by Oliver Sacks
And yet, perhaps, this is not so surprising. There is an old proverb that fish are the last to recognize water. And for signers, Sign is their medium and water, so familiar and natural to them, as to need no explanation. The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct. ‘The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity,’ Wittgenstein says. Thus it may take an outside view to show the native users of a language that their own utterances, which appear so simple and transparent to themselves, are, in fact, enormously complex and contain and conceal the vast apparatus of a true language. This is precisely what happened with Stokoe and the deaf—and it is put clearly by Louie Fant: 158
158. Fant, 1980.
Like most children of deaf parents, I grew up with no conscious awareness that ASL was a language. It was not until my mid-thirties that I was relieved of this misconception. My enlightenment came from people who were not native users of ASL—who had come into the field of deafness with no preconceived notions, and bound to no points of view regarding deaf people and their language. They looked at the signed language of the deaf with fresh eyes.
Fant goes on to describe how despite working at Gallaudet and getting to know Stokoe well (and even himself writing a sign language primer using some of Stokoe’s analysis), he still resisted the idea that it was a real language. When he left Gallaudet to become a founding member of the National Theater of the Deaf, in 1967, this attitude persisted among him and others—all productions were in signed English, because ASL was considered ‘bastardized English not fit for the stage.’ Once or twice Fant, and others, almost inadvertently used ASL in declaiming on stage, with electric effect, and this had a strange effect on them. ‘Somewhere in the recesses of my mind,’ Fant writes of this time, ‘was a growing awareness that Bill was right, and that what we called ‘real Sign Language’ was in fact ASL.’
But it was only in 1970, when Fant met Klima and Bellugi, who asked him innumerable questions about ‘his’ language, that the change occurred:
As the conversation proceeded, my attitude underwent a complete conversion. In her warm, winning way, she [Bellugi] made me realize how little I really knew about Sign Language, even though I had known it from childhood. Her praise for Bill Stokoe and his work made me wonder if I was missing something.
And then, finally, a few weeks later:
I became a convert. I ceased to resist the idea that ASL was a language, and submerged myself in studying it so that I could teach it as a language.
And yet—despite talk of ‘conversion’—deaf people have always known, intuitively, that Sign was a language. But perhaps it required a scientific confirmation before this knowledge could become conscious and explicit, and form the basis of a bold and new consciousness of their own language.
Artists (Pound reminds us) are the antennae of the race. And it was artists who first felt in themselves, and announced, the dawn of this new consciousness. Thus the first movement to stem from Stokoe’s work was not educational, not political, not social, but artistic. The National Theater of the Deaf (NTD) was founded in 1967, just two years after the publication of the Dictionary. But it was only in 1973, six years later, that the NTD commissioned, and performed, a play in true Sign; up to that point, their productions had merely been transliterations, in signed English, of English plays. (Although during the 1950’s and 1960’s, George Detmold, dean of Gallaudet College, produced a number of plays in which he urged the actors to move away from signed English and perform in ASL. 159)
159. ASL lends itself extremely well to artistic use and transformation—far more so than any form of manually coded or signed English—partly because it is an original language, and therefore a language for original creation, for thought; and partly because its iconic and spatial nature especially allows comic, dramatic, and aesthetic accentuation (the last section of Klima and Bellugi’s book is especially devoted to ‘The Heightened Use of Language’ in Sign). In ordinary discourse, however, few deaf people speak in pure ASL—most will bring in and incorporate expressions, signs, neologisms from signed English, as suits the needs of communication. Even though, in linguistic and neurological terms, ASL and signed English are wholly distinct, there is for practical purposes a continuum, from forms of signed English at one extreme, through various forms of ‘pidgin’ signed English (PSE), to pure or ‘deep’ ASL at the other.
Once the resistance had been broken, and the new consciousness established, there was no stopping deaf artists of all sorts. There arose Sign poetry, Sign wit, Sign song, Sign dance—unique Sign arts that could not be translated into speech. A bardic tradition arose, or re-arose, among the deaf, with Sign bards, Sign orators, Sign storytellers, Sign narrators, who served to transmit and disseminate the history and culture of the deaf, and, in so doing, raise the new cultural consciousness yet higher. The NTD traveled, and still travels, all over the world, not only introducing deaf art and culture to the hearing but reaffirming the deaf’s feeling of having a world community and culture.
Though art is art, and culture is culture, they may have an implicitly (if not an explicitly) political and educational function. Fant himself became a protagonist and teacher; his 1972 book Ameslan: An Introduction to American Sign Language was the first Sign primer on explicitly Stokoean lines; it was a force in assisting the return of signed language to education. In the early 1970’s the exclusive oralism of ninety-six years began to be reversed, and ‘total communication’ (the use of both signed and spoken language) was introduced (or reintroduced, as it had been common enough, in many countries, a hundred and fifty years before). 160
160. Teachers and others are now being encouraged to speak and sign simultaneously; this method (‘Sim Com’), it is hoped, can secure the advantages of both—in practice, though, it fails to do this. Speaking itself tends to be slowed down artificially, in order to allow the signs to be made, but even so, the signing suffers, tends to be poorly performed, and may in fact omit crucial signs—so much so that those for whom it is designed, the deaf, may find it unintelligible. It should be added that it is scarcely possible to sign ASL and speak simultaneously, because the languages are totally different: it is hardly more possible than speaking English and writing Chinese at the same time—indeed, it may be neurologically impossible.
