The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  I had known—or, rather, not quite known—Allie for many years as a fellow member on multiple listservs in our community. I’d met her in the flesh only once. The posthumous revelations were not that shocking; we’ve always had DeafBlind wannabes or compulsive sympathizers in our midst. For better or for worse, they are part of our lives. Whatever it is that any of them gets out of it, many do give of themselves in return.

  In Allie’s particular case, she also gave me the most tactile work of art I own. It is a marvelous mosaic of seashells, judiciously arranged so to have it rise and fall by turns from roaring densities to quieter rumblings. Though just two inches at its tallest point, it is a work of such soaring lyricism that I begin to understand what is meant by the sublime.

  A long-distance DeafBlind friend of Allie’s had lovingly put it together for her. It was the first time the artist had made something with a fellow DeafBlind person in mind. Allie explained to me that, unfortunately, the artist’s other work is visual, primarily concerned with color, with only feeble tactile features. So it was a DeafBlind fake who had challenged a real DeafBlind person to make an intentionally tactile piece for the first time.

  I cannot stop running my hands over it. When Allie knew she was going to die, she sent it with a note saying, “This piece cried out to be enjoyed by Mr. Tactile so it goes to you. Love, Allie.”

  vi

  When I attended Deaf school growing up, I learned about a sickness that infects many hearing people. It keeps them awake at night unless they do something to bring music into our supposedly silent world. Dance troupes, bands, orchestras, and ex-hippie sound engineers invaded our campus every year.

  I would later learn that sighted people were often afflicted in the same way. Only their desperate mission is to make visual art accessible to blind people. One victim of this malady is John Olson, a photojournalist and war photographer who made his mark dispatching images from the wars in Vietnam. After an illustrious career spanning five decades, he found himself wondering

  what it was like for those who didn’t have access to art, to photography. I wondered what it was like for the blind community, who couldn’t access visual information. It was at that moment, on a Labor Day weekend of 2008, that I set out to develop a means by which blind people could see art, could see photographs, and could acquire visual information.

  For the past decade, he has been busy with his company 3DPhotoWorks, creating raised representations of art, photography, maps, and graphics. As he told a convention of the National Federation of the Blind in July 2018, “it has been my goal from the very beginning to create a worldwide network of museums, science centers, libraries, and institutions willing to provide the world’s blind population with visual information using this tactile medium.”

  No one seems to have asked whether we want access to visual information. Why would we want a representation of a representation of something? Why not a tactile representation of that something, bypassing visual representation altogether? Why force visual art to be what it is not? We accept that most visual art is meant to be visual alone. Sighted people and institutions are the ones having trouble reconciling themselves with this fact.

  vii

  What shall we call it—tactile grammar, semiotics of touch, Protactile aesthetics, tactiletics? True tactile art must have language. It should express and extract meaning. Texture, contour, temperature, density, give, recoil, adsorption, and many other elements are units in this language.

  Most things made by sighted people that we touch fail to make sense. Heft is one common grammatical unit they get wrong.

  There are many toy tanks, for example, that replicate the shape and many of the moving parts of a real tank. Visually, it looks exactly like the real thing, and is thus able to exude some of its menace.

  In the tactile realm the toy tank is a joke, because it is made of flimsy plastic parts and is light, being hollow and without ballast. If I wished to install an exhibit about the terrors of totalitarianism, tanks rolling over protestors like so much cardboard, I would need tanks with real heft. The protestors can be made of, well, cardboard, and can even be taller than the tanks. But the power is with the heft, and the tanks have it.

  Or if I wanted to send a more hopeful message, I could reverse things. The tanks are made of cardboard, while the protestors possess the gravity of rock. The tanks could be much bigger, but the power, again, is with the heft. Visually, the power is with size; tactilely, size is much less important. That’s grammar.

  viii

  One winter, not long ago, your parents invite you and your boys to join them at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to visit its greenhouse. It is lovely to inhale the heavy air, which makes your lungs giddy. Smiling, you reach out—

  Cacti.

  So much for unfettered intercourse with nature.

  As you tiptoe deeper into the garden, you find where the proper plants are and begin to examine them. There, among the pencil trees and ferns, you meet the most beautiful flowering plant.

  It has a fan of smooth arching blades, and from the fist that holds this fan sprouts stems stretching out at odd angles. A matte-like human skin covers these stems, and it reminds you of a warm handshake.

  Excited, you look for someone to read the label, because nothing is in Braille here. The first sighted person you find is your mother. You tug her to meet your new friend and you ask her its name. She looks and says there is no label. “Why,” she then inquires of you, “do you want to know the name of such an ugly plant?”

