Crip brilliance transcending the theater
By: Ryan Theodosia
Tags: Environment, Theater, Disability, Performing Arts, Environmental Justice

The Forgotten (Maria Palacios)

Maria Palacios in a later act, dancing flamenco to Seema Bahl’s accompaniment. ©NINE LAM, 2020 via Sins Invalid

Crips can’t afford to live being prepared for the worst

although the worst will always hit us harder…

The truth is, being prepared & being disabled

means mentally prepared

to be abandoned & left to die. — Maria Palacios, “The Forgotten”

Sins did not choose an image from “The Forgotten” for promotional materials, so the image above captures a later performance. Maria appeared in her chair on stage, mostly in darkness, her outfit off-white. With urgency, despair, and grief, she shared her and her Houston community’s experiences of Hurricane Harvey. The performance’s visual plainness focused attention on her words and emotions.

This performance, the second of the night, hit my partner and I hard. She made the point that crips, disabled folks like us, can’t afford to prepare. Some of us are on fixed incomes and can’t buy extra food. Or we eat our emergency food supplies before a natural disaster. We can’t predict some medical expenses, or other everyday disasters that cut into our finances. Most of us are living in constant isolation and social disaster.

Some of us are lucky. We have actual accommodations, ones we fought hard for. “Privileges” the government and insuance companies and other bureaucracies tried to keep from us. Or we’re Deaf and have a close local network of ASL interpreters who the Deaf community knows and can call on.

And for the same reasons, these disasters will hit us harder. Some people can’t listen to the radio. Some need help to get out of the house. If we can escape, some aren’t able to save all our specialized equipment — sometimes it’s too unwieldy to do alone. A government registry of disabled people doesn’t create a plan to save us. It doesn’t make the crip community even trust the government enough to add our names to the list.

I find myself using the present tense about this particular performance, because it has occupied so much space in my brain for the past week.

Maria brought up someone she knows, who so long after Harvey is still in a nursing home. They lost their accessible housing in the community in the hurricane, and they’re still waiting for a house they can live in. After losses like this, survivors live outside their interdependent communities against their wills.

In nursing homes, they have fewer people making sure they’re safe. They face a higher risk of caregiver abuse/neglect, not to mention COVID-19 exposure. And the able-bodied world expects them to show gratitude for the simple fact that they’re alive. They act as though that’s an act of great charity and not the lowest possible bar to clear. An actual act of great charity would be restoring the living conditions we had pre-disaster as much as possible.

I find myself using the present tense about this particular performance, because it has occupied so much space in my brain for the past week. It feels too real for me and my partner. We keep our wheelchair in the car, partly for convenience and partly so we have it if — God forbid — we ever have to escape with only ourselves, our cat, and our car. We don’t have an accessible vehicle or an accessible apartment, we can’t bring the wheelchair inside anyway.

But in the heat of disaster, would we remember all our medications, electrolyte drink mix, medical records, legal name change orders? Our collection of joint braces, wraps, and similar accommodations? Would disaster recovery volunteers make sure I continued to have access to vegan food? Would I remember my rollator, even if I hadn’t used it in a while?

Could we find a crip friend to take us in? Or would we end up in a shelter, separated because we aren’t related? Not considered a unit because getting married would limit the SSDI benefits my partner might qualify for? Would first responders understand that he is an ambulatory wheelchair user? Could they discern that I’m his partner and also disabled, not his caregiver?

I felt, and feel, for Maria. We are both crips facing climate chaos. We both have reasons to be afraid for our futures, though the specific reasons vary. We could find ourselves in acute disaster zones while already trying to survive in an everyday disaster.