by Oliver Sacks
It’s been my impression, after having been here for several years, that the Gallaudet faculty and staff treat students as pets. One student, for example, went to the Outreach office; they had announced there would be an opportunity to practice interviewing for jobs. The idea was to sign up for a genuine interview and learn how to do it. So he went and put his name on a list. The next day a woman from the Outreach office called and told him she had set up the interview, had found an interpreter, had set up the time, had arranged for a car to take him…and she couldn’t understand why he got mad at her. He told her, ‘The reason I was doing this was so that I could learn how to call the person, and learn how to get the car, and learn how to get the interpreter, and you’re doing it for me. That’s not what I want here.’ That’s the meat of the issue.
Far from being childlike or incompetent, as they were ‘supposed’ to be (and so often they supposed themselves to be), the students at Gallaudet showed high competence in managing the March revolt. This impressed me especially when I wandered into the communications room, the nerve-center of Gallaudet during the strike, with its central office filled with TTY-equipped telephones. 165
165. It should not be thought that even the most avid signer is against other modes of communication when necessary. Life for deaf people has been altered immensely by various technical devices in the past twenty years, such as closed captioned TV, and teletypewriters (TTY; now TDD, or telecommunication devices for the deaf)—devices that would have delighted Alexander Graham Bell (who had originally invented the telephone, partly, as an aid for the deaf). The 1988 strike at Gallaudet could hardly have got going without such devices, which the students exploited brilliantly.
And yet TTYs have a negative side, too. Before they were widely available, fifteen years ago, deaf people went to great lengths to meet each other—they would constantly visit each other’s homes, and would go regularly to their local deaf club. These were the only chances to talk with other deaf people; this constant visiting or meeting at clubs formed vital links which bound the deaf community into a close physical whole. Now, with TTYs (in Japan, faxes are used), there is much less actual visiting among the deaf; deaf clubs are starting to be deserted and empty; and a new, worrying tenuity has set in. It may be that TTYs (and closed captions or signed programs on television) give deaf people the sense of being together in an electronic village—but an electronic village is not like a real one, and the downfall of visiting and going to clubs is not readily reversed.
Here the deaf students contacted the press and television—invited them in, gave interviews, compiled news, issued press releases, round the clock—masterfully; here they raised funds for a ‘Deaf Prez Now’ campaign; here they solicited, successfully, support from Congress, presidential candidates, union leaders. They gained the world’s ear, at this extraordinary time, when they needed it.
Even the administration listened—so that after four days of seeing the students as foolish and rebellious children who needed to be brought into line, Dr. Zinser was forced to pause, to listen, to reexamine her own long-held assumptions, to see things in a new light—and, finally, to resign. She did so in terms that were moving and seemed genuine, saying that neither she nor the board had anticipated the fervor and commitment of the protestors, or that their protest was the leading edge of a burgeoning national movement for deaf rights. ‘I have responded to this extraordinary social movement of deaf people,’ she said as she tendered her resignation on the night of March 10 and spoke of coming to see this as ‘a very special moment in time,’ one that was ‘unique, a civil rights moment in history for deaf people.’
Friday, March 11: The mood on campus is completely transformed. A battle has been won. There is elation. More battles have to be fought. Placards with the students’ four demands have been replaced with placards saying, ‘3’12, ’ because the resignation of Dr. Zinser only goes halfway toward meeting the first demand, that there be a deaf president immediately. But there is also a gentleness that is new, the tension and anger of Thursday have gone, along with the possibility of a drawn-out, humiliating defeat. A largeness of spirit is everywhere apparent—released now, I partly feel, by the grace and the words with which Zinser resigned, words in which she aligned herself with, and wished the best for, what she called an ‘extraordinary social movement.’
Support is coming in from every quarter: three hundred deaf students from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf arrive, elated and exhausted, after a fifteen-hour bus ride from Rochester, New York. Deaf schools throughout the country are closed in total support. Deaf people flood in from every state—I see signs from Iowa and Alabama, from Canada, from South America, as well as from Europe, even from New Zealand. Events at Gallaudet have dominated the national press for forty-eight hours. Virtually every car going past Gallaudet honks now, and the street are filled with supporters as the time for the march on the Capitol comes near. And yet, for all the honking, the speeches, the banners, the pickets, an extraordinary atmosphere of quietness and dignity prevails.
Noon: There are now about 2,500 people, a thousand students from Gallaudet and the rest supporters, as we start on a slow march to the Capitol. As we walk a wonderful sense of quietness grows, which puzzles me. It is not wholly physical (indeed, there is rather a lot of noise in a way—the ear-splitting yells of the deaf, as a start), and I decide it is, rather, the quietness of a moral drama. The sense of history in the air gives it this strange quietness.
Slowly, for there are children, babes-in-arms, and some physically disabled among us (some deaf-blind, some ataxic, and some on crutches)—slowly, and with a mixed sense of resolve and festivity, we walk to the Capitol, and there, in the clear March sun that has shone the entire week, we unfurl banners and raise pickets. One great banner says WE STILL HAVE A DREAM, and another, with the individual letters carried by fourteen people, simply says: HELP US CONGRESS.
