Challenging the language of ‘In the snack-bar’

Nuala Watt reflects on negative, damaging stereotypes of disability in poetry, and the wider culture of ableism in the arts and formal education. Watt critiques Edwin Morgan’s poem, In the snack-bar, a recommended National 5 English Literature text for Scottish schools.

‘He is up as far as he can get. The dismal hump
Looming over him forces his head down.
He stands in his stained beltless gaberdine
Like a monstrous animal caught in a tent
In some story…’

These lines are from ‘In the snack-bar’, written in 1964 and first published in Edwin Morgan’s A Second Life (1968). If you grew up in Scotland in the last fifty years, there’s a good chance you studied this poem at school.

There’s a good chance your teenage children are or will be studying it too. This is a problem because the poem’s representation of disability is irredeemably ableist.

I set out the issues here. The narrator describes a blind man with a neurological condition that affects his co-ordination and posture. The narrator accompanies this man to the toilet, though it’s not clear whether the man explicitly asked him to do so. Imagine being a teenager with similar conditions, reading this poem at school. That was me. I tried to explain to the teacher why the poem made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t have the tools to do that then. I do now.

There was plenty to make me uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I suspect this episode really did happen, because the man asks the narrator to ‘Give me your arm – it’s better’. I have said that to helpful members of the public many, many times, because people don’t realise that allowing a person with cerebral palsy to take your arm is better for balance.

The poem describes the man as ‘hunchback- born’ – not an acceptable description now. He is ‘uncouth’ in the ‘clinical gleam of the toilet’. Even his urine is described as ‘feeble’. The reader is invited to stare as the man takes ‘painful ages’ to do up his trousers and coat before the narrator does the final button. Poor man – he must have been terribly embarrassed. ‘He asks doubtfully ‘Can I – wash my hands?’ From experience this might mean ‘Can you help me wash my hands’ but it might also mean “Can you get out of the way so I can wash my hands myself?” This is not clarified. The narrator helps anyway. The final stages of the poem show the narrator musing on the man’s predicament.

‘Without embarrassment or shame
He must announce his most pitiful needs
In a public place. No one sees his face.
Does he know how frightening he is in his strangeness…?’

I read that, aged fifteen and recognised myself. That is not what I want for pupils with disabilities. Nor do I want our peers to see us as ‘frightening’ or ‘monstrous’. Language like that going unchallenged suggests such words are acceptable. A friend helpfully suggested that Morgan may have been appalled by the man’s vulnerability because Morgan himself was a closeted gay man – able to pass in a way that the man cannot. This helped me reframe the poem a bit. But if true it is not reflected in contemporary teaching of the poem as far as I know.

To be fair to Morgan, he is far from the only abled poet to present disability as a spectacle. Marie Howe, the recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is the author of ‘The Star Market’ – depressingly published in the New Yorker in 2008.

‘…the feeble, the lame, I could hardly
Look at them:
Shuffling through the aisles, they smelt of decay, as if the Star Market
Had declared a day off for the able-bodied…’.

We are supposed to respect this as good poetry. Why? Imagine if it referred to any other minority group – would it win a prize? I hope not.

Morgan and Howe are not alone. Arguably, the problem is not with a mistake made by an otherwise very good Scottish poet, but with a much wider culture of ableism within literature. In the introduction to Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe 2025). Rachael Boast writes about the root causes of this attitude:

“There is little acknowledgement that prejudicial attitudes, flawed interpretations of value, eugenicist legacies…. are a key factor in what actually disables people, creating a vicious cycle, fuelled by pathos. Pathos arises out of a colossal misunderstanding. The narrative is so often that deafness, disability and neurodivergence has to be framed within a narrative of tragedy, that it merits an outpouring of pity, when the real tragedy is ignorance.”

‘In the snack-bar’ reflects and perpetuates this ignorance. It also seems unfair to Morgan to choose this poem. Why can’t we have the joy of ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song? Morgan can do better and so can we.