Survival is an act of defiance
In Abhishek Anicca’s memoir The Grammar of my Body (2023), the protagonist is a disabled body, charting its terrain through the unforgiving, able-bodied world.
“The journey from being a being a human being to a thing is a journey that all disabled people go through,” writes Abhishek Anicca, in The Grammar of My Body (Vintage Books, 2023). A writer and poet, Anicca’s memoir is a liberating homecoming to claiming the body as a living, breathing, imperfect being, one that attempts to subvert the ableist gaze upon the body.
The body is not a neutral category. It has many labels: disabled, fat, thin, tall, short, dark, fair. These labels determine the relationship of our body with this world. The protagonist of Anicca’s book is a disabled body, charting its terrain through the able-bodied world. This world is an unforgiving place, deliberately constructed to exclude disabled bodies.
Anicca captures this exclusion when he writes,
I am still waiting for
the hospitals within me
to recover and leave
there is no space
to heal in an ongoing
occupation
Is it possible for love to exist without being reduced or defined by his disabled body? Anicca recollects the quiet erosion of relationships which ends with the unfulfilled promise that they can remain “good friends”. Anicca knows the sting of this rejection, based on the unspoken truths of his reality.
Inhabiting a disabled body is akin to being at war with the world. What does Anicca’s world look like then?
Throughout the memoir, the reader witnesses the unfolding of the author’s life, and his shifting relationship with this body. Anicca has lived with VATER syndrome since birth. VATER or VACTREAL syndrome is a rare disorder in which three or more congenital characteristics occur together, which in Anicca’s case is imperforate anus, scoliosis, and ectopic kidney. Earlier in his life, he could contain this as a secret. In his mid-20, however, Anicca’s body began to let him down in public when his disability became irreversible due to impairment of legs, bowel movement, and recurrence of urinary tract infections. “What happens when our bodies betrays the idea of self?” he asks, to himself and his readers.
Anicca has movingly documented these betrayals through unflinching vulnerability. There is anger and exasperation at the world which denies granting autonomy to his body when Anicca is out looking for a home. There is outrage at realtors, who insist that he falsely tell landowners that he will live with his parents, when in fact he wishes to live independently. Throughout the narrative, there is a dual struggle of the body’s fragility along with its assertion for autonomy.
In 2012, the disability rights activist Stella Young coined the term ‘inspiration porn’, a portrayal of people with disabilities to serve as inspiration for the able-bodied. In her 2014 Tedx talk in Sydney, Young called this act of “inspiring” to be exploitative at its core, as it reduces disabled people, and demands them to perform feats of exceptionality despite their disability. Anicca also rejects the framework of inspiration and exceptionalism; he is aware that his disabled body evokes discomfort for the able-bodied audience, and writes that, even when discussing his disability, he has to measure the extent to which his listeners are comfortable with the truths of his body. Through this resolute telling of the story, Grammar becomes an act of resistance against the systemic erasure of narratives of disabled bodies.
Anicca is not writing to comfort his able-bodied audience. In fact, throughout the memoir, he shows us how the ableist world has failed him: whether it is in trying to find a job or making friends or finding partners. At some point in these interactions, he is reduced to nothing more than his disabled body.
Survival is an act of defiance in this ableist world, but the cost of the defiance is exhaustion. When all the resources available are consumed in the act of surviving, then how can living and loving begin? Anicca shows us that there are moments of glimmer in friendships and brief romance. Sometimes the friendships begin as a nod to shared struggles. In one such instance, he shares a camaraderie he formed with his female colleagues over the horrors of using public toilets in fieldwork, and the risk of contracting urinary tract infections.
The internet has also played a major role in shaping Anicca’s relationships. While he might be physically restricted, the online world still allows for friendships, intimacies, and explorations. How does one take stock of loneliness which arises in a world that doesn’t care for people with disabilities? Once again, Anicca finds solidarity in queer communities, which open up the world of intimacy and pleasure to him. He realizes that, along with the realities of his body, he is also restricted by the norms of heterosexuality. Stumbling upon queerness as a practice allows him to live and love in unique ways.
Is it possible for love to exist without being reduced or defined by his disabled body? Anicca recollects the quiet erosion of relationships which ends with the unfulfilled promise that they can remain “good friends”. Anicca knows the sting of this rejection, based on the unspoken truths of his reality. He also knows the frustrations of dating another person with a disability where conversations revolve only around their disabilities.
There are many moments of radical vulnerability in the memoir where Anicca confronts the fragilities of the disabled body and the care it demands. There remains a fear—often realized—of not having access to care during moments of acute need. There are instances in the book when he have soiled himself and unable to get up from the bed. In these intensely vulnerable moments, Anicca is faced with the looming question of who can he call for help. While he shares an amicable relationship with his mother, he picks up on her stoic silences when he falls sick and she becomes his primary caregiver. He dwells on the complexities of care as he writes, “I also feel bad whenever she has to take care of me. The guilt becomes mine. Her sacrifices become a part of my failure”. There is always prevailing double anxiety surrounding sickness and caregiving during sickness.
The essayistic narrative structure that Anicca employs successfully acts as a vessel to explore his raw reality. The book is divided across forty-one vignette style essays which explores various facets of the author’s life ranging from his childhood to adulthood, exploring his political awakening around issues of disability rights, queerness, and also his friendships, love life and his dynamic regarding the giving and receiving of care.
Throughout his writing, Annica maintains a searing honesty about his tethered relationship with his disabled body. There is anger towards this body, too: Anicca is constantly confronted with the limitations of his body. He describes the social consequences of these limitations, too: he backs away from movie plans with his friends after he feels a spasm in his right leg, and has to back out of the plan due to “urgent work”.
But throughout this remarkable book, Anicca reserves a tenderness for his body, too, marvelling at its resilience in having to survive in an ableist world. “I have switched off all the lights to save myself,” he writes, “There is no need to see myself falling again and again”.
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Priyanka Chakarabarty is a neuroqueer person and law student based in Bangalore. She aspires to be a human rights lawyer. An avid reader of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, she has been writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. She is a bookstgrammer and regularly documents her reading journey on Instagram: @exisitingquietly.
