Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  are acutely aware of the undertones and overtones of iconicity in their vocabulary.… In communicating among themselves, or in narrative, deaf signers often extend, enhance, or exaggerate mimetic properties. Manipulation of the iconic aspect of signs also occurs in special heightened uses of language (Sign poetry and art Sign).… Thus ASL remains a two-faceted language—formally structured and yet in significant respects mimetically free.

  While the formal properties, the deep structure, of Sign allow the most abstract concepts and propositions to be expressed, its iconic or mimetic aspect allows it to be extraordinarily concrete and evocative, in a way, perhaps, which no speech can be. Speech (and writing) have distanced themselves from the iconic—it is by association, not depiction, that we find speech-poetry evocative; it can elicit moods and images, but it cannot portray them (except through “accidental” ideophones and onomatopoeia). Sign retains a direct power of portrayal that has no analogue in, cannot be translated into, the language of speech; on the other hand, it can ascend to any height of metaphor or trope.

  Sign still preserves, and emphasizes, both of its faces—the iconic and the abstract, equally, in complementarity—and thus, while it is able to ascend to the most abstract propositions, to the most generalized reflection of reality, it can also simultaneously evoke a concreteness, a vividness, a realness, an aliveness, that spoken languages, if they ever had, have long since abandoned.78

  A language’s “character,” for Humboldt, is essentially cultural—it expresses (and perhaps partly determines) the way a whole people think and feel and aspire. In the case of Sign, the distinctiveness of the language, its “character,” is biological as well, for it is rooted in gesture, in iconicity, in a radical visuality, which sets it apart from any spoken tongue. Language arises—biologically—from below, from the irrepressible need of the human individual to think and communicate. But it is also generated, and transmitted—culturally—from above, a living and urgent embodiment of the history, the world-views, the images and passions of a people. Sign for the deaf is a unique adaptation to another sensory mode; but it is also, and equally, an embodiment of their personal and cultural identity. For in the language of a people, Herder observes, “resides its whole thought domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul.” This is especially true of Sign, for it is not only biologically but culturally—and unsilenceably—the voice of the deaf.

  The Revolution of the Deaf

  WEDNESDAY morning, March 9, 1988: “Strike at Gallaudet,” “Deaf Strike for the Deaf,” “Students Demand Deaf President”—the media are full of these happenings today; they started three days ago, have been steadily building, and are now on the front page of The New York Times. It looks like an amazing story. I have been to Gallaudet University a couple of times in the past year, and have been steadily getting to know the place. Gallaudet is the only liberal arts college for the deaf in the world and is, moreover, the core of the world’s deaf community—but, in all its 124 years, it has never had a deaf president.

  I flatten out the paper and read the whole story: the students have been actively campaigning for a deaf president ever since the resignation last year of Jerry Lee, a hearing person who had been president since 1984. Unrest, uncertainty, and hope have been brewing. By mid-February, the presidential search committee narrowed the search to six candidates—three hearing, three deaf. On March 1, three thousand people attended a rally at Gallaudet to make it clear to the board of trustees that the Gallaudet community was strongly insisting on the selection of a deaf president. On March 5, the night before the election, a candlelight vigil was held outside the board’s quarters. On Sunday, March 6, choosing between three finalists, one hearing, two deaf, the board chose Elisabeth Ann Zinser, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro—the hearing candidate.

  The tone, as well as the content, of the board’s announcement caused outrage: it was here that the chairman of the board, Jane Bassett Spilman, made her comment that “the deaf are not yet ready to function in the hearing world.” The next day, a thousand students marched to the hotel where the board was cloistered, then the six blocks to the White House, and on to the Capitol. The following day, March 8, the students closed the university and barricaded the campus.

