Sinéad Burke (00:09):

Welcome to the third and final episode of Cripping Ulysses. My name is Sinéad Burke and I have been your host and facilitator for the past three conversations. I've just finished recording with this week's guest and it's strange in some ways to be announcing that at the beginning of the episode. But well, to give you an insight into how these things are made, the introduction is recorded afterwards. The key theme that has come out of these three conversations has been questioning the notion of independence, particularly from a disability consciousness. In the first episode, Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh live at the Museum of Literature Ireland

(01:03):

Invited us all to interrogate why we need and require disabled people to be independent in order to be valid and exist. In episode two, a Alok V. Menon talked about the urgency for love, both in ourselves and in each other, which will in turn shape the world and how those mindsets and behaviors that we have around expectation or who we have to be or how the world sees us are barriers to how we love ourselves. And this conversation with Kimberly Drew brought out honest reflections from actually the first time we met as friends in 2019 and how we were different people then how we have evolved, become stronger, become more vulnerable, become more in need of care, more in need of community, but also how we learn from who the world wanted us to be in those moments. When I first set out to do this podcast, I had this ambition to introduce you to people that I love and admire.

(02:29):

I think in many ways I had a sense of confidence, but I knew what these conversations would be and probably in some ways an arrogance that I wouldn't learn anything cuz I knew who these people were and I knew who I was. Gosh, three episodes in that couldn't be further from the truth. These conversations have genuinely changed me, have given me new ambitions to seek for myself, have continued to remind me the work that needs to be done on myself. And actually in many ways has been a gift of time and grace with myself and with other disabled people and neuro divergent people to really reassess what's it all for.

(03:28):

And for me, I guess in many ways, it's for us all to have a disability consciousness and for us to feel a sense of energy, opportunity, obligation, and even more for us to feel accountable in making that tangible, measurable and real. While we're here, this is the final episode of Clipping Ulysses, and I could not be more thrilled to do this with such a dear friend and genuinely one of the people that I admire most in the world. Today we are going to have a conversation with Kimberly Drew. Kimberly is a writer, a thought leader, a curator, and somebody who has taught me so much about the art world, but just life in general. But before we go any further, I'm gonna visually describe myself. I have just gotten home off a flight to London and I'm more glamorous than I usually am in that my hair has been blow dried and quaffed.

(04:48):

So this visual description is unique in that I am wearing a black cashmere Burberry jumper. I am wearing a navy Dior new look, bell skirt with a belt that is difficult to difficult for my respiratory system is what I would say in terms of the level of cinching. But it looks good and a pair of slippers because I'm home and we can't be chic all of the time. But I identify as a queer disabled woman. I use the pronouns, she and her, and I am white and cisgendered and I have brown shoulder and hair. That was a reverse visual description, but thank you for your grace as I moved through that ensemble first and then identity. But before we get into the conversation, I would love Kimberly for you to visually describe yourself, please.

Kimberly Drew (05:37):

Yes. Um, I am a black person with a tiny little copper colored afro. Um, most of this conversation as you, um, might assume I will be smiling very big. Um, it is an honor to be joining you Sinéad. I'm currently wearing one of my favorite sweatshirts. It's this camouflage sweatshirt. And recently I learned that there are different type of camouflage that are based on different leaves. So you'll see different leaf types and I think that mine is decorated with the oak leaf if that means and resonates with anyone. Um, and I, I think that that sums my visual description.

Sinéad Burke (06:25):

I like it. You're also in LA? Oh

Kimberly Drew (06:28):

Yes. And I am reporting live from a closet in Los Angeles, California. sat on the floor, um, but very cozy .

Sinéad Burke (06:38):

How's LA treating you so far?

Kimberly Drew (06:40):

LA has been really good. I came here for the opportunity to work in a slower paced environment. Um, I am recently moving into um, more of an awareness of my own neurodivergence and some of the things that it requires. Um, I wanna use a word other than maintenance, but maintenance is the word that really resonates right now. And as part of that maintenance of my brain, um, I came out to LA just to be able to do maybe the same amount of things but um, with a different pace. So I've been able to slow down, get things knocked off the list, but not feel the same like rat race that New York sometimes can require of us.

