Episode 1: Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh

Cripping Ulysses

INTRO
Hi, my name is Sinéad Burke and this is Cripping Ulysses. Cripping Ulysses is a part of Ulysses 2.2, a celebration of the centenary of the text, brought to you by Landmark Productions, ANU productions and the Museum of Literature Ireland. Well, that’s the project as a whole. This podcast is an exploration of what was often called Joyce Disability Consciousness, both how he saw himself being a disabled man and how that framed the stories he told the characters he wrote and how he perceived the world. And while over these three episodes, we’re gonna be rooting the conversation in and around Ulysses. It’s also gonna be about ourselves, who we are, and that friction between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us.

Over the next three episodes, I have the great privilege of introducing you to and bringing you into conversations with truly extraordinary people. But now for the first episode with Dr. Rosaleen McDonagh. This episode is a live recording. This conversation took place live in the Museum of Literature Ireland on the week of the UN day for people with disabilities. Rosaleen is a playwright, a writer and advocate, and one of the people I admire most. So let’s go up the steps of the building through the door, up the steps, or through the lift upstairs into the most beautiful room with a high ceiling, gorgeous antique windows, and at the top sits, me and Rosaleen. This is episode one of Ulysses.

TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1 (00:20):

I asked Ian to play that just slightly longer than was comfortable . I think it worked . So that piece of music was designed by a brilliant disabled composer called Jacques who is part of the RAMPD collective, which is based out of the United States, which is a collective of disabled musicians. We commissioned that piece of music to start our conversation today and this three-part series laying out our intention for this dialogue as a whole. As you may or may not be aware, we have tried to model better practices around accessibility within this space and within this series as a whole. We have ISL interpreters, we have live captioning, we have a quiet room out front, and hopefully you received clear information around the accessibility of this space. But accessibility is a continuous practice that requires flexibility. And I share that in advance because at some point tonight I'm going to speak too quickly for the interpreters to keep up because I'll be nervous.

(01:26):

Undoubtedly, at some point my accent will probably be too strong for the closed captioners who are remote to pick up live on screen. But as Ben said in the introduction, there may be times where you feel overwhelmed and need to step outside to the quiet space or need to just engage or stim or be yourself in this room. Know that this conversation and the whole purpose of Cripping Ulysses is the idea that you can come as you are, which is how Rosaleen and I are going to enter into this conversation. But that was RAMPD and their piece of music and we're very grateful to them for their collaboration in part of this project.

(02:06):

So in thinking about the ways in which this conversation will tie somewhat into the themes of Ulysses and specifically the chapter that we're going to engage in, Joyce was often considered to have a disability consciousness. And I'm going to pause there because we had a great conversation prior to this afternoon talking about what sign would be for disability consciousness. Apparently it doesn't yet exist, and the rationale behind Joyce having a disability consciousness was because of his own lived experiences of disability through glaucoma. Often in the text of Ulysses, there are characters who have a disability, but when we look at the timings of the text, the way in which disability was framed, it was often used as a metaphor to talk about paralysis in Irish society and in Irish politics, which in and of itself is ableist. Joyce talked a lot in 1916 and 1917 in his own letters around the deep embarrassment he had over his own disability, being apologetic for not responding quick enough because it took him time to read and to ensure that he could write down.

(03:29):

There's many passages which talk about his own written word being almost illiterate by the time it came to the close of his life. But in many ways it talks to the reality that so often we still see disability as less. We still see that characteristic and trait as making somebody less. So I'm going to read a bit of a monologue which ties this text to the conversation we're going to have today. But then we're all going to take a deep breath because we're going to move from the academic and the literature into the literature and the personal and really share a conversation around what is so much tied to this chapter. And I'm using modern technology to do so.

(04:15):

‘The interactions between non-disabled characters and disabled characters also point to Joyce's criticism of Ireland as a prototypical nation obsessed with normalcy. Ireland is comfortable with the stereotypical representation of disability yet threatened by its condition because unlike congenital, marginal identities, disability can assume anyone at any time.’ It is very likely that it is not just Rosaleen and I who identify as disabled in this room. If so, we really have an issue. ‘In Joycean Ireland disability was not considered to be part of the life cycle of the human experience, but an invisible other within our society.’ Which brings us to Eumaeus, where the character of Murphy is unimportant and invisible. Yet a central tenett to the chapter is a modern pastime: gossip. Conversations lined with prejudices and assumptions, humor and cynicism, suspicious inquiries about who people are and how they live have such residency in even modern parlance. But what if we had the opportunity to define ourselves, to speak to the ways in which what makes us other can be unifying and sometimes a challenge. What if we created space for the protagonist and the audience to have a disability consciousness? Welcome to Cripping Ulysses. My name is Sinéad Burke. For access reasons, I'm going to give a visual description of myself.

(06:07):

I'm a white cisgendered woman who uses the pronouns, she and her. I identify as queer and disabled. I'm a little person with brown shoulder length hair. And today I'm wearing a red high neck and long sleeved dress custom Hermes, I’ll have you know, and I'm sitting in the museum - I'd love to see if they can caption that

Speaker 2 (