Q&A with Joanne Bloch, Author of Unseen

_______________

In Unseen, Joanne Bloch explores what it means to live with visual impairment in a society structured around sight. Drawing on her own experience alongside the voices of 20 other South Africans, she brings together lived experience with a commitment to amplifying voices that are often overlooked. 

Book Description: After artist Joanne Bloch experienced serious sight loss, she felt called to explore what it means to be visually impaired in our society. Unseen gives both her own reflections and those of 20 other South Africans, each told in the unique voice of its contributor. The conversations and stories in Unseen reveal many hidden complexities. They describe sensory and bodily adaptations, as well as the systemic barriers to basic rights that are built into our society. They show the constant need to counter ignorance and hostility and describe the social discomfort and isolation that often comes with visual impairment. Yet these are not narratives of passive victims. Instead, they are idiosyncratic, compelling expressions of courage, humour, solidarity and resilience. Most of all, they reflect a determination to live a rich and fulfilling life despite every difficulty. Buy the book here. Author Bio: For most of her adult life, Joanne Bloch was an exhibiting visual artist. Her work was shown on both solo and group exhibitions, including the 2013 Venice Biennale. In parallel with her art practice, Joanne worked as a freelance writer, specialising in human rights-related and educational materials. In 2011, six months into her PhD in Fine Art, Joanne was faced with irreversible sight loss. After she completed her PhD, her deteriorating vision forced her to abandon art- making and concentrate entirely on writing. Joanne has always been especially interested in life writing, and worked as interviewer, photographer and writer on several interview-based books for young adults and children. Her new book Unseen emerged as a response to her own experience of visual impairment, a growing awareness of the ignorance, stigma and discrimination confronting visually impaired South Africans and a strong desire for marginalized voices to be more widely heard. She lives in Cape Town.

What was your main motivation behind writing Unseen?

After my sudden, severe sight loss, I began writing about my experience as a way of processing what was happening. This took some time, and while I was busy with what ultimately became Part 1 of the book, I was of course also trying to adapt to a different set of circumstances.  I felt dismayed at how often I encountered ignorance and misconceptions about visual impairment from fully sighted people. It was also impossible not to notice all the ways in which our society is set up to favour those with bodies considered to be ‘normal’. It seemed important to try to create more awareness. I  reasoned that the best way to do that was via life writing, so as to give members of this largely marginalised community the opportunity to speak out about their experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

Were there any challenges or unexpected moments in your writing process? 

The arrival of the pandemic in 2020  initially presented a challenge in terms of meeting up with the contributors. Luckily, I discovered that communicating with WhatsApp voice notes actually works just as well as speaking face-to-face. It might even be better, because the exchange remains personal and focused, but there’s a chance for both parties to pause for a breather or to think about a complex question. The only other challenge I experienced was my own difficulty with seeing and with screens—not being fully trained up to use a screen reader effectively, so struggling with sore eyes and exhaustion during the writing and editing process. 

You’ve spoken about your deep connection with art and your experience observing the work of accomplished artists. What are the ways in which you were able to remain connected to art when your vision was at its worst? 

Mostly, there weren’t any, except for remembering, although occasionally I had the chance to encounter artworks that I could get a reasonable sense of because of their size. But I’d made a decision to turn away from looking at as well as making visual art, and whether that was the right decision or not, I usually stuck to it.

What was it like transitioning into a new community later in life? Since you weren’t blind from birth, did the blind community feel like an accepting place to belong right away, or did it take some time before you felt included?

I found most of the blind and visually impaired people I met friendly, but it was hard to meet them. In my experience, organizational support is quite dispersed in Cape Town, mostly divided along racial and class lines and often quite paternalistic in its approach. 

What was the process like for interviewing other visually impaired people? 

I tried to keep it open-ended, didn’t have a set of questions, and was happy to let the contributors veer off in different directions if they felt like it. It was a slow process, and it took some months before patterns emerged in the responses. I didn’t mind that it was slow, though, because I found the responses and the narratives so interesting.

How did you find participants who were willing to share their experiences? 

Just by word of mouth and through two organisations. It was easy, because the people I approached were happy to speak to me.

Did you face any pushback from the community for your project, or were people happy to have representation? 

The people I interviewed were very generous with their time and seemed genuinely to be very pleased at the opportunity to speak about their lives. There were only two people who declined the invitation to participate.

In “Unknowable trajectories”, you and a contributor discuss the role that imagination can play in enhancing sensory input after sight loss. Are there ways in which your imagination or creativity expanded after vision loss? 

Well, I  redirected my creative process entirely towards writing, but that doesn’t exclude imagining in a visual way. As an interesting aside, in my dreams, I see as clearly as I used to, which I enjoy.

Can you describe your experience interviewing others with vision loss? Did hearing their stories feel validating to your own?

I could relate really well to a lot of the things they told me about, purely bodily and sensory experiences, and about the sometimes hurtful reactions of strangers and even sometimes friends. I could relate to the myriad ways in which life is made hard for visually impaired people by a lack of accessibility and support.  At the same time, I am a relatively privileged white South African, so my experience is inevitably different—and often easier—than that of working-class Black South Africans. For example,  I am lucky not to have to depend on public transport, as many of the participants did, and I never personally experienced the brutalities of apartheid, which some of the older participants described.

Were there any participants whose story you felt especially relatable to your journey? 

I had a lot in common with the artists, Mogorosi and Bianca…but in different ways, I found that there was always some point of connection between the person I was talking to and me.

What do you hope is the main takeaway for readers of Unseen?

I hope that readers realise that sight is a spectrum, with a whole range of possible ways of seeing as opposed to the widespread idea that sight is simply equivalent to full sight versus its total lack or blindness. This would encourage people not to lump all visually impaired people together and make assumptions on that basis. I’d also like readers to realise that people with disabilities should never be defined solely by their differences, but are fully rounded, complex individuals like everybody else, and deserve to have the opportunity to live as full a life as possible.