1989 - Seeing Voices (28 page)

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.

All sorts of changes, administrative, educational, social, psychological, are already beginning at Gallaudet. But what is clearest at this point is the much-altered bearing of its students, a bearing that conveys a new, wholly unself-conscious sense of pleasure and vindication, of confidence and dignity. This new sense of themselves represents a decisive break from the past, which could not have been imagined just a few months ago.

But has all been changed? Will there be a lasting ‘transformation of consciousness’? Will deaf people at Gallaudet, and the deaf community at large, indeed find the opportunities they seek? Will we, the hearing, allow them these opportunities? Allow them to be themselves, a unique culture in our mist, yet admit them as co-equals, to every sphere of activity? One hopes the events at Gallaudet will be but the beginning.

THE END

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HISTORY OF THE DEAF

The fullest history of deaf people, from their liberation in the 1750’s to the (deadly) Milan conference of 1880, is given in Harlan Lane's
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
.

Excerpts from autobiographies of the first literate deaf and their teachers, during this period, are to be found in Harlan Lane, ed.,

The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education
, translated by Franklin Philip.

A pleasant, informal history of the deaf, full of personal vignettes and fascinating illustrations, is provided by Jack R. Gannon in
Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America
.

Edward Gallaudet himself wrote a half-autobiographical history of Gallaudet College,
History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907
.

A remarkably informative and lengthy article, under the heading of "Deaf and Dumb," may be found in the "scholars' " (11
th
) edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
.

ISLANDS OF THE DEAF

An extremely vivid, poignant account of the unique Martha's Vineyard community is Nora Ellen Groce's
Everybody Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard
.

BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

David Wright's
Deafness
is the most beautiful account of acquired deafness known to me.

A more recent book by Lou Ann Walker,
A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family
, draws a powerful picture of life as a hearing child of deaf parents.

The Quiet Ear: Deafness in Literature
, compiled by Brian Grant, with a preface by Margaret Drabble, is an extremely readable and varied anthology of short pieces by or about deaf people.

A vivid account of a rich, creative life is
Lessons in Laughter
by the eminent deaf actor Bernard Bragg. Interestingly, this was not written (though Bragg, a Shakespearian actor, is intensely literate), but
signed
(for Sign, not English, is Bragg's first language) and then translated into English.

Another fascinating account of a full and creative life is
What's that Pig Outdoors
, by the book editor of the Chicago
Sun-Times
,

Henry Kisor. Kisor lost his hearing at three and a half, when he had already acquired speech and language-he does not sign, but lipreads and speaks. Kisor does not identify himself as culturally Deaf, and his life, unlike Bernard Bragg's, has been spent entirely in the hearing world.

THE COMMUNITY AND LANGUAGE OF THE DEAF

Demographic surveys are usually dull, but Jerome Schein is incapable of being dull.
The Deaf Population of the United States
, by Jerome D. Schein and Marcus T. Delk, Jr., provides a vivid crosssection of the deaf population in the United States fifteen years ago, at a time when major changes were just starting to occur. Also recommended are Schein's
Speaking the Language of Sign
and
At Home Among Strangers
.

It is interesting to compare and contrast the situation of the deaf and their Sign in Britain. A fine account is given by J.G.
Kyle
and B. WoIl, in
Sign Language: The Study of Deaf People and Their Language
.

A splendid overview of the deaf community is
Sign Language and the Deaf Community: Essays in Honor of William
C.
Stokoe
, edited by Charlotte Baker and Robbin Battison. There is not a single essay in this volume that is less than fascinating-and there is also an important and moving looking-back by Stokoe himself.

An extraordinary book-the more so because its authors are deaf, and can speak from within (as well as about) the deaf communityits organization, its aspirations, its images, its beliefs, its arts, its language, etc.-is
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries.

Also very accessible for the general reader and full of vivid interviews with members of the deaf community is Arden Neisser's
The Other Side of Silence: Sign Language and the Deaf Community in America
.

