1989 - Seeing Voices (21 page)

131. It will be evident that I have moved around somewhat between a ‘nativist’ (a Chomskian) and an ‘evolutionist’ (an Edelmanian) viewpoint. I must confess to being emotionally attracted to a Chomskian, or Cartesian, or Platonic idealism, to the notion of our language capacities, our powers of intellectual apprehension, all our perceptual powers, being innate—and, in the most general terms, to the notion of Design; but my observations of language acquisition, and of all developments in the individual or the species, tell me a much untidier story, tell me that nothing in nature (or animate, nature) is ‘designed’ in advance, and that everything evolves, or emerges, under the pressures of contingency and selection. Thus my general movement, as I have been writing, is from a nativist towards an evolutionist standpoint. Yet the study of Sign, and its acquisition in childhood, fascinatingly, seems to give strong support to
both
points of view, and perhaps the two are not incompatible.

To be deaf, to be born deaf, places one in an extraordinary situation; it exposes one to a range of linguistic possibilities, and hence to a range of intellectual and cultural possibilities, which the rest of us, as native speakers in a world of speech, can scarcely even begin to imagine. We are neither deprived nor challenged, linguistically, as the deaf are: we are never in danger of languagelessness, or severe linguistic incompetence; but nor do we discover, or create, a startingly new language.

The unspeakable experiment of King Psammetichos—who had two children raised by shepherds who never spoke to them, in order to see what (if any) language they would speak naturally—is repeated, potentially, with all children born deaf.
132

132. The experiment of King Psammetichos, a seventh-century B.C. Egyptian ruler, was described by Herodotus. Other monarchs, including Charles IV of France, James IV of Scotland, and the notorious Akbar Khan, have repeated the experiment. Ironically, in the case of Akbar Khan, the infants were given over, not to shepherds who were forbidden to speak, but to deaf nurses who did not speak (but who, unknown to Akbar, signed). When, at the age of twelve, these children were brought to Akbar’s court, none of them (it is true) spoke, but all of them signed. There was, it was clear, no inborn or ‘Adamic’ language, and if no language was used, no language was acquired; but if
any
language was used, even a signed language, this would become the language of the children.

A small number—perhaps 10 percent of these—are born of deaf parents, exposed to Sign from the start, and become native signers. The rest must live in an aural-oral world, neither biologically, nor linguistically, nor emotionally well-equipped to deal with them. Deafness as such is not the affliction; affliction enters with the breakdown of communication and language. If communication cannot be achieved, if the child is not exposed to good language and dialogue, we see all the mishaps Schlesinger describes—mishaps at once linguistic, intellectual, emotional, and cultural. These mishaps are imposed, to a larger or smaller degree, upon the majority of those born deaf: ‘most deaf children,’ as Schein remarks, ‘grow up like strangers in their own households.’
133

133. Schein, 1984, p. 131. Shanny Mow, in a brief autobiography excerpted by Leo Jacobs, describes this all-too-typical estrangement of a deaf child in his own home:

You are left out of the dinner table conversation. It is called mental isolation
.

While everyone else is talking and laughing, you are as far away as a lone Arab on a desert that stretches along every horizon…You thirst for connection. You suffocate inside but you cannot tell anyone of this to. You get the impression nobody understands or cares…You are not granted even the illusion of participation…

You are expected to spend fifteen years in the straitjacket of speech training and lip-reading…your parents never bother to put in an hour a day to learn sign language or some part of it. One hour of twenty-four that can change a life time for you (Jacobs, 1974, pp. 173-174
).

The
only
deaf children not liable to suffer such cruel estrangements even in their own households are those who are born of deaf (and signing) parents—such children are (in the words of a deaf friend with hearing parents) ‘another species.’ Deaf children of deaf parents can enjoy, from the start, a full communication and relation with their parents; they acquire fluent language as easily and automatically as hearing children do, and at the same crucial time (in the third year of life): their Sign has a precision and a richness no non-native signer can acquire. They are more likely, very early, to meet other deaf adults and deaf children, to enter fully into an understanding community. They grow up with a firm sense of confidence, and of personal and cultural identity—their lives have been organized, from the start, around ‘a different center’ (Padden and Humphries, 1988). Many of the ‘elite’ in the Deaf world are born of deaf parents, and sometimes, indeed, come from large, multi-generational deaf families—this was the case with all four student leaders of the Gallaudet revolt.

A different, and unique, position is occupied by the hearing children of deaf parents, who grow up with both Sign and speech as native languages, and may be equally at ease in both deaf and hearing worlds. They often become interpreters, and they are ideally suited for this, because they can interpret not only the language, but the culture, of one world to another.

Yet none of this has to happen. Although the dangers that threaten a deaf child are very great, they are, mercifully, entirely preventable. To be the parents of a deaf child, or of twins, or of a blind child, or of a prodigy, demands a special resilience and resourcefulness.
134

134. Hearing parents of deaf children face especially delicate and anguished issues of belonging and identity. Thus one such mother, writing to me of her own child who had been deafened at the age of five months by meningitis, wrote: ‘Does this mean that overnight he has suddenly become a stranger to us, that somehow he no longer
belongs
to us but to the deaf world? That he is now part of the deaf community, that we have no claim on him?’ This fear that their deaf child will become estranged from them, will be taken away from them by the deaf community, is one which a good many parents of deaf children express; and it is a fear which may move them to bind the child to themselves, and to deny him access, while he is young, to Sign and other deaf people. ‘While his care and nurture is in
our
hands,’ continues my correspondent, ‘I feel he needs access to
our
language, in the same way as he has access to
our
food,
our
foibles,
our
family history.’

There are two related issues here. One has to do with parents being able to ‘let go’ of their children: all parents must do this, but it may need to be done at an earlier age, in some ways, with a deaf child, so that he may start on his own, so-special development. The other issue has to do with the deaf community. A deaf child does not need to be ‘protected’ from the deaf community; the deaf community is not lying in wait to steal him from his parents. On the contrary, the deaf community is the greatest resource there is for a deaf child, and one which can be (with the parents’ cooperation) a liberating force, allowing the child to acquire language and develop in his own way. It requires a special generosity of spirit for parents to realize this for them to perceive their deaf child as he is, to unshackle him from their own wishes and needs, and to allow him to develop as a free and independent—though different—being. The deaf child needs a
double
identity. Allowing this allows mutual respect and love, whereas forbidding it is all too likely to lead to the estrangement of which Schein and Mow speak.

Many parents of the deaf feel powerless in the face of such a communication barrier with their child, and it is a tribute to the adaptability of both parents and child that this potentially devastating barrier can be overcome.

Finally, still too rarely, there are the deaf who fare well, at least in terms of realizing their innate capacities. Crucial to this is the acquisition of language at a ‘normal’ early age this first language can be Sign or speech (as we see with Charlotte and Alice), for it is
language
, rather than any particular language, that kindles linguistic competence and, with this, intellectual competence too. As the parents of deaf children have to be, in a sense, ‘super-parents,’ so deaf children themselves have to be, even more obviously, ‘super-children.’ Thus Charlotte is already, at six, a fluent reader, with a real and unforced passion for reading. She is already, at six, bilingual and bicultural—whereas most of us spend our whole lives in one language and one culture. Such differences can be positive and creative, can enrich human nature and culture. And this, if you will, is the other side of deafness—the special powers of visuality and Sign. The acquisition of Sign grammar occurs in much the same way, and at much the same age, as the grammar of speech—we may take it that the deep structure of both is identical. The propositional power of both is identical. The formal properties of both are identical, even though they involve, as Petitto and Bellugi say, different types of signals, different kinds of information, different sensory systems, different memory structures, and perhaps different neural structures.
135

135. Petitto and Bellugi, 1988.

The formal properties of Sign and speech are identical, and so too is their communicational intent. Yet are they, or can they be, in some way, deeply different?

Chomsky reminds us that Humboldt ‘introduced a further distinction between the form of a language and what he calls its ‘character’…[this latter being] determined by the way in which language is
used
, and thus to be distinguished from its syntactic and semantic structure, which are matters of form, not use.’ There is indeed a certain danger (as Humboldt pointed out) that in examining more and more deeply the form of a language, one may actually forget that it has a meaning, character, a use. Language is not just a formal device (though it is, indeed, the most marvelous of formal devices), but the most exact expression of our thoughts, our aspirations, our view of the world. The ‘character’ of a language, as Humboldt speaks of it, is of an essentially creative and cultural nature, has a generic character, is its ‘spirit,’ not just its ‘style.’ English, in this sense, has a different character from German, and Shakespeare’s language a different character from Goethe’s. The cultural or personal identify is different. But Sign differs from speech more than any spoken language from another. Could there here be a radically different ‘organic’ identity?

One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has a playful quality, a style, quite different from that of speech. Signers tend to improvise, to play with signs, to bring all their humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their signing, so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according to grammatical rules, but, irreducibly, the voice of the signer—a voice given a special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the body. One can have or imagine disembodied speech, but one cannot have disembodied Sign. The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are continually expressed in the act of signing.

Sign perhaps has a different origin from speech, since it arises from gesture, spontaneous emotional-motor representation.
136

136. We can, of course, only guess at the origins of language—speech or Sign or make hypotheses or inferences which cannot be directly proved or disproved. Speculation in the last century reached such peak proportions that the Paris Société de Linguistique, in 1866, finally banned the presentation of any further papers on the subject; but paleo-linguistics has become a science, and there is much evidence now that was not available a century ago—evidence which points to the pre-historical origin of language in signs. This, indeed, is the title of Stokoe’s 1974 paper, ‘Motor Signs as the First Form of Language’ (see also Hewes, 1974).

There are intriguing direct observations of gestural communication between (hearing) mothers and infants prior to speech (see Tronick, Brazelton, and Als, 1978)—and if ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, this provides a further suggestion that the earliest human language was gestural or motor.

And though Sign is fully formalized and grammaticized, it is highly iconic, it retains many traces of its representational origins.
Deaf people
, write Klima and Bellugi,
137

137. Klima and Bellugi, 1979, Introduction and Chapter 1.

—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.