A review by booksnailmail
There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin

challenging funny informative reflective slow-paced

4.75

Juxtapositions. There Plant Eyes excavates plenty of them.

At the meat of it: “What I’m wrestling with…is the concept of blindness that our ocularcentric culture extols on the one hand and dismisses on the other.” Blind guides, bards and seers are linchpins in traditional Euro-originated literature. There is no paucity of this trope: those who have lost one sense to heighten another, those who gave up their sight in one realm only to gain it in another. Despite this literary reverence for blindness, Dr. Godin contends with the lived experience of blindness, which is at odds with the rich lineage of blindness of Eurocentric literature.

The next juxtaposition: Dr. Godin’s wry wit and humor pokes out throughout a groundbreakingly erudite text. In some places, I am reading what feels like a PhD thesis, but then...I am laughing? Somehow, Dr. Godin’s style brings the reader “in on” whatever she topic she is covering - and the book is capacious. From portrayals of the blind in media, to parenting, to the fraught history of Braille, Dr. Godin’s chronicling is not just irrefutable, but accessible. I not only learned the word “ocularcentrism”, but I also now deeply understand my place in it. 

This one is more of an oxymoron: That I would recommend this book a hundred times over to EVERYONE but I also left these pages on a note of dissatisfaction. There Plant Eyes faces a monumental task - chronicling a “a personal and cultural history of blindness” - which probably means starting at the dawn of humankind. So there’s the meat of my dilemma. How could one book rise to such a byzantine demand? As Dr. Godin asserts in the book multiple times, there is not one experience of blindness, and she has been generous with her own experience of retinal dystrophy in context of the European literary tradition. However, she has unraveled my own ignorance of blindness from an intersectional lens, so I left wanting more media like this - lush, engaging, munificent, and wickedly smart.