How have I experienced access as love? Who are my mentors? What histories are forgotten in the colonialist, white, wealthy and cishet impulse to be “first, best, only”? How might the very language(s) of disability be preventing solidarity? Who's left behind when privileged people proclaim themselves experts and leaders of movements? Who do we choose (not) to cite? What is disabled, neurodivergent1 and D/deaf2 history in Canadian literature? Who gets to tell this history, and in what form must it be told?
The idea of “Canadian” literature is itself problematic. Most Canadians are settlers on Indigenous lands, and much of “our” literature reflects the colonialism, erasure and white supremacy of that settler history. I can't presume to write the story of a stolen geography. As a queer, disabled, white person of working-class Scottish, Dutch and French-Canadian migrant and settler ancestry, I will instead relate my experiences of having been a guest on Turtle Island. I'll highlight some of the people who led me to feel (inter)connection around disability, and educated me in art and anti-colonialism, in a specific place and time: Tkaronto/Taranton/Toronto from the mid-nineties to mid-2000s.
We can feel we're beginning from nothing when searching for marginalized histories amid the official history of the privileged, but there have always been people making art and surviving outside the mainstream. This is one such story; I know there are many more, filled with names that will never reach the pages of literary journals. The reason we often “can't find” our disabled and sick ancestors is because they were purposefully kept out of the canon, especially if they're BIPOC, poor and/or LGBTQI2S+.
Caveat: Placing artists into categories of identity based on what they create or how they look/sound can be a dodgy practice. In the case of this essay, I've consulted with all artists I mention in detail. However, please seek consent before using labels such as “disabled,” “writer who has a disability,” or “chronically ill”; people have many reasons to (not) ascribe to certain terms or experiences. Although someone might feel comfortable with a label at one point, this can also change according to time and context. Additionally, many people who examine illness, neurodivergence or mental health might not use terms like “disability” or “Mad,” though their artworks might still have relevance in such communities and fields of study. (For the record, please call me disabled any old time.)