ABSTRACT
Patients who experience prolonged periods of episodic or chronic pain often feel most alienated by its invisibility. Jean Jackson writes, “Although some people with visible marks would prefer a concealable condition, chronic pain sufferers sometimes bemoan the invisibility of their pain, saying they would prefer a more visible-even though also more stigmatized-condition,” because visible impairments are recognized and treated as real, so they can at least be dealt with head-on (2005, 341). Two literary anecdotes exemplify methods by which visible
impairments (or scars left by them) can be directly demarginalized for children. In the fi rst, coming from Deborah Ellis in No Ordinary Day (2011), a homeless orphan in Kolkata meets other patients in a leprosy ward of a hospital who are already visibly marked by the disease, and, based on the lore of her upbringing, the child thinks they are “monsters.” But one of them tells her “Look at me until you see me” (135). Valli breaks her habitual uncomfortable stare and down-turned eyes to see beyond her fear into understanding what is a surface trait, the scars of past disease:
And something happened. I stopped seeing the caved-in nose. I stopped seeing the damaged eye with its drooping eyelid and milky-looking eyeball. And I stopped seeing the stubs of fi ngers. Instead I saw the face of the woman who had brought me a good cup of tea. I saw little lines around the corners of her eyes. I saw kindness in her smile. I saw a woman who was stubborn and hard working and did not want to hurt me.