  Taken aback, your mind slips inside its library and pulls out Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. It is the story of a tall, loose-limbed gentleman who had been assembled in a laboratory. When he emerged into the world, however, he could find no one willing to be his friend—except for a blind man. They were engaged in a productive conversation when the blind man’s sighted family returned from their outing. Seeing the tall gentleman, they screamed.

  Poor fellow, so unjustly treated! Well, you would be this plant’s friend. You decide that its name is “Frankenstein’s Handshake.”

  ix

  We have DeafBlind artists, but do we have DeafBlind art?

  The potters carefully glaze for visual effect. Legos are easy to build with, but are hideous to the touch. Many attend painting and drawing classes at centers for the blind. There are dancers who spin into empty air. Actors hope they are aimed in the right direction. Hundreds have beaded or woven or quilted tapestries that are tactilely blank. Artists ask sighted assistants “What color is this?” and “Does it look all right?”

  Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century Deaf British portraitist, provides a crude but helpful formula. “The regular progress of cultivated life,” he wrote, “is from necessaries to accommodations, from accommodations to ornaments.” We don’t have all our necessaries in place as tactile people. As yet we own very little of the material world and are forced to make do with sighted things.

  But it isn’t true that we haven’t made much art. We have an incredibly rich literature. We probably have more writers per capita than any other community in the world. It is because there is one space within which we have gone from necessity all the way to art: our traditional virtual space. Our correspondence networks and access to books began in the middle of the nineteenth century and have served as our home until we could begin to make claims on the corporeal world.

  The goal of the Protactile movement is for us to get, do, and make everything in our own way. After we peeled our language away from visual sign language and remade it completely, reciprocally, and proprioceptively tactile, Protactile storytelling, Protactile poetry, and Protactile theater quickly emerged. It makes sense that those forms would come first, as they do not require that we buy anything or lug equipment around or hammer something together. Just ourselves and each other. Protactile theater, though, is starting to play with costumes and props. Does this mean Protactile art is next?

  x

  I once dreamed abo
ut installing an exhibition of assemblage art, using familiar objects that my friends would recognize immediately. The only glue I use is gravity. They can lift anything, handle it in their hands.

  Some of the pieces were:

  A 1970s cassette player with the slot popped open. Inserted within is a sticky toy wind-up brain that pulsates. The Brain Implant.

  A Midwestern-sized cereal bowl filled with hearing-aid earmolds. Silver spoon. Breakfast of Champions.

  A coffin made of old and used white folding canes. At rest inside, surrounded by a few lilies, is a wrecked Franklin Mint replica of a car. Accident.

  In another dream the exhibit is called Buried Treasures. Each box is filled with a hand-sinkable substance—sawdust, popcorn, glass beads, and, my favorite, quinoa. Buried inside these boxes are surprise objects that juxtapose with the materials we dig through to get at them.

  In another dream, a museum has lovely railings that take us from one exhibit to another, following the poetry of conavigation. But another dream shoves it aside because the museum is now a gloriously walled labyrinth. It leads into a burrowing tunnel. This, in turn, cedes to a dream of water.

  In another dream, I meet Genghis Khan. Most DeafBlind people have Usher syndrome, whose genetic history can be traced back to the Mongolian juggernaut. I realize from this wonderful statue in the dream that wood is so suggestive of living flesh; that most statues should be naked and then covered with clothing or representations thereof, for we feel right through clothes in real life; and that foam is a fine way to represent hair. Beneath his armor and linens I could feel Genghis Khan’s love handles and the loins whence we came.

  In another dream I am in a vast library of tactile objects. Millions of objects are housed there. They have an acquisitions department and a replica-making department. Things too small to feel with my hands are magnified. Things too large to grasp are reduced to the right scale for manual inspection. Many of the library’s holdings are real objects. Most importantly, the great bulk of the collection is mailable. I can order anything, and a few days later, a box arrives.

  xi

  Since most of what may be understood as tactile art doesn’t exist yet, there are no master strokes. But this doesn’t mean there haven’t been lucky strokes. My friend Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect and design consultant, stumbled upon two such examples while traveling in Norway in the fall of 2017.

  Norway had then recently legislated the separation of church and state. The formerly official national Lutheran Church had seven Deaf churches—called Døvekirken—that provided many services to the Deaf and DeafBlind communities. Now that these churches would no longer administer these programs, the seven Døvekirken realized that they would need to reinvent themselves. Sirvage was hired to help them reimagine their role and their spaces.