This was not accomplished without great resistance. Schlesinger tells us that when she advocated the reintroduction of signed languages in education, she received warnings and threatening letters, and that when her book Sound and Sign appeared in 1972, it caused controversy and tended to be ‘wrapped in a plain brown wrapper as if unacceptable.’ And even now the conflict still rages unresolved, and though signed language is now used in schools, it is virtually always signed English and not Sign that is used.
Stokoe had said from the first that the deaf should be bilingual (and bicultural), should acquire the language of the dominant culture, but also and equally their own language, Sign. 161
161. But there has not yet been in the United States any official attempt to provide deaf children with a bilingual education—there have only been small pilot experiments (like that reported by Michael Strong in Strong, 1988). And yet, in contrast, as Robert Johnson observes, there has been a widespread and successful use of bilingual education in Venezuela, where this is a national policy and increasing numbers of deaf adults are being recruited as aides and teachers (Johnson, personal communication). Venezuelan schools have daycare centers where deaf children and infants are sent as early as they are diagnosed, to be exposed to deaf signing adults until they are old enough to go to nursery and grade schools, where they are instructed bilingually. A similar system has been set up in Uruguay. Both of these South American programs have already achieved notable success and hold out great promise for the future—they are, unfortunately, as yet virtually unknown to American and European educators (but see Johnson, Liddell, and Erting, 1989)
. The only other countries with bilingual programs for the deaf are Sweden and Denmark—where the native sign languages are officially recognized as ‘mother tongues’ of the deaf. All of these show very clearly that one can learn to read perfectly well without speaking and that ‘total communication’ is not a necessary intermediate between oral education and bilingual education.
But since Sign is still not used in schools, or in any institutions (except religious ones), it is still largely restricted, as seventy years ago, to a colloquial and demotic use. This is even the case at Gallaudet itself—indeed, it has been the university’s official policy since 1982 that all signing and interpretation in class be conducted in signed English—and this constituted an important contributing reason for the revolt.
The personal and the political are always combined, and here both are combined with the linguistic too. Barbara Kannapell brings this out when she traces the influence of Stokoe, of the new consciousness, on herself and how she became aware of herself as a deaf person with a special linguistic identity—‘my language is me’—and moved from this to seeing Sign as central to the communal identity of the deaf (‘To reject ASL is to reject the deaf person [for] ASL is a personal creation of deaf persons as a group it is the only thing we have that belongs to deaf people completely’). Moved by these personal and social considerations, Kannapell founded Deaf Pride, an organization dedicated to deaf consciousness-raising, in 1972.
Deaf depreciation, deaf deference, deaf passivity, and even deaf shame were all too common before the early 1970’s; one sees this, very clearly, in the 1970 novel by Joanne Greenberg, In This Sign—and it took Stokoe’s dictionary, and the legitimation of Sign by linguists, to allow the beginnings of a movement in the opposite direction, a movement toward deaf identity and deaf pride.
This was essential, but, of course, not the only factor in the deaf movement since 1960: there were many other factors of equal force, and all flowed together to produce the revolution of 1988. There was the mood of the sixties, with its special feeling for the poor, the disabled, the minorities—the civil rights movement, the political activism, the varied ‘pride’ and ‘liberation’ movements; all this was afoot at the same time that Sign was slowly, and against much resistance, being legitimated scientifically, and while the deaf were slowly collecting a sense of self-esteem and hope, and fighting against the negative images and feelings that had dogged them for a century. There was an increasing tolerance, generally, for cultural diversity, an increasing sense that peoples could be profoundly different, yet all be valuable and equal to one another; an increasing sense, specifically, that the deaf were a ‘people,’ and not merely a number of isolated, abnormal, disabled individuals; a movement from the medical or pathological view to an anthropological, sociological, or ethnic view. 162
162. The sociolinguist James Woodward is especially concerned with this (see Woodward, 1982). This increasing sense of cultural diversity, rather than a single fixed ‘norm,’ with ‘deviance’ to either side, goes back to a generous tradition of a century or more earlier; in particular to the viewpoint of Laurent Clerc (and this is another, even more fundamental reason why the students invoked his name, and felt that his was the spirit that guided the revolt).
