience of recording the audiobook version of this book.

Leona Godin:
I went into this telling the director that this is how I'm going to be reading, which is what I call the electronic Cyrano method. I've got a little earbud in my ear, which we might have a moment to demonstrate in a moment. And with my screen reader reading in my ear I repeat I suppose the lines that the electronic screen reader is whispering in my ear, like a very passionless Cyrano de Bergerac. And so I told them and they were understandably I suppose a little bit nervous about it. "How is this going to work?" And I of course needed to bring in my laptop.
Usually, when you go into the recording studio, I guess people use iPads and they have it very sterile. You don't want to have any other sounds. It's meant to be sort as seamless and quiet as possible. And of course, here I have my laptop that's going to do a little bit of whirring. I had my earbud under the headphones, but there was maybe still going to be a little bit of leakage from the earbud. I wanted to let readers know that this was going to be the way that I was going to be reading both to tell them that they might hear some sounds that they're not ordinarily hearing, but also to say just as what you just said, that this is another way of reading, this is another way of accessing the printed word.
And I wanted to really put out there the idea that sometimes there's this distinction between listening and reading. In fact, there's a convention in audiobook production where if you have a passage where you say something like, dear reader, which I do quite a bit, they'll actually change it on the fly to be dear listener. And so I had a little conversation with my director saying, "I believe that listening is reading and I don't want to change this. I want to keep it dear reader." So I think a couple of dear readers got left in because I was so nervous the first day. But for the most part, I tried to unravel that convention. Because if you pay too much attention to that modality of reading, I think sometimes it's too easy to value one over the other. And obviously reading by ear has been just hugely important for me as an academic and as a writer.

Joeita Gupta:
I wanted to give you a minute to, in fact, read an excerpt from your book. Tell us a little bit about what you'll be reading and take it away.

Leona Godin:
Yeah, absolutely. So this is from the introductory chapter. It's called Seeing and Not Seeing, and it just lays out what I mean to do in this book. And it speaks to quite a bit of what we've been talking about in terms of my own personal story relating to the larger issues of trying to break down these binary structures. This is maybe the last paragraph of the first of the intro chapter.
The arc of my illness has taken me through nearly every notch of the sight blindness spectrum. That spectrum both metaphorically and literally is what I want to reveal in these pages as a much more truthful and interesting alternative to the strict sight blindness dichotomy. Blindness, in reality, is more often incomplete and spotty, degenerating and contingent. With the help of examples taken from my own life and the lives of others as well as artistic, philosophical, and scientific representations of blindness, we can begin to unravel the symbols and ideas upholding the notion that one is either sighted or blind.
I hope by the end of this book to show you dear sighted and blind readers, how intimately connected are our histories, our stories, and how dependent we are on one another for human understanding. By tracing the complexities of metaphorical and literal blindness and sight, I also hope to demonstrate how flimsy are the barriers between literally blind and sighted people. There Plant Eyes seeks to chip away at the pervasive ocular centrism of our culture, to open up a space for social justice that accepts sensorial difference, to celebrate the vast dappled regions between seeing and not seeing blindness and sight, darkness and light.

Joeita Gupta:
That's amazing. Leona, thank you very much. That was really well read and it's such a powerful passage. I really appreciate that you talked to us today about your book and some of your thoughts about blindness and cultural representations of blindness. Thanks so much for being on the program.

Leona Godin:
Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Joeita Gupta:
Leona Godin is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. That's all the time we have for today. I hope you will leave your comments down below and don't forget to subscribe as well. You can always find us on Twitter @amiaudio and use the #pulseami. If you'd like to comment, you can write to us at feedback@ami.ca or give us a call at 1-866-509-4545 and let us know we have your permission to play the audio on the program. Our videographer today has been Ted Cooper. Our technical producer is Marc Aflalo, and Andy Frank is the manager for AMI-audio. And I've been your host Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.