  Wednesday afternoon: The faculty and staff have come out in support of the students and their four demands: (1) that a new, deaf president be named immediately; (2) that the chairman of the board, Jane Bassett Spilman, resign immediately; (3) that the board have a 51 percent majority of deaf members (at present it has seventeen hearing members and only four deaf); and (4) that there be no reprisals. At this point, I phone my friend Bob Johnson. Bob is head of the linguistics department at Gallaudet, where he has taught and done research for seven years. He has a deep knowledge of the deaf and their culture, is an excellent signer, and is married to a deaf woman. He is as close to the deaf community as a hearing person can be.1 I want to know how he feels about the events at Gallaudet. “It’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have bet a million dollars this couldn’t happen in my lifetime. You’ve got to come down and see this for yourself.”

  When I had visited Gallaudet in 1986 and 1987, I found it an astonishing and moving experience. I had never before seen an entire community of the deaf, nor had I quite realized (even though I knew this theoretically) that Sign might indeed be a complete language—a language equally suitable for making love or speeches, for flirtation or mathematics. I had to see philosophy and chemistry classes in Sign; I had to see the absolutely silent mathematics department at work; to see deaf bards, Sign poetry, on the campus, and the range and depth of the Gallaudet theater; I had to see the wonderful social scene in the student bar, with hands flying in all directions as a hundred separate conversations proceeded2 —I had to see all this for myself before I could be moved from my previous “medical” view of deafness (as a condition, a deficit, that had to be “treated”) to a “cultural” view of the deaf as forming a community with a complete language and culture of its own. I had felt there was something very joyful, even Arcadian about Gallaudet—and I was not surprised to hear that some of the students were occasionally reluctant to leave its warmth and seclusion and protectiveness, the cosiness of a small but complete and self-sufficient world, for the unkind and uncomprehending big world outside.3

  But there were also tensions and resentments under the surface, which seemed to be simmering, with no possibility of resolution. There was an unspoken tension between faculty and administration—a faculty in which many of the teachers sign and some are deaf. The faculty could, to some extent, communicate with the students, enter their worlds, their minds; but the administration (so I was told) formed a remote governing body, running the school like a corporation, with a certain “benevolent” caretaker attitude to the “handicapped” deaf, but little real feeling for them as a community, as a culture. It was feared by the students and teachers I talked to that the administration, if it could, would reduce still further the percentage of deaf teachers at Gallaudet and further restrict the teachers’ use of Sign there.4

  The students I met seemed animated, a lively group when together, but often fearful and diffident of the outside world. I had the feeling of some cruel undermining of self-image, even in those who professed “Deaf Pride.” I had the feeling that some of them thought of themselves as children—an echo of the parental attitude of the board (and perhaps of some of the faculty). I had the feeling of a certain passivity among them, a sense that though life might be improved in small ways here and there, it was their lot to be overlooked, to be second-class citizens.5

  Thursday morning, March 10: A taxi deposits me on Eighth Street opposite the college. The gates have been blocked off for forty-eight hours; my first sight is of a huge, excited, but cheerful and friendly crowd of hundreds barring the entrance to the campus, carrying banners and placards
, and signing to one another with great animation. One or two police cars sit parked outside, watching, their engines purring, but they seem a benign presence. There is a good deal of honking from the traffic passing by—I am puzzled by this, but then spot a sign reading HONK FOR A DEAF PRESIDENT. The crowd itself is both strangely silent and noisy: the signing, the Sign speeches, are utterly silent; but they are punctuated by curious applause—an excited shaking of the hands above the head, accompanied by high-pitched vocalizations and screams.6 As I watch, one of the students leaps up on a pillar and starts signing with much expression and beauty. I can understand nothing of what he says, but I feel the signing is pure and impassioned—his whole body, all his feelings, seem to flow into the signing. I hear a murmured name—Tim Rarus—and realize that this is one of the student leaders, one of the Four. His audience visibly hangs on every sign, rapt, bursting at intervals into tumultuous applause.

  As I watch Rarus and his audience, and then let my gaze wander past the barricades to the great campus filled with passionate Sign, with passionate soundless conversation, I get an overwhelming feeling not only of another mode of communication but of another mode of sensibility, another mode of being. One has only to see the students—even casually, from the outside (and I felt quite as much an outsider as those who walked or drove casually by)—to feel that in their language, their mode of being, they deserve one of their own, that no one not deaf, not signing, could possibly understand them. One feels, intuitively, that interpretation can never be sufficient—that the students would be cut off from any president who was not one of them.

