Sites of struggle

Abstract

dramatic retelling of the Tonypandy ' Riots' of 1910-11 in Cwmardy (1937, a young communist challenges the authorities to 'come and work the coal themselves if they want it. Let them sweat and pant till their bodies twist in knots as ours have. ' He knows, however, that '[t]hey will do none of these things', and tells the striking men to take heart, for:While it is true our bodies belong to the pit, so also is it true that this makes us masters of the pit. It can't live without us. When we are not there to feed it with our flesh, to work life into it with our sweat and blood, it lies quiet like a paralysed thing that can do nothing but moan. 1The tributes of flesh and blood demanded by the monstrous mine allude to the routine injuries and accidents which maim, kill or at the very least promise disability as a none-too-distant part of the life course. But the central image of the mine as a 'paralysed thing' turns the normal relationship between mining and disability on its head by projecting a condition so often associated with industrial accidents onto the pit itself. Disability in the form of paralysis and 'moan[ing]' is imagined, rather conventionally, in terms of loss of agency and pain. Yet in this metaphor power lies with an organised collective of embodied workers, including -or especially -those whose bodies are 'twist[ed]' and impaired: by withholding labour they have agency and can 'paralyse' the monstrous machinery of capitalism. In this short, illustrative excerpt from Lewis Jones's novel, we see how the imagery of disability is embedded in metaphors of power, work and resistance; furthermore, by portraying the miner's body as 'twist [ed] in knots', the emblematic worker is a disabled worker.As we have seen throughout this book, the fiction, poetry, ballads, autobiography and drama written in and about the coalfields offer valuable insights into the way disability was regarded and experienced in these communities. DISABILITY IN INDUSTRIAL BRITAINThe preceding chapters have turned to this literature as a historical source to help expand our understanding of disability in work, leisure, politics, welfare and the various medical encounters that went with impairment. Imaginative literature is, however, more than the sum of the scenes and episodes contained within it. To assess the cultural and political meaning(s) of disability in literature (and, by extension, to understand something about the communities from which this writing originates) we need to be aware that literature has its own traditions, formal constraints and innovations. Representations of disability within workingclass coalfields writing not only interact with prevailing community understandings of disability, they must also negotiate literary form and convention, imagery and language. As literary theorist Ato Quayson points out, 'not only do the characters [in any given text] organize their perceptions of one another on the basis of given symbolic assumptions, but as fictional characters they are themselves also woven out of a network of...