ABSTRACT
In the US TV series OZ (1997–2002), about life in a high security prison in the US, Augustus Hill is the narrator who introduces us to characters, comments on story lines and expounds moral dilemmas. Augustus is a young black man who has a spinal injury and is a wheelchair user. Within the universe of this prison drama, his disability is used as an enabling device for Augustus: he can see events from a different perspective, make links, and act as a chorus for the viewers. Within the narrative economy of the series, Augustus’s wheelchair acts as a prison for his body – allowing his mind to be freer than the minds of his fellow inmates. Augustus’s disability in the prison is a narrative choice: Harold Perrineau, the actor playing Augustus, is non-disabled, and Tom Fontana, one of the executive directors and writer of the OZ series, made a narrationally driven choice to include Augustus in his cast of characters – a choice that can be read as being determined by the meanings of disability in our culture. Fontana explained that he wanted a narrator, a ‘Greek chorus’, and he wanted that person to represent a minority and be in a wheelchair. 1 He wanted ‘somebody who suffered even more than any of these guys … (his) understanding of the universe would be more acute’. 2 This statement reveals a pervasive attitude towards disability as a metaphor and shorthand: it sums up and presents in an economic way a deep form of ‘difference’ – a difference that creates a distance from the ‘universe’ of ‘normal people’. To open up this world of deep and profound difference, all a non-disabled performer has to do is get handy with a wheelchair.
