A few months ago, an article entitled "A Silver Lining," published in a national mainstream magazine, reported in the fourth line that Jane Field was "struck" with Guillain-Barré syndrome in 1988, and that it "left her in a wheelchair." The article then went on to explain that Jane's songs make "light of her disability and her homosexuality."

A lot of people told Jane she was lucky to be mentioned in such a well-known publication. But she is convinced that words and phrases like the ones used in this article do more harm than good.

The first discouragement, she points out, is the title. "'A Silver Lining,'" she quotes. "Read: '...in the otherwise black cloud of her tragic existence.' A silver lining to what? Why does a disability need a silver lining? Why can't it be positive in itself?"

She is also displeased with the way the journalist described her disability. "Guillain-Barré syndrome 'left me' in a wheelchair. It sounds like, left to die at the side of the road!

"That's the kind of media that does a lot of damage," says Jane. And although readers of the magazine might not have picked up on any overt discrimination, she adds: "It's insidious. It seeps into their consciousness that this language is okay, that that's the way we talk about disability."

To set the record straight about her music, Jane explains, "I don't 'make light' of my disability, or anybody's disability, and I don't make light of homosexuality. I'm making light of attitudes, and ridiculous government regulations that allow us to moose hunt -- although they won't provide WheelTrans."

She is referring to a policy in Thunder Bay, Ontario, that permits people with disabilities to start moose hunting a week before everybody else. This peculiar law, coupled with her discovery that Ontarians with disabilities may fish without a license, prompted her to write the title song on her cassette, The Fishing is Free. In the song, she describes some of the other bonuses available to people who have disabilities: Movies are half the price, well, isn't that nice / And the parking spots are nothing but the best...

Many of Jane's songs are inspired by conversations she has or items she finds in the media. "It'll usually be something ridiculous that I read somewhere, just one phrase or a line of something that someone said that just struck me."

During the murder trial last year of Robert Latimer, the Saskatchewan man who killed his daughter, Tracy, a Globe and Mail reporter wrote that Tracy Latimer "had an unacceptable body."

Jane says, "I just read that and thought, 'unacceptable'? To whom? For what? And who decides what's acceptable and what isn't? I was really terrified reading that." She wrote a song called "Label Me Normal," which she has performed at several events. She has also gotten involved with the Friends of Tracy Latimer Society. "I feel we really have to work to change those public attitudes and images of disability."

But more often, as with The Fishing is Free, the song that evolves out of Jane's experience is lighthearted. Once a receptionist asked Jane if she was going to Gay Pride Day. When she asked him how he knew she was a lesbian, he said to her, "I didn't know. I just assume everyone is." Jane went home and thought about it, and liked it. "In mainstream society, the assumption is that everyone is straight unless they declare otherwise," she says. "So I just wrote this complete reversal song." The quirky conversation with the receptionist shows up in the lyrics of "Some of My Best Friends are Straight." Another of the verses declares: Well, I firmly believe all people have rights / regardless of their sexuality / and if someone wants to sleep with the opposite sex / well, it doesn't have to worry me.

"Somebody said to me, 'Reversal is the lowest form of humour,'" says Jane. "Yeah, so? It's funny! And it makes people think, oh, I've actually said that."

But despite the awareness that her songs might raise, she asserts, "I don't write 'messages.' I certainly don't think of it that way."

Jane was born and raised in Toronto. She has three brothers. Her middle brother, Mike, played the guitar before she did.

"I remember sneaking into his room when I was about eight years old and just strumming the guitar that was lying on his bed -- looking furtively around, afraid I'd get caught. I made up my first song that way. It sounded terrible... I had no idea what a chord was.

Jane always loved words and rhyme, and after she got her own guitar at the age of 12, she started writing folk songs. She didn't begin performing, though, until 1990, the International Year of Literacy. Jane was volunteering in a literacy program and had written a song about the issue. She was asked to play it at a community function. "I was surprised -- I guess people liked it. I started writing a lot more, and began being asked to perform at community events."

She admits she gets stage fright -- "I'm absolutely terrified" are her exact words -- but she also adds, "I think it would be dangerous not to be. If I get too relaxed, then I won't do a good performance. I need that extra edge at appearances."

The venues she has performed at include disability rallies and demonstrations, and the annual Eaglewood folk festival. She also plays to audiences of gays and lesbians. She performed at a benefit for the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (which regularly features work by gay and lesbian artists) and she was a guest singer at the Toronto Lesbian and Gay Chorus spring concert.

When her performance at a campaign for equal families earned her a standing ovation, she says, "I think it was at that point that I realized that maybe I had something. I guess we all need those positive strokes to happen occasionally that will push us on to try more."

A lot of her audiences had been asking for a tape of her songs, but she didn't have the resources to produce one. It was Barbara Thornber, the executive director of the Ontario Association for Community Living, who gave Jane an opportunity. Thornber tracked down

a friend of a relative who had a recording studio in his apartment and was interested in helping out. The person was Paul Lau, who ended up donating about 45 hours of time recording, mixing, and basically engineering the whole production. "Without that, I wouldn't have been able to do it," says Jane. "It's a hard business to break into."

Her tape is distributed in Sam the Record Man and HMV record store locations in downtown Toronto, as well as in the Women's Bookstore and a couple of other bookstores. A distribution company called Women Revolutions Per Minute has been taking the tape to various events and bookstores across Canada. "I don't make much money, but at least it's getting out there," Jane says.

