Visibility, erasure, and making space for our sublime disabled stories – by Jeda Pearl Lewis

When Williams said, ‘The fact I exist is a political act,’ it reminded me of a recent poem I wrote that repeated the phrase ‘it was political.’ In the context of my own circumstances – who and where I was, my path to writing and writing that very poem, my hypervisibility in 1980s Scotland as a child of a white woman and a Black man – every aspect of my existence felt political, which resulted in the title / first line: ‘I was born / and it was political.’