The monster is an integral part of world history, in the very least because it allows us to examine and critique evolving notions of what and who qualifies as a monster. With their book Monster Portraits, siblings Del and Sofia Samatar offer an ethnography of monsters, using it as a medium for “tell[ing] [their] lives through monsters” (Samatar 2). Sofia Samatar provides the text, a mixture of poetry and prose, while Del Samatar provides the illustrations of the monsters, bringing forth a hybrid of art and fiction. This notion of hybridity is brought up within the text itself, wherein Sofia Samatar navigates her own reality as a biracial woman. This paper aims to provide a reading of Monster Portraits that is informed by intersections of race and disability. According to Jennifer James and Cynthia Wu in their Editor’s Introduction to “Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and Interventions,” one should not simply use disability as an analogy for race, but to “understand how disability has always been racialized, gendered, and classed and how racial, gender, and class difference have been conceived of as ‘disability’” (James and Wu 8). Margrit Shildrick informs a broader look at the book and the many ways in which S. Samatar portrays and responds to the ways in which racial minorities have been labeled as monsters and the tensions that arise within these labels. Through an engagement with both Shildrick and Alison Kafer’s use of crip theory, this paper further engages with concepts of identity, categorization, and hybridization that Samatar grapples with through her being mixed-race. In Monster Portraits, Sophia Samatar contends with the racist and colonialist origins of monsters, using her experience as a mixed-race woman to present the tensions within these discourses; disability studies and crip theory bring an important perspective regarding the ways in which disability and diagnosis inform the tensions within the categorization, or lack thereof, of mixed-race identities.

Margrit Shildrick’s chapter from her book Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self titled “Monsters, Marvels, Meanings,” provides an important foundation that is needed in order to understand the complex history of monsters in society, a history that greatly informs Samatar and Samatar’s work. In this chapter Shildrick delves into the history of monsters by looking at the ways in which what is considered as monstrous has changed over time. She argues that monsters are the creations of racist, sexist, and colonialist viewpoints that demonize the other in an attempt towards validating their own existences. As she tracks the different conceptualizations of the monster throughout history, she discusses the shift from the pre-Enlightenment view of the monster as a symbol for a divine plan towards the post-Enlightenment methods of enforcing a strict categorized binary between nature and its deviant examples in order to better control them. Ultimately, what stays consistent throughout this fraught history with the monstrous is that these monsters work as both heralders of uncertainty and understanding. As the binary was further enforced between white colonial powers and everyone else, the monster served also as a source of validation in their need to define themselves as being at the top of this imposed hierarchy. Shildrick explains that it is by mapping out these distinct differences that people are able to distinguish who they are by who they are not.

Monster Portraits presents exactly what is in the title, portraits of monsters, both through Del’s illustrations and Sofia’s prose. In “The Field,” Sofia (referred to as Samatar from here on) states that she will “tell our lives through monsters,” thus using monsters as a medium for portraying their own life story. About a third of the way into the book comes “The Search,” in which Samatar gives a condensed history of the monster as “a cultural object,” describing Western reactions to Africans, to those in the East, and the complex histories of Western Orientalism and colonialism that presented them as monsters (Samatar 11). Similar to Shildrick, Samatar describes this relationship with monsters as a mode of “interpreting otherness,” a notion that instills ideas of binarism, needing a “them” to distinguish an “us” (11). Tensions arise within this mode of imperialist thought when one considers a combination of the two sides, thus leading to a “monstrous hybridism of the East and West” (12). This hybridism goes against all that the binarism of Western thought had been trying to establish as true, instead working to blur that line. For Samatar then, monsters become the perfect analogy, because, as she explains in “The Clan of the Claw,” “monsters combine things that ought not to go together…Break down the line between humans and beasts. Revoke God’s contract with Adam. Blend racial categories, mix genetic codes” (22). Samatar responds to this rhetoric by, in part, reiterating it in the context of monsters. She illustrates the hyperbole of the West’s reaction to hybridity by describing a result that has extremely negative connotations, and could mean the end of humanity. As Shildrick noted, “By focusing on the monster as an object of knowledge, observers could endeavour to ignore the disquieting questions that monsters raised about the human condition in general, and individual identity in particular” (Shildrick 23). These questions that Shildrick mentions are the tensions that monsters, and thus hybridity, place within the popular discourse surrounding embodiment, thus challenging what it means to be the “other” when it is mixed. According to Samatar, “The monster destroys the integrity of the (social) body...The monster destroys the integrity of the body (politic)” (Samatar 23). The monster is outright destroying these notions of embodiment that have been steeped within colonialist discourses. In “The Collector of Treasures,” Samatar portrays the ways in which white Europeans have looked upon racial minorities, presenting a kind of scientific language that would further objectify them. We see the language of “You are inferior as a Coloured,” alongside “What a magnificent species!” thus showing the seemingly counteractive discourses work in tandem to further objectify people (27). The “Collector” becomes the Western colonial power, reveling in the exotic other so long as it feeds their curiosity, then dismissing them as inferior to their own race. By looking closely at the rest of the book, one notices that the language used in Monster Portraits invites an addition of disability studies as a lens of critique.