  Innumerable banners and signs catch the brilliant March sun: DEAF PREZ NOW is clearly the basic one. There is a certain amount of anger—it could hardly be otherwise—but the anger, on the whole, is clothed in wit: thus a common sign is DR. ZINSER IS NOT READY TO FUNCTION IN THE DEAF WORLD, a retort to Spilman’s malapropos statement about the deaf. Dr. zinser’s own comment on Nightline the night before (“A deaf individual, one day, will … be president of Gallaudet”) had provoked many signs saying: WHY NOT MARCH 10, 1988, DR. ZINSER? The papers have spoken of “battle” or “confrontation,” which gives a sense of a negotiation, an inching to and fro. But the students say: “Negotiation? We have forgotten the word. ‘Negotiation’ no longer appears in our dictionaries.” Dr. Zinser keeps asking for a “meaningful dialogue,” but this in itself seems a meaningless request, for there is no longer, there never has been, any intermediate ground on which “dialogue” could take place. The students are concerned with their identity, their survival, an all-or-none: they have four demands, and there is no place for “sometime” or “maybe.”

  Indeed Dr. Zinser is anything but popular. It is felt by many not only that she is peculiarly insensitive to the mood of the students—the glaring fact that they do not want her, that the university has been literally barricaded against her—but that she actively stands for and prosecutes an official “hard line.” At first there was a certain sympathy for her: she had been duly chosen and she had no idea what she had been thrown into. But with the passing of each day this view grew less and less tenable, and the whole business began to resemble a contest of wills. Dr. Zinser’s tough, “no-nonsense” stance reached a peak yesterday, when she loudly asserted that she was going to “take charge” of the unruly campus. “If it gets any further out of control,” she said, “I’m going to have to take action to bring it under control.” This incensed the students, who promptly burned her in effigy.

  Some of the placards are nakedly furious: one says ZINSER—PUPPET OF SPILMAN, another WE DON’T NEED A WET NURSE, MOMMY SPILMAN. I begin to realize that this is the deaf’s coming of age, saying at last, in a very loud voice: “We’re no longer your children. We no longer want your ‘care.’ ”7

  I edge past the barricades, the speeches, the signs, and stroll onto the large and beautifully green campus, with its great Victorian buildings setting off a most un-Victorian scene. The campus is buzzing, visibly, with conversation—everywhere there are pairs or small groups signing. There is conversing everywhere, and I can understand none of it; I feel like the deaf, the voiceless one today—the handicapped one, the minority, in this great signing community. I see lots of faculty as well as students on the campus: one professor is making and selling lapel buttons (“Frau Zinser, Go Home!”), which are bought and pinned on as quickly as he makes them. “Isn’t this great?” he says, catching sight of me. “I haven’t had such a good time since Selma. It feels a little like Selma—and the sixties.”

  A great many dogs are on the campus—there must be fifty or sixty on the great greensward out front. Regulations on owning and keeping dogs here are loose; some are “hearing ear” dogs, but some are just … dogs. I see one girl signing to her dog; the dog, obediently, turns over, begs, gives a paw. This dog itself bears a white cloth sign on each side: I UNDERSTAND SIGN BETTER THAN SPILMAN. (The chairman of Gallaudet’s board of trustees has occupied her position for seven years while learning hardly any Sign.)

  Where there was a hint of something angry, tense, at the barricades, there is an atmosphere of calm and peacefulness inside; more, a sense of joy, and something like festivity. There are dogs everywhere, and babies and children too, friends and families everywhere, conversing volubly in Sign. There are little colored tents on the grass, and hot dog stands selling frankfurters and soda—dogs and hot dogs: it is rather like Woodstock, much more like Woodstock than a grim revolution.

