Human Meme

The Held Land tells three stories across 159 years, all rooted in a single quarter-section of Nebraska prairie. In March 1867, Ezekiel Washington, a Black veteran of the 5th United States Colored Troops, files a homestead claim on 160 acres. He builds a soddie with his own hands, breaks the sod, plants corn, and waits for the land to become his. Five years later, a rigged hearing strips him of everything. He walks off the land he made productive with nothing but his discharge papers and disappears from the historical record.

What makes you countable? Not valuable. Not worthy. Not loved. Countable. What is it about you that allows a system to place you in a box, assign you a number, and track your existence across time? We live inside classification systems we did not choose and cannot see. Every form you have ever filled out asked you to sort yourself into categories invented by strangers. Race. Gender. Age. Income. Education. Marital status. Employment. Each checkbox a small act of self-definition performed for an audience that will never know your name. The systems do not care about you. They care about the categories. You are the instance; the category is the thing. And when the last instance of a category dies, the category closes, and the system moves on without mourning.

You inherited a debt you never agreed to pay. I want you to consider that statement before you dismiss it. Not a financial debt, not a mortgage or a student loan with your signature on the paperwork. Something older. Something that attached itself to your bloodline before you were born, before your parents were born, before anyone now living had any say in the matter. This is not metaphor. This is how land works in America. The house you grew up in, the town where you learned to read, the state whose history you memorized in school, all of it sits on ground that belonged to someone else first. The transfer was not clean. The transfer was never clean. And the people who were displaced did not disappear. Their descendants are still here, still remembering, still holding ledgers that no one on the other side wants to examine.

When we encounter disability, most of us have been trained to see deficiency. Something missing. Something wrong. A departure from the norm that requires correction, accommodation, or at minimum, sympathy. This is the meme of the broken body, and it has replicated through Western culture for centuries. The meme manifests in our language. We speak of people "suffering from" conditions rather than "living with" them. We describe someone as "wheelchair-bound" rather than "wheelchair-using," as though the chair were a prison rather than a tool. We praise disabled people for "overcoming" their disabilities, as if the goal of every disabled life should be to approximate able-bodied existence as closely as possible. The meme manifests in our narratives. Stories about disabled characters tend to follow predictable patterns. The disabled person exists to inspire the able-bodied protagonist. The disabled person must be cured by the story's end, their disability a problem to be solved. The disabled person is saintly and patient, bearing their burden with grace, teaching others valuable lessons about gratitude and perseverance. Or the disabled person is bitter and villainous, their disability the source or symbol of their moral corruption. Visit BolesBooks.com for trilogy details.

Here is something I did not expect to discover while writing a textbook about American Sign Language. The shoulder knows things the hand cannot say. That sentence sounds like metaphor. It is not. It is linguistics, documented and measurable, and it has been sitting in plain sight for as long as deaf people have been signing to each other. The position of the arm, the engagement of the shoulder, the extension or contraction of the elbow: these carry meaning. Not incidental meaning. Not decorative meaning. Semantic meaning that changes what a sign communicates even when the handshape stays exactly the same. Consider what this implies about how consciousness expresses itself through the body. We tend to think of language as something that happens in the head. Words form in the mind and then exit through the mouth, or through the fingers if we are typing, but the origin point is cognitive, neural, somewhere behind the eyes where the self is supposed to live. The body is just the delivery system. The meaning is elsewhere.