A real treasure for browsing (even if the volumes are a little too heavy to read in bed, and a little too costly to read in the bath) is the
Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness
, edited by John Van Cleve. One of the delights of this encyclopedia (as of all the best encyclopedias) is that one can open it anywhere and find illumination and enjoyment.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION OF THE DEAF

In the works of Jerome Bruner one can trace how a revolutionary psychology can in turn revolutionize education. Particularly remarkable in this context are Bruner's
Towards a Theory of Instruction
and his
Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language
.

An important "Bruneresque" study of the development and education of deaf children is provided by David Wood, Heather Wood,

Amanda Griffiths, and Ian Howarth in
Teaching and Talking with Deaf Children
.

Hilde Schlesinger's recent work is only to be found in the professionalliterature, which is not always readily available. But her earlier book is both vivid and accessible: Hilde S. Schlesinger and Kathryn P.

Meadow,
Sound and Sign: Childhood Deafness and Mental Health
.

Observation and psychoanalysis are powerfully combined in Dorothy Burlingham's
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Sighted and the Blind;
one wishes a similar study could be made of deaf children.

Daniel Stern also conjoins direct observation and analytic construction in
The Interpersonal World of the Infant
. Stern is particularly interesting on the development of a "verbal self."

GRAMMAR, LINGUISTICS, AND SIGN

The linguistic genius of our time is Noam Chomsky, who has written a dozen books on language since his revolutionary (1957)
Syntactic Structures
. I find the most vivid and readable are his 1967

Beckman Lectures, reprinted as
Language and Mind
.

The central figure in Sign linguistics, since 1970, has been Ursula Bellugi. None of her work is exactly popular reading, but one can glimpse fascinating vistas and dip with much pleasure into the encyclopedic
The Signs of Language
by Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi.

Bellugi and her colleagues have also been the foremost investigators of the neural basis of Sign; here too one may gain a sense of the fascinations of the subject in Howard Poizner, Edward S.

Klima, and Ursula Bellugi,
What the Hands Reveal about the Brain
.

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE

Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown's
Words and Things
.

Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg's
Biological Foundations of Language
.

The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L.S. Vygotsky's
Thought and Language
, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Vygotsky has been described-not unjustly-as "the Mozart of psychology."

A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church's
Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition
, a book one goes back to again and again.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Though he may (or may not) be dated, there is great interest in all the works of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, and his incessant pondering on "primitive" language and thought: his first book,
How Natives Think
, originally published in 1910, gives the flavor of him well.

Clifford Geertz's
The Interpretation of Cultures
has to be by one's side the moment one thinks about "culture"—and it is a crucial corrective to primitive, romantic thoughts about pure and unadulterated, uncultivated human nature.

But, equally, one has to read Rousseau-to read him again in the light of the deaf and their language: I find his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
the richest, the most balanced, of his works.

WILD AND ISOLATED HUMAN BEINGS

Unique views of what human beings are like if deprived of their normal language and culture are provided by these rare and fearful, but crucially important human phenomena (each of which, Lord Monboddo says, is more important than the discovery of 30,000 stars). Thus, not accidentally, Harlan Lane's first book was
The Wild Boy of Aveyron
.

Anselm von Feuerbach's 1832 account of Kaspar Hauser is one of the most amazing psychological documents of the nineteenth century.

In English, it was published as
Caspar Hauser
.

It is again more than coincidental that Werner Herzog conceived and directed not only a very powerful film of Kaspar Hauser, but also a film on the deaf and the blind,
Land of Darkness and Silence
.

The deepest contemporary pondering on "the soul murder" of Kaspar Hauser is to be found in a brilliant psychoanalytical essay by Leonard Shengold, in
Halo in the Sky: Observations on Anality and Defense
.

It is well worth looking at Susan Curtiss's minutely detailed study of a "wild child" found in California in 1970,
Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day "Wild Child
. "

Finally, an enthralling and minutely-detailed account of a modernday Massieu, a deaf man who reached adulthood with no language of any sort, but later acquired language, and how his life and mind changed with this, has been provided by Susan Schaller in
A Man without Words
.

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