  Earlier in the week, the initial reactions to Elisabeth Ann Zinser’s appointment were furious—and uncoordinated; there were a thousand individuals on the campus, milling around, tearing up toilet paper, destructive in mood. But all at once, as Bob Johnson said, “the whole consciousness changed.” Within hours there seemed to emerge a new, calm, clear consciousness and resolution; a political body, two thousand strong, with a single, focused will of its own. It was the astonishing swiftness with which this organization emerged, the sudden precipitation, from chaos, of a unanimous, communal mind, that astonished everyone who saw it. And yet, of course, this was partly an illusion, for there were all sorts of preparations—and people—behind it.

  Central to this sudden “transformation”—and central, thereafter, in organizing and articulating the entire “uprising” (which was far too dignified, too beautifully modulated, to be called an “uproar”)—were the four remarkable young student leaders: Greg Hlibok, the leader of the student body, and his cohorts Tim Rarus, Bridgetta Bourne, and Jerry Covell. Greg Hlibok is a young engineering student, described (by Bob Johnson) as “very engaging, laconic, direct, but in his words a great deal of thought and judgment.” Hlibok’s father, who is also deaf, runs an engineering firm; his deaf mother, Peggy O’Gorman Hlibok, is active in lobbying for the educational use of ASL; and he has two deaf brothers, one a writer and actor, one a financial consultant, and a deaf sister, also a student at Gallaudet. Tim Rarus, also born deaf, and from a deaf family, is a perfect foil for Greg; he has an eager spontaneity, a passion, an intensity that nicely complement Greg’s quietness. The four had already been elected before the uprising—indeed while Jerry Lee was still president—but have taken on a very special, unprecedented role since President Lee’s resignation.

  Hlibok and his fellow student leaders have not incited or inflamed students—on the contrary, they are calming, restraining, and moderating in their influence, but have been highly sensitive to the “feel” of the campus and, beyond this, of the deaf community at large, and have felt with them that a crucial time has arrived. They have organized the students to press for a deaf president, but they have not done this alone: behind them there has been the active support of alumni, and of deaf organizations and leaders all around the country. Thus, much calculation, much preparation, preceded the “transformation,” the emergence of a communal mind. It is not an order appearing from total chaos (even though it might seem so). Rather, it is the sudden manifestation of a latent order, like the sudden crystallization of a super-satu
rated solution—a crystallization precipitated by the naming of Zinser as president on Sunday night. This is a qualitative transformation, from passivity to activity, and in the moral no less than in the political sense, it is a revolution. Suddenly the deaf are no longer passive, scattered, and powerless; suddenly they have discovered the calm strength of union.

  In the afternoon I recruit an interpreter and with her help interview a couple of deaf students. One of them tells me:

  I’m from a hearing family … my whole life I’ve felt pressures, hearing pressures on me—“You can’t do it in the hearing world, you can’t make it in the hearing world”—and right now all that pressure is lifted from me. I feel free, all of a sudden, full of energy now. You keep hearing “you can’t, you can’t,” but I can now. The words “deaf and dumb” will be destroyed forever; instead there’ll be “deaf and able.”

  These were very much the terms Bob Johnson had used, when we first talked, when he spoke of the deaf as laboring under “an illusion of powerlessness,” and of how, all of a sudden, this illusion had been shattered.

  Many revolutions, transformations, awakenings are in response to immediate (and intolerable) circumstances. What is so remarkable about the Gallaudet strike of 1988 is its historical consciousness, the sense of deep historical perspective that informs it. That was evident on campus; as soon as I arrived I spotted a picket saying: LAURENT CLERC WANTS DEAF PREZ. HE IS NOT HERE BUT HIS SPIRIT IS HERE. SUPPORT US. I overheard one journalist say, “Who the hell’s Laurent Clerc?” but his name, his persona, unknown to the hearing world, are known to virtually everyone in the deaf world. He is a founding father, a heroic figure, in deaf history and culture. The first emancipation of the deaf—their achievement of education and literacy, of self-respect and the respect of their fellows—was largely inspired by the achievement and person of Laurent Clerc. It was immensely moving, then, to see this placard, and one could not help feeling that Laurent Clerc was here, on the campus, was, albeit posthumously, the authentic spirit and voice of the revolt—for he, above all, had laid the foundations of their education and culture.