We are packed together, but there is no sense of a crowd, rather of an extraordinary camaraderie. Just before the speeches start, I find myself hugged—I think it must be someone I know, but it is a student bearing a sign ALABAMA, who hugs me, punches my shoulder, smiles, as a comrade. We are strangers, but yet, at this special moment, we are comrades.
There are many speeches—from Greg Hlibok, from some of the faculty, from congressmen and senators. I listen for a while:
It is an irony [says one, a professor at Gallaudet] that Gallaudet has never had a deaf chief executive officer. Virtually every black college has a black president, testimony that black people are leading themselves. Virtually every women’s college has a woman as president, as testimony that women are capable of leading themselves. It’s long past time that Gallaudet had a deaf president as testimony that deaf people are leading themselves.
I let my attention wander, taking in the scene as a whole: thousands of people, each intensely individual, but bound and united with a single sentiment. After the speeches, there is a break of an hour, during which a number of people go in to see congressmen. But most of the group, who have brought packed lunches in on their backs, now sit and eat and talk, or rather sign, in the great plaza before the Capitol—and this, for me, as for all those who have come or chanced to see it, is one of the most wonderful scenes of all. For here are a thousand or more people signing freely, in a public place—not privately, at home, or in the enclosure of Gallaudet—but openly and un-self-consciously, and beautifully, before the Capitol.
The press has reported all the speeches, but missed what is surely equally significant. They failed to give the watching world an actual vision of the fullness and vividness, the unmedical life, of the deaf. And once more, as I wander among the huge throng of signers, as they chat over sandwiches and sodas before the Capitol, I find myself remembering the words of a deaf student at the California School for the Deaf, who had signed on television:
We are a unique people, with our own culture, our own language—American Sign Language, which has just recently been recog
nized as a language in itself—and that sets us apart from hearing people.
I walk back from the Capitol with Bob Johnson. I myself tend to be apolitical and have difficulty even comprehending the vocabulary of politics. Bob, a pioneer Sign linguist, who has taught and researched at Gallaudet for years, says as we walk back:
It’s really remarkable, because in all my experience I’ve seen deaf people be passive and accept the kind of treatment that hearing people give them. I’ve seen them willing, or seem to be willing, to be ‘clients,’ when in fact they should be controlling things…now all at once there’s been a transformation in the consciousness of what it means to be a deaf person in the world, to take responsibility for things. The illusion that deaf people are powerless—all at once, now, that illusion has gone, and that means the whole nature of things can change for them now. I’m very optimistic and extremely enthusiastic about what I’m going to see over the next few years.
‘I don’t quite understand what you mean by ‘clients,’ ‘I say.
You know Tim Rams [Bob explains]—the one you saw at the barricades this morning, whose signing you so admired as pure and passionate—well, he summed up in two words what this transformation is all about. He said, ‘It’s very simple. No deaf president, no university,’ and then he shrugged his shoulders, looked at the TV camera, and that was his whole statement. That was the first time deaf people ever realized that a colonial client-industry like this can’t exist without the client. It’s a billion-dollar industry for hearing people. If deaf people don’t participate, the industry is gone.
Saturday has a delightful, holiday air about it—it is a day off (some of the students have been working virtually nonstop from the first demonstration on Sunday evening), and a day for cookouts on the campus. But even here the issues are not forgotten. The very names of the foods have a satirical edge: the choice lies between ‘Spilman dogs’ and ‘Board burgers.’ The campus is festive now that students and schoolchildren from a score of other states have come in (a little deaf black girl from Arkansas, seeing all the signers around her, says in Sign, ‘It’s like a family to me today’). There has also been an influx of deaf artists from all over, some coming to document and celebrate this unique event in the history of the deaf.
Greg Hlibok is relaxed, but very vigilant: ‘We feel that we are in control. We are taking things easy. We don’t want to go too far.’ Two days earlier, Zinser was threatening to ‘take control.’ What one sees today is self-control, that quiet consciousness and confidence that comes from an inner strength and certainty.
Sunday evening, March 13: The board met today, for nine hours. There were nine hours of tension, waiting…no one knowing what was to come. Then the door opened, and Philip Bravin, one of the four deaf board members and known to all the deaf students, appeared. His appearance—and not Spilman’s—already told the story, before he made his revelations in Sign. He was speaking now, he signed, as chairman of the board, for Spilman had resigned. And his first task now, with the board behind him, was the happy one of announcing that King Jordan had been elected the new president.
King Jordan, deafened at the age of twenty-one, has been at Gallaudet for fifteen years; he is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, a popular, modest, and unusually sane man, who at first supported Zinser when she was selected. 166
166. Although the choice of King Jordan delighted almost everyone, one faction saw his election as a compromise (since he was postlingually deaf), and supported instead Harvey Corson, superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf, and the third finalist, who is both prelingually deaf and a native signer.
Greatly moved, Jordan, in simultaneous Sign and speech, says:
I am thrilled to accept the invitation of the board of trustees to become the president of Gallaudet University. This is a historic moment for deaf people around the world. This week we can truly say that we together, united, have overcome our reluctance to stand for our rights. The world has watched the deaf community come of age. We will no longer accept limits on what we can achieve. The highest praise goes to the students of Gallaudet for showing us exactly even now how one can seize an idea with such force that it becomes a reality.
With this, the dam bursts, and jubilation bursts out everywhere. As everyone returns to Gallaudet for a final, triumphal meeting, Jordan says, ‘They know now that the cap on what they can achieve has been lifted. We know that deaf people can do anything hearing people can except hear.’ And Hlibok, hugging Jordan, adds, ‘We have climbed to the top of the mountain, and we have climbed together.’
Monday, March 14: Gallaudet looks normal on the surface. The barricades have been taken down, the campus is open. The ‘uprising’ has lasted exactly one week—from last Sunday evening, March 6, when Dr. Zinser was forced on an unwilling university, to the happy resolution last night, that utterly different Sunday evening, when all was changed.
‘It took seven days to create the world, it took us seven days to change it’—this was the joke of the students, flashed in Sign from one end of the campus to another. And with this feeling they took their spring break, going back to their families throughout the country, carrying the euphoric news and mood with them.
But objective change, historical change, does not happen in a week, even though its first prerequisite, ‘the transformation of consciousness,’ may happen, as it did, in a day. ‘Many of the students,’ Bob Johnson told me, ‘don’t realize the extent and the time that are going to be involved in changing, though they do have a sense now of their strength and power…The structure of oppression is so deeply engrained.’
And yet there are beginnings. There is a new ‘image’ and a new movement, not merely at Gallaudet but throughout the deaf world. News reports, especially on television, have made the deaf articulate and visible across the entire nation. But the profoundest effect, of course, has been on the deaf themselves. It has welded them into a community, a worldwide community, as never before. 167
167. Though the level of political and public awareness in Europe may not yet match that in the United States, there are other ways in which the European deaf communities are more advanced. European signers are far more experienced, and far more skilled, than their American counterparts in establishing communication with deaf people from other countries—and this is the case not only between individuals, but at meetings where people with a dozen different sign languages may come together. There is an artificial, invented system of gestures and signs called Gestuno, on the analogy of Ido or Esperanto; but the real mode of communication is increasingly the so-called International Sign Language, which draws upon the vocabularies and patterns of everyone present, and is, so to speak, continually improvised and enriched between them. ISL has been evolving, becoming richer, more formalized, more language-like for three decades—although it is still, in essence, a contact language, a lingua franca. It should be stressed that such ‘inter-lingual’ communication between the deaf, which can develop with remarkable rapidity and sophistication—far beyond anything which can occur with speakers of different tongues—is rather mysterious, and is a subject of intense investigation at this time.
Not only do European deaf people tend to travel a great deal—for they can overcome language barriers much more easily than the hearing do—they often marry deaf people from other countries, and thus much inter-lingual migration takes place. It would be improbable and difficult for a Welshman, say, to settle in Finland, or vice versa; but such migrations (at least within Europe) are not all that uncommon among deaf people. For the deaf community is a supranational one, not unlike the world community of Jews, or other ethnic and cultural groups. We may, in fact, be seeing the beginnings of a pan-European deaf community—a community which may well spread beyond Europe, because the deaf community spans the entire world.
This, indeed, became very evident at a remarkable international festival and conference of deaf people, the Deaf Way, held in July 1989 in Washington, D.C. This was attended by more
than 5,000 deaf people, coming from more than eighty countries across the world. As one entered the vast lobby of the conference hotel, one could see dozens of different sign languages being used; yet, by the end of a week, communication among different nationalities was relatively easy—not the Babel which would surely have resulted with dozens of spoken languages. There were eighteen national theaters of the deaf—one could, if one wished, see Hamlet in Italian Sign, Oedipus in Russian Sign, or all sorts of new Sign plays in a dozen and a half different sign languages. An International Deaf Club was formed, and one saw the beginnings, or the emergence, of a global deaf community.
There has already been a deep impact, if only symbolic, upon deaf children. One of King Jordan’s first acts, when the college reconvened after spring break, was to visit the grade school at Gallaudet and talk to the children there, something no president had ever done before. Such concern has to affect their perception of what they can become. (Deaf children sometimes think they will ‘turn into’ hearing adults, or else be feeble, put-upon creatures if they do not.) Charlotte, in Albany, watched the events at Gallaudet on television with great excitement, donned a ‘Deaf Power’ T–shirt, and practiced a ‘Deaf Power’ salute. And two months after the revolt at Gallaudet I found myself attending the annual graduation at the Lexington School for the Deaf, which has been a stronghold of oral education since the 1860’s. Greg Hlibok, an alumnus, had been invited as the guest speaker (signer); Philip Bravin was also invited; and all the commencement speeches, for the first time in one hundred and twenty years, were given in Sign. None of this would have been conceivable without the Gallaudet revolt.