"Getting it out there" is important, since there is always the danger, with performing at only disability or gay and lesbian events, of preaching to the converted. Often the only people who get a chance to hear her songs are already "working really hard on these issues."

In a way, though, she is educating at least two groups about each other. The song, "Some of My Best Friends are Straight," does not mention disability. And the other songs on her tape don't address gay and lesbian issues. So now her gay fans hear songs about barrier-free access on The Fishing is Free, and as for people with disabilities, they "get this little bonus song about homophobia... That's certainly one way to reach people for whom disability issues are very prominent and up front in their lives, but who have not really thought about homophobia. I'm sort of slipping that little song in there."

Jane also says that when she sang with the Toronto Lesbian and Gay Chorus, "Label Me Normal" and "The Fishing is Free" were well received by listeners, even though disability "isn't the focus of their activism."

Gradually, Jane is making a name for herself in more mainstream culture. Organizers of her community's fall fair asked her to perform. She balked at first, wondering if her songs were perhaps too political for a family event, but then she decided, "I'm part of the community. This is a chance for other people who aren't exposed to issues of accessibility and barriers to hear about it, hopefully in an entertaining way that doesn't hit them over the head -- too hard."

When she does play at more mainstream functions, to people who know little about disability or gay and lesbian issues, she admits she sometimes risks the message getting lost on her audience. "But I think everything that artists do is going to be lost on somebody," she says. "I never get so sarcastic that it's not funny, that people can't listen to it. I know there are lots of people who don't like what I do, and don't get it, and people with disabilities who don't get it."

At the Eaglewood folk festival, for instance, an event that is fully accessible and attended by many people with disabilities, she heard later that someone in the audience had been quite offended by something she sang. She had sung a song called "Poster Kids No More," and wondered if the complainant was "somebody who was a poster kid for Easter Seals and loved it." But, she points out, "It's not Easter Seals I'm dragging through the mud. I think the work it does is wonderful. But it's the approach of using children to create pity, and the heart-rending approach to charity to get people to give money, that I object to."

Jane has always been driven by activism, whether it was in the community projects she worked on in Nicaragua or teaching English in Nigeria. "I was very interested in problems of poverty and development," she says. But then, after she acquired her disability in 1988, "the global issues seemed a lot farther away, and I realized there was a lot to fight for right here in my immediate environment." She was flabbergasted by the limitations of her city's accessible transportation service. "That just outraged me," she says. "Transportation is not a privilege, it's a right. Just tell people [without disabilities] that they can't get to work tomorrow because they're not allowed to get on the bus. There'd be riots in the streets!

"It's that shock of suddenly being immersed in this world of injustice, that wakes you up to activism in a different way... In a way I feel ashamed that I only got involved in disability rights activism when I acquired a disability. Why wasn't I fighting for disability rights when it didn't personally affect me? But I think it's not until you're personally touched by an issue that you really get involved at a grassroots level."

This happened again to Jane when she was assaulted several years ago. The incident took her completely by surprise.

"I was going through life thinking, who's going to attack me, I'm in a wheelchair, and just not seeing that, here you are, kind of vulnerable. I really had no concept that women with disabilities were at the degree of risk for violence that they are... I went to a counselling group and I started doing a lot of reading and realized what the statistics are -- and that people are vulnerable for the very reason that I thought I wouldn't be."

She got involved in wen-do, a form of self-defence for women. "I don't think I really believed when I first started wen-do that I could defend myself," she says. "But by the end of the course, I sure believed it. It did a lot to change my attitude, and my genera awareness."

One of the songs on her tape is called "A Cautionary Tale or Aren't you Glad that You Know Wen-Do?" The song is about an encounter with a would-be attacker, who is quickly subdued with a zipper punch to his nose, a hammer fist to his collar bone and an eagle's claw to his eyes for good measure. Jane describes the narrative in the song as "an imaginary scenario, with the feeling coming out of that first self-defence course, thinking, just anybody try to attack me now!"

Out of her same experience, she wrote a song called "The Power to Defend," questioning the guilt and shame that women feel after assault. This song is not on the tape but Jane performs it at Take Back the Night rallies and other events that focus on violence against women.

"A lot of women are learning how to fight back, and learning that they're worth fighting for," says Jane.

When she instructed a wen-do course in Ottawa, one of the students was quadriplegic and operated her wheelchair with her head. "I know a lot of people would think, how could she possibly fight back?" Jane remarks. "But she learned how to yell, and how to not think twice about putting her wheelchair on high speed and running somebody down if they're threatening her." Partway through the course, the student was in a crowd and found herself nearly smothered by the bodies standing around her. "She yelled, and people stepped away, and suddenly she felt better. It was the course that taught her to think of asserting herself when people are invading her space, that she had a right to claim her space."

"Claiming her space" is what Jane seems to be doing, both as an artist and as a person with the same rights as everybody else. Whether the issue is violence against women, disability rights, or gay and lesbian rights, Jane believes in speaking out. As she says in her song, "Some of My Best Friends are Straight": I won't give up until laws have been passed / And the Charter of Rights is in use.

But it's a verse of "Poster Kids No More" that really sings out for people with disabilities across the country:

It's time to change these ancient attitudes

And show the world a thing or two

If you've got a disability, it's just a different way to be

And you can be proud of it too!

-- Lisa Bendall

From Abilities Magazine, Issue 27