Miss-Delectable
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Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
When one has the luxury of existing in normality, then most see ‘difference’ as nothing more than a physical impairment: the absence of hearing, of sight, of mind
It was a stifling, late-August afternoon. I was at the Dr Ambedkar Bus Terminal in Delhi to buy my ticket back to Lahore. The ticket-counter had closed down for lunch-break just as I arrived and I was asked by two weary-looking men to return in an hour.
I told the cabbie to park in the shade and went looking for some tea.
Minutes later, sipping tea that was too yellow and sweet for my liking, I couldn’t help thinking that for a bus station the place was eerily quiet. The terminal was deserted; there was no one there but a vast silence, myself, and in the distance, the canteen-wallah waiting for customers. No queues for tickets and none of the thoughtless noises associated with such points of transition.
Cup in hand, these thoughts on my mind, I saw a group of about a hundred or so children of various ages suddenly spill in through the terminal gates and spread out in all directions on the terminal floor.
The terminal was no longer deserted. But it was still quiet. It took me a few moments to realise that these kids were all deaf, and dumb.
They were everywhere, the boys tugging at the girls’ hair, the girls gnawing them in resistance, playing their games, and just generally going about with their kiddie-business. But they were talking also, in picture-like delineation, with their hands, their eyes and their fingers, curling them into different shapes, thumb tucked in, thumb protruding out, finger extended, finger folded, fingers splayed, left hand in a fist...
They were talking but I could not understand their silent language. There was a very sudden, blinding change of configuration: I, the ‘normal’ one, was the outsider; they were hearing-impaired, incomplete, imperfect, but I was the linguistic minority, isolated from the dominant culture because that culture didn’t use or even recognise spoken words.
What is it like to ‘hear’ a hand? You have to be deaf to understand.
Not many of us ever think the ‘deaf’ or the visually impaired or ‘the special’ constitute a world — a working system of their own where life unfolds as it does in our world, with its own rules and drills, its own procedures to render communication possible and easy, to allow life to go on as ‘normal’. Perhaps if one slows down and thinks about it, this becomes obvious. But when one has the luxury of existing in normality — the tyranny of the majority — then most see ‘difference’ as nothing more than a physical impairment: the absence of hearing, of sight, of mind. For the deaf especially, discrimination against them, for the longest time, was based on the supposition that they were without language — dumb, with all its connotations of mute and stupid.
Over the past 30 years or so, the status of these so-called ‘physically impaired’ people has changed as scholars and activists have struggled to change the way we perceive ‘normality’. In the case of the deaf, for example, the civil-rights movement has been used as a model for the struggle to form a deaf identity. Hence, at least in the United States, the deaf are considered a linguistic minority and deafness a sociological phenomenon rather than a physical problem. This view of deafness became possible after ASL (American Sign Language) was established in the late 50s and early 60s as a genuine language and not just pantomime. Scholars have also appropriated the views of Edward Said and Michel Foucault to conclude that the deaf are like a colonised people who share a common language (ASL) and, hence, a common culture, because of which they are considered a separate, outsider group.
But despite all these movements, one space, among others, that the deaf are still denied is that of poetry. A deaf poet is an oxymoron, they say. And one would agree considering the common conception that poetry, at its very heart, is about sound and voice. Also, the understanding that deafness reduces the human experience means that deaf poets have largely been, if one studies the freshly-written history of the deaf in the United States, objects of bewilderment and dismissal, their work rarely judged beyond the context of their ‘impairment’.
A historian of the deaf, John Lee Clark notes that this marginalisation was especially acute in the nineteenth century when poetry was expected to have a rhyme scheme and an identifiable metrical pattern. These requirements discouraged deaf poet John Carlin to the extent that he considered giving up poetry. Fortunately, his friend and ‘hearing poet’ William Cullen Bryant pressed Carlin to continue writing and Carlin eventually published many poems, including “The Mute’s Lament” in the first issue of American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb in 1847.
Even so, the ‘hearing editor’ of the journal could not resist adding a note to the poem: “How shall he who has not now and who never has had the sense of hearing, who is totally without what the musicians call an ear, succeed in preserving all the niceties of accent, measure, and rhythm? We should almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter as one born deaf to produce poetry of even tolerable merit.”
Deaf poet Laura C Redden did not experience this opposition initially because it was not known that she was deaf. When this came out, many lowered their opinion of her poetry. An enraged Redden responded with her 1870 autobiographical allegory, “Down Low” (later re-titled “The Realm of Singing”), in which she portrayed herself as a bird with a crippled wing trying to make a place for herself in the fabled Realm of Singing.
After some attempts, the bird won the praise of a band of soldiers passing through the forest. However, when the soldiers discovered that the bird was crippled, they abandoned her, saying, as had Redden’s critics: “What have we here? A crippled bird that tries to sing? Such a thing was never heard of before. We were certainly mistaken in thinking that there was anything in such songs. Our ears have deceived us.”
I hope readers will agree that a crippled wing has nothing to do with a bird’s ability to sing.
