The Way In |
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| by Molly Geidel, '02 |
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> When the deaf Miss America spoke to a crowd of thousands about overcoming her handicap, deaf people across America were disgusted. Deafness is not a handicap, I have been told again and again. It is a cultural identity, a way of life, a choice, even (some hard-of hearing people speak of the time when they had to decide, deaf or hearing), but never a handicap, never something to be overcome. The sign for people like Miss America is the sign for hearing, with the forefinger circling up by the forehead instead of down by the mouth. She thinks she's hearing, is what it means. There is also a sign for the reverse: some hearing people get so involved in the deaf community that they think they are deaf, like the woman who pretended to be deaf and got to be in one of those real-life Saturn Commercials. She was a minor celebrity until she was found out - an investigative reporter called her house and she answered the phone. Afterward there was an outpouring of letters to DeafLife magazine from people who said they had known all along her signing was not perfect, and the sign she made up for Saturn in the commercial was not in accordance with the deep structure of American Sign Language. American Sign Language is a naturally acquired language; my sister, at five, has perfect ASL grammar and sentence structure, something I will never really have. Grammar in ASL is about your face: eyebrows are lifted for yes or no questions, scrunched together for wh- questions. When signing the word "big", say "Cha" with your voice. It is important to look the signer in the face; use peripheral vision to absorb the hand and arm movements. This, of course is not as easy as it sounds - deaf people have extraordinary peripheral vision, something the rest of us have not found it necessary to develop. Deaf people are united by the special skills they have developed, the ways they have coped, compensated and triumphed, by elements of a shared consciousness most of us cannot conceive. One of these elements is a heightened appreciation for the margins, for the periphery. Symmetry According to Ronnie Wilbur of Boston University, a strict Symmetry Condition exists for signs where both hands move, they must have the same handshapes and both hands' movements must be either identical or in polar opposition to one another (1). Some symmetrical signs: family, group class place, love, community. The deaf community is not a mirror image of the hearing world; ASL is not "English with the sound off." Bring the fingertips of your right hand together. Touch the fingertips to your chin near your mouth, then up further to the right, by your ear. Home is significant for so many deaf people, for the ones who grew up in a hearing world, missing whole conversations, falling behind in school, acting as hearing as they could. One deaf teacher told me she was sure, as a child, that when she turned eighteen she would become hearing: she didn't know any deaf adults, so she just assumed they didn't exist. She didn't know what sign language was. When she turned eighteen and was still deaf, she decided to go to Gallaudet, the only deaf liberal arts college in the country. She said she couldn't really explain it to me, I wouldn't really know, but she felt like she was finally home had finally found her true family and the place where she didn't have to pretend any more. It was wonderful to hear her story, wonderful that she was able to tell it to me, a hearing person. But I was overcome with fear: what do I have to do, I wanted to ask, to keep from losing my sister, to keep her from finding a home that I can never be a part of? The Way In We can speak of a deaf mind. Not just the deaf mind in a cultural sense, not just in terms of a worldview. The deaf mind is unique in a neurological sense. Spoken language is rooted in chronology, in time: prefixes, suffixes, pauses, and word order are the fundamental ways we modify and clarify our speech. Sign language is compressed: any modifications are made spatially, not chronologically. Deaf people find it difficult to use signed exact English because they cannot keep track of all the signs, cannot remember and parse all the words coming at them. Their minds are trained for visual parsing, for picking up multiple visual cues, for understanding all the different components of a story in one instant (2). When deaf people sign, they are not so much miming as constructing, building complex realities with a momentary gesture and the accompanying facial expression. My sister is already a creator of complicated visual constructions, suspended beautiful and transitory in the space in front of her. I see her face and hands fly together as she describes a new boy in her class, tells me what she did yesterday. I want to pick up every visual element of the story, to immerse myself in her construction and understand every intricate simultaneous part of it, not just the individual signs. But I always find myself on the outside, translating the signs into words instead of feeling or knowing them, darting my eyes from hands to face to body, trying to find the way in, to force the shift in my mind which I know can only come naturally. Gallaudet The "G" hand, thumb and forefinger extended on the face next to the eye, thumb and forefinger brought together as hand moves away from the face. Nobody really knows what its correct pronunciation is: it doesn't matter. Gallaudet stands on a slab of concrete in the middle of the most dangerous neighborhood in Washington DC. It is a truly ugly place: the only attempt at redeeming aesthetic features are the fake plants in concrete pots which are all over the campus. Yet Gallaudet is an oasis for deaf people, a place where they are not strange, are not outnumbered or pitied or limited. Here are deaf teachers, scientists, linguists, artists, dancers, writers