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10:10pm September 22, 2014
ajellyinthemix asked: Have you ever read A Wrinkle in Time or any of the books in that series? One of the main characters is a young boy named Charles Wallace who is described as having skipped baby talk, suddenly learning to speak in full sentences around age 4. (As I remember, anyway.) The books treat him as extremely unusual, with powers normal people don't have. If you're familiar with the books I was curious how you would feel about this portrayal.

Yes, in fact in my poem The Mind Bridge: A True Story, I talk about how that series of books was the first way someone was able to figure out a way to communicate with me forreal.  Like, real thoughts being passed back and forth, not just me using meaningless words to keep the conversation going:

We were only twelve years old
And you instinctively knew
That the way to communicate with me
Was to find books in common
And talk in metaphors
Gleaned from the pages
Of the books we had just read

It was A Wrinkle In Time, I recall
We classified people as
Meg-like or Charles-Wallace-like
Sandy-and-Dennys-like

For the first time ever I was able
To break out of non-communicative echolalia
By using echolalia from a book
I told you I was Mrs. Who
The character who could only communicate
By quoting the words of others

For a 12-year-old autistic kid
Who had never heard of autism or echolalia
I doubt anyone could have done better
Than we did that day
At building a bridge between our worlds

And yes, we used Charles Wallace as an example of an autistic kid, we just didn’t have the term autism yet.  My friend in the poem, had a cousin who had not spoken at all, and then suddenly spoke his first words at a family reunion, “You ain’t nothin’ but a flea-bitten varmit.”  Uttered at his brother, who he was annoyed at, apparently.  Anyway, she described him as being like Charles Wallace, and we’re pretty sure he’s on the spectrum.  Meg, too.

I used Mrs. Who to explain my echolalia, which I had never been able to explain to anyone before in my life.

I love those books.  They have an amazing place in my heart, even if parts of them bother me a lot.  (Like all the “blue-eyed Indian” stuff in one of the later ones.)  

As far as him having powers normal people don’t have, this is science fiction and fantasy, that happens all the time.  I don’t mind it happening to a character who was a late talker and unable to fit in socially at school, and having a physical disease as well (mitochondrial disease).  I liked seeing characters who were at least somewhat like me, powers or no powers.

I’m sure there’s some fancy way to critique in through a disability studies lens or something, but I’m no good at that kind of thing.  I just like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t like.  And I loved the Wrinkle In Time series.  I especially love the second book, A Wind In The Door.  That series is one of those series of books that has a lot of meaning packed into it that people don’t always expect in a “children’s book”.

Some other books like that:

The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane, and the related Feline Wizards series.

Momo by Michael Ende.  Also by the same author, The Neverending Story.

To some extent, the Austins series by Madeleine L'Engle.  But not to the same extent as the Time series.

Wise Child by Monica Furlong, also Juniper and Colman.

And I know there’s plenty of others but my brain is fizzling out.

Anyway, all those books have problems, all of them could be ‘critiqued’, but they all also have an intense depth to them that can’t be ignored.  And it’s the depth that attracts me to books like that.  I can’t sit there and analyze them, it’s just not in my capacity to do so beyond a certain point.

Also a lot of the 'powers’ that Charles Wallace had weren’t actually like normal superpowers.  They were more like exaggerations of things that can exist in real life.  Like the idea of kything, people can’t do it the way it’s done in the books, but something similar can be done.  The 'magic’ in her books always strikes me as one step away from things like intense pattern-matching abilities and sensing that can happen in the real world.  She just takes it a step further into the fantastical.  And it would be fairly common for an autistic person who didn’t speak until they were four to be highly sensing, which would allow them to do things like, say, notice when their sister was going to be up and needing hot chocolate, or whatever that early scene was where he always seems to know what she wants.  That sort of thing isn’t magic (or rather, it doesn’t have to be, I guess in the book it’s portrayed that way), it’s very good pattern recognition, and lots of autistic people have it.