1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  One aspect of this is the so-called diglossia of the deaf. Thus a group of deaf people, at Gallaudet or elsewhere, converse in Sign among themselves; but if a hearing person should enter, they at once switch to signed English (or whatever) for a time, returning to Sign as soon as he is gone. ASL is often treated as an intimate and highly personal possession, to be shielded from intrusive or foreign eyes. Barbara Kannapell has gone so far as to suggest that if we all learned Sign, this would destroy the deaf world:

  ASL has a unifying function, since deaf people are unified by their common language. But the use of ASL simultaneously separates deaf people from the hearing world. So the two functions are different perspectives on the same reality—one from inside the group which is unified, and the other from outside. The group is separated from the hearing world. This separatist function is a protection for deaf people. For example, we can talk about anything we want, right in the middle of a crowd of hearing people. They are not supposed to understand us.

  It is important to understand that ASL is the only thing we have that belongs to deaf people completely. It is the only thing that has grown out of the deaf group. Maybe we are afraid to share our language with hearing people. Maybe our group identity will disappear once hearing people know ASL (Kannapell, 1980, p. 112).

  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. 142

  142. Even those teachers who sign tend, however, to use a form of signed English rather than ASL. Except in the mathematical faculty, where a majority of the teachers are deaf, only a minority of the faculty now at Gallaudet is deaf—whereas in Edward Gallaudet’s day a majority were deaf. This, alas, is still the case generally with regard to the education of the deaf. There are very few deaf teachers of the deaf; and ASL, for the most part, is either not known to, or not used by, hearing teachers.

  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. 143

  143. Over and above the general disadvantagedness of the deaf (not through their disability, but through our discrimination), there are all sorts of specific problems which arise from their use of a signed language—but these are only problems to the extent that we make them so. It is difficult for a deaf person, for example, to get adequate medical or legal care; there are a score of signing attorneys in the United States, but almost no signing physicians at all (and, as yet, very few paramedics or nurses who sign). There are scarcely any adequate emergency facilities for the deaf. If a deaf person becomes seriously ill, it is crucial to immobilize only one arm with IVs; to immobilize both arms may render him unable to talk. Similarly, it is often not realized that to handcuff a deaf signer is equivalent to gagging him.

  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. 144

  144. Although the deaf are sometimes supposed to be silent, as well as to inhabit a world of silence, this may not be the case. They can, if they wish to, yell very loudly, and may do this to arouse the attention of others. If they speak, they may speak very loudly, and with very poor modulation, since they cannot monitor their own voices by ear. Finally, they may have unconscious and often very energetic vocalizations of various sorts—accidental or inadvertent movements of the vocal apparatus, neither intended nor monitored, tending to accompany emotion, exercise, and excited communication.

  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.’ 145

  145. This resentment of ‘paternalism’ (or ‘mommyism’) is very evident in the special edition of the students’ newspaper (The Buff and Blue) published on March 9, in which there is a poem entitled ‘Dear Mom.’ This starts:

  Poor mommy Bassett-Spilman

  How her children do rebel,

  If only they would listen

  To the story she would tell

  —and continues in this vein for thirteen verses. (Spilman had appeared on television, pleading for Zinser, saying, ‘Trust us—she will not disappoint you.’) Copies of this poem had been reproduced by the thousand—one could see them fluttering all over campus.

  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 if 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-saturated 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. This 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.

  When Clerc founded the American Asylum at Hartford with Thomas Gallaudet in 1817, he not only introduced Sign as the medium of all deaf schooling in the United States but also introduced a remarkable school system—one that has no exact parallel in the speaking world. Other residential schools for the deaf soon opened throughout the country, all using the Sign that had evolved at Hartford. Virtually all the teachers in these schools were educated at Hartford, and most had met the charismatic Clerc. They contributed their own indigenous signs and later spread an increasingly polished and generalized ASL in many parts of the country, a
nd the standards and aspirations of the deaf continually rose.

  The unique pattern of transmission of deaf culture relates equally to the deaf’s language (Sign) and to their schools. These schools acted as foci for the deaf community, passing down deaf history and culture from one generation to the next. Their influence went well beyond the classroom: commonly, deaf communities would spring up around the schools, and graduates would often remain close to the school, or even take jobs working in the school. And crucially, most of these schools for the deaf were residential schools, as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries point out: 146

  146. Padden and Humphries, 1988, p. 6.

  The most significant aspect of residential life is the dormitory. In the dormitories, away from the structured control of the classroom, deaf children are introduced to the social life of deaf people. In the informal dormitory environment, children not only learn sign language but the content of the culture. In this way, the schools become hubs of the communities that surround them, preserving for the next generation the culture of earlier generations…This unique pattern of transmission lies at the heart of the culture. 147

  147. Such considerations should be taken into account in relation to the current controversies about ‘special’ schools or ‘mainstreaming.’ Mainstreaming—educating deaf children with the non-deaf—has the advantage of introducing the deaf to others, the world-at-large (at least, this is the supposition); but it may also introduce an isolation of its own—and serve to cut the deaf off from their own language and culture. There is much pressure, in the United States, Canada, England, and elsewhere at this time, to shut down residential and other special schools for the deaf. Sometimes this is done under the aegis of civil rights for the handicapped, giving them the right to ‘equal access’ or to the ‘least restrictive’ educational environment. But the deaf—at least the profoundly and prelingually deaf, whose native and communal language is Sign—are in a very special, indeed unique, category. They cannot be compared with any other group of pupils. The deaf do not regard themselves as handicapped, but as a linguistic and cultural minority, who have the need, and indeed the right, to be together, to go to school together, to learn in a language which is accessible to them, and to live in the company and community of others of their kind.