Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The life of villages in northern Bali is based on a clan system. The deaf can both participate in and transcend their clans; for birthdays, for example, they invite their own clan as well as the deaf alliance in the village, while hearing people would not invite anyone outside their clan. The deaf have certain traditional jobs. They bury the dead and serve as the police, though there is almost no crime; they repair pipes in the often-troubled water system. Most are also farmers, planting cassava, taro, and elephant grass, which is used to feed cows. Bengkala has a traditional chief who presides over religious ceremonies; an administrative chief chosen by the central Balinese government to oversee government functions; and a deaf chief, traditionally the oldest deaf person.

  I arrived in Bengkala with the Balinese linguist I Gede Marsaja, born in a neighboring village, who has studied Kata Kolok in depth. We climbed into a canyon where a river rushed under a two-hundred-foot rock wall. Several deaf villagers were waiting for us by the water, where they farm rambutans. Over the next half hour, the rest of Bengkala’s deaf arrived. I sat on a red blanket at one end of a large tarp, and the deaf arranged themselves around the tarp’s edge. People were signing to me, confident that I could understand. Gede translated and Kanta provided further assistance. I quickly picked up a few signs, and when I used them, the entire group broke out in smiles. They seemed to have multiple levels and kinds of signing, because when they were signing to me, they were like a bunch of mimes and I could follow their narratives clearly, but when they were signing to one another, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all, and when they were signing to Gede, they were somewhere in between. Some of the hearing people in the village sign better than others, and while Kata Kolok has an exact grammar, purely iconic signs can be strung along without grammatical overlay for people who are not fluent.

  The Kata Kolok sign for sad is the index and middle fingers placed at the inside corners of the eyes, then drawn down like tears. The sign for father is an index finger laid across the upper lip to suggest a mustache; the sign for mother is an upward-facing open hand at chest level supporting an imaginary breast. The sign for deaf is the index finger inserted into the ear and rotated; the sign for hearing is the whole hand held closed beside the ear and then opened while it is moved away from the head, sort of like an explosion coming out of the skull. In Kata Kolok, positive words usually involve pointing upward, while negative ones involve pointing downward; one villager who had traveled told the others that the raised third finger is a bad word in the West, so they flipped the sign and now use a third finger pointing down to indicate horrendous. The vocabulary is constantly evolving, while the grammar is fairly static. This language probably took on rules, as many signed languages do, over decades; second-generation language is always more sophisticated and ordered than first-generation.

  Local hearing farmers do not have an enormous vocabulary, and neither does this sign language, in which about a thousand signs have been identified by scholars, though deaf people clearly know more signs than that and can combine them to achieve additional meanings. For Western members of the educated classes, intimacy usually resides in mutual knowledge, and that knowledge is advanced when language unlocks the secrets of the other mind. But some people are less given to articulation: people for whom the self is expressed in the preparation of food and in the ministrations of erotic passion and in shared labor in the field. For such people the meaning embedded in words is secondary, an adjunct to love rather than its method. We had come into a society in which language was not the necessary precondition of familiarity for the hearing or the deaf, nor the primary medium through which to understand and negotiate the world.

  When we finished lunch, fourteen men put on sarongs, and two women donned fancy, lacy nylon blouses. Like most deaf people, they could feel the vibrations of the drum, and their dance included movements that seemed to flow from their mimetic language—you could tell when they were dancing about being on a boat, and when they were smoking, and when they were running away. Each woman individually would invite one of the men to dance. One invited me, and I went for it; she hung flowers around my neck as we danced. Then the women remarked that they were all getting hot and tired, as it was incredibly humid, so they stopped. The men offered to show us the martial arts they use as the village security agents. I was interested in the way they mixed signing and the deployment of their hands and feet as weapons. One young man, Suarayasa, resisted joining in the theatrics until he was shamed into it by his mother, and the whole time he was demonstrating his abilities, he was also signing repeatedly, “Look at me!” It was fierce but playful.

  The women gave everyone a Sprite, then the men proposed a dip in the river, so we walked down through the elephant grass and hot peppers and went skinny-dipping. The rock wall rose steep above us, and long vines hung down, and the deaf men swung on them. I did somersaults in the water, others did headstands, and we set bait to fish for eels. Some would swim underwater until they were right beside me and then shoot up out of the current. They continued to sign to me, and the communication was exuberant, even joyful. It seemed possible, in that sunset light, to contemplate this as an idyll for the fluent communication it entailed, despite the poverty and disability of the people whom we were visiting.

  The next day, Kanta translated from Kata Kolok into Balinese, occasionally addressing me in his limited English; Gede translated Kanta’s Balinese into English, occasionally signing in his limited Kata Kolok; and the deaf Bengkala villagers addressed me directly in animated sign. Communication in this linguistic jumble was established through sheer force of collective will. It was hard to ascertain even the numbers of deaf and hearing people in individual families because everyone had different ideas about what was meant by family: All the male relatives? All the adults? All the people sharing a kitchen? What one could ask was limited because many grammatical structures couldn’t be translated. For example, Kata Kolok has no conditional tense nor any sign for why; the language has no categorical words (such as animals or the abstract notion of name), only specific ones (such as cow or someone’s actual name).