There is a pervasiveness of medical language, as well as language relating to disability within Monster Portraitsthat inspires a deeper understanding of the relationship between race and disability. In “The Perfect Traveler,” Samatar writes “I am lucky to have a job and friends. Yet I long for the Perfect Traveler’s molten heart, the lawless intricacies of his amethyst-blue bowels. I long for a body that does not fail” (Samatar 4). This is the second entry in the book, but the first official one in “the field.” She emphasizes the “perfect” aspect of the traveler, showcasing his characteristics as perfect, simultaneously denoting her own as imperfect. “A body that does not fail” brings two distinct interpretations when considering the context of the book. One is whether the writer has a disability and is therefore referring to that as a source of her body failing and wanting the opposite. The second, since she compares herself with this seemingly otherworldly creature with “amethyst-blue bowels,” is whether she is referring to human mortality being the failure, and wanting a body that does not die. Either way, she is longing for a body that is beyond human signifiers, beyond complex forms of embodiment and enmindment, a body that does not inspire various interpretations and judgements from society.

In the text, one notices language relating to disability alongside that of religion. In “The Green Lady,” Samatar describes the appearance of the creature, “How she surged into view from underneath. Like a symptom. Monstrum: a portent. A divine omen” (7). The monster becomes analogous to a disease, rising like a symptom within one’s body, as well as a warning that evil will come. This connection between disability and religion becomes apparent when considering the discourse of what is “natural” versus “unnatural,” and showcasing the religious foundation that has been used as an excuse to subjugate others. Towards the end of this section Samatar writes “The monster itself is a revelation,” thus countering the language used earlier by again presenting the monster through religious language, but in a positive light (8). This effectively replaces the negative rhetoric of the omen and simultaneously turns the monster into a source for celebration. She continues embellishing upon this relationship between the language surrounding disability and religion in “The Shadow Beast,” wherein she brings a more concrete example from the Bible. She writes “‘Look well into your past,’ said the rider, ‘and you will know whom God loved.’ I thought of Cain, his body a web of scabs. How he mourned because his mark kept him from settling among his own. Everywhere children chased him, shrieking “Gaal!” The ruthless elegance of his punishment. He would learn to dwell among the beasts. To be always itinerant” (10). She uses Cain, a biblical character regarded as evil, to portray an example of those whom God did not love, a sentiment that is often used to justify discrimination against people, especially disabled people. Samatar is critiquing this idea of God’s punished people by presenting Cain’s life through the lens of her work in Monster Portraits, and concluding with a new reading of the tale that puts the term of monster upon the ones who have more power, the so-called “God’s favored,” “Cain was the murderer but Abel was the monster” (10).

Samatar creates a heavy emphasis on the aspect of categorization, and the tensions that multi-racial people present within this paradigm. Throughout the work, we begin to see language that coalesces with that used by disability studies scholars, crip theory in particular. In the introductory chapter from her book Feminist, Queer, Crip titled “Imagined Futures,” Alison Kafer provides an interjection into disability studies by examining the notion of disability as a term that is not inherent within one’s body, but is rather influenced by ableist histories that demonize disability. She argues that, due to the dismissal of disability from the notion of an ideal future, there is no way in which there can be made any progress with regards to the disabled populations of the world. By using a political/relational model, Kafer brings disability into the realm of debate, and allows for conversations to be held regarding ways in which political actions can be taken to create a more accessible world for everyone. This political/relational model dispels the notion that the medical models of labeling disability are inherently apolitical. Through the lens of feminist, queer, and crip theory, Kafer illustrates how the notion of what constitutes normativity versus deviance is always changing in relation to the values upheld by society. Crip theory provides a more expansive and complex reading of disability, one that understands how relying on diagnosis is a way to limit oneself within a very strict binary, and that disability does not depend on diagnosis.

