Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller

Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller by Georgina Kleege


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A book I should have liked, but really, unreasonably didn't. A blind English professor writes letters to Helen Keller, who is a really uncomfortable figure for the disability community because her "story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual's fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions effecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action." Kleege talks about that discomfort, and the assorted favors and damage Keller's narrative did the disability movement by probing some of the difficult unknowns of Keller's life, such as her always-elided sexuality, her socialism, and the persistent claims that she was nothing more than one of those horses that can appear to do math by following trained cues – that she was a fake, because clearly she could not be intelligent. The letter format makes it personal and reflective, and lets Kleege do some interesting work with narratives and points-of-view and the lens of modernity.

And ug, I did not like it, and it was all about the damn letters. Kind of twee, sure, but really it's just that I seem to be allergic to second-person writing these days. Seriously, I was having flashbacks to bad eighties lit fiction, and I was in actuality just reading freaking Dr. Seuss in the eighties. I don't know why I had such a huge problem with the form of this book, because its content was generally good, if not ever surprising to someone in my particular niche of the disability movement.

Just, second-person. For hundreds of pages. Yargh.

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