Miss-Delectable
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Being deaf taught me to write - Times Online
My university professor told me that you know the stone that you trip over the best. Language is the stone that I’ve been tripping over all my life. Coming from the American deaf community, language is what people talk about constantly. But they talk about it in a way that is worlds apart from the way that writers and artists talk about it, and I struggle with this.
Our native language is sign language and it has a different relationship with the world. It is more concrete and iconic. Since the Ancient Greeks, people have written off sign as a lesser language that is not as sophisticated as written and spoken language. Deaf people often believe this too, with the idea that our world is somehow less vibrant. Far past the time when most people believe that skin colour changes how you experience life, many still seem to believe that being able to speak and hear is essential to being a complete human being.
Many rotten systems have been forced on us by hearing people. When I was growing up, the fashion in deaf education was signing in English word order, using native signs. That makes as much sense as speaking Spanish, but in English word order. Sign language is a different animal from spoken language, but the uniformed zookeepers have thrown them into the same cages for thousands of years.
And because we have been so constantly mauled, there is a lot of pride in the deaf community. It’s what has made us survive, but it can be harmful too. Ours is a tiny community, but fractured. The ones who sign beautiful pure sign language don’t always get on with the ones who sign in English word order, and both sides don’t always get on with those who speak or have cochlear implants. Some people struggle with written language. The simplest explanation I can give is that it is the attitude of the oppressed to the colonial occupiers.
My father is deaf and an educator of the deaf. He is the kind of person you believe because you can see so clearly who he is, in his every action and in his being. Whenever he can, he eats lunch with the kids in the school and he tries to go to all their basketball and American football games. He stands at the edges of the playing field with a red flag on a stick, to help mark where the ball goes out of bounds.
He has been trying to explain himself for more years than I can remember. Trying to make people understand why deaf children need to be able to communicate with their hearing parents who don’t know how to sign, and why deaf children shouldn’t be on their own in a hearing school, unable to communicate their simplest thoughts and needs. He always thought that if he found the right words, people would understand. I thought that too, and I was in awe of people who seemed to have the right words all the time.
Many deaf children are left with no way to communicate, surrounded by people who know how to communicate too well — so well that they believe whoever has the best snake oil in their mouths; so well that they forget that truth is in the rise and fall of emotion in your body, the feel of sun on your skin, the moment when your eyes meet someone else’s with clarity.
Because of this, I don’t trust written language at all, and I don’t trust people who know how to use language too well. And, funnily enough, it’s why I started writing.
When you try to make art or when you try to write, you are dismayed at the difference between the strong feeling that you try to express and what you manage to squeeze out. But this is the same dismay that is part of the human need to communicate. It seems to me that we have lost sight of that, maybe because there are so many more words around us than there used to be. It is easier to take them for granted.
When I moved to London from America, I started working with Oliver Pouliot, who is my sign language interpreter and speaks for me. It’s a strange experience, trusting someone else to present you to the world, especially for someone as suspicious of words as I am. But I have learnt to turn over much of the burden of communication to Oliver. We share it, and it works.
All of this may not seem the most obvious jumping-off point for trusting language enough, to write a book where the first story is about two deaf girls meeting a would-be pimp in Rio. But after years of thinking about it, the book is the next step in my efforts to get across all the things about communication that feel urgent to me. I’ve always been a reader and I’ve always written, but I was reluctant to be A Writer, in part because of my problems with written language. But after trying, and failing, to get the things that I say across via other mediums, this feels the most direct way to do it.
I want to show how much of perception lives in spoken conversation. I also want to show the worlds that my characters live in, some of what lies beneath their skin. Then I want to try to let the interpretation, and the immaterial, rise from that embodiment instead of these things being dictated from above by the writer, or by anyone else.
My university professor told me that you know the stone that you trip over the best. Language is the stone that I’ve been tripping over all my life. Coming from the American deaf community, language is what people talk about constantly. But they talk about it in a way that is worlds apart from the way that writers and artists talk about it, and I struggle with this.
Our native language is sign language and it has a different relationship with the world. It is more concrete and iconic. Since the Ancient Greeks, people have written off sign as a lesser language that is not as sophisticated as written and spoken language. Deaf people often believe this too, with the idea that our world is somehow less vibrant. Far past the time when most people believe that skin colour changes how you experience life, many still seem to believe that being able to speak and hear is essential to being a complete human being.
Many rotten systems have been forced on us by hearing people. When I was growing up, the fashion in deaf education was signing in English word order, using native signs. That makes as much sense as speaking Spanish, but in English word order. Sign language is a different animal from spoken language, but the uniformed zookeepers have thrown them into the same cages for thousands of years.
And because we have been so constantly mauled, there is a lot of pride in the deaf community. It’s what has made us survive, but it can be harmful too. Ours is a tiny community, but fractured. The ones who sign beautiful pure sign language don’t always get on with the ones who sign in English word order, and both sides don’t always get on with those who speak or have cochlear implants. Some people struggle with written language. The simplest explanation I can give is that it is the attitude of the oppressed to the colonial occupiers.
My father is deaf and an educator of the deaf. He is the kind of person you believe because you can see so clearly who he is, in his every action and in his being. Whenever he can, he eats lunch with the kids in the school and he tries to go to all their basketball and American football games. He stands at the edges of the playing field with a red flag on a stick, to help mark where the ball goes out of bounds.
He has been trying to explain himself for more years than I can remember. Trying to make people understand why deaf children need to be able to communicate with their hearing parents who don’t know how to sign, and why deaf children shouldn’t be on their own in a hearing school, unable to communicate their simplest thoughts and needs. He always thought that if he found the right words, people would understand. I thought that too, and I was in awe of people who seemed to have the right words all the time.
Many deaf children are left with no way to communicate, surrounded by people who know how to communicate too well — so well that they believe whoever has the best snake oil in their mouths; so well that they forget that truth is in the rise and fall of emotion in your body, the feel of sun on your skin, the moment when your eyes meet someone else’s with clarity.
Because of this, I don’t trust written language at all, and I don’t trust people who know how to use language too well. And, funnily enough, it’s why I started writing.
When you try to make art or when you try to write, you are dismayed at the difference between the strong feeling that you try to express and what you manage to squeeze out. But this is the same dismay that is part of the human need to communicate. It seems to me that we have lost sight of that, maybe because there are so many more words around us than there used to be. It is easier to take them for granted.
When I moved to London from America, I started working with Oliver Pouliot, who is my sign language interpreter and speaks for me. It’s a strange experience, trusting someone else to present you to the world, especially for someone as suspicious of words as I am. But I have learnt to turn over much of the burden of communication to Oliver. We share it, and it works.
All of this may not seem the most obvious jumping-off point for trusting language enough, to write a book where the first story is about two deaf girls meeting a would-be pimp in Rio. But after years of thinking about it, the book is the next step in my efforts to get across all the things about communication that feel urgent to me. I’ve always been a reader and I’ve always written, but I was reluctant to be A Writer, in part because of my problems with written language. But after trying, and failing, to get the things that I say across via other mediums, this feels the most direct way to do it.
I want to show how much of perception lives in spoken conversation. I also want to show the worlds that my characters live in, some of what lies beneath their skin. Then I want to try to let the interpretation, and the immaterial, rise from that embodiment instead of these things being dictated from above by the writer, or by anyone else.