Autism Vox

Diversity, Neurodiversity, and Dictee

by Kristina Chew, PhD on January 5th, 2007

Strong, and indeed acrimonious, words were leveled at the “movement” of “the neurodiverse,” in the words of David Kirby and of autism mother Kim Stagliano this week, with responses from many a blogger. Among the points of contention is that the notion of the neurodiversity is all well and fine if you are an adult with (as another autism mother puts it) “very high functioning autism”—indeed with Asperger’s Syndrome, specifically—rather than “severe autism” which seems to mean a “low functioning” and non-verbal child (with numerous other challenges, messiest of which are kaka).

I would like to end the week on a more affirmative note, especially as regards the notion of neurodiversity and, indeed, of diversity; of how autistic persons, autistic children, autism parents, everyone who cares and talks and thinks about autism, can somehow be e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” We all keep talking about one thing, namely, autism, though from many different angles, from many different places and perspectives. But autism is not the concern of most of the general public, to whom our differing viewpoints—on “curing” autism, on the notion of neurodiversity—may seem small debates. More people have heard about autism now, but it is not the concern of most and I think we might be able to agree (somewhat) that we all do care about autism, whether you speak of a spectrum, or think autism is mercury poisoning, or think autism is not autism (the absurdity expressed by Kirby).

And so I would like to talk about Dictee by Korean-American poet, videomaker, and performance artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, originally published in 1982 by Tanam Press.

Dictee is not about autism, but it is about difference, about the struggle to speak, about the clash of beliefs, about displacement—about being in some wrong place that is not your home, about being in exile. It is about being broken, and of the self that rises from those fragments, that do not need to be perfectly fitted together, to be fixed. It is an assemblage: Cha includes photographs (including one of her own mother, on the book cover above), maps, anatomical charts, her own handwritten drafts. She writes in French as well as English. She uses a made-up quotation by Sappho as her epigraph; she invokes the Muse and structures the book into nine sections according to the nine Muses of Greek mythology; she quotes from the The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: The Story of a Soul ; she includes stills from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. She writes about Korean history.

In other words, Cha draws from a quite diverse array of sources and traditions and media; Dictee is often described as a hybrid. Dictee is a thoroughly multi-cultural book, a difficult and complicated read—-just as views and voices about autism speak from multiple perspectives and varied beliefs.

Dictee is a thorougly diverse book in the etymological sense of “diversity,” of various and multiple entities (from the Latin vertere) from two or more (from the Latin via the classical Greek prefix di-) sources turned into each other. The diversity in Dictee is ethnic and cultural; the diversity in neurodiversity is rather neurological—arising from different neurological wiring.

Even more, Dictee is throughout concerned with issues of speech and language. This is from the opening passage, “Diseuse”:

She mimicks the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words. Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth. The entire lower lip would lift upwards then sink back to its original place. She would then gather both lips and protrude them in a pout taking in the breath that might utter some thing. (One thing. Just one.) But the breath falls away. With a slight tilting of her head backwards, she would gather the strength in her shoulders and remain in this position.

[The rather blurry photo is of the original 1982 cover of Dictee.]

Once I read this passage as a description of being an Asian American woman struggling to speak and find her voice in a Western society. Today I read this passage as all about Charlie, whose struggle to speak is not at all metaphorical, is real, physical, and continually tough. Charlie learned to talk by first learning to imitate simple actions (”block in bucket!” “clap!” “wave!”) and then—slowly, very, very slowly—to imitate the movements of the ABA and speech therapists’, and Jim’s and my mouths. (Even then, he struggled just to put his tongue or turn his lips into the right position; Charlie has apraxia.)

Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words.

Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say.

These words can be read as a non-native (an immigrant) speaker struggling to produce the sounds of English, and they can be read as an autistic child trying to answer his mother’s question, “What do you want?”

Yes, on the surface, a book like Dictee has nothing to do with autism. But perhaps if we considered how it or other books or ideas might shed new light on thinking about autism—on thinking about cognitive and neurological difference—on being different (”even” neurodiverse) in a culture that feels so very foreign; about how those with less or no language still communicate through other means. We could come to some more positive (”posautive“) understanding of what it means to be different, to be the kid in the “special” class, who does not talk so well, and who makes the biggest difference of all wherever he goes.

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