The woman in the apron said something loudly to our backs as we moved off down the street. I didn’t understand what she said and asked the girls to translate for me. Yangchen said, “She has said we must be sad that we are blind.”
Although I was sure I knew the answer already, I asked the girls if they were indeed sad that they were blind. “No!” Choden said, her round pink cheeks glowing in the sunlight. “I am happy I am blind. I am lucky.”
Why did she feel lucky?
“Because,” Yangchen said, “we could come to Lhasa and learn new things with the other blind students. If we were not blind, we would still be sitting in our countries only helping at home and doing nothing. So, we are lucky.”
It was a matter of luck for them. Sabriye and Paul had provided them with a rare opportunity for an education. Many sighted children in their villages hadn’t had anywhere near the opportunities they had had. The blind students at BWB had sighted brothers and sisters, many of them illiterate, who were stuck in their mountain villages with nothing to occupy their minds but the milking of yaks. It was a complete reversal of social tradition that the blind village children were the ones suddenly being given an opportunity, but it was also precisely because they were blind that they were allowed to leave their villages. Their blindness made them undesirable. Many families wanted nothing more than to be rid of their blind children, and so in a sense the children’s blindness had given them an escape route. And for the first time in Tibetan history, the blind children were beginning to understand that their blindness did not make them inferior.
We continued walking, the girls still leading me because, although I could now see, I had no idea where I was. A group of teenage boys turned their heads to stare at Yangchen and Choden and their white canes; they made some comments and then laughed loudly. I asked the girls what the boys had said. Yangchen answered calmly, “Anyway, we don’t care what they say. We can read in the dark. Can they?”
At the corner where I had to turn right to go to my hotel and they had to turn left to go to the school, I took a photograph of the two girls, thanked them again for their time, and we said good-bye. I watched them for a while as they walked arm in arm away from me down the street, their white canes waving methodically before them. Choden and Yangchen were fully aware that they were being stared at everywhere they went. They knew they were being ridiculed by some, pitied by some, and despised by many. They knew they were outcasts, yet they walked cheerfully on, unfazed by the fear and the contempt of others.
1The room, like every other room in the hotel, was roughly the size of a conference room in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. This, I had decided, was a concession to the Tibetan comfort and familiarity with vast open spaces.
2How well do you know the sidewalk on your own street? You think you know it, but put on a blindfold and walk around on it and you’ll likely find that you don’t know your sidewalk at all. You’ll find cracks and grooves, trees, hydrants, and signposts that are unfamiliar to you because you never truly noticed them. Walk face-first into one of those trees and you’ll never again forget that it’s there. Samuel Clemens, an avid champion of Helen Keller, stated firmly to a skeptical friend, “Blindness is an exciting business…if you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door.”
3Of this phenomenon Jacques Lusseyran wrote, “Sight is a miraculous instrument offering us all the riches of physical life. But we get nothing in this world without paying for it, and in return for all the benefits that sight brings we are forced to give up others whose existence we don’t even suspect.”
For the Benefit of Those Who See
In the year 1880, Phineas Taylor Barnum added a new attraction to his popular traveling circus and freak show: the Wild Men of Borneo. Dubbed Waino and Plutanor by their longtime handler, the Wild Men were two dwarf brothers, each of whom, fully grown, reached only forty inches in height and forty-five pounds in weight—approximately the size of a five-year-old child. The Wild Men were neither wild nor from Borneo; they were born on a farm in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and, as young adults, were sold by their mother to a passing showman and promoter. Their real names were Hiram and Barney Davis, born in 1825 and 1827, respectively. The brothers were widely described as being “mentally deficient,” which could mean several things but which I take to mean of very low intelligence. They were an extremely odd-looking pair, judging from their photographs. They had big-boned faces, very wide, flat foreheads, short necks, receding chins, large noses, and small lopsided eyes—all facets of the warping dysmorphia of some congenital disorders. Their countenances held something of the severe, misshapen cast of the mummified faces of Seti I and Ramses II. Their skinny little bodies were chimplike, with sloping shoulders and dangling arms. Their long straight hair grew nearly to their waists. Stunted as they were, their claim to fame was that they had immense physical strength; they were said to be able to lift three hundred pounds apiece. Their extremely popular act in Barnum’s freak show consisted mainly of feats of strength—wrestling fully grown men to the ground and lifting audience members over their heads. (This while dressed in horizontal-striped ballet tights and singlets.) So bizarre and fascinating were the Wild Men of Borneo that in the years they were with Barnum’s circus, their act earned them a total of two hundred thousand dollars, a true fortune at the time.
