I recently had a similar situation where my screen's ribbon was severed 2/3 through, to the point where I could input touch screen input but no backlight, screen output, indicator light or ear speaker (the small speaker you listen to while on the phone). I eventually purchased a broken N900 off ebay with a broken screen which I swapped into the original, but I was able to issue commands through therminal by hitting SHIFT+CTRL+X for xterm. you may need to run a few commands just to be able to ssh since you restored. I've been able to blindly connect to my wifi and ssh, vnc and the rest from here.
piping output to espeak helped some