A Wicked allegory
There’s a cool moment in the movie and musical Wicked when Elphaba arrives at Shiz and is seen for the first time by everyone around her. To begin with everyone expresses shock at her green skin, but then Glinda’s response is different. Glinda, thinking of herself as superior, offers a ‘superior’ reaction and rather than being shocked she pities Elphaba, offers her help to fix what she considers a blight upon Elphaba’s life, to change her very skin.
It’s a really interesting allegory for any visible difference but there’s something specific about seeing this as an allegory for disability. Glinda’s response to Elphaba isn’t just one of pity, it is one that is made in a wider context of an unspoken social contract wherein everyone generally agrees that to have green skin is… bad, a bad thing to have, that to have green skin is to live a marred life.
This perception is so widely held to be true that it becomes true. The reaction from other people, the fear, the distancing, the othering, the pity, is what worsens Elphaba’s life. People’s reactions, what they think of as attractive, even as normal, sets the terms of belonging in a way that excludes people with green skin, and that makes it challenging to have it.
What is worse is what this constructed truth does to Elphaba’s self-concept. Elphaba sees her own abilities, her very features, as a bane. Elphaba comes to realise that she might be able to meet the Wizard, and her first thought is that maybe he might be able to change her, to make her ‘normal’. In a fundamental sense Elphaba concludes that she cannot be comfortable in her own skin.
When I saw the people at Shiz see Elphaba their reactions hit home for me in a way that they haven’t before. I recognised these reactions as my own before I became disabled, when I saw disability as frightening, even pitiable.
I feel ashamed now of my past conception of disability, but it didn’t come from nowhere. It comes from the endless pull of Capitalism to be more productive, like a fundamental force…
… like gravity.
When I was able bodied I saw my work, how hard I could work, as evidence of my value as a person. I’d be proud when I stayed up late working well into the night, when I overpopulated my diary with meetings, when I had to run to my car to get to my next appointment, when I gave myself heart palpitations, when I became exhausted, when I triggered my first relapse.
Given that work culture required me to live beyond my limits I saw anything that might make that difficult as a threat, and disability as a true tragedy. I’d be frightened of it. And my instinct would be to feel that same fear when I saw someone who was visibly disabled, frightened that it could happen to me, and I’d respond with Glinda’s sadness, her distancing, her pity, and I’d subscribe to the deeply held agreement that disability was a terrible fate.
Of course the social contract to which we’ve all unwittingly subscribed is one that sees productivity and value as one and the same. The engine of capitalism needs fuel to turn, and the more power a person can supply, the more valuable they are to the system.
For me this concept is revealed most acutely in schools where I have met countless families with a child or young person who is finding school hard for one reason or another. When I speak to school staff, embedded within this system, they frequently talk about age-related expectations, about added value, about measurable progress. When I talk to children and young people, not yet inducted into the system fully, they value very different things. They value kindness, friendship, freedom, and fun. Even now when we think of what we like about a friend, it isn’t how hard they can work, how late in the night they’ll stay up writing reports, it’s their kindness, their humour, their ability to listen, to care, how we feel when we spend time with them. Somewhere along the way we forget what we once considered so very important.
In a world that values the machinery of capitalism and the people that fuel it, someone being disabled garners a reaction reminiscent of Shiz's students to Elphaba. It is generally agreed that to have a disability is… bad, a bad thing to have, and to be disabled is to live a marred life.
Those who are disabled know what it is to be marginalised by this system, and we know the pain of internalising the view of ourselves as less worthy. We know what it is to see ourselves as less than, so much so that we might seek to meet the wizard to wish away what makes us different, to wish away what makes us… us.
But the central message of the musical is the irony that while what makes us different might make us feel less valuable, what makes us different is often also where our value truly lies.
If the wizard were here, with a cure, I would still take it.
But there is no wizard, there is no cure, and what makes us different might yet be the very source of our truest value. We are disabled, but primarily that means that we are unable to be churned by the economic machine and maybe we are through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game.
So this holiday season, as hard as it all is, remember what we truly value in the people we love. Remember that the voracious economic machine invites us to construct a reality that marginalises us, and remember that beneath it all what we value in each other isn't how well we feed it. If we can remember what we value in our friends, and therefore what we should value in ourselves, then maybe we’ll discover that what makes us different is also what allows us…