Written by Madison Bigelow, with support from the DAC Team
For my third annotation, I chose to borrow the race/gender/disability triangle that we worked with when reading Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and apply it to Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me. While I believe that it could have been reasonably assumed that without this visual representation, the Willow triangle further exemplifies the necessity of understanding holistic identity as it pertains to disability (and social issues, more broadly).
In my attempt to recreate the triangle, the quotes positioned most closely to the corners of the triangle are supposed to explicitly address a single aspect of Danquah’s identity. For instance, the quote, “Some Black Americans use the trope of having survived slavery as an indication that they should be able to survive anything” (18) directly discusses race in America. The quotes that are closest to the sides of the triangle (or, in between two points of identity) are placed to represent how these identities blend together, often becoming indistinguishable. For example, the quote “All I could think about was that I didn’t want her to grow up knowing the pain of racism, the pain of the despair it creates” (54) ties Danquah’s lived experiences of racism with her depression. The quote at the center of the triangle, in my mind, is one of the most explicit moments in Willow where all three of these identities intertwine.
However, I also find this model problematic; I think that this triangle model only works as a tool of shallow analysis. While these quotes and identities first appear to be separate from each other, there’s no way to truly distinguish them as “separate” entities. To do so would be misrepresentative of Danquah’s experience and an injustice to her memoir. Even the quotes that I’ve designated to a single aspect of her identity do not solely or only speak to that single aspect of her life. Within the academic world, it seems that many scholars have settled on the agreement that intersectionality is crucial when it comes to doing work in the humanities and/or social sciences. However, sometimes it seems like this intersectional awareness is abandoned by scholars once the conversation shifts to disability (but also, there’s clearly progress being made in response to this criticism).
I made this triangle to (hopefully) visualize how piecing out someone’s identity renders their personhood incomplete. If this model was presented to others who have also read the memoir, I would hope for them to debate whether these quotes are placed “correctly” (a vexed text, perhaps?). Without a holistic understanding of a person’s experience, change, justice, growth, or any other end-goal cannot be achieved.
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