BURY MY ART BUT PLEASE NOT ME

by Nabil Shaban (1981)

"Portrait of an Artist as a Young Prophet"

Most people, at times in their lives, feel alienated from the world they live in, but it might be true to say that with a person who is born with a severe physical disability, the sense of alienation begins at birth, particularly if that person is also deprived of all the usual mothering and familial comforts of a normal upbringing.

I spent all my childhood, adolescence and teenage life in special care, running the gamut of the first six years in ice-cold, clinical, restrictive hospitalisation, with the hospital bed as the only thing that never changed. Then came seven years of special school with the emphasis on over-protectiveness, puritanism, underestimation, Christianity and fairy-tales. After this I had three soul-debilitating years in a sheltered workshop.

Such an unattached existence can have many effects on a person, and on me, one of them was to make me self reliant and determined at a very early age. Much of my childhood pastime was spent thinking and fantasizing. With hindsight, it would seem only natural that I should end up with a degree in philosophy and psychology.

From an early age, I took an interest in painting. I had to have a medium of expression that reflected my independence and my observer status in the world, and which enabled me to see in graphic form the fruits of my thinking. Painting and writing were my first loves, acting came later, when I was sixteen. For me, if I paint a picture, it is because I wish to tell a story or express an idea, perhaps express my yearning for the unobtainable.

From the sheltered workshop, where I was supposed to pick up a few office skills, I passed on to a college for Further Education for the Disabled, where I gained the Ordinary National Diploma in Business Studies which gave me entry into University and into the `Real World'. It was whilst at University that I produced `Self Portrait', `Don't Blame Eve' and the first beginnings of `Too Late, Too Soon. A Cull-mination'*. It is not surprising that these expressions, with their suggestion of sexual undertones, should come from this period, since they reflect how I, the Beast, was at its most sexually frustrated time, with poor body image in a campus full of Beauties, Youth and Virility. Universities and colleges are places that are forever Spring.

"Doodle of a Nowhere Man"

It wasn't until I completed `Self Portrait' that I realised how I, as a disabled person, was reacting in a very able-bodied environment. `Self Portrait' is a doodle of the nowhere man being pursued by an accusing finger into a world of illusions, mazes and mind-games. He believes that, as a responsible member of the human race, he should go forth and multiply,but he has neither the body nor the will.

* "Too Late, too soon..." is also known as "The Grand Cull"

"Write the misery out of yourself, then it will seem that it has never existed" August Strindberg,playwrite, diarist, 1907 DaDa and Surrealist Art and Poetry

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"Life is not a riddle to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived. It is a deep mystery, so trust and allow yourself to enter it." Osho or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931 - 1990)

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