from all over the world. How many stories of deaf isolation end with the discovery of Gallaudet? In my class at Gallaudet, I watched a panel of deaf adults answer questions. They talked about the significance of lighting in a room, how to get a deaf person's attention, the way deaf people always ask for extra details, even in situations which would be uncomfortable in the hearing world. They talked about how they all thought a "mixed" marriage could never work: the hearing person wouldn't understand, they said, would never feel at home in the deaf social clubs, could never really even sign fluently. When I was at Gallaudet, people were constantly correcting me, explaining to me that my sign was an old one, or one that nobody ever uses. Countless times I was corrected by one person, only to be told the next day by someone else that my original sign was the correct one. Sign language is a relatively new language and a transient one, and it varies widely from place to place, but deaf people all know this and communicate easily across regions. It is difficult to understand that I am different, that no matter what I do I will sometimes be wrong either way. Maybe I will never sign completely correctly, because that implicit correctness is only possible for those who understand the language, for these who are deaf themselves. Some History In 1916, the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet sailed to Europe in search of new ways to educate the deaf. His voyage was inspired by the sight of Alice Cogswell, an isolated, languageless deaf child who could not join the other children playing in his garden. He sailed first to England, but was turned away; England, he was told, had a secret method for teaching the deaf to speak. He sailed on to France, where he heard of Laurent Clerc. Clerc had become deaf at two years of age, from falling into a fire, and had evolved into a brilliant scholar and a teacher at the Institute for the Deaf in Paris. Through interpreters, Gallaudet proposed that Clerc leave Paris and accompany him back to America, where the two men could start a school for deaf children, and Clerc agreed The story goes that on the voyage across the Atlantic, Clerc learned English and Gallaudet learned French Sign Language. In 1917, the two men started American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut (3). At Gallaudet a framed portrait hangs in the main classroom building. The portrait is made from the thumbprints of hundreds of Gallaudet students, with help from a famous deaf artist. It is a portrait of Laurent Clerc: his fingerspelled name is painted beneath his face. No other introduction is given, and none is needed: deaf Americans learn and retell Clerc's story with pride, the story of a hero, a visionary, and a great teacher. In deaf mythology, he is Prometheus, only this time it was the introduction of a common language that changed everything that set his people free. My sister's first sign was Bird. We had been signing to her for two months when one day she just pointed up at the sky and said it, her thumb and forefinger closing and opening to form a tiny arc in front of her mouth. After that, it was like something had freed itself, had taken flight inside of her. She learned hundreds of signs in the three months before her second birthday. Strong-deaf The sign for deaf is the forefinger tapped once on the chin, up by the ear, and once down by the mouth. The speed and energy given to the sign depends not on the deaf person's level of hearing but on how strongly she identifies with the deaf community, how strongly she demands a deaf, signing identity. Miss America is not strong-deaf. Another sign with a similar meaning is ASL, used as an adjective, bestowed as the highest praise. To be ASL is to be free of English, with its cumbersome initializations and voicing. To be ASL is to sign in the truest, most natural way to communicate the way deaf people were meant to communicate. Touch One hand above the other, palms facing down. Tap the top of the bottom hand with the middle finger of the top hand. When we brought kids from Austine summer camp to the town pool, the lifeguard kept blowing her whistle, yelling that the kids were not allowed to touch each other in the water. I had to explain to her that first of all, they couldn't hear the whistle, and second of all, that they need to touch each other, that touch is essential to their communication. Deaf people observe different rules about physical closeness, about touch. They tap each other, point, sign on each other's faces. Deaf hugs are whole bodies pressed together, not just arms like in hearing people's hugs, although the deaf woman explaining the distinction also said it would be presumptuous for a hearing person ever to hug her like that. My sister first came home to us in the middle of the night, one day at the end of the summer. When my mother got out of the airport shuttle, I could not believe what she was holding was so small, such a tiny bundle. My sister woke up and peeked out the top: her huge dark eyes and the tufts of hair sticking up all over her head made her look scared and out of place, too tiny and warm-blooded for this cold Connecticut bus station. I was afraid to hold her, sure I would drop her or she would cry. But she held on so tight, much tighter than I was holding her, and started rhythmically patting my back. It may have been just a reaction, an imitation, or maybe a grateful response to finally being held after four months in an orphanage without being held at all. But I remember thinking it was more than that, marveling at how already, at four months old, she was wonderfully adept at communicating love through gestures, maybe more adept than I will ever be. Education Laurent Clerc and Thomas Gallaudet had vision. They founded the American School for the Deaf with the purpose of educating teachers who could then start their own deaf