In November of 1887, Annie Sullivan took her seven-year-old student, Helen Keller, on a visit to P. T. Barnum’s circus. By all accounts, Keller was a pretty, impeccably dressed child with ribbons in her hair and a wreath of auburn ringlets curling about her forehead. At that time, long before her eyes had been surgically removed and replaced with painted glass orbs, the only physical sign of Keller’s blindness was that her left eye protruded slightly beyond the natural seat of its socket.1 Sullivan had already made great progress with Keller, helping her to transform herself from a brutish, emotionally volatile, inarticulate enigma to a charming, well-behaved little girl able to communicate intelligent thoughts and desires. In a letter to a friend, Sullivan wrote of their visit to the circus: of the riders, the clowns, the tightrope walkers they met, the many animals they saw, and of how delighted Helen was at being allowed to touch the lions, elephants, and monkeys. On being told that the lion cubs would grow up to be fierce and aggressive, Keller responded, “I will take the baby lions home and teach them to be mild,” quite as her teacher had done with her.2 Sullivan declared that at Barnum’s circus, they had had “the time of our lives!” The excursion was a great pleasure for everyone involved. Except, it seems, for one of the Wild Men of Borneo. According to Sullivan, upon meeting Helen Keller, “the Wild Man of Borneo shrank from her sweet little face in terror.”
Blindness, more than any other physical handicap, has been terrifying even the most intelligent and enlightened people since the beginning of time. The common negative reaction that the sighted have toward the blind is visceral, and the social status of millions of blind people has been decided more by sighted people’s emotional misprision of them than by any qualities or inabilities inherent in the blind person. The response we have to the blind is reflexive and prepotent. It is a hysterical projection that continually clouds our reason.
In her intelligent and vastly informative history The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl, published in 2001, Elisabeth Gitter described the self-referential quality of unease that sighted people often feel around the blind:
Because the blind cannot participate in the social code of affiliative facial signals, in the ritual exchange of nods, smiles, and glances, they deprive the sighted of the sense of a seen—and therefore secure—self. Not finding themselves mirrored in the eyes and expressions of the blind, the sighted may experience a sense of dread mixed with guilty anger and revulsion, a feeling of uncanniness.
On the ramifications of this unease, Pierre Villey, a blind French professor of literature at the University of
Caen, wrote in The World of the Blind in 1930,
The sighted person judges the blind not for what they are but by the fear blindness inspires.…Stronger than all external observations, the revolt of his sensibility in the face of “the most atrocious of maladies” fills a sighted person with prejudice and gives rise to a thousand legends. The sighted person imagines himself struck by blindness.…An abyss opens up before him.
Passed down over eons, the prejudice against the blind is, like all clichés, difficult to bury.
Traditionally, the blind have been perceived and portrayed in one of three stereotypic ways: as mystical soothsayers endowed with supernatural and thus potentially dangerous powers; as helpless ineducable idiots fit only for pity and mockery; or as vagrant beggars with base morals and uncanny gifts for cunning and deception. These portraits, which sometimes overlap, are confusing and even contradictory. As the blind author Georgina Kleege observed, “The blind are either supernatural or subhuman, alien or animal.”
Since the beginning of recorded history, the blind simply have not come off very well. I’ll start with the Old Testament,3 which gives a rather bleak picture of their situation. The exclusion of the blind, along with every other unworthy cripple, from the altar of God is decreed right up front in Leviticus:
For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight [in case “a man blind” wasn’t clear enough] or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles…He may eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy and of the holy things, but he shall not come near the veil or approach the altar because he has a blemish, that he may not profane my sanctuaries.
The Lord considered the blind tainted, but King David outright despised them and wanted them all ostracized or, better yet, dead:
David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, “Whoever would smite the Jeb’usites, let him get up the water shaft to attack the lame and the blind, who are hated by David’s soul.” Therefore it is said, “The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.”
Blindness was considered not only a mark of opprobrium but a most fitting punishment for disobedience to God.
In the book of Genesis when the two angels disguised as earthly men go to the city of Sodom to pass judgment on its wayward people, Lot invites them to spend the night in his house. Before the night is over, a crowd of men, with the malign intent intrinsic to Sodomites, gathers outside Lot’s house and demand to see the two visitors. Lot refuses to produce them. Enraged, the crowd threatens him, but before the men can get their hands on him, the two angels come to the rescue and strike “with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves groping for the door.” The angels could as easily have incapacitated the men by paralyzing them from the necks down or casting them all into epileptic fits of extended duration. But no, blindness was the weapon of choice against bad character; it delivered a uniquely insulting sting.
In the New Testament, in the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus restored sight to a blind man. Upon meeting the man, the disciples’ first question had been, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” The question was only natural, because what other possible reason for congenital blindness could there be? In biblical times, the moral implication of blindness was explicit: It was God’s punishment for guilt, sin, and transgression.
I scoured the Old and New Testaments both on the off chance that there might be something positive in them about the blind. I found a few miraculous healings and a few monitory temporary blindings, such as that of Paul, whose sight was quickly restored to him when he reversed his position and professed his faith in the Lord. These, however, are not positive attitudes toward the blind—they are only positive attitudes toward sight. I did find a few charitable gestures toward the blind: “Thou shalt not curse the deaf nor put a stumbling block before the blind” and “I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.” But these are not positive either, unless pity and paternalism are positive.
