Stolen Moments

Blind writer Lepetric McKee reflects on a writing workshop conflict, disability, race, depression and what it means to keep faith with the sentence.

“Kindness is the language the deaf can hear, and the blind can see”

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I got expelled from a writer’s workshop for arguing with another student. I am a coffee colored, blind, ashen man who netted zero credence in a classroom designed to study the beauty of how words are crafted, while syntax and grammar be dammed. The Fiction side of my writing was attacked over its’ lyrical presentation. The experience caused emotional lacerations to the point where I’ve seriously considered forfeiture.

I violated the workshop’s policy by defending my work. The short story I wrote was about a man of color, legally blind, who also suffered from depression, and through a sequence of events, he finds love with a staff member employed to run the outpatient circle’s front desk at a hospital. I used analogies and similes, making lateral moves specifically to describe my central character’s vision for readers to see what he saw, every day. Within the critique, this student accused me of pretending to be writerly. It made me angry. This student, like others, hid behind cosmetics to denounce the realism of what I attempted to convey.

My experience infused in every sentence should not be viewed through the lens of subjectivity, mainstream society’s guillotine that executers everything and everybody, who embodies the fabric associated with Side B of Old Glory. Disabled writers own a river of thematic material spawned by an ecosystem of traumas. Why is it that our stories are not worthy to be counted in Fiction?

I wrote and then read my first sentence aloud from a blank yellow page. I could not see the board, and was afraid to say it as a six year old, but I saw my classmates perform the act of reciting. That was how I learned in school. A friend of the family had the audacity to suggest to my mother that I was steps behind intellectually, when I failed to fetch a box of peanut brittle from the overcrowded janitor’s closet pantry. I did not enjoy reading or learning because I could not see what to comprehend. Before teachers were taught etiquette on how to handle kids who supposedly were learning disabled, they were free to speak to me with such disdain that it neutralized the potentialities for maximum success in future endeavors with whoever. The opulent doctor who diagnosed me used his right index finger as a prop to resemble a crumbling building. What he did not care to know a five-minute conversation would have broadcasted. And during three stints of therapy chaperoned by an anti-depressant, I found out what it means to be alone while confronting the reality of a shortage of real men to talk to, a real woman to love, and the endless field trips in my mind, overseeing the windows of opportunities closing.

I emulated Mount St. Helens because the instructor did nothing to cease the onslaught of my work being maimed and mocked, though muted, I felt it. Anyone disabled can identify the characteristics of psychological beatings and therefore become proficient in managing the heat of vexation, for the most part. I got tired of this student defecating on my craft, due to failure to fit the perquisite of what is accepted as quality Fiction writing.

I have yet to find a crevice in this life that welcomes the avant-garde. I have yet to make a legitimate connection with another writer. This does not surprise me. In the online classroom, the discussion board revealed patterns steeped in rejection. Whatever I tried to contribute established no threads. I found myself latching onto other threads to at least feel that I was part of the class, yet not even close in auxiliary, concerning the major components missing in my life. My efforts were panned for being skilled in settling for almost half.

I could not allow the consequence of the push back to interfere with voicing my frustration. The literary realm paints a smokescreen devoted to diversity, only if the subject matter reflects slices of Blac American life relevant in social media, the rudiment of my diatribe on that student, where I pointed out other instances of sentences molded differently in other works that either went unnoticed or was praised.

The sentence is all that I have. My brother has turned his back on me. My woman doesn’t see me. And if the blood of American and Black History was not on my ballot, I would not vote, because the Donkey and Elephant, and other animals in the political zoo who promote any legislation, good, bad, or indifferent have no influence on the outcome regarding existence in gravel, the tier below the underrepresented.

The sentence, like jazz music, makes all this unimportant. But the desire to stand at the podium on a platform still means everything to me, because I took everybody’s best shot to crush my will ubiquitously, and now I have something to say about it, and one more thing all the time. What eludes me are proper venues and an advocate unafraid to represent a peripheral flower.