March 1, 2021
How blindness has shaped global culture across centuries. Playwright and columnist Godin approaches her subject from a unique perspective. Now blind, she gradually lost her sight from retinal dystrophy, a frightening process she poignantly recounts throughout the book. Her ambitious goal is to trace the "complexities of metaphorical and literal blindness and sight." As she writes, "what I'm wrestling with...is the concept of blindness that our ocularcentric culture extols on the one hand and dismisses on the other." The idea that poetic gifts are compensation for blindness began with Homer, who may or may not have been blind. Godin uncovers a rich literary history of blindness, including such signposts as the blind bard Demodocus, biblical Scripture, King Lear, Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Danielewski's "haunting masterpiece," House of Leaves, and Daisy Johnson's Everything Under. John Milton, whose Paradise Lost provides the book's title, went blind in his 40s, composing his later works in his head until an amanuensis wrote them down. Godin discusses Milton's blindness and the "long tradition in Milton scholarship that falls victim to...ocularcentrism." The author also introduces us to Valentin Ha�y, who opened Paris' groundbreaking Royal Institute for Blind Youth in 1785 and developed a way of reading via embossed letters on paper. A young Louis Braille attended the school and would go on to "invent a writing system that would eventually revolutionize blind education." After World War II, a veteran-rehabilitation specialist "pioneered the technique" for using a long, sweeping white cane. After a sprightly look at Helen Keller in vaudeville and Godin's play about it, she moves on to the topic of blindness and sex and the difficulties that face blind authors, artists, and musicians, including Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. The author wraps up her erudite, capacious book with discussions of blind parents and superheroes, the portrayal of the blind in the media, and blind pride. As Godin wonderfully shows, we've come a long way in our quest to understand what blindness means.
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May 1, 2021
Depictions of blind people abound in popular culture, from the blind prophet Tiresias in classical antiquity to the Marvel superhero Daredevil. Yet few of these stories highlight the experiences of real blind people, and even fewer are written by blind creators. Writer and performer Godin makes a passionate argument for placing blind people at the center of their own stories. She delves into the metaphorical, biological, and societal aspects of blindness, drawing not just from history and literature but from her own experience of becoming blind over the course of her life. This book is an insightful and wide-ranging book that asks sighted readers to examine the myriad ways in which our culture uses concepts of blindness as metaphor or morality tale while simultaneously ignoring the existence, insights, and experiences of blind people. Even in its lapses--Godin says little, for instance, about how race, ethnicity, or sexuality inflect blind experience, representation, or community--There Plant Eyes speaks eloquently and urgently to the necessity of making space for blind thinkers within our ocular-centric world.
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Starred review from May 10, 2021
Godin, a performer and educator who is blind, debuts with a revealing and humorous account of how blindness has been misunderstood by the sighted. At the age of 10, she was diagnosed with retinal dystrophy, a degenerative condition that gradually caused her to become blind. “Lack of sight does not give rise to specific types of personalities, behaviors... or conversions,” she writes, noting how blindness has long been treated by the seeing-world as either something to be pitied or something to be revered as a marker of “innocence and purity.” Oftentimes, she argues, sighted people like to believe that being blind is linked to secret supernatural abilities, as with the Marvel character Daredevil, whose blindness masks his superhuman crime-fighting abilities. The Bible, meanwhile, casts blindness as a symbol of “spiritual ignorance.” These pervasive biases are “not only misplaced but demeaning,” she writes, and rob the blind of their agency. Through her educational writing and “in-your-face, irreverent performance art,” Godin has worked to challenge such stereotypes, but she also realizes it’s not all on her. “If a sighted person wants to believe in my prophetic powers, why not? I mean, our practical abilities are so often doubted.... I might as well claim the blindseer superpower.” By turns heartfelt and thought-provoking, this is a striking achievement.
June 1, 2021
Writer and educator Godin has produced a sweeping work of social history, literary criticism, and memoir about blindness and sight. After sharing her own story of losing her vision, Godin proceeds to interrogate biases surrounding blindness in particular, and disability in general. Particularly strong chapters explore fictional representations of blindness, where it is often linked with knowledge and understanding. Other impactful sections analyze works by John Milton and Jorge Luis Borges and recount how their gradual vision loss parallelled Godin's. Moving into the realm of pop culture, Godin asks readers to reconsider blindness as a literary trope, especially in the form of sighted seers in SFF and horror. Later chapters draw on the work of disability researchers to detail the complicated history of Louis Braille and the braille writing system. The author devotes a chapter to the legacy of Helen Keller, though this could have been expanded into its own book. VERDICT Godin covers a lot of ground in this wide-ranging account. Though sometimes dense with detail, her writing stands out for the way it emphasizes that disability is often an afterthought when it comes to diversity, and that disabled people are not a monolith.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
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