Sinéad Burke (07:28):

Over the past three episodes, it'...

00:00:10 Sinéad Burke
Welcome to episode two of crippling Ulysses. A podcast that explores. The friction between how we see ourselves. And how the world sees us. But what does that mean? Specifically, through three conversations, we explore the notion of disability consciousness, which Joyce was supposed to have. Within three conversations across geographic boundaries and identities, we look through the lenses of physical disabilities, neurodivergence, chronic pain to learn a little bit more about who people are. How they navigate the world and how they're observed. Today's conversation is with somebody who. Is incredibly special to me. And has had an enormous impact. On my life. And how I think about myself and the world. Alok V Menon is a poet, a writer, an activist, a thought leader. And a stand-up comedian. Over the past 12 months, I've seen them perform twice in person. Here in Dublin, at home in Ireland and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and while both performances had a similar script, what I took from each of them was extraordinarily different. I've been fortunate to get to know Alok across coffee tables at parties. In intimate conversations and I am always. So moved by firstly their command of language and their use of it. And secondly, just their insightfulness in how they push us all to think. Beyond. Going into this conversation, I felt like I had a great understanding of what the output would be. There are moments when you can probably sense that. The cogs are turning live, at least for me. This conversation ends with some amazing moments. Where it's not just thinking about the practices that we all know about to create change. But actually. What role does love play? And a disability consciousness. Both in terms of how we love ourselves. And how we love each other. It's a theory of change that I haven't given much time to. But I'm going to do it after this episode. This is episode two of crippling Ulysses. I am so pleased and feel very grateful to be joined in conversation today by Alok V Menon. Alok is a writer, a thought leader, and somebody who has genuinely shaped how I think about myself. And also has given me tools to see the world from a different perspective. But I'm conscious that they're on the end of the line and me waxing lyrical about how I see them. It's probably not the greatest start to a podcast whose whole purpose is about how they see themselves. I guess to start, for accessibility reasons, I'm going to give a brief visual description of myself and then I'm going to throw to Alok to do the same. Oh, hi, my name is Sinéad and I have been your host for these three episodes. I'm a white cisgendered woman who uses the pronouns she and her. I identify as queer and physically disabled. I have brown shoulder length hair and today I am wearing. A burnt orange pangaia jumper in the hope that it feels warmer than it is in Ireland currently and I'm wearing just comfortable, leisurely trousers because it has been a long week of working from home. But Alok I'll pass to you now. Do you describe yourself visually today?

00:04:29 Alok V Menon
Hi everyone. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Alok and tell me a joke, Alok. I use they/them pronouns and it's Fashion Week, which means in protest I'm wearing a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts and utterly unfashionable and glamorous in it. I've got multi coloured green hair. I'm being interrupted by a siren so you know that I'm truly in New York City. And I am Indian and gender nonconforming and live with chronic pain.

00:05:08 Sinéad Burke
This podcast was born out of a piece of academic research which talked about James Joyce having a Disability Consciousness, both because he himself had low vision, though he never in his own descriptions described himself as having a disability or being disabled. But in Ulysses, there are many characters who have disabilities, and across Joyce's work, disability exists, though disability is often used as a metaphor to talk to political paralysis. So unintentionally describing the ableism that exists within society. And that notion of Disability Conscious has really rooted in these three conversations. I guess. I'd love to ask, have you ever thought of yourself as having a Disability Consciousness based on how you've just described yourself there, or do you think it's something that is continuous? Work in progress for result.