  We first talked to the family of Pinda, who currently had two wives and had divorced two others. He was father to two living children, a daughter by Ni Md Resmini and a son by another wife; three children from his previous marriages had died. His wives and children were all deaf. Pinda said, “I don’t like the hearing people here. If I ask them for money, they always refuse.” Pinda was vain and wanted to have his picture taken incessantly, but warm, too, and he laughed readily. He said he loved Resmini because she cut grass all day for the cows and never talked. “Hearing people talk too much,” he explained. Resmini said, “I always knew I wanted to marry a deaf man, but I never cared whether my children could hear or not. With a hearing husband, my deaf daughter will probably be richer, and with a deaf husband she will end up fighting like I do. Having too much of a common language with your husband is not an advantage. It makes everyone too emotional.” Pinda seemed to take an obscure pride in this prognosis. “The deaf, if there is something wrong with the wife, he is kicking her out straightaway,” he said. “If she’s been too friendly with another man, she’s kicked out without questions. I would never marry a hearing woman. And I want my son to marry someone deaf as well.” It became clear that it would be harder for him to dominate the family with a hearing woman.

  I met the family of Santia, the deaf son of hearing parents, and his wife, Cening Sukesti, the deaf daughter of deaf parents. The two had been childhood friends. Santia was somewhat slow, whereas Cening Sukesti was vibrant, lively, and intelligent. Cening Sukesti chose to marry him because his hearing parents owned enough land for them to work. She said, “If you are deaf, you are deaf. If you are hearing, you are hearing. That’s simply how it is. I’ve never been jealous of hearing people. Life is no easier for them. If we work hard, we will get money, too. I take care of the cows and I sow the seeds and I boil the cassava. If I lived in another village, I migh
t want to be hearing, but I like it here, and here it doesn’t matter.”

  Three of their four children were deaf. When their son Suara Putra was nine months old, hearing friends observed that he could hear. He began to sign at eleven months, though he came to feel more fluent in speech. As a young adult, Suara Putra often translates for his parents. He’d never want to give up his hearing or his signing: “I have two where most people have one,” he said. But he maintained he could have been equally happy being deaf. Half his friends were deaf and the other half, hearing; “I don’t count them that way,” he explained, “because it’s all the same to me.” Nonetheless, he said, “I think my parents like having one hearing child. Yet I’d have less tension with them if I were like them.” Cening Sukesti said that Suara Putra signed even better than his deaf siblings because spoken language had made him more comfortable expressing complex ideas.

  Their deaf son, Suarayasa, who had been signing while doing his martial arts moves the day before, told us that he had deaf and hearing friends, but that he really liked getting drunk with deaf friends. “Deaf people my age don’t go to school,” he said, “so they have time to work, so they’ve got money and buy the drink.” Alcohol abuse is more frequent in the deaf community in Bengkala, and a number of deaf young men showed me with pride the scars from their drunken fights. Suarayasa’s deaf grandmother said he had to get his drinking under control and shook her head when he said he was going to marry a hearing girl. I asked him why, and he said, “All the deaf girls already turned me down. They don’t like my drinking, even though I never vomit.”

  An older couple, Sandi and Kebyar, lived with their two deaf sons, Ngarda and Sudarma. Ngarda’s hearing wife, Molsami, came from another village, and when she realized she was pregnant by Ngarda, she thought she’d better learn to sign. “I worry about the difference between a hardworking husband and a lazy one,” she said. “Hearing or deaf doesn’t make very much difference.” Ngarda was glad to have four hearing children. “We already have many deaf people here,” he said emphatically. “If all of us are deaf, it’s not good.”

  Sudarma took the exact opposite position. He is married to a deaf wife, Nym Pindu, and said he would never have married a hearing woman. More than anyone else I met in Bali, he seemed to take the positions associated with Deaf politics in the West. “Deaf people should stick together,” he said. “Hearing to hearing is good, and deaf to deaf is good. I wanted deaf children and I want to live among deaf people.” All three of his children are deaf. Sudarma is a big drinker, with scars to show for his brawling.

  We were supposed to have started the day by visiting Getar, the deaf chief of the village, and his sister, Kesyar, but Getar had been called out in the morning to fix some pipes, so we talked to them the next day. At seventy-five, Getar is not only still fixing pipes but also, when he has some money, making regular visits to the brothel in the neighboring town, about which he told us in some considerable detail; on his last visit, he had had three “girls” for thirty thousand rupiah (just over $3). The number of deaf in Bengkala fluctuates; Getar said that when he was born, the village had only six deaf people—though he subsequently explained that by people he meant “adult men,” and that if he included women, he could remember eleven deaf villagers. He communicated frequently with hearing people, and his signing was iconic; it lacked the elegance of Cening Sukesti’s or the punch of Sudarma’s.

