Thammasat University students who are interested in education, literature, allied health sciences, sociology, disability studies, gender studies, Iceland, microhistory and related subjects may find a new Open Access book available for free download useful.

Disability Studies Meets Microhistory: The Secret Life of Bíbí in Berlín is coauthored by Professor Guðrún Valgerður Stefánsdóttir, who teaches disability studies at the University of Iceland.

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of disability studies.

This new book rediscovers the work of Bjargey “Bíbí” Kristjánsdóttir, an Icelandic woman with intellectual disabilities.

She grew up in northern Iceland on a small farm called Berlin, so the Berlin mentioned in the book’s title has nothing to do with Germany.

Kristjánsdóttir fell ill as a small child and was considered to be feeble-minded by her family and the local community.

In previous generations, talented writers such as the poets William Blake or Friedrich Hölderlin were sometimes considered insane and even placed in institutions.

After Kristjánsdóttir died, it was discovered that she had left a 145,000-word autobiography that she had hidden from her family and neighbors, written in capital letters in 19 notebooks totaling 1,200 pages.

It is now deposited in the Manuscript Department of the National and University Library of Iceland.

Many people had assumed that she was illiterate.

Her book is a forceful response to the treatment she received by Icelandic society.

She made efforts to find a publisher for her writings, without success.

The term microhistory in the book’s title refers to a type of history that focuses on small units of research, such as an event, community, individual or a settlement.

In addition to reading books, she also was active in gardening and also collecting dolls.

She sewed costumes for her dolls, which she donated to the National Museum of Iceland at the end of her life.

About her interest in dolls, she wrote:

I was a sincere admirer of dolls as soon as I grew beyond my infant years, which I think lasted 4 years longer than normal. That was natural enough, because I didn’t start walking around until I was 6, after my illness as a baby. I was probably about 8 years old when I first started enjoying dolls, so it was natural for me to take longer – or things were delayed in my case compared to others. It didn’t matter if I gave it up sometimes, it always returned.  If I didn’t have a doll at hand, I felt something was missing, but not many people understood it. Mothers who have lost their children would understand it better, there aren’t many who understand such people as me, and people like me.

The authors explain that the purposes of their study include

• To shed light on the hidden history of people with intellectual disabilities, especially girls and women in Iceland born in the first half of the 20th century.
• To explore how social class, disability, gender, and emotional communities intersect and influence Bíbí’s life.
• To explore how the scientific knowledge and dominant ideology about people with intellectual disabilities – the grand narrative of the accomplishments of the medical profession – influenced and shaped Bíbí’s life and circumstances.
• To reflect on how Bíbí’s historical sources appear as a counter-narrative – counter-archive – that resists negative beliefs and stereotypes of people with intellectual disabilities.
• To explore the intellectual opportunity that is to be found in the connection between critical disability studies and microhistory; a new and exciting theoretical and conceptual framework spanning two innovative academic disciplines.
• To explore how people with intellectual disabilities experience the history of disability through Bíbí’s story by adopting an inclusive approach for a peer review process.
• To explore and contextualize Bíbí’s material and cultural heritage by examining her doll collection, her garden, the manuscript of her autobiography, the poetry she wrote, her diaries, the book collection, the layout of housing in four different places, as well as illustrations from her life. It will focus on her own agency in creating her life story, how she maintained the narrative, and how/if it was preserved and managed after she died.

Kristjánsdóttir herself noted the following about her motivations for writing about the people whom she knew:

I want to say a little about how it came about that I’ve written about the people who are mentioned in the book.

The people I have got to know here, either at the home or otherwise.

I don’t like the idea of their being forgotten, I want to commemorate them in some way.

I am grateful to these people for our good acquaintanceship; it’s not certain that all these contemporaries can read this, but hopefully some of them can, it may not get into print for a while.

When she was placed in an institution where she felt like a caged bird, she recalled:

The only animal I said goodbye to was the poor kitty, and I didn’t feel able to do so until I realized I must, I never saw that kitty again. That kitty had been my friend, though I didn’t always understand her, but that’s another matter.

She offered some opinions and advice to readers:

• Though I never scalded myself in hot water and so never got any scars from that, I have got invisible scars, and they are the work of people’s malice.
• Never tell guests what is wrong with your child, if they have to be taken to the doctor, and not least if it’s something major.
• I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t been cheerful by disposition. Although I had these difficulties, that I expected few people to know about, it never occurred to me to take my own life or top myself, as  it’s    Although I had little schooling, I knew that you mustn’t top yourself, though some people do anyway. I’m not as stupid as people think.
• I often felt that I didn’t love my parents at all, although that’s a nasty thing to say. What else could be expected, with the cold treatment I so often received?
• Of course, I started to cry about it, but do you think my mother comforted me, oh, no, she just told me to start knitting, that was supposed to comfort me.
• Once I heard my mother talking to a neighbor woman, saying that she would wish that I might go to heaven before her. I heard her say that in the adjacent field and was very surprised – I was 24 years old. Now as I write this, I am 58, and I am pleased in some ways that my mother didn’t get her wish, for another role has been allotted to me, that’s for sure. It’s a rotten lie that I was difficult. From the very first I was in the habit of playing with my toys.
• People like [my parents] shouldn’t marry, they should just stay on the shelf and live alone, and they shouldn’t have children either, at least not disabled children.
• In a sense I was like a broken machine that had to be treated carefully if the people had thought about it. It happened more than once that people acted that way and showed me both harshness, I won’t say cruelty, and a lack of compassion.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)