00:06:04 Alok V Menon
I tend to believe that everything is a work in progress. That nothing is absolute. Everything is always becoming. And I think so often there's an emphasis with modernity, big word, that things are real and permanent. But my view of the history of time is that everything is energy and circulation. And that's why I have a very ambivalent relationship with definitions, categories and identities. Because I think we keep on trying to believe that there's one standard way to be. To be man, to be woman, to be disabled, to be anything. And I don't know if that's really the goal. I think what's more interesting to me about identity is how we all deploy them differently. And so in my life. This framework of invisible disability has always been a real provocation for me because. I think that we don't question that realm of visibility enough. Is it that these things are invisible? Or is it that they become invisible, lized? Is it that the only framework that we have to observe each other is one in which foregrounds a particular form of vision, precluding the possibility of other ways of witnessing each other? And that's why I was excited to have that conversation with you.

00:07:40 Sinéad Burke
I often wonder if. That categorization of visible. And invisible disability creates. A hierarchy both of needs and. Of who qualifies most to be disabled and how is that often articulated through a nondisabled lens, whether that's based on access to services, whether that's based on representation and really further marginalises people in a way in which identity. Is potentially supposed to create a sense of community and pride.

00:08:16 Alok V Menon
Yeah, I feel like it's, it's not organic, it's superimposed. And I think that this is the difficulty and so many of the worlds that I orbit. We just said that language and the frameworks that we've inherited don't come from us, they come from the language of biomedicine. And biomedicine’s approach to queer people, to trans people, and to people with disabilities has always been one of elimination, and has always been one of pathologization. Trying to say there's one standard body. This is what a healthy body is, and anyone who I don't even want to use, the word deviates because that's loaded. Anyone who flirts with anyone who transcends expands out of this framework. Is suspect and criminal, and So what happens often is that the only vocabularies that we have to narrate ourselves are so steeped in that history and ongoing present. Of biomedicine. And that's why I actually really turned to literature as an alternative vocabulary to describe myself, because I actually feel like writings for and by marginalised people give us so much more of an abundant sense of self. What I'm saying is I think. I would have only seen myself as lacking or as broken if the only framework I had to describe myself was Western medicine. And then when I began to read. I realised that actually maybe the reason that I have pain, and maybe the reason I live with pain. Is not because I have some disorder. Maybe it's actually because the society itself is disorderly. Maybe it's not actually my fault. Maybe it's actually that we live in a world where people are only valued for their labour and their output, not for their soul, their dignity. And maybe my pain is a result of that, the external indictment of a world rather than my internal failure.
<...

INTRO
Hi, my name is Sinéad Burke and this is Cripping Ulysses. Cripping Ulysses is a part of Ulysses 2.2, a celebration of the centenary of the text, brought to you by Landmark Productions, ANU productions and the Museum of Literature Ireland. Well, that’s the project as a whole. This podcast is an exploration of what was often called Joyce Disability Consciousness, both how he saw himself being a disabled man and how that framed the stories he told the characters he wrote and how he perceived the world. And while over these three episodes, we’re gonna be rooting the conversation in and around Ulysses. It’s also gonna be about ourselves, who we are, and that friction between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us.

Over the next three episodes, I have the great privilege of introducing you to and bringing you into conversations with truly extraordinary people. But now for the first episode with Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh. This episode is a live recording. This conversation took place live in the Museum of Literature Ireland on the week of the UN day for people with disabilities. Rosaleen is a playwright, a writer and advocate, and one of the people I admire most. So let’s go up the steps of the building through the door, up the steps, or through the lift upstairs into the most beautiful room with a high ceiling, gorgeous antique windows, and at the top sits, me and Rosaleen. This is episode one of Ulysses.

TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1 (00:20):

I asked Ian to play that just slightly longer than was comfortable . I think it worked . So that piece of music was designed by a brilliant disabled composer called Jacques who is part of the RAMPD collective, which is based out of the United States, which is a collective of disabled musicians. We commissioned that piece of music to start our conversation today and this three-part series laying out our intention for this dialogue as a whole. As you may or may not be aware, we have tried to model better practices around accessibility within this space and within this series as a whole. We have ISL interpreters, we have live captioning, we have a quiet room out front, and hopefully you received clear information around the accessibility of this space. But accessibility is a continuous practice that requires flexibility. And I share that in advance because at some point tonight I'm going to speak too quickly for the interpreters to keep up because I'll be nervous.

