Blindness and blind people have usually been framed in history as inspirational or tragic, but now Selina Mills wants to question that narrative
When looking at the history of blindness and those with visual impairment, it is not very common to come across writers and historians who have themselves experienced sight loss. This is something that journalist Selina Mills wants to change. Having spent ten years writing Life Unseen: A Story Of Blindness, a part memoir, part historical journey that charts blindness through the ages, Mills’ new publication aims to establish how blindness has been perceived throughout history and where our modern notions of blindness have come from. We sat down with Mills to discuss her new book, her own feelings towards discussions around sight loss, and her research into the past.
Why did you decide to write Life Unseen: A Story Of Blindness, and how would you describe the book? I was fed up with reading extreme polarised depictions of blind people: either they were superstars or they were burdens and impoverished and I thought “that’s not me”. There are all these modern biographies about people climbing Mount Everest and I’m just here getting up and trying to go to work with all the obstacles that entails. There are dangerous repercussions of those extreme portrayals which are all put onto blind people.
I’m visually impaired and legally blind, and my friends who are completely blind say the same thing. I wanted to correct the dial a little bit. I also wanted to counter the rather endlessly enthusiastic sighted historians who had written all the books about blind people, aside from one or two exceptions. History has been written from a very visual point of view about lack of sight as a deficiency. But what if blindness is more of a descriptor, then maybe we don’t have to make it a melodrama? I say this with caution because, obviously, it can be a trauma and a very frustrating situation if you suddenly lose your sight, but I still want to correct the extreme versions that have been depicted for the past thousand years.
One of the reasons I wrote the book in the way that I’ve written it as part memoir is because it is really hard to read all of this trauma. There is so much that is sad and isolating and if you think about how people have been treated over th