When one has the luxury of existing in normality, then most see ‘difference’ as nothing more than a physical impairment: the absence of hearing, of sight, of mind
It was a stifling, late-August afternoon. I was at the Dr Ambedkar Bus Terminal in Delhi to buy my ticket back to Lahore. The ticket-counter had closed down for lunch-break just as I arrived and I was asked by two weary-looking men to return in an hour.
I told the cabbie to park in the shade and went looking for some tea.
Minutes later, sipping tea that was too yellow and sweet for my liking, I couldn’t help thinking that for a bus station the place was eerily quiet. The terminal was deserted; there was no one there but a vast silence, myself, and in the distance, the canteen-wallah waiting for customers. No queues for tickets and none of the thoughtless noises associated with such points of transition.
Cup in hand, these thoughts on my mind, I saw a group of about a hundred or so children of various ages suddenly spill in through the terminal gates and spread out in all directions on the terminal floor.
The terminal was no longer deserted. But it was still quiet. It took me a few moments to realise that these kids were all deaf, and dumb.
They were everywhere, the boys tugging at the girls’ hair, the girls gnawing them in resistance, playing their games, and just generally going about with their kiddie-business. But they were talking also, in picture-like delineation, with their hands, their eyes and their fingers, curling them into different shapes, thumb tucked in, thumb protruding out, finger extended, finger folded, fingers splayed, left hand in a fist...
They were talking but I could not understand their silent language. There was a very sudden, blinding change of configuration: I, the ‘normal’ one, was the outsider; they were hearing-impaired, incomplete, imperfect, but I was the linguistic minority, isolated from the dominant culture because that culture didn’t use or even recognise spoken words.
What is it like to ‘hear’ a hand? You have to be deaf to understand.
Not many of us ever think the ‘deaf’ or the visually impaired or ‘the special’ constitute a world — a working system of their own where life unfolds as it does in our world, with its own rules and drills, its own procedures to render communication possible and easy, to allow life to go on as ‘normal’. Perhaps if one slows down and thinks about it, this becomes obvious. But when one has the luxury of existing in normality — the tyranny of the majority — then most see ‘difference’ as nothing more than a physical impairment: the absence of hearing, of sight, of mind. For the deaf especially, discrimination against them, for the longest time, was based on the supposition that they were without language — dumb, with all its connotations of mute and stupid.
Over the past 30 years or so, the status of these so-called ‘physically impaired’ people has changed as scholars and activists have struggled to change the way we perceive ‘normality’. In the case of the deaf, for example, the civil-rights movement has been used as a model for the struggle to form a deaf identity. Hence, at least in the United States, the deaf are considered a linguistic minority and deafness a sociological phenomenon rather than a physical problem. This view of deafness became possible after ASL (American Sign Language) was established in the late 50s and early 60s as a genuine language and not just pantomime. Scholars have also appropriated the views of Edward Said and Michel Foucault to conclude that the deaf are like a colonised people who share a common language (ASL) and, hence, a common culture, because of which they are considered a separate, outsider group.
But despite all these movements, one space, among others, that the deaf are still denied is that of poetry. A deaf poet is an oxymoron, they say. And one would agree considering the common conception that poetry, at its very heart, is about sound and voice. Also, the understanding that deafness reduces the human experience means that deaf poets have largely been, if one studies the freshly-written history of the deaf in the United States, objects of bewilderment and dismissal, their work rarely judged beyond the context of their ‘impairment’.
A historian of the deaf, John Lee Clark notes that this marginalisation was especially acute in the nineteenth century when poetry was expected to have a rhyme scheme and an identifiable metrical pattern. These requirements discouraged deaf poet John Carlin to the extent that he considered giving up poetry. Fortunately, his friend and ‘hearing poet’ William Cullen Bryant pressed Carlin to continue writing and Carlin eventually published many poems, including “The Mute’s Lament” in the first issue of American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb in 1847.
Even so, the ‘hearing editor’ of the journal could not resist adding a note to the poem: “How shall he who has not now and who never has had the sense of hearing, who is totally without what the musicians call an ear, succeed in preserving all the niceties of accent, measure, and rhythm? We should almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter as one born deaf to produce poetry of even tolerable merit.”
Deaf poet Laura C Redden did not experience this opposition initially because it was not known that she was deaf. When this came out, many lowered their opinion of her poetry. An enraged Redden responded with her 1870 autobiographical allegory, “Down Low” (later re-titled “The Realm of Singing”), in which she portrayed herself as a bird with a crippled wing trying to make a place for herself in the fabled Realm of Singing.
After some attempts, the bird won the praise of a band of soldiers passing through the forest. However, when the soldiers discovered that the bird was crippled, they abandoned her, saying, as had Redden’s critics: “What have we here? A crippled bird that tries to sing? Such a thing was never heard of before. We were certainly mistaken in thinking that there was anything in such songs. Our ears have deceived us.”
I hope readers will agree that a crippled wing has nothing to do with a bird’s ability to sing.