TRANSLATING KUIR MAGAZINE

Translating Crip (with your
heart on your sleeve)
By Fran Cus
There’s no place in a perfect circle.
Susana Thénon
I’ve written a short text in order to share a few questions, insights, and impressions with
you all. I would like to introduce a word: crip. A word can also be an experience. I would
like to contemplate the crip experience, inhabiting a crip body–a body so monstrous and
unpredictable–like having the task of constructing a raft in the middle of an often hostile
and out of control sea. I still do not quite know how this raft is built, my raft: there are some
bones, some tissue fragilely tied between them, such that every so often they fall out of place.
Sometimes they fuse together, the muscles, the bones; they swell, howl, hurt, burn, tremble,
rest, sleep, require an urgent pause. On these bones and tissues of mine befall winds, storms,
squalls, earth, iodine, rust, rain showers, unknown airs that pass through its gaps and scars,
more or less visible: they mark my skin. My skin seems to never forget, and sometimes this
insistence plagues and disturbs me, but it’s ok. WIth time I make space for it, enjoying the visits
and unexpected guests.
But a raft, in this case a crip raft, my raft, is not at all the same thing as a boat or a ship. By
which I mean: sometimes there are no life vests and I have to learn and relearn how to swim.
That my raft does not sink or get swept out to sea. In other words, and as a friend of mine who
is no longer with us yet who visits me when I miss her wrote, submerging myself to lose weight,
finding and traveling with other rafts, acquires finesse, something of depth. The bare secret
that I believe finds and unites these crip rafts comes from precarious ties and I believe that crip
people do the best that we can, including when we sink and have to surf vast stretches against
the wind and with no sign of the surface or the coast in sight. As Deligny–another master–
writes in his wonderful autobiography “(...) When it rains questions, when hard times intensify,
we bring together our flesh to construct a well assembled platform. Very much to the contrary.
Having lived together in our solitude we retain what brings us together and sets us free. You
can see the importance of our ties and our strange way of gathering and coming together, the
distance that our bodies can sustain between each other. Bonds take care of us, protect us, as
long as they are loose enough and don’t let us go (...)”
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