“
In mainstream literature, disabled people are inspirations, tragedies, monsters, hermits, cautionary tales, plagues, warnings. We are Beth from Little Women. We are Bertha, Rochester's mad Jamaican first wife locked up in his attic in Wuthering Heights. We are symbols, and we are an absence. Rarely do we get to write our stories for ourselves, be disabled writers writing disabled characters. Our literary traditions are erased, our poets and writers dismissed with a "Oh, did she actually identify that way?"
But the reality is crip writing is everywhere and crip bodies are overflowing rivers full of stories we are burning to tell.
”
”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs)