Children with Disabilies in Literature

Discussing disabilities in literature is a very sensitive subject to me because of personal experiences I have had throughout my life. My sister is severely disabled, she is blind and has cerebral palsy. I have also worked with children who have disabilities for a few years, especially children with autism. Because of this background knowledge I have received from these experiences I feel I am better able to criticize literature that deals with these topics. With this, I think it is very important how authors portray people with disabilities in their literature because it can greatly affect the person with disabilities, their families, or anyone else concerned with these issues. A couple weeks ago in my class, we read Al Capone Does My Shirts. I really enjoyed reading this book; however, I also had some discrepancies about the characters as well. Natalie, the sister who had autism (however the author failed to mention the disability at all in the book), was portrayed as the outcast or the "other". Even her mom continuously wanted her daughter to be a "normal" teenage girl and wanted to make sure she was included with her brother and his friends. "Retarded" was also a word that another character used to describe Natalie as a person. This is the most difficult thing for me to discuss because this word offends me so much. It is as if people with disabilities are inhumane and do not have a personality or feelings like everyone else. When we had small group discussions in our class about different books dealing with disabilities, my group had the book Sara's Secret. We could talk about this book for hours because it portrayed Sara's brother so negatively and we could pick out so many issues and misconceptions about his disability. The one issue that we discussed which we thought was the worst portrayal was again, the usage of the word "retarded." Throughout the entire book the brother was said to be a boy who was not "normal" (another word I dislike) because he slobbered, couldn't walk, couldn't eat by himself or even function at all on his own. This basically compares the poor boy to a dog, because Natalie also said how he enjoyed when she patted him on the head. There was nothing positive about the boy or how he could really relate to any of the students. He was also seen as an object because Natalie brought him to show and tell because everyone in her class had to bring something that was associated with disabilities. This was the main point of the story and I was (as well as the rest of my group) so disturbed by how this book was written. It was written in the 1990's, and the author used the word "retarded" throughout the entire book, as well as in the author's note. We were so surprised by this and we think that in this time period, shouldn't we all use terms that do not define a person with their disability or difference even with race, religion, etc? I would like to know what other people think about this topic, thank you so much.