5 - Blind, but Not in the Dark

Summary

Chapter 5 brings analysis to more recent times with its focus on Tuina (Massage, 2008) by Bi Feiyu (b. 1964), a novel that explores the world of blind tuina massage therapists in Nanjing and is, ostensibly, based on conversations with real-life therapists there. Although a non-disabled person, Bi Feiyu argues that Tuina breaks away from received ways of writing about blindness and impairment more broadly to show the ‘human’ experience of blindness from within the experience of disability. The novel reveals the surprising (to the able-bodied gaze at least) ‘normalcy’ of disabled lives and emotions – greed, ambition, fear, despair, anger, love, desire and everything in between – debunking, as it does, the various prejudices surrounding the ‘world of darkness’. The way in which the novel highlights the individual/particular over the public/metaphoric certainly demonstrates its potential for the sharing of marginal perspectives and the personal reinterpretation of ‘difference’ and belonging; but, as the chapter also reveals, this does not mean that it can produce literature that fully avoids symbolism and allegory, or many of the more obvious pitfalls of the ‘narrative prosthesis’.