’Uyun Teta: blindness, sightedness and the stories in-between

This article is a critical and creative essay that employs the story of my late maternal grandmother’s experience of blindness to interrogate the relationship between blindness and sight in the context of contemporary Lebanese social, cultural and political life. To this end, the essay draws on retrospective autoethnography and memoirs as well as on critical disability studies and visual culture to reflect on broader notions of seeing and unseeing. In addition, I also incorporate a creative component to imaginatively narrate the relation of blindness and sight, especially in contexts marked by multiple forms of sociopolitical vulnerability and fragility.