The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish

By Nuala Watt

Friends may be aware that a book is being published about the Department of Work and Pensions, entitled The Department. Its subtitle is: ‘How a violent government bureaucracy killed hundreds and hid the evidence.’ The author, John Pring, is hoping to persuade the new government to abandon the Dickensian cruelties of the past fourteen years of ‘welfare reforms’.

Nuala Watt, a disabled activist, is a triumphant survivor of that bureaucratic violence. Her book is an electrifying collection of (mostly) highly-personal poems. These sing with perfectly-controlled rage, tenderness, wit, humour, and unflinching honesty. They cover what it’s like to live as a disabled woman, especially in our insensitive and largely-uncaring society. It’s a long time since I read a collection with such power. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or run up to people shouting ‘Listen to this!’

Every disabled person has a unique suite of physical/ neurological eccentricities. Watt is of course an expert on her own conditions, and has found a brilliant and sometimes hilarious language for them: a ‘wilderness/slashed with dud roads’; the impairment of vision that means she ‘walks’ on her ears; her disabilities as a house full of disorderly tenants:

Epilepsy wrecks the house then leaves

six scented candles on. Note on the door.

You kept me up all night you bastards. E.

Cerebral Palsy cries. Dyspraxia

doesn’t know how to help and drops a plate....

In other places, while you’re still smiling, a quiet comment will pierce your heart:

Please never say to me

woman with disabilities.

They are not jewels. 

I cannot put them down.

The dissection of well-meaning responses may make you wince. There’s the pithy rebuke to the term ‘the disabled’ (‘as if we could/all occupy/one phrase’); the evangelist who wants to pray for her; the students who are avoiding her and her petition; the impatient midwives.

Some of the best poems are about giving birth and being a mother – challenging enough in any circumstances. But what if you’re scared you might drop or vomit on your baby simply because you moved your head? What about when your daughter gets old enough to run off on her own? Pregnancy, on the other hand, is a ‘holiday from awkwardness’, since ‘Just before childbirth, everyone’s disabled’. No passer-by is spooked by you. And hooray, no one needs to ask ‘Can you have sex?’

Along with the technical mastery, there’s confidence and daring in every line. On the back cover, the poet Alyson Hallett writes: ‘Sit down before you read these poems. Open the window. Open the door. There’s a bolt of pure electric coming for you.’ You have been warned!

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