Bíbí in Berlin. Education and confirmation

Abstract

Bíbí is a nickname for Bjargey Kristjánsdóttir, an Icelandic woman who was born in 1927 and died in 1999. She grew up on a small farm called Berlin in northern Iceland. Bíbí fell seriously ill when she was in her first year and after that she was labelled ‘feebleminded’ by her family and local community. In her early years, Bíbí was excluded within the local community and hidden from visitors at her home. Her autobiography, however, evinces intelligence and insight into her life and circumstances. The autobiography is a huge work, totaling about 120,000 words. Bíbí wrote her autobiography alone, keeping it secret from her family and neighbors. In this chapter, Bíbí’s childhood story will be analysed based on two research disciplines: critical disability studies and microhistory. By connecting these two research fields, we will subsequently provide a new way of critical thinking about disability as well as history. A feminist intersectionality framework is used to analyse Bíbí’s childhood story; more specifically to explore how social class, disability and gender intersected and afflicted Bíbí’s childhood life and education.

The main aim of this chapter is twofold. Firstly to shed light on Bíbí’s childhood, especially her education and confirmation. On the other hand, the goal is to explore various official records, such as church records, parish registers and annual reports. As well as explaining various events in Bíbí’s life, those documents also elucidate the spirit of the age and the perspectives of the community she was brought up in. We also wish to clarify how the scientific knowledge and dominant ideology about people with intellectual disabilities influenced and shaped Bíbí’s life and circumstances. Bíbí’s autobiography clearly reflects the influence of the grand narrative of eugenics and the medical understanding of disability (Carlson, 2010). As a result, Bíbí was marginalised and experienced many forms of exclusion and oppression. Bíbí was definitely unaware, as were other members of the community in those times, of the impact of eugenics and medical science upon negative attitudes towards her. She blames the “peculiar attitude of the people,” not her impairment, for her problems and wretched circumstances. It could be maintained that Bíbí’s understanding of disability was opposed to the traditional medical understanding, where all problems are seen in terms of the impairment of the individual (Goodley, 2016). Blaming the present state of mind of the general public reveals the modern social understanding of disability.

Critical disability studies note that disability only becomes a barrier because of society’s negative attitudes and responses (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009). Bíbí did not fit into the ableist vision of society and these views were used to justify her unequal treatment and isolation. In Bíbí’s case, the negative attitudes of her family and the local community became the largest hindrances in her life. The main theme in the examples from Bíbí’s childhood are the exclusion and humiliation she was subjected to. She also includes examples of how she protested and challenged people when she felt she was unfairly treated. Those protests were not always loud; they frequently occurred in her mind, as demonstrated by the text of her autobiography. Although the examples from Bíbí’s autobiography reveal the injustice she had to live with, they also strongly reflect Bíbí’s personality; she was a humourist, a great lover of nature and animals, and, in many respects, her way of life resembled that of other country children. Bíbí shows us that the longings and expectations of the little girl are the same as those of her peers early in the early twentieth century, which first and foremost involved the comforting presence of family and loved ones, safe shelter, having friends and being involved and accepted by one’s family and the local community.

The examples from Bíbí’s story presented in the chapter also clearly reveal how those three social categories – that is, disability, social class and gender – intersect in Bíbí’s life and lead to multiple forms of oppression and exclusion in her life. An example of the way gender and disability intersect in Bíbí’s childhood is how her brother Steini was preferred to her, as she points out, because she was a “disabled girl” and he was a boy. Bíbí’s parents were poor farmers and her story contains numerous examples of the way her disability and social class intersects. A clear case in point is the difference in social position of Bíbí and her friend Alda, both of whom had disabilities. Alda’s parents were, however, positioned considerably higher on the social ladder than Bíbí’s parents. Alda was allowed to go to school and she was confirmed wiht her peers but Bíbí was not. Thus, it becomes more apparent that different social categories and forms of oppression work together in producing multiple layers of discrimination and oppression in Bíbí´s life.