REVIEW: The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn

Review by Sara Pisak

The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight by Naomi Cohn functions as an encyclopedic guided tour through Cohn’s diagnosis and worsening eyesight. Accompanying her on this tour is an unlikely companion, the inventor of braille, Louis Braille.

Together Cohn and Braille offer the reader a unique understanding of their lived experiences. Braille, a 19th century saddle maker, invented the braille system of communication after accidentally blinding himself with an awl. Centuries later, Cohn learns braille after her vision worsens due to neovascularization.

Using etymology, history, and lived experiences, Cohn’s alphabetical entries present a masterclass on voice. These short, braided essays allow Cohn to reflect on how braille has changed her understanding of her voice and communication. She asks the reader to feel the story both literally and figuratively. This book is about how tactile understanding and connection leads to emotionally and mentally feeling and connecting.

In the essay “Code,” Cohn considers how the history of braille has affected her writing and influenced her voice and style. She writes:

In developing his system, Louis Braille was inspired by a military code of raised dots for passing notes. Night writing, they called it. […] Something the enemy cannot hear. Writing in the dark, in a code almost no one understands, has freed up my writing in ways I did not expect. Braille conceals. Chances are the bumps that mean symbols and words to me mean nothing to you. Or mean something else — mystery, curiosity? Something opens up in the place of concealment. In the silence of the braille cell, I write what I would never put into print (20).

Cohn comes to see braille for the duality it is: a system of communication that is hidden to most of the world. In the mysteriousness of “night writing,” Cohn finds meaning in the dots and bumps that most gloss over. She finds meaning and vocalizations in a system based on silence.

For Cohn, metaphors and figurative language aren’t confined to the sighted written word. These metaphors and figurative meanings are expanded to the physical and tactile tools needed to read braille. Allowing her voice and narrative to flow freely in both the world of night writing and in the traditional print world, Cohn engraves a place for braille to function as both a tool of writing and a metaphor for sovereignty over her writing.

Perhaps developing a completely different voice based on the medium she is writing in is best summed up by Cohn’s essay entitled “Voice,” where she reflects:

After a few years of keeping a braille journal, I notice a different voice emerges. Sometimes wild, sometimes catty, but more and more, a voice that does not pull punches. Not wrapping everything in endless modifiers. When it’s so much work to write a single word, it had better be worth saying.

Despite my ready tongue, I have always been afraid to say my mind. But so few people can read what I write in braille. I can leave a screed, a manifesto, or a satisfying string of insults and obscenities face up in the middle of a room (107).

Again, Cohn reflects on the duality of language, especially braille. On one hand, braille has allowed Cohn to develop an uninhabited voice. Here she considers the weight of her words because it takes a great deal of work to write a single word. On the other hand, Cohn is not fully ready to lean into this side of her voice, even though very few people can read her braille journal.

Cohn is using the duality of braille to come into her voice as a writer and a disabled person. Viewing her braille journal as an ever-evolving workbook to develop and hone her voice, Cohn is becoming bilingual in the multifaceted aspects of her voice. Analogies aside, The Braille Encyclopedia is a touchstone for writers looking to develop their authentic, authoritative, and authorly voice.