  Upon entering the Bergen Døvekirke, Sirvage’s cane rapped against the base of the first of two extraordinary works. A priest at the Døvekirke in Stavanger named Georg Abelsnes had created them with DeafBlind parishioners in mind. He gave the pieces to the new Døvekirke in Bergen when it opened its doors on December 10, 1989.

  The first piece, God Bless You, rests on a board about three feet from the floor. The main portion is a sectional cut of a tree trunk, a section where it starts to spread its roots. The grains are pleasantly rough, and the middle grain is studded with gemstones.

  Sirvage found himself moving his hands downward and outward, his thumbs bumping across or wiggling past the gemstones. He turned to ask his host how they said “bless” in Norwegian Sign Language. It was as he thought—the piece indeed invites hands to follow its grains and in doing so say the word “bless.”

  By returning to the top, this time beginning properly with closed fists, he discovered that the piece has another feature. Cleverly placed along its downward planes is a stick. When Sirvage moved his hands downward, he felt the stick gently opening up his hands. He marveled and later told his friends that the artwork is “all about motion and tempo, not static at all.”

  As wonderfully interactive as this piece is, nothing could have prepared Sirvage for what he encountered next. He was later given to understand that the second piece is called something like God Loves and Protects You. Standing about four feet tall, it is made of rounded, polished, and unevenly shaped wood. It has subtle suggestions of a head, neck, and torso. Just below and in front of the torso-trunk of the figure, the wood becomes hollow, and within this is another piece of wood with a different texture. It includes a handle carved to slide into one’s grasp.

  His host suggested that he walk around to hug the figure from behind. When he rested his head on the crook of the figure’s neck, he told me,

  My heart jumped. Holy—Remembering that I was in a house of worship stopped me from completing the thought. It felt like I was transgressing big here, but in a good way. It felt like I had found a whole new way of knowing God.

  What he had done was to temporarily assume the place of God, leaning over to hug the figure, which now represented Sirvage himself, his hand the Hand of God holding the handle, perhaps the hilt of a sheathed sword.

  Shaken, Sirvage stepped back to ask his host more about this “performative artwork.” He learned that the DeafBlind parishioners and many others would, upon entering, commune with both pieces and go through the whole motions of simultaneously performing and receiving the messages.

  “After my host became distracted talking with someone else,” Sirvage went on to share,

  I turned back to interact with it again. This time I let myself relax and hug the figure. To make the message clearer, I allowed my heart and physical being to radiate with tenderness and love. After a while, I stood up and caressed my body. Somehow I knew that I would retrieve myself if I said something, and I was instantly retrieved when I whispered, “Thank you.”

  Arundhati Roy

  India: Intimations of an Ending

  The Nation in partnership with Type Media Center

  FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Originally presented as the Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture on the Fate of the Earth at Cooper Union in New York City in November 2019, “India: Intimations of an Ending” describes a democracy surrendering its founding principles. “From the denial of citizenship to Muslims to the rise of state-sanctioned lynch mobs, Arundati Roy sharply and decisively catalogues the tightening grip of Hindu nationalism,” said the National Magazine Award judges. “In a sweeping essay, pulsing with incandescent, furious prose, Roy issues a harrowing warning as India moves ever closer to fascism.” Arundati Roy is the author of two novels, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, as well as several collections of nonfiction. Her new book, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction., was published in September. She lives in New Delhi. Founded by abolitionists in 1865 as a voice for progressive causes, The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States.

  While protest reverberates on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Bolivia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different. There was a time when dissent was India’s best export. But now, even as protest swells in the West, our great anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against big dams, against the privatization and plunder of our rivers and forests, against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous peoples’ homelands—have largely fallen silent. On September 17 this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted himself the filled-to-the-brim reservoir of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River for his sixty-ninth birthday, while thousands of villagers who had fought that dam for more than thirty years watched their homes disappear under the rising water. It was a moment of great symbolism.

  In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming m
ore and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.

  Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.

  The rich in Western countries are making their own arrangements for the coming climate calamity. They’re building bunkers and stocking reservoirs of food and clean water. In poor countries—India, despite being the fifth-largest economy in the world, is, shamefully, still a poor and hungry country—different kinds of arrangements are being made. The Indian government’s August 5, 2019, annexation of Kashmir has as much to do with the Indian government’s urgency to secure access to the five rivers that run through the state of Jammu and Kashmir as it does with anything else. And the NRC, which will create a system of tiered citizenship in which some citizens have more rights than others, is also a preparation for a time when resources become scarce. Citizenship, as Hannah Arendt famously said, is the right to have rights.