Disability as metaphor or resilience: A Palestinian poetic inquiry

ABSTRACT

People’s attitudes toward illness and disability are a product of how they are informed culturally. Most studies on disability offer quantitative views and apply Western disability models. In this paper, through a series of invoked conversations (morphed into poems) with my Palestinian maternal grandmother and my mother, I examine the concepts of resilience, survival, and historical trauma. By using autoethnography and poetic inquiry, I consider the impact of the Gulf War on Palestinian families and treat survival as a tool informed by Palestinian resilience. Circling back to the attitudes of disability, the disability war metaphor has indeed become real. Rather than dismissing disability metaphors as ableist and harmful, taking due account of the situation of cultural attitudes toward disability and resilience is necessary in Global Disability Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestinian
• disability
• autoethnography
• poetic inquiry
• resilience