(01:26):

Undoubtedly, at some point my accent will probably be too strong for the closed captioners who are remote to pick up live on screen. But as Ben said in the introduction, there may be times where you feel overwhelmed and need to step outside to the quiet space or need to just engage or stim or be yourself in this room. Know that this conversation and the whole purpose of Cripping Ulysses is the idea that you can come as you are, which is how Rosaleen and I are going to enter into this conversation. But that was RAMPD and their piece of music and we're very grateful to them for their collaboration in part of this project.

(02:06):

So in thinking about the ways in which this conversation will tie somewhat into the themes of Ulysses and specifically the chapter that we're going to engage in, Joyce was often considered to have a disability consciousness. And I'm going to pause there because we had a great conversation prior to this afternoon talking about what sign would be for disability consciousness. Apparently it doesn't yet exist, and the rationale behind Joyce having a disability consciousness was because of his own lived experiences of disability through glaucoma. Often in the text of Ulysses, there are characters who have a disability, but when we look at the timings of the text, the way in which disability was framed, it was often used as a metaphor to talk about paralysis in Irish society and in Irish politics, which in and of itself is ableist. Joyce talked a lot in 1916 and 1917 in his own letters around the deep embarrassment he had over his own disability, being apologetic for not responding quick enough because it took him time to read and to ensure that he could write down.

(03:29):

There's many passages which talk about his own written word being almost illiterate by the time it came to the close of his life. But in many ways it talks to the reality that so often we still see disability as less. We still see that characteristic and trait as making somebody less. So I'm going to read a bit of a monologue which ties this text to the conversation we're going to have today. But then we're all going to take a deep breath because we're going to move from the academic and the literature into the literature and the personal and really share a conversation around what is so much tied to this chapter. And I'm using modern technology to do so.

(04:15):

‘The interactions between non-disabled characters and disabled characters also point to Joyce's criticism of Ireland as a prototypical nation obsessed with normalcy. Ireland is comfortable with the stereotypical representation of disability yet threatened by its condition because unlike congenital, marginal identities, disability can assume anyone at any time.’ It is very likely that it is not just Rosaleen and I who identify as disabled in this room. If so, we really have an issue. ‘In Joycean Ireland disability was not considered to be part of the life cycle of the human experience, but an invisible other within our society.’ Which brings us to Eumaeus, where the character of Murphy is unimportant and invisible. Yet a central tenett to the chapter is a modern pastime: gossip. Conversations lined with prejudices and assumptions, humor and cynicism, suspicious inquiries about who people are and how they live have such residency in even modern parlance. But what if we had the opportunity to define ourselves, to speak to the ways in which what makes us other can be unifying and sometimes a challenge. What if we created space for the protagonist and the audience to have a disability consciousness? Welcome to Cripping Ulysses. My name is Sinéad Burke. For access reasons, I'm going to give a visual description of myself.

(06:07):

I'm a white cisgendered woman who uses the pronouns, she and her. I identify as queer and disabled. I'm a little person with brown shoulder length hair. And today I'm wearing a red high neck and long sleeved dress custom Hermes, I’ll have you know, and I'm sitting in the museum - I'd love to see if they can caption that

Speaker 2 (

Hi. My name is Sineéad Burke and I am the host of this podcast, Cripping Ulysses, which is an exploration of the tension between how the world sees us versus how we see ourselves. Whether or not we see. Over three episodes, we are deliberately taking the lens of disability across different identities to challenge the world we wanna live in and the people we wanna be. This podcast kicks off on February 10th with Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh, and we'll have two more episodes with Kimberly Drew and Alok V. Menon. Subscribe now for the first episode on February 10th, this is Cripping Ulysses.