“”Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

I don’t like the seniors’ class motto. Walking next to me is not a friendly act. People do it so we can have a conversation, certainly. But if we’re out in public, I’m trying not to get lost. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to navigate and talk to someone at the same time.

Even worse, people who want to walk beside me often insist on walking on my left-hand side. I don’t notice a lot of things on my left. What they experience as “not looking me in the eye” or “not being friendly,” I experience as “someone’s sneaking up on me.”

When I see the senior class motto on its felt banner at school assemblies, I know I’m being silly. My mother’s voice chides me in my head: “You have NLD and are being literal. It’s not talking about actually leading or following, or walking next to people. It’s a metaphor.” I know it’s a metaphor. That’s why it bothers me.

We have lots of metaphors around navigation, and they assume that everyone’s literal experience of them is the same. The metaphors praise “leadership;” being side by side is associated with equality, following with not being able to think for oneself. And being lost means everything from not existing in some way (“losing one’s mind,” “losing” someone who’s died), to eternal damnation.

I called this blog “Sweet Perdition” for a reason–a simple reason, yet one I haven’t been ready to unpack until now. (I think slowly, and by using lots of words.) The word “perdition”(hell, damnation) comes from the Latin participle perditus, which means “lost.” It lives on in modern Italian (perdere, which still means “to lose” in various senses: everything from a leaky faucet to a missing jacket to someone losing their way.

“Sweet perdition” is pretty much what it sounds like. I have problems with the idea that disabled people are especially blessed or angelic. I like horror movies and video games—things either about Hell, or that media watchdogs see as signs we’re all going there. A lot of scholars don’t think of them as “high art,” (up and down are other navigational concepts that have lots of metaphorical meanings attached to them, as are left and right), but they often reflect societal attitudes in interesting ways. And even when “high art” reflects those things—how disability is used in novels like Heidi or The Secret Garden, for instance—a lot of scholars won’t look at them, either.

I also spend a lot of time being lost. It amuses and annoys me that the English language dumps so many moral meanings onto what for me is a pretty neutral state. This series will examine lostness as a metaphor: what those metaphors mean and why. Hopefully, the series won’t be as heavy as that sentence makes it sound.

My teacher says that writing too much is a good problem to have. “Most people,” she tells me, “have to flesh out their ideas. That’s much harder than having to cut things out.” She doesn’t understand why I can’t just do it, and I, at fourteen, am no help. It will be years before I go to conferences and see other people with my diagnosis freeze when asked to summarize things. It will be even longer before I realize what my having a “good problem” really means.

I am the break from all the other students, the ones who make teachers think about doing their jobs. Junior high English teachers liked having me in their classes because “I don’t have to worry about you.” A science teacher once told my mom that she often forgot I was there, and meant it as a compliment. When they find out I’m not the student they wanted, I am the lemon and the shady used-car dealer that sold it to them. “The only reason you get As in English and Cs in math,” my third-grade teacher tells me, “is because you’re lazy.” (She tells another girl that she is stupid. “Don’t you know how to read?” It is the girl’s fault for sullying her class with her imperfection, for being nine years old. It’s not the fault of the registrar, who meant for her to go into the slower reading class but put her in the advanced class on accident).

Crap. I’m lost in my own hedge maze of words again. Hang on.

My teacher was right. Language problems like mine were indeedgood to have–for her. She didn’t have to help me flesh out my ideas; perhaps wished she would’ve had such a problem in her own writing. Her attempts to get me to see how good I had things had nothing to do with me or with any of the other students whom I was supposed to see as “worse off” than me. It had to do with her. My types of problems with writing aren’t better or worse than anyone else’s; sometimes they are just different than what someone else expects. The same is true of any needs any of us have: they might be different, they might even be more or less compared with someone else’s, in certain areas or in general. But they are not better or worse.

I once wrote something about how my impairments and skill set mesh with the sorts of video games I like to play; bemusingly, several gaming websites picked it up. Most bemusingly, WanderingGoblin introduced the piece this way:

For those that are feeling especially bad about themselves right now; maybe you lost $20, locked your keys in the car, you’re living in your parents basement or had to pay a ton of dough to get your dog out of dog jail because he ran away for the 17th time, this story is for you.

“Wait,” I thought. “I have days like that.” Having a disability doesn’t magically keep you from sleeping through your alarm clock or prevent your dog from digging in the cats’ litterbox or protect you from a power outage in the middle of the final-final-final boss fight in a Square-Enix game. And in my experience, it does not make those things suck any less. The flaw in this type of logic, this “putting things in perspective,” is that the people you think are “worse off” than you may not be.

“At least I’m not as bad off as __” thinking is a selfish act. It is the Oppression Olympics in a different form, turns people into stepping-stones on one’s journey to spiritual enlightenment. You don’t exist to make me feel better about myself. Yes, society privileges certain types of people and oppresses others. No, I cannot pretend to understand to understand what lives without my privileges (some of which fit into subtle hierarchies) are like. Still, telling someone who is not privileged in ways I am: “At least I’m not as bad off as you!” is not helpful, not insightful, and not true.

I am the right kind of mental patient. He is not.

White, sixteen and overwhelmed by life, I take all the Tylenol in a bottle. (I don’t know then that there aren’t enough left to kill me, but that is neither here nor there). My new doctor wants to try medication; I want to do what the doctor says. In the psych ward–the short-term, pediatric wing–I follow all the rules. (Except that one time: my psychiatrist had to say: “Do you want me to put you into a long-term facility?” and then I was perfect again). In group therapy, the staff encourages me to speak. They sometimes try to encourage me in very strange ways, like telling me my IQ score in front of everybody, but they mean well, I guess.

He is a year older than me, black. I don’t always understand everything he says, but I like listening to him. “They say I hallucinate,” he tells me. I don’t get to talk to him as much as I’d like; when he talks in group therapy, the staff give him a shot of Thorazine and he is asleep in a small room for the rest of the day. “This is wrong,” I think. But I am only sixteen and have no idea how to stop it, stop them.

I am the right kind of suicidal teenager. She is not.

We are in the same Latin class at school. I sit in the front of the room; she sits in the back. Our teacher, a nun, gives us lots of auditory drills: ah eye eye ahm ah. Eye ahrum ees ahs ees. Sister likes how I do Latin, as if it is not just some serendipitous meeting of her methods and my mind. Sister does not like the girl at the back of the class as well as she likes me.

When I come back to school after being in the hospital, the principal wants to make sure I have everything I need. (She wasn’t keen on giving me what I needed when my mother and I asked for it a few months ago, which is partly why I took the Tylenol in the first place, but that is neither here nor there). Sister is glad to see me back; she doesn’t even take points off my grade for lack of participation.

The girl who sits in the back of the class does the same thing I’ve done. She goes to the same hospital; she’s met my psychiatrist, and I wish I could meet hers. When she comes back to school, Sister is annoyed with her, as if she’s just skipped class for two weeks. Nothing she’s done has made Sister treat her like this; she has only not been the kind of student Sister likes.

Somtimes I’m the right kind of person; other times, I’m not. There is “good” or “bad” behavior involved, no secret way to stay on the right side of personhood. There are only the whims of others; whether you line up with them or not, ultimately, has nothing to do with you. You can be privileged to be the right kind of person, sometimes, but it is no skill you possess, nothing you have done. The only thing you or I or anyone else can do is stop chopping people up into pieces, into kinds. And when we are the right kind of person, we can recognize our luck-our privilege-for what it is.

This is the kind of racism that white people easily recognize, are able to understand because “we don’t do that anymore.” From this distance, white storytellers like B. turn such overt racism into a morality play that reads like something out of the old EC Comics. District 9 isn’t so much about racism as it is about racists—people who do horrible things that are clearly horrible.

Bureaucrat Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharito Copley), who’s trying to serve one of the aliens an eviction notice, notices the man’s young son. He offers the boy a lollipop,who promptly beans him in the head with it. Later, Wirkus calls, “It’s the sweetie-man! Remember me?” Post-apartheid, post-Civil Rights legislation, Wirkus’s privilege looks ridiculous—really; my mom and I both laughed at this scene—especially because he clearly doesn’t notice it.

But as Wirkus is unaware of his white privilege, so Blomkamp is unaware of his. Due to a quirk in the aliens’ DNA, catfood is an addictive substance to them (“Like catnip for cats,” a white MNU agent says, giggling—although it’s more analogous to heroin). Considering the white government’s need to control the aliens, it seems natural that MNU would supply them with drugs, as a means to get the aliens to obey. Instead, Blomkamp chooses a gang of Nigerians for his drug dealers. Called “the Nigerians” by Wirkus and other white MNU agents, they not only trade catfood to the aliens, but kill and eat them to ingest their power. As Nnedi Okorafor points out in My response to District 419…I mean District 9. :

“The Nigerians”, that’s how they were described in the film, as if the mere title is enough to explain their savagery and baseness. My sisters and I are Nigerians and as Nigerians, this aspect of the film was AGONY to watch.

The gang’s leader uses a wheelchair; when Wirkus starts transforming into an alien, Obasanjo wants to eat his alien flesh himself. (Nnedi points out that Obasanjo is the name of Nigeria’s former president; its use here is sloppy writing at best.) On the one hand, Obasanjo’s interest is a sign of Wirkus’s specialness, like the interest of the white government who wants to use him as a biological weapon. Yet, the meaning of that interest is different, and because Blomkamp doesn’t recognize that, his allegory breaks down. Yes, in the film’s fictional power hierarchy, Obasanjo is a human and Wirkus is an alien (which has elements of disability and oppressed race). But in the power hierarchy we’re all familiar with, Wirkus is an able-bodied white man while Obasanjo is a black man with a disability. Wirkus has power that Obasanjo does not, and should. And as the only disabled “Nigerian” who is also the most hungry for alien power, the implication is that Obasanjo will do anything—even kill and eat another (mostly) human being—to walk. By having a disabled black man take power by such violent, scary means, Blomkamp is playing into the anxiety of privilege at having to give up some of its space.

And this is why a social justice allegory like District 9 fails. It packages oppression in ways that are palatable to privileged people, in steps removed just enough from actual racism to make white people comfortable. Any insight the film appears to have is only surface sheen, and it steps on the feet of black Africans while trying to make its “anti-racist” point. In an interview with Brad Balfour at the Huffington Post, Blomkamp says:

“The Nigerian thing is there because I wanted to take as many cues from South Africa as I could. I wanted South Africa to be the inspiration. If I try to keep South Africa as true to South Africa as I could, then, unfortunately, a massive part of the crime that happens in Johannesburg is by the Nigerians there. It’s just the way it is. I wanted to have a crime group, and thought the most honest refraction of a crime group would be Nigerians, for one.

“And then secondly, the Muti, the African witch doctor, is also a huge part of Africa and many African countries. So I wanted to incorporate that as well. At the time I was writing the movie, there was all these tribal witch doctor attacks on Albinos, because Albino flesh were worth more than normal humans. That was the analogy to a different group or a different race, [with their] traditional medicine, or traditional Muti–even cannibalism, in some instances. I incorporated aliens into that.”

In other words, Nigerians are criminals in District 9 because…Nigerians are criminals.  And they eat (mostly) human flesh because they do.

District 9 is not the first movie to miss its own point by not thinking through it. (One of the most notorious is Ruggero Deodoto’s title=”Wikipedia: Cannibal Holocaust”>Cannibal Holocaust,). It’s not even that I disliked District 9–I really did enjoy it. But it’s hard to fully enjoy a work that means one thing in theory, and another in practice.