residential schools all around the country. Today, when deaf people introduce themselves, they sign first their names and name signs and second, the name of the residential school they attended. Since only ten percent of deaf children are born to deaf parents, residential schools are in the unique position of providing a first language, a culture, an education, and a family to whoever needs one. My sister and her friends run wild through the halls of her school, confident in the knowledge that they will find open arms wherever they go. The Bridge My sister's school, Austine School for the Deaf, is of the bilingual/bicultural philosophy. Other schools, other educators are of the philosophy that in order to read, speak and function in the hearing world deaf children must sign as close to exact English as possible. ASL, they believe, is a barrier to learning. The Bilingual/Bicultural educators argue that ASL is the only way for deaf children to grasp abstract concepts and thoughts, that ASL is the base from which all subjects must be taught. They see ASL as a bridge to English and the hearing world, not a barrier. But ASL must come first, they say. Jill Donahue is the top student in the graduating class at Austine this year; she was recently accepted to Gallaudet and will go there next fall. She was educated orally in New York until fifth grade, although she used sign with her friends. Last year I was signing with her and another friend, and she told a story about getting gas by herself for the first time, how hard it was for her to communicate with the attendant, how she felt like the people in the next car were laughing at her. I asked her if it was always this hard, if it was always this scared to do simple errands. She looked at me like I was stupid, like she had forgotten a hearing person was looking in on her conversation. Her friend Josh, another top student, broke in. Of course it's hard, he signed. That's why Jill goes everywhere with me. Deaf need to stick together. At first I was horrified by Jill's story, horrified that such an intelligent, articulate person would be humiliated to go to the gas station alone. But at the same time, it seemed reassuring that they could venture out, could do anything, as long as they had each other. The community as well as the language can be a bridge to the hearing world. Home Signs Home signs are the signs you make up, the signs that are unique to a family. The danger with home signs is when the child does not go to deaf school, when the home signs are all you have. But every family has a few. Our first home sign was hot, invented by my sister when she was one year old, before we knew she was deaf. She would pretend to touch something and flick her fingers away, saying "ha" with her voice. Another home sign is for our dog Max, a variation on the letter x. Sign creeps into our spoken English: we say 'that's cha" when we mean big, or call our dog X. These lyrical slips, our own particular combinations of sign and speech, are our bridges to ASL, the way we make it our own. Poetry Hands in fists, one on top of the other, in front of the stomach and chest. Open the hands so the palms face upward. The teacher at deaf literacy, making a booklet for parents, translated "you are my sunshine" into ASL. Translated, it goes my sunshine precious you. It does not sound like anything special, but it looks beautiful. Sign poetry does not translate. My sister has more passions than I can count. She loves working with my father: she will sit, fascinated, and hold tools for him for hours on end. She is in love with her cat, her bicycle, the color red, and her female doll she insisted on naming Mike. She signs to herself, making up elaborate, pretend worlds, and signs nothing, nothing, when someone looks over. She tells ever one who will pay attention the story of her adoption, how my parents flew all the way to Colombia, knew right away that she was the special one missing from our family, and brought her home. More than anything, my sister loves people, loves crowds and attention and making new friends. When she was younger and we went to cities, she used to stand in the middle of the sidewalk with her arms and legs spread out, ready to make people stop and pay attention to her, or at least smile. The worst thing is that my sister, who loves people so much, who is already so charming and perceptive and passionate, will be so limited in her interaction. Right now she has an incredible ability to transcend language barriers, to make herself loved and understood by all. But as she grows, as her thoughts become more complex and hearing people less understanding, she may lose the ability and desire to be a part of the hearing world. Her use of ASL is a given of course; whether it will be a bridge or a barrier for her remains to be seen. It may be that only those who can sign will be able to see the passion and poetry inside her. Code-Switch We can think of signing as a continuum from pure ASL to Signed Exact English. Most hearing people sign somewhere on that continuum, not really aware of the distinction, of where their signing falls. Usually it is further from ASL than they think, and always it is further than they hope. Most deaf people, when they are alone, sign in language very close to pure ASL. When they are signing with hearing people, however, they code-switch, aligning themselves more with English. Code-switching mirrors the mixture of benevolence and exclusion shown them by the hearing community for hundreds of years: they code switch out of politeness, so hearing people will better understand them, but they also code-switch to keep their language separate, to keep it safe. I do not want my sister to have to code-switch for me. I want to understand her language and her world enough so she can sign naturally with me, can be as ASL as she wants. She cannot come into my world, so I will have to discover everything I can about hers. footnotes |