Articles by Antoinette

I am a friendly person. I volunteer and visit with people. Under COVID, I can’t do that anymore, so I crochet blankets at home to give to people. I am doing this project because I want people to know our story and what happened to us. I think it’s good that we’re telling our stories. I think it’s good to let people hear what happened to everybody in their life. You have to be nice to everybody. It’s the way you feel in your heart, to give it back.

Coalition-In-Progress: Found Poetry Through Phone Calls with People Labelled/With Intellectual Disability During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Photo courtesy of Ishan Gupta
By Erin Kuri, Antoinette, A. K., Bill Chase, Cindy Scott, Doreen Kalifer, Harold George Dougall, Kevin John Head, Marie, Nicholas Herd, P. A. I., P. S., R., Sean Simone, Chelsea Temple Jones and Ann Fudge Schormans

For institutional survivors and their younger peers labelled/with intellectual disability, the COVID-19 pandemic and its related lockdowns carry over past experiences under government-directed isolation and mandatory medical interventions. The sudden convergence of past and present necropolitical ableism in labeled persons’ lives colours this crisis, as we—a group of survivors, younger labeled people (who have not lived in institutions), and researcher/allies—attempt to simply stay in touch amid digital divides that cut off our once vibrant, interdependent in-person activities. No longer able to gather, and with limited Internet (or no) access, we resist social abandonment through phone calls. During phone conversations we discuss the affective contours of this time: grief over the past, loss of agency, restrictive rules in group homes, the dynamics of protest, fear sparked by public health orders, and a mix of anxiety and hope about the future. Taking this telephone-based dialogue as evidence of our lives in these times, we present a brief body of collectively written found poetry, a form of poetic inquiry composed of phone call snippets. This piece, coauthored by twenty members of the “DiStory: Disability Then and Now” project in Toronto, Canada, offers a snapshot of coalition-in-process, keeping in touch amid a crisis that threatens our togetherness and—for some more than others—our lives. Following Braidotti, we couch this found poetry in a brief commentary on our slow, in-progress attempt to “co-construct a different platform of becoming” with one another amid a divergence of historical and contemporary inequities.