February 12, 2016 - 15:39
The Art of Accompaniment:
Negotiating Conventional Communication and Caring Presence
I was most struck today by a statement Stella made, as she introduced us to the center. So far, she hasn’t given us many instructions as to how to interact generally with participants—and understandably so, as everyone at the center has their own unique ways of communicating, their own preferences and discomforts. But as soon as we entered the large room, full of artists hard at work in various mediums, she threw in a brief piece of advice: “Oh—and if you don’t understand what someone’s saying to you, ask them to repeat themselves. Don’t just say ‘yeah, okay,’ and don’t feel weird about how many times you have to ask.”
- excerpt from field notes, 1/27/16
The role of the healing presence is introduced by author and spiritual director James E. Miller in his book The Art of Being a Healing Presence. As Miller puts forth, those who hope to engage in caring relationships must learn to embody healing—stepping outside of themselves and their inclinations to actively “help” in order to deeply listen and make room for the empowerment of others. Entering the center several weeks ago, Miller’s language—and the words of others whose philosophies on listening I deeply respect—ran through my head. How could I best embody these values when my interactions were not always so simple? So many people at the center communicate differently, whether through tactile sign language, through a personalized and cryptic humor, or through English not articulated in ways I am used to. How, I wondered, could I even begin to listen when I couldn’t make out the words that were spoken to me?
With these questions running through my mind, Stella’s words made a great deal of sense. So much can be “lost in translation,” whether that means between different languages, between a young child and an adult, or between two adults when one lives with an impairment related to speech and articulation. I so often find myself searching for an escape in these situations, eager to move on to a subject that makes differences less visible. When a person of privilege gives up on trying to communicate, they are sending the message that the other person—who, for whatever reason, must work harder to express themselves in a way that is understandable to the privileged individual—is not worth their time, and that their stories are not worth hearing. In this sense, asking a participant to repeat themselves demonstrates caring, and places the emphasis on one’s own inability to understand, rather than the supposed deficit of the other individual. It is not that the artists at the center “can’t speak well,” but rather that I enter the space ill-equipped to hear what they are trying to tell me. At the same time, not every word spoken is a message waiting for a recipient. Several members I have met frequently toss out seemingly random language, and seem surprised when I press them further—frustrated, even, as if I had intruded on a private conversation (and perhaps I had). I try to listen in new ways, to accept an occasional inability to understand, and to soak in what a person seems to be expressing to me, even if I can’t pick up every word. This constant decision—between reaching to understand and a more open form of understanding gained through simply sharing a space—is one that I question each week.
My experience at the center makes visible what seems to be a paradox in Miller’s writing. As he claims, the healing presence must prepare themselves for their encounter with another person by ridding themselves of expectations. He writes, “By noting and releasing any rigid expectations about what will happen in your time together, as well as what will happen after, you help clear the way for others to do what is theirs alone to do” (Miller 33). Only pages later, Miller insists that “that other person is your equal in every way that really matters,” and that a healing presence “honor[s] the other’s significance” (35-36). I wonder how to divorce the concepts of “significance” and “equal” from expectations, when treating someone as my equal has always meant that I hold them to the same expectations to which I hold myself.
At the same time, I worry that, in ridding myself of expectations, I risk looking at the participants as a damaged community, as people with disabilities are so often seen to be. In her piece entitled “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Eve Tuck writes on the problematic nature of recent research methods, which tend to document only the negative impacts of oppression on marginalized and colonized communities. While she claims that the recognition of this history is important, it is ultimately unhelpful and disempowering if the story of a people does not also include “desire-based” information, stories and data that display the community’s present resilience and dreams toward a better future. The result, she writes, is a feeling “of being overresearched yet, ironically, made invisible” (Tuck 411-12). Entering the center each week with a notebook for my field notes, I am struck by the uncomfortable and nauseating feeling that I am simply researching “these people.” My only tools with which to combat this are my communication and listening skills—only through hearing the voices and stories presented to me by the artists can I possibly leave this experience feeling able to share stories of my placement, without the concern that I have been a mere spectator, paradoxically rendering the participants invisible as I watch them. In this sense, it is my ethical responsibility to reach for communication—to try as hard as I can to hear, to comprehend.
Today I found a chance to try to employ Stella’s advice. Marcia came up to me, eager to tell me about the box she had been constructing in the woodworking studio. Excited, she was speaking quickly and I had a hard time understanding many of her sentences before they whizzed by. She ended her impassioned speech with something that seemed to have the intonation of a question, and glanced in my direction, looking just past me (I know that Marcia doesn’t like to make eye contact, so I assumed that she was indicating to me that she wanted a response). Unsure of what was being asked, I thought of Stella’s advice; it would have been easy enough to smile and change the subject, but this clearly mattered a lot to Marcia. “What did you say?” I asked. She repeated herself—I still didn’t understand. “I can’t understand you, what did you say?” I asked again. When she repeated herself again and I asked a third time, she seemed frustrated. Marcia changed the subject, talking about her daughter, who also works at the center. What just happened?
