Thoughtful responses from poet Andy Jackson, interviewed by Rob from Advocacy for Inclusion (28th Nov 2023), online at Buzzsprout.
Rob, discussing Andy’s poetry collection Human Looking
The poem that really struck me that I sat with for quite a bit was separation, and for me it spoke of the violence of surgical intervention and a very deep and intimate sense of loss that followed from that. In the poem, you speak of those philosophers with scalpels, and I love that line, the kind of philosophy of cutting, those philosophers with scalpels who make a life normal by breaking it in two. So, and I guess this is really flying from what you’ve said so far, is the current health system enthralled to this pursuit of this idea of normal at all costs? And how much does the system operate with the presumption that health is really defined by that particular way of looking and functioning in the world? I guess it really is a little bit of a further answer.
Andy Jackson
Yeah, look, that poem came out of a very particular interest that I had at the time in looking at conjoined twins and this really intriguing sense that for the two, you know, you’re sharing skin, which is, I guess, a very extreme version of our interconnectedness anyway. And that’s where that line comes from, you know, making life normal by breaking it in two, because the assumption in that context is, well, you can’t have a normal life. It’s not normal, to be conjoined. You actually, often it’s thought of as you have to sacrifice one in order to have a singular child. And of course, you know, in general and in that particular situation, there’s no way of being purist about this. I, for my own sake, I’ve had surgical interventions that have quote – unquote normalised me slightly, and they were necessary, you know, they were useful. But it’s interesting, I find it very interesting to explore what the motivations are and where that border is between something that is necessary and something that seems necessary. So in many other cases, we think about intervening in a child’s life. I mean, we see this in people who are intersex, for example. They’re forced to, you know, oh, we’ve got to make this child either, or recognize them being male or female. We’ve got to, in other situations, you know, we even see it with kids who are bullied. We think, all right, we’ll move the child who’s being bullied, rather than addressing the behavior. So, yeah, I think it’s understandable on some level to go for the individualist, easier option of, let’s fix this person so that they blend in, or let’s move them to another space so that the bullying or the staring doesn’t happen. The harder option is to really start unpacking and addressing and yeah, tackling the prejudice that happens. It’s not easy, but it’s the only thing that is actually going to make a society more coherent and more fair and more just and compassionate. That’s the challenge and we all suffer from this idea of the normal. It’s something that I think plenty of us, you know, it affects more deeply but I think all of us have this feeling that we don’t quite match up. So it’s not just a question of disabled people, it’s really a question for all of us. How do we have a different model? How do we have a model that’s more about the broader human health and human flourishing and human connection, and belonging on the land and being able to be here with each other.