Autism Vox

Strange and Unstrange

by Kristina Chew, PhD on December 28th, 2006

A new book about autism and a mother from India: You think, “I’ve already read about that here—-Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at George Washington University and father of Isabel, who has autism?

But it is a different new autism book I am referring to, one that is (as the subtitle reads) about “two mothers, two sons, and the quest to unlock the hidden world of autism.” Strange Son is by Portia Iversen, who founded Cure Autism Now (CAN) with her husband, Hollywood producer John Shestack. Her son, Dov, is now 14 years old and (in the words of Shestack in his 2006 annual letter for Cure Autism Now) “almost totally non-verbal, slim and sweet” and “so very autistic.” The other mother in Iversen’s just-published memoir is Soma Mukhopadhyay, who is from India and who taught her son Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhay to point to the alphabet letters on a piece of cardboard and so to communicate. Tito, who is non-verbal and is “severely autistic” (in Iversen’s book, he is constantly described as “stimming”), is a poet and the author of The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism and The Gold of the Sunbeams and other stories.

Iversen first learns about Tito in 1999 at a conference at New Jersey’s Rutgers University. After reading Tito’s Beyond the Silence: my life, the world and autism (which is incorporated into The Mind Tree), Iversen determines that she must meet Tito and Soma and, after a regular exchange of email, eventually plays a part in bringing them to the United States from India. The narrative of Strange Son then takes on three main strands: How Iversen, through communicating (often via email) and spending time with Tito, arrives at a new theory about autism; how Tito’s abilities and intelligence are proven under testing by a number of scientists whom Iversen brings him to; how Dov starts to communicate under Soma’s teaching and proves that he is not retarded but, indeed, intelligent. Along the way, Iversen charts her interactions with Soma; describes the poetry reading of Tito poetry held in the house of Iversen’s Philadelphia lawyer father-in-law; and narrates her discovery of what refers to as two types of autism (a visual and an auditory kind), via her own reading about the science of the brain, autism, and more, and also her regular communications with Tito.

The title of Iversen’s book is from a fragment of the Book of Noah from the Book of Enoch (ch. CVI.5):

I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious

Strange Son emphasizes the “strangeness” of autism. The first chapter opens with an image of some “dark things” that are trying to “steal Dov [when he was a baby] away”:

It was his mind that came for. They came to steal his mind.*

Iversen refers often to Tito’s stimming and other behaviors (including tearing apart her house when he visits; consuming a pack of cookies as soon as he finds one on a shelf at a school; grabbing the neck of her shirt so tightly that she cannot breath; rocking and flapping his hands constantly) as well as to his poetry and to his use of metaphorical and associative language to express himself. Iversen notes that “Tito had an extraordinary ability to condense an amazing number of meanings into his words” and refers often to one of Tito’s poems, “Mutilated Spirit”:

Mutilated spirit sits on the grave of sighs
Weaving its thoughts,
answering
The whats and whys.
Mutilated spirit with tender pain
Watches the earth
Watches all that remains

(The entire poem can be read on Tito’s website.)

In the course of Tito being tested in a lab at the University of California in San Francisco, Iversen wonders: “I knew that Tito was asking the profound question that was at the back of everyone’s mind: If he could talk, would he still be autistic?” Autism in Iversen’s book is something that is separate from what Tito, and from what her son Dov, are. Tito’s poetry and other writings, that is, are presented as revealing what he truly is, caught inside a body that cannot control his flapping and other “stimming” behaviors and in which sensory processing is profoundly confused. In this, autism is presented as mysterious and “strange” and Dov, and Tito, as both “strange sons.”

In so presenting autism as “strange,” the understanding of autism from Strange Son moves in a different diection from that presented in Grinker’s Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (to be published in February 2007). “As the general public learns to understand and appreciate people with autism, the autistic person is no longer strange or foreign. He or she is, instead, unstrange,” as Grinker writes about his book’s title. Grinker travels to India and Korea to find about how autism is understood in other, foreign countries but it is ultimately his experience raising his now-teenage daughter Isabel that provides the core of the understanding of autism presented in his book.

This book is guided by [anthropologist Colin] Turnbull’s belief that anthropology is about much more than going away to distant cultures. It’s also about coming home and seeing your own world, even your own child, in a new light. It’s about finding that, in the end, the people who can teach you the most might very well be in your own backyard. (pp. 34-35)

I will be further reviewing Iversen’s Strange Son in future posts and also comparing it to Grinker’s Unstrange Minds.

*I have been listening to Strange Son via the audiobook read by actress Jane Kaczmarek and so have not noted page numbers for the text; I will refer to the written text of the book in future posts.

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POSTED IN: Asia, Autism Lit, Books, India, Korea, Neuroscience, Poetry, Psychology, Race & Ethnicity, Science, Sensory, Treatment