Sorrowland and Media's history with Disability

Late at night, when I’m sleeplessly turning over and over, too hot and too cold, I can’t help but think of this history we’ve all been born in to. Would Daredevil cause me so much grief if disability was generally represented well? Would killing gay characters go without interrogation if we hadn’t made a habit of killing the gays for years? The sins of the father and all that jazz.

I wanted to like Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon. I was set up to love Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon. Purchased from my favourite book store at the behest of a passionate employee who genuinely understood my desperate search for books written by and about disabled people. The main character is blind! It tells a painfully relevant story from the mind of an award-winning (though not blind) author and has a gorgeous cover. Seldom is there such a perfect book buying experience. And, generally speaking, it lives up to those accolades. Except tell me why the fuck is it that an experimental weaponised fungus that can create protective carapaces, control minds via breathing spores, and bring people back to fucking life can’t cure blindness?

In my experience with media I’m constantly looking for the sweet spot where disability is realistically applied to a character’s narrative without becoming a comedic pastiche of bumbling and bumping and hands in front of eyes waving around with fingers askew. Daredevil represents the side where superpowers completely nullify Matt’s blindness outside of specific situations where the story goes to extreme lengths to remind us that Matt is blind. Other stories have blind characters that are wise monks that sit around and do nothing or are comedic relief as they bump around and generally navigate the world in a way that no disabled person would ever do (people realise that we get training, right? Like, we’re taught how to safely and efficiently explore our environment).

Sorrowland does this weird thing where it insists that the main character is blind, but never has their blindness consistently apply. It feels like a character trait that was stapled on so that the protagonist could check the “disabled protagonist” box in some odd marketing checklist for under-represented communities. “Our market demographic survey suggests that you’re almost popular with those crippled folks, let’s get that number up!” says the old white man responsible for approving what books do and don’t get printed. One moment, the protagonist is struggling to walk through the woods safely because of their vision and then three pages later they are absolutely sprinting through it with no trouble. In a particularly egregious scene, they trip on some soft dirt and then, not even a page later, describe how they know how to safely run through the woods because they know said woods and its soil texture intimately. Even though they just got done tripping over soil that was right in front of the house they were living in. It reeks of someone trying to write a physically disabled character when they have no notion of what that person’s experience would be like. It turns disability into a plot device to create tension when needed but ignore it when it would get in the way of a cool chase sequence.

But as I suggested before, the most annoying bit is that the fantastical fungus that has an entire suite of restorative and biological altering powers is incapable of curing the protagonist’s eyesight, a fact that is directly stated in the book. Even more insulting than having a superpower nullify disability is when an author chooses to make a character have near omnipotent capabilities but keep the disability. Not for any good narrative reason either. At no point does the protagonist make the decision to stay blind in a meaningful scene that I could compare to Geordi from Star Trek. At no point is there anything meaningfully stated about how a fungus can capture the memories and personalities of dead people, grow carapace armour over its host, and revive folks who were shot in the head minutes ago, but not just repair the genetic damage in the eyes. It makes this particular representation of disability feel cheap. Like a marketing gimmick. An “in” with the blind crowd so that they’ll relate to this character even though it is a shallow Platonic palimpsests of blindness.

Would I be so bothered by this decision if I were not weighed down by the ages of terrible disability representation? In a world where I have my pick of great representation and meaningful disabled stories, would I be so upset at the limitations of this fictional fungus? In my current state I do see a compelling wrongness with using disability essentially as a marketing pitch, but reading a book like this makes me wonder if we could’ve had a world where disability is not something I have to specifically ask a bookseller about. I’m torn between my want of liking a book where I can read about someone like me and the reality that it is such a poor representation that I have to cast hate upon it. It’s a sad world where I am impressed at the mere inclusion of a blind person to the point of spending money on a book and instead of having a meaningful conversation about the other themes in the book, which I think are very well done, I am instead stuck doubting the efficacy of those themes if disability is nothing more than a selling point.

Solomon does an excellent job of writing a book that shines an incredible light on the lives of Black Americans and has interesting moments where queerness is explored through non-white perspectives that we rarely see, especially in a country that is based on stolen land. The blending of religious trauma borne from racial trauma is akin to the work that Jordan Peele has been putting out in cinema and if the character just weren’t blind I would have almost no complaints. The protagonist’s blindness even stems from an interesting place in that they are albino and so the racial aspect of the book really has this intense depth in that race truly is a social construct, which I see in the book quite a bit. It makes me wonder if the author doing due diligence is actually what shot them in the foot. They read and researched and talked to folks and found out that blindness and albinism tend to go together and so made that a part of the protagonist, but didn’t then do further reading into how blindness would actually express itself in the world they wrote. I also have to wonder at the thought process that was behind the conscious decision to make the blindness stay despite everything saying it should be cured.

I have to give an incredibly small amount of credit for not making it disappear, but that credit is immediately revoked when I consider that the decision to keep said disability is counter to what everything in the narrative suggests. It commodifies the disability and if there is one thing I am tired of it is commodified disabilities.

In my old(er) age I am drawn less and less to critiquing poor depictions of disability and want to focus more on positive ones, but the media being produced makes it incredibly hard to find the stories that are written by disabled people for disabled people. Even harder to find stories written by pre-disabled people for disabled people/everyone else. I am an angry person by default, it’s part of my charm, but I don’t always want to be angry. I want to sit down and read an amazingly compelling book about race and religion in the United States through the lens of urban and mycelial fantasy, but the tradition of shitting on the disabled experience and using it as nothing more than a performative character trope leaves me with a distinct lack of hope that my goal of reading great disabled stories is less a hobby and more an intensive study. I want to read a book and go “damn, that diva was blind, cool” instead of “damn, looks like I need to go open a fucking text document again.”

Yet here I am, text document open, more sad than angry, and writing in a way that expresses how I feel instead of how I want to feel.