- excerpt from field notes, 2/10/16
And, sometimes, reaching for communication doesn’t mean that one can find it—in fact, as my experiences from a past week in my placement indicated, my repeated attempts were off-putting to an artist, and she chose to change the subject. Had I tried too hard—or for the wrong reasons? Here, it seems appropriate to revisit my positionality at the center. Was I sinking into the dangerous and problematic role of the “helper?” Had my insistence upon a crystal clear translation between Marcia’s language and my own been too goal-oriented, too driven by my desire to prove myself to her, or to myself? And then, if it had, wouldn’t it still have been inappropriate—lazy—a mark of my privilege—to give up, even after two tries?
Entering the Haverford dining hall today with the participants was overwhelming. We hadn’t figured out meal tickets ahead of time, so we spent about 15 minutes waiting for a series of dining hall supervisors to attempt to solve our situation. When we finally got in, the options were overwhelming—for us as well as for the artists. The food was dispersed around the room, so there was no obvious line to join, and we were mingling with a group of students unused to the presence of adults at all (let alone adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities). Marcia looked to me for something, muttering under her breath words I couldn’t make out. I wondered how to be the best host possible, while not really being from Haverford myself. I settled on accompaniment in its simplest form—rather than showing Marcia where to go or telling her what to eat, I walked alongside her and filled my own plate, offering suggestions only if she asked. Returning to the table smiling, Marcia seemed happy with her bounty, and I was relieved to see the lack of stress she displayed, despite the potentially overwhelming situation.
- excerpt from field notes, 2/3/16
Perhaps Miller’s text contains an answer in itself, when he writes that the healing presence must be “open to your humanness,” and “open to your brokenness” (Miller 24-25). In knowing one’s own limits, abilities—in acknowledging and accepting ones own imperfections—one can know when to reach, when to settle. And in doing so, one may inherently step away from the “helper” instinct, as a decision to stop desperately trying to communicate may indicate a recognition of a personal limit—rooted not in the other’s inability to express themselves, but in ones own struggle to understand what is being presented to them. What happens to the “helper” when they recognize and name their own “helplessness?”
Petra Kuppers, a disability activist and community performance artist, explores related questions in her work. In her book entitled Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Kuppers participates in and speaks to a number of artistic research practices from around the world—from myth-making to communal poetry—all of which seek not only to incorporate disabled individuals, but to bring their stories out and place them front and center in history, current events, and in dreaming towards a future. As she travels, she raises a significant question: “How do limits of sharing fuel performance practice?” (Kuppers 143). In the groups and workshops she experiences and describes, Kuppers remarks frequently on the power of the groups to emphasize the present; while theatrical troupes are so often focused on rehearsing toward a performance, the groups she works with “crip” this normative, progress-based, linear timeframe, and see rehearsals as the most significant part of the process. Many groups move away from conventions of their form in other ways as well, using photography or touch in place of the spoken language historically associated with theatre. This “artistic universal design,” of sorts, demonstrates that the value is placed on “being together,” even when this is not physically possible when people are unable to show up. In part, this focus is significant because it allows the artists to share in less conventional manners, without necessarily imparting every factual detail of their lived experience. Instead, she claims, we can absorb each other’s truths through pure togetherness. And it is here that Kuppers speaks most directly to my dilemma: Importantly, she claims, connection runs deeper than hearing and understanding the words someone else shares. As she explains:
And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this – it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will hae forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe of those moments of energetic connect that happy through, beyond, and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space (Kuppers 143).
As I walked through the Haverford dining hall with Marcia, mostly in silence, only occasionally offering opinions or advice, I felt connected and present. What I hope I communicated through this silence was my steadfast support, my care, and ultimately, a desire to be together that did not require spoken language. It was my accompaniment that mattered. Of course, this will not always be enough—and I will have to learn to read the cues of social interactions with each artist that tell me when to ask for clarification, and when I have asked enough. But I return to the words of Petra Kuppers, as she writes:
“Come and sit by my side, and we share in this path river flow border cell life” (Kuppers 150).
Works Cited
Kuppers, Petra. Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011. Print.
Miller, James E., and Susan C. Cutshall. The Art of Being a Healing Presence: A Guide for Those in Caring Relationships. Fort Wayne, IN: Willowgreen, 2001. Print.
Tuck, Eve. "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities." Harvard Educational Review 79.3 (2009): 409-27. Print.