White on Black
By Ruben Gellego
John Murray
Price: £6.25

Ever looked at the world from a supine position with your eyes six inches from the floor? What if it was the only perspective you were allowed of the world? Never as a human standing upright, but a lifetime of worm’s eyeview?

“I’m a hero,” goes Ruben Gallego’s opening line. “It’s easy to be a hero. If you don’t have hands or feet you’re either a hero, or dead.” Starting with its title and its very first paragraph, White on Black challenges the parameters of “normal” and goes on to throw open every definition: “hero”, “dreams”, “holiday”, “hands”, “food”, and “never”.

The shocking memoirs of Gallego’s truncated childhood, spent in numerous “children’s homes” of Russia as an orphan suffering from severe cerebral palsy, hit home. For as true courage is not the absence of fear, but ability to face one’s fears, true heroism is the effort to surmount the odds knowing the odds can never be surmounted. For Gallego, it is coming to terms with the fact that he will never be “ambulatory” — which, in his distorted world, is essential to be counted as “human”. His battle is as much for a right to life as a right to dignity: his tongue-in-cheek avowal of heroism followed by a description of a midnight trip to the toilet — in his scale of things, a feat no less than scaling the Everest.

But if Gallego’s physical handicap made him a “quasi corpse”, his situation — as a handicapped orphan in the “perfect world” of the Communist welfare system which promised to leave no citizen behind — made his a “quasi existence”.

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