When putting Monster Portraits in dialogue with disability critique, one begins to see correlations between Samatar’s exploration of racial categorization and Kafer’s work with crip theory. An important through line in Kafer’s work is her discussion and critique of the medical model. She notes, “the medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms…what characterizes the medical model isn’t the position of the person (or institution using it, but the positioning of disability as an exclusively medical problem and, especially, the conceptualization of such positioning as both objective fact and common sense” (Kafer 5). In her response to this, Kafer states that we need “to examine how terms such as ‘defective,’ ‘deviant,’ and ‘sick’ have been used to justify discrimination against people whose bodies, minds, desires, and practices differ from the unmarked norm” (Kafer 17). Samatar is working within the realm of this unmarked norm, trying to establish her own agency through the cataloguing of monsters, whose very existence depends upon the obscurities of hybridism. In “The Knight of the Beak,” she portrays how when asked whether she and her brother were black or white, “we realize that our shields are blank” because there is no term given to them as mixed-race (Samatar 15). She further examines this in “The Clan of the Claw,” quoting an early 20^th century anthropologist and known proponent of eugenics, H.E. Jordan: “This cross-breeding is fatal to the best qualities whether of the white man, the black, the Indian, and produces an indescribable type whose physical and mental energy suffers” (22). This quote embodies the anxieties about mixed-race people that stem from what Shildrick calls “a racist hierarchy based in the apparent neutrality of science” (Shildrick 22). Samatar repeats “indescribable type” a few more times in this section, emphasizing the phrase that in itself is a descriptor for this type. Crip theory allows for a more nuanced reading of this phenomenon, and through it we begin to see how the mixing of different races, and the subsequent creation of the “indescribable type” threatens the racist power structures that aim to create and operate within their own understanding of normativity. In “The Early Ones,” Samatar notes that they existed before these forces developed the language to describe them, showcasing that what these categories do is simply give names to what is already there (24). However, as shown in disability studies and crip theory, the actual categorization/diagnosis plays a huge part in how society perceives you, in part acting as a form of validation from broader hegemonic forces.

In the latter half of Monster Portraits, Samatar tries to find comfort in this liminal identity that demands constant explanation. In “The Nanny,” Samatar regals that people mistake her for being her children’s nanny due to their difference in skin tone, to which the Nanny she is speaking to responds, “It doesn’t matter to you.... You know you’re real” (38). All of these broader cultural categorizations come from racist, sexist, colonialist, and ableist histories with the specific intent to normalize them. People who are not accurately presented within these paradigms are still human beings; in fact, they provide the tensions within these paradigms that allow society to question them. In her response, the Nanny doesn’t dismiss these histories, but rather affirms that a crucial part of Samatar’s journey is to understand that they do not define her experience. How she views herself is already a form of speaking back to these histories, even on an individual level. Later, she responds to this in “Monsters of the Fairy Kingdom” by asking “What does it even mean to embrace your nature? Surely it can’t mean explaining it all the time,” showcasing the tensions in this relationship between you knowing you’re real and the world knowing (40). Ultimately, Samatar is able to reach the realization that belonging within these paradigms should not be one’s goal, but also that embracing one’s self is a long journey. In “Liber Monstrorum,” she writes “Try as much as possible to conform and you will be saved by a wily grace. Imperfection is your genius,” which introduces a language of acceptance into the notion of not conforming (60). In the final section “Self-Portrait,” Samatar finds what she has searched for within monsters, self-acceptance. She implores us: “Endure the scar. Let an insight come and find you. The monster, in this case, would have been, emerging from a certain order of the figures, a ‘philosophy of love’” (64). Combining the language used, “endure the scar,” “imperfection is your genius,” we witness Samatar creating a poetics of love and acceptance, in which the aspects of ourselves that don’t conform to the socially-accepted norm are celebrated rather than hidden away. When the monsters finally find them, they bring with them a philosophy of love and acceptance.