Praying into the Void: Crip Ancestry and Archival Violence

Through an examination of practices of crip ancestry among disabled activist-writers, this paper challenges a common theological strategy within the field of Christian disability theology. Many theologians (Sharon Betcher, Brian Brock, and others) call for radical attention to the present presence of disabled bodies to resist curative theo-logics inherited from the past or anticipated in the world to come. While recognizing the dangers of past and future speculation about disabled people, this paper departs from a strict presentism, carving out space for more sustained theological reflection on disability, creation, and eschatology. Moreover, by attending to the distinctive prayer practices of disabled communities, this paper contributes to the development of a crip theology of prayer, ancestors, and saints.

Analyzing essays, poetry, and memoirs by key disabled activist-writers, I argue that such crip ancestry prayer practices function in part to resist a curative social imaginary that erases disability from our collective histories and futures. I contend that Christian theologians might learn from disabled activist-writers’ embodied attention to the past as a resource to reimagine the future without erasure of disability. This paper develops a negative theological hermeneutic in which the search for crip ancestors in the archive and in scripture exposes the violence of the past that prevents the recovery of disabled lives. Ultimately, I argue, following Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, that our stumbling upon and seeking crip ancestors “in the void of not always knowing… what their legacy means” generates desires for liberated futures.

First, I examine the concept of crip ancestry as articulated by disabled activist-writers Stacy Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha. While ancestry often connotes biological kinship, Milbern offers a queer/crip notion of ancestry, emphasizing “people we choose to be connected to and honor day after day.” In an interview with Milbern, Piepzna-Samarasinha reflects on how she found her crip ancestors: “I stumbled upon them. I dug them up. I fought to find them. I dreamed them. Others shared them. I remembered them.” Informed by “ancestor-loving spirituality from multiple traditions,” she prays before an altar to her crip ancestors. She asks for help to write, to be in right relation, to deal with conflict, to survive, and to engage with the medical-industrial complex. Acutely aware of the erasure of disabled lives from history, Piepzna-Samarasinha is careful not to project her own experiences onto them. She leaves room for radical difference between her and her crip ancestors: “Maybe they experienced disability in fundamentally different ways than I did that are not just internalized ableism. I don’t know. I am making it up as I go along.” Despite the impossibility of recovering the lives of crip ancestors, Piepzna-Samarasinha insists that the practice of tracing crip ancestry is “political work.” The space of prayer—“in the void of not always knowing who is disabled and what their legacy means”—is also a disability justice space. For Piepzna-Samarasinha, prayer to crip ancestors is a form of “passing knowledge back and forth, beyond the beyond.” Ultimately, her search for crip ancestors grounds her desire for a world in which disabled people can live to become “crip elders.”

Second, I extend crip ancestry to describe an orientation among disabled activist-writers to disabled figures in history. In particular, I examine the writings of Molly McCully Brown and Eli Clare as they interrogate the archives of the Virginia State Colony for the Epileptics and Feebleminded. In my analysis, I foreground the embodied and sensory dimensions of their archival research practices. For example, Brown stresses the visual and auditory dimensions of her contact with patient files, imagining patients’ names (and even her own name) in the empty space of a sterilization order and hearing the “chorus of ghosts, the imagined voices of women in the Colony.” Though keenly aware of the irrevocable erasure of these disabled women’s lives, both Brown and Clare emphasize the relational dimensions of their research: Brown describes her poetry as “an act of kinship,” and Clare names his own “yearning” for a connection to Carrie. As I interpret them, Brown’s and Clare’s discovery of their own proximity to and yearning for the past through archival research can be read as a form of tracing crip ancestries. Thinking with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation in redressing archival violence related to slavery, I theorize how these writers’ search for crip ancestors resists archival violence against disabled lives, despite the total impossibility of their recovery.

In conclusion, I gesture toward how this this search for crip ancestors could inform theological and scriptural reflection. Following Nancy Eiesland’s attention to the “hidden histories” of disabled people, I call for theological engagement with scriptural texts as sites of archival violence. Julia Watts Belser’s interpretation of the “bent over woman” in Luke 13 offers one example of critical fabulation applied to scripture. In the attempt to tell the impossible stories of disabled lives erased within scripture, the biblical interpreter must signal the inevitability of their failure. In doing so, the interpreter exposes the violence of our past, discovers its role in creating our present, and generates a desire for a liberated future, free from such violence.