Clerc’s teachings, until his death, had the effect of widening the nineteenth century view of ‘human nature,’ of introducing a relativistic and egalitarian sense of great natural range, not just a dichotomy of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ We speak of our nineteenth-century forebears as rigid, moralistic, repressive, censorious, but the tone of Clerc’s voice, and of those who listened to him, conveyed quite the opposite impression: that this was an age very hospitable to ‘the natural’—to the whole variety and range of natural proclivities—and not disposed (or at least less disposed than our own) to make moralizing or clinical judgments on what was ‘normal’ and what was ‘abnormal.’
This sense of the range of nature is apparent again and again in Clerc’s brief Autobiography (which is excerpted in Lane, 1984a). ‘Every creature, every work of God, is admirably made. What we find fault in its kind turns to our advantage without our knowing it.’ Or, again, ‘We can only thank God for the rich diversity of his creation, and hope that in the future world the reason for it will be explained.’
Clerc’s concept of ‘God,’ ‘creation,’ ‘nature,’—humble, appreciative, mild, unresentful—is perhaps rooted in his sense of himself, and other deaf people, as different but nonetheless complete beings. It is in great contrast to the half-terrible, half-Promethean fury of Alexander Graham Bell, who constantly sees deafness as a swindle and a privation and a tragedy, and is constantly concerned with ‘normalizing’ the deaf, ‘correcting’ God’s blunders, and, in general, ‘improving on’ nature. Clerc argues for cultural richness, tolerance, diversity. Bell argues for technology, for genetic engineering, hearing aids, telephones. The two types are wholly opposite but both, clearly, have their parts to play in the world.
Going along with this depathologizing was an increase in portrayals of deaf people in every medium, from documentaries to plays and novels—a portrayal increasingly sympathetic and imaginative. Changing social attitudes, and changing self-image, were both reflected in, and affected by, these: the image ceased to be that of the diffident and pathetic Mr. Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and became the audacious heroine of Children of a Lesser God; Sign was introduced on television, in such programs as ‘Sesame Street,’ and started to become a popular elective at some schools. The entire country became more aware of the previously invisible and inaudible deaf; and they too became more aware of themselves, of their increasing visibility and power in society. Deaf people, and those who studied them, started to look back into the past—to discover (or create) a deaf history, a deaf mythology, a deaf heritage. 163
163. A massive, illustrated Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America by Jack R. Gannon was published in 1981. Harlan Lane’s books, from 1976 onwards, not only presented the history of the deaf in stirring, dramatic terms, but were themselves ‘political’ events, serving to give the deaf an intense (perhaps partly mythical) sense of their own past and an urge to regain the best of the past in the future. Thus they not only recorded history, they helped to make it as well (just as Lane himself was not just a recorder, but an active participant, in the 1988 revolt).
Thus, within twenty years of Stokoe’s paper, new awareness, new motives, new forces, of all sorts were combining a new movement was afoot, a confrontation was in the making. The 1970’s saw the rise not only of Deaf Pride but of Deaf Power. Leaders arose among the previously passive deaf. A new vocabulary arose, with such words as ‘self-determination’ and ‘paternalism’ in it. The deaf, who had previously accepted characterizations of themselves as ‘disabled’ and ‘dependent’—for this is how they had been regarded by the hearing—now started to think of themselves as powerful, as an autonomous community. 164
164. So, at least, the matter seemed to outside observers—the deaf revolting against the label of ‘disabled.’ Those within the deaf community were inclined to put it differently, to assert that they had never seen themselves as disabled. Padden and Humphries are emphatic on this point:
’Disabled’ is a label that historically has not belonged to Deaf people. It suggests political self-representations and goals unfamiliar to the group. When Deaf people discuss their deafness, they use terms deeply related to their language, their past, and their community. Their enduring concerns have been the preservation of their language, policies for educating deaf children, and maintenance of their social and political organizations. The modern language of ‘access’ and ‘civil rights,’ as unfamiliar as it is to Deaf people, has been used by Deaf leaders because the public understands these concerns more readily than ones specific to the Deaf community (Padden and Humphries, 1988, p.44).
Sooner or later, it was clear, there would have to be a revolt, a striking political assertion of self-determination and independence, and
a once-and-for-all repudiation of paternalism.
The accusation that the Gallaudet authorities were ‘deaf in the mind’ implies no malevolence, but rather a misdirected paternalism, which, deaf people feel, is anything but benign—based as it is on pity and condescension, and on an implicit view of them as ‘incompetent,’ if not diseased. Special objection has been made to some of the doctors involved in Gallaudet’s affairs, who, it is felt, tend to see the deaf merely as having diseased ears and not as whole people adapted to another sensory mode. In general, it is felt this offensive benevolence hinges on a value judgment by the hearing, their saying: ‘We know what is best for you. Let us handle things,’ whether this is in response to the choice of language (allowing, or not allowing, Sign), or in judging capacities for education or jobs. It is still sometimes felt, or again felt—after the more spacious opportunities offered in the mid-nineteenth century—that deaf people should be printers, or work in the post office, do ‘humble’ jobs and not aspire to higher education. The deaf, in other words, felt they were being dictated to, that they were being treated as children. Bob Johnson told me a typical story:
