MĀNOA

Review by Ata Zargarof

What do you do when a rare disease strikes at the heart of who you are and what you love? It’s a question that haunts Naomi Cohn, author of The Braille Encyclopedia, a collection of micro essays and prose poems documenting her experience of progressively worsening eyesight. The culprit? Pathological myopia, the rampant growth of blood vessels in the eye. Cohn wonders whether her love of words exacerbated the condition: “Did the repeated act of being bookish deprive me of being able to read a book?” For a writer and academic whose sense of self is riddled with words, it’s an unsettling possibility. 

For Cohn, the story is less about her eyesight and more about the changes it forces her to make. She tells us she is “more interested in adaptation than diagnosis,” which explains Encyclopedia’s almost taxonomical obsession with the pleasures and griefs involved in any transformation: “Flirting across a crowded room with a quirk of half-smile and wink. Movies with subtitles. Reading the whole menu. Window shopping. Each more or less frivolous. But over time, their cumulative diminution takes a slice out of you.” Cohn judiciously documents the everyday tasks that are made exponentially harder by her condition, from booking an online appointment to completing a Captcha. Through it all, what stands out is her remarkable steadfastness–a kind of grit that, layer by layer, reveals a deeper tenderness. 

Take Cohn’s attempts to learn Braille as an adult. Despite being acutely aware that she will never possess the fluency of those who learn as children, Cohn persists. Each entry in this encyclopedic text is coupled with the corresponding letter in Braille, forcing the reader to contend with just how seismic an undertaking her adoption of this system really is. Over and above the formal difficulties that any author faces, Cohn must grapple with the obscure intermediary of an unfamiliar script–to say nothing of the “noisy, demanding sparkler” which occupies the center of her vision. When Cohn says she has “struggled to write this piece for months,” it’s not hard to believe her. 

Of course, there are limits to how much any book can acquaint us with its author’s experience. Cohn even occasionally throws in the towel: “it is more than I–with my born-sighted bias–can figure out or describe.” Not for want of trying: in attempting to capture the confusion of altered sight, Cohn’s prose relies heavily on the associative power of metaphor. Here, a hawk becomes “a patch of winter sky cut loose in the shape of wings,” and couplets of poetry transform into “deer tracks mincing down the page.” Indeed, Encyclopedia is at its best when Cohn allows herself to delight in pure sensation, as in the aptly-titled “Synesthesia” entry, where she marvels at how “the smell of wet acorns makes me feel I see […] their little shaggy berets atop glossy nuts. How ice smells blue.” For Cohn, there is magic to be found in the way our sensory impressions co-create an evolving apprehension of reality. 

Perhaps this explains Cohn’s profound distaste for definitions. For her, the legal system’s fastidious demarcation between sighted and blind fails to account for the experiences of those who technically belong to both. Cohn compares such definitions to borders on a map, writing: “Ravens, smoke from fires, slanting rain, all pass over borders without a thought.” Is it any wonder that she revels in ambiguity? 

We see this in Cohn’s reverence for the Dutch painter Vermeer–in particular, his 1663 painting “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.” Despite the fact that her vision warps the painting into a confusion of shadows and shapes, Cohn is struck by “the intensity of his looking, how he chose what to see.” It’s clear that Cohn places immense importance in how we choose to see the world, in the broadest sense of the verb. No matter what circumstances stand in the way, The Braille Encyclopedia insists on the human right to extract joy from even the most mundane moments. Post abdominal surgery, requesting scrambled eggs in bed from her husband, Cohn confesses her “delight over being alive to eat that yellow cloud.” That delight is the purpose of this book–a purpose undiminished by disability. 

Perhaps the greatest achievement of The Braille Encyclopedia is that it transforms the vertiginous terror of loss into the fervor of celebration. It’s no small feat, especially when considered alongside Cohn’s unfamiliarity with the very writing system needed to bring forth her work. As a writer, I cannot imagine how strenuous the revision process was. All I can do is marvel at the book in my hands. “What I want to write is a love poem,” Cohn confesses at one point. In so many ways, she has. 

Ata Zargarof is an Iranian writer born and raised in Vancouver/K’emk’emeláy, Canada. His work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Glint Literary Journal, Apocalypse Confidential, Braided Way and others. You can follow his literary escapades at endlesswriter.com