In Greek and Roman mythology, in which a staggering amount of eye-gouging takes place, the report on the blind improves just a little. Still, in a great many cases, blindness is the fate of anyone who manifests an egregious fault or character flaw, or it is meted out as punishment for a crime or personal offense against the gods. With a sharpened stick, Odysseus gouges out the one large eye of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus to punish him for having eaten five or six of Odysseus’s devoted men as well as for sorely violating the strict rules of Achaean hospitality: Wiping his enormous mouth on his sleeve, idly picking human bones from between his tombstone-size teeth, the boorish Cyclops had mockingly told Odysseus that as his “guest-gift,” he would finish the meal off by eating Odysseus too.
Polymestor, the king of Thrace, is also guilty of rough hospitality. Temporarily entrusted with the care and safety of King Priam’s young son Polydorus and the gold and other precious treasures the boy brings with him, Polymestor flings the child off a cliff and into the sea, thereby ensuring that all that treasure will be his. When Polydorus’s mother, Hecuba, gets wind of the murder, she orders the women of Troy to kill Polymestor’s children, and then, for good measure, she gouges his eyes out with her own hands, saying, “His debt is paid, and I have revenge.”
Witnessing a goddess in the nude was a common cause of human blindness in Greek mythology. When Erymanthos, the son of Apollo, sees Aphrodite bathing, she blinds him for the outrage. When Tiresias stumbles upon Athena bathing, he pays the same penalty.4 Tiresias’s mother begs Athena to unblind her son; Athena declares that she is unable to do so, but, as feeble compensation, she cleans Tiresias’s ears, which gives him the ability to understand birdsong and, by extension, the gift of prophecy—so often a power associated with the blind. (Homer’s purported blindness was believed to have brought him a kind of sixth sense, a connection to the world of the gods, and hence his poetic gift, his insight, and his wisdom.)
To ancient minds, blindness was a greater punishment than death, an ongoing mark of shame, an enduring torture, the lowest state to which a person could possibly sink, a depth from which there was no return. Realizing all the terrible deeds he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus does the only proper thing: He tears out his own eyes, crying, “Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!” Oedipus carried on that way for the rest of his life, never quite adapting to it, endlessly horrified and surprised to find that he was blind. Putting a fine point on just how profane, insulting, and significant a revenge the act of blinding was, Alcmene made the extra effort to gouge out the eyes of Eurystheus, her son Hercules’s nemesis, even after his head had been severed from his body.
The ancient Greek word for blindness is átē, but in Homer and in the mythology of later authors, the word suggests metaphorical rather than physical blindness, a confusion of the mind rather than a failing of the eyes. Átē has no exact translation, but its chief meanings are “folly,” “delusion,” “mental ignorance,” “passion,” “disaster,” “ruin,” and “calamity.”5 All in all, átē is a dark, mysterious state. The historian Moshe Barasch addressed the significance of átē in the early formation of the reputation of the blind. Most important is “the belief that both blindness and madness, being either god-sent or the outcome of the intervention of demons, have something of a numinous, supernatural character.”
Prejudices and preconceptions inevitably evolve over time, but across the ages, society’s attitude toward blindness has remained hostile. The idea that blindness is punishment for a sin or a crime, a mark of mysticism, or evidence of idiocy persisted into the medieval period and well beyond.
The World Health Organization estimates that 285 million
people in the world are visually impaired: 246 million of them have what’s known as low vision, and 39 million are completely blind. It should come as no surprise that 90 percent of the world’s blind or visually impaired people live in developing countries. Ethiopia has the world’s highest rate of blindness. India has 18.7 million blind citizens. Nearly 51 percent of the world’s blindness is caused by cataracts, one of the most easily curable ocular disorders. To put the present status of the world’s blind in perspective, nine out of ten blind or visually impaired children in developing countries have no access whatever to education. Because they are blind. The United States has the lowest rate of blindness in the world, and yet among Americans, blindness is the most feared physical affliction, following only AIDS and cancer. (There is, I suspect, a direct correlation here; the less familiar we are with a thing, the more frightening it becomes.)
When I learned, early in my research for this book, that the world’s first school for the blind was founded in 1785, I was surprised. Because we have known for millennia that education is one of the fundamental requirements for the development of humanity, 1785 struck me as woefully late in the greater scheme of human history. What didn’t surprise me was that this first school was founded in Paris, for when it comes to the blind, the French were perhaps the most progressive people in Europe, if not the world.
In her fiercely well-researched study The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille, Zina Weygand gives a minutely detailed view of the social perception of the blind in France in the second half of the second millennium. Motivated by the question “Why is it that today, in a ‘disenchanted’ world, blind people still face irrational behavior that partially determines their place in our society?,” Weygand, a scholar of seemingly limitless patience and determination, apparently unearthed and analyzed every extant receipt, ledger, government certificate, theater script, novel, private letter, ticket stub, tax roll, invoice, treatise, religious text, scholarly text, petition, and picture pertaining to the blind in France over a five-hundred-year period.
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 10