  Getar married once only. His wife bore him five children, then died from eating too much jackfruit. His children were all deaf; four of the five survived infancy. His primary responsibility as chief was to order jobs for members of the deaf alliance. “There are pipes to be fixed. There is a security job,” he explained. “The big boss comes to me, and I decide who will do the jobs. If there’s a death, the family will come to me, and I will decide who will dig the grave. For each job, the person who does it gets most of the money, but some money is also kept to go into the collective deaf-alliance fund, and every six months we slaughter a pig—or some pigs if we can afford it—and the meat is divided equally among the deaf people.” Getar told me that choosing who gets which job is political, since everyone wants the jobs that pay well. “I keep a record of who has done each job so I can show that the decisions are fair,” he said. “If someone is hungry and needs the work, then I’ll give it to him. If someone hasn’t had a job for a long time, I give them a chance.” When the other deaf people sign to Getar, they use more polite, formal signs; he, in turn, uses those forms of address with hearing people. Getar had not been the object of prejudice, but he spoke with longing about the freedoms of younger deaf people. There were more of them, he thought, and their lives were easier. Now they were even going to school.

  After our long days of interviews, Cening Sukesti invited us to come out to their farm. It was raining, but Santia shimmied up a tree and brought us fresh coconuts, and we had mealy corn and heavy cassava. There were a lot of jokes with innuendo; Cening Sukesti chuckled as she explained that she had refused sexual favors to Santia until he had finished building their new hut. The deaf alliance had an attractive ease to it, a ready and embracing intimacy. When I asked about prejudice against the deaf, they all agreed that there was none in the village. They all had hearing and deaf friends and could mingle at will.

  In Bengkala, people talked about deafness and hearing much as people in more familiar societies might talk about height or race—as personal characteristics with advantages and disadvantages. They did not discount the significance of deafness nor underplay its role in their lives; they did not forget whether they were deaf or hearing and did not expect others to forget it, either. But they considered it within the realm of ordinary variations rather than an aberrance and a severe disability. The deaf alliance in Bengkala is extremely free in every sense except geography; their freedom is predicated on a linguistic fluency shared only in their village. I had gone there to investigate the social constructionist model of disability and found that where deafness does not impair communication, it is not much of a handicap.

  * * *

  Kata Kolok appears to be unique among sign languages for the deaf in that it is used by more hearing people than deaf people. But it is threatened as deaf teenagers from Bengkala are increasingly sent to boarding school, where they learn Indonesian Sign Language (ISL). Many marry deaf people from other parts of Bali and use ISL instead of Kata Kolok; in recent years, eight deaf individuals from Bengkala have moved to other parts of Bali or Australia. Even if non-Bengkala spouses are deaf, the marriages are unlikely to produce deaf children, since individuals from outside Bengkala do not possess the recessive gene that causes deafness there. Since 2005, no deaf children have been born to parents who use Kata Kolok, so no new transmission of the language from deaf parents to deaf children has occurred. As the number of deaf people in Bengkala dwindles, so, too, will the communicative utility of Kata Kolok.

  BRAZIL

  * * *

  Rio, City of Hope

  Travel + Leisure, October 2011

  I went to Rio de Janeiro in 2010 for Travel + Leisure to report on how the city was changing in the lead-up to the World Cup and the Olympics. The central question was the shifting dynamic between the privileged and the impoverished. I addressed the subject in the published article, but conducted a deeper investigation that finds voice in this expanded version.

  * * *

  At a time when much of the world is in some form of decline, Rio de Janeiro is the view looking forward; it can feel like the capital of hope. The wave of change owes something to the booming Brazilian economy, something to the discovery of offshore oil, something to the energy brought to the city when it was chosen for the 2014 World Cup finals and the 2016 Olympics, and most of all to the dramatic reduction in crime. All of these changes are elaborately intertwined. Rio has not achieved the placidity of Zürich or Reykjavík, but just as every small joy feels like rapture after a depression, the improvement in Rio has an aura of fiesta that those tranquil towns will neve
r know.

  A great many cities sit beside the sea, but no other integrates the ocean as Rio does. You can imagine San Francisco located inland, or Boston minus its harbor, but to imagine Rio without the waterfront is like imagining New York without skyscrapers, Paris without cafés, L.A. without celebrities. The landscape has an almost Venetian urgency. “If you don’t go to the beach, you don’t know anything that’s happening,” said the artist Vik Muniz. “No matter if you have Twitter or a cell phone, you have to go to the beach every day from four o’clock until sundown.” Beaches are inherently democratic; when you socialize in public wearing only a bathing suit, money loses its copyright on glamour. Though the beaches in Rio remain considerably segregated by class, because the color of your skin and the brand of your bathing suit and sunglasses mark your status, much of what you show at the beach is your body, your skill at volleyball, your aura of cool. The social implications are significant. It takes effort to be a snob in Rio.

  The topography has dictated another social anomaly. People of privilege live in the flat seaside areas, which are not prone to landslides, in the Zona Sul (the Southern District), which encompasses the famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Those neighborhoods are punctuated by abrupt hills, which have been settled by the poor over the past century or so. Although home to nearly a quarter of Rio’s population, these steep districts, known as favelas, do not appear in detail on most maps of the city and historically have lacked utilities, garbage collection, closed sewers, and police protection. Even in the exclusive Zona Sul, you are never more than five minutes from a favela. Muniz said, “You’re sitting in Saint-Tropez surrounded by Mogadishu.”