Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

Abstract

Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight is a personal narrative of the writer’s decades-long transition from sightedness to blindness triggered by retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an eye condition that first affects one’s peripheral vision and gradually results in total loss of sight. It is also an inquiry into the history, culture, and the sociopolitical discourse surrounding blindness. This combination makes the book a part of the tradition of American life-writing that approaches blindness both as a lived experience and a subject of historical inquiry. The said tradition includes Georgina Kleege’s Sight Unseen (1999) and M. Leona Godin’s Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (2021), works that demonstrate the centrality of writing to one’s understanding of blindness and emphasise that blindness is as much cultural and political as personal.

Keywords

• andrew leland
• the country of the blind: a memoir at the end of sight
• blindness
• disability
• jewish-american writer