Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (57 page)

The sea ice that impinged on our trip has become even more abundant as glaciers continue to break up, making it increasingly difficult even for scientists to reach their research stations. Ice blockages are exacerbated by the fierce wind that results from the depletion of polar ozone, the increase of greenhouse gases, and the temperature differential caused as the tropics warm faster than Antarctica. Those winds
drive relatively warmer water up under glaciers, causing them to melt. Structural characteristics of certain glaciers of West Antarctica render them particularly vulnerable; degeneration of the West Antarctic ice sheet will likely raise sea levels by at least four feet in the near future, a process NASA describes as “unstoppable.” Meanwhile the Totten Glacier in East Antarctica is taking on warm water through two gateways. The glacier holds back land ice three-quarters the size of Texas; if it melts, sea levels could rise by a further eleven feet.

On March 24, 2015, a record-high recorded temperature of 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit was logged at Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. New varieties of fungi are cropping up in Antarctica, buoyed by such warmer temperatures; the number of fungal varietals could be up by a quarter by the end of the twenty-first century. Such fungi could support an onslaught of invasive species. Warmer weather has made Antarctica an attractive destination for king crabs, which may pose significant risk to other sea animals that lack defenses against them. Melting glaciers deposit iron in the water, which is good for phytoplankton, which is in turn good for penguins, but which also significantly disrupts the ecosystem.

The ban on polar mining established by the Antarctic Treaty expires in 2048. The Chinese have already built four research stations on the frozen continent and are working on a fifth. China is harvesting vast quantities of krill from Antarctic waters. Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, said, “The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share.” China has recently signed a five-year accord with Australia that permits vessels to refuel before continuing south; that pact will enable the Chinese to harvest sea life, exploit the continent’s abundant oil and mineral resources, and obtain fresh water from icebergs. Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said, “China is playing a long game in Antarctica,” adding that the wish to initiate mining operations there has been broadcast “loud and clear to domestic audiences.”

Far from the Tree
, 2012

Nicholas Evans, an Australian linguist I met in 2006 when we were on a shared fellowship program, told me about a village in Bali where a hereditary strain of deafness had led to the development of a deaf-normative culture, and I had long wanted to visit. After the frustrations of our Antarctica trip, John and I were pleased to stop in Bali on the way home so that I could pursue this research.

When I described Bengkala as an idyll in
Far from the Tree
, some readers supposed I was enthusing about the primitive lives of noble savages. I would never want to gloss over the struggles of people in villages such as this one. It is utopian only from a disability-rights perspective. Deaf people the world over experience social exclusion; a society in which everyone can sign responds to a common dream of shared fluency even if that idyll is circumscribed by the toil of subsistence farming in an impoverished locale.

I
n the small village of Bengkala in northern Bali, a congenital form of deafness has persisted for some 250 years; at any time, it affects about 2 percent of the population. Everyone in Bengkala has grown up with deaf people and knows the unique sign language used in the village, so the gap between the experience of hearing and deaf people is narrower than perhaps anywhere else in the world. I found that
where deafness is commonplace, it is not much of a handicap. Deaf and hearing people marry each other freely, and people are essentially as happy with a deaf child as with a hearing one.

Bengkala is also known as Desa Kolok, or Deaf Village. When I went in 2008, forty-six of the village’s two thousand residents were deaf. I met hearing parents with deaf children, deaf parents with hearing children, deaf families with deaf parents and children, deaf or hearing parents with a mix of deaf and hearing children. It’s a poor village, and the general education level is low, but it has been even lower among the deaf. The only education for deaf people supplied by the government was in a signed version of Indonesian, and the only school for the deaf in Bali was in the capital, Denpasar. Signed Indonesian uses an aural grammar to dictate a sequence of signs; people whose grammar is primarily visual find it difficult to learn. Kanta, a hearing teacher in the village, introduced a program in 2007 to educate the deaf of Bengkala in their own sign language, Kata Kolok; the first deaf class had pupils from ages seven to fourteen because none had had any previous formal education. They were learning fingerspelling for Balinese words and were also working on numeracy.

The life of villages in northern Bali is based on a clan system. The deaf can both participate in and transcend their clans; for birthdays, for example, they invite their own clan as well as the deaf alliance in the village, while hearing people would not invite anyone outside their clan. The deaf have certain traditional jobs. They bury the dead and serve as the police, though there is almost no crime; they repair pipes in the often-troubled water system. Most are also farmers, planting cassava, taro, and elephant grass, which is used to feed cows. Bengkala has a traditional chief who presides over religious ceremonies; an administrative chief chosen by the central Balinese government to oversee government functions; and a deaf chief, traditionally the oldest deaf person.

I arrived in Bengkala with the Balinese linguist I Gede Marsaja, born in a neighboring village, who has studied Kata Kolok in depth. We climbed into a canyon where a river rushed under a two-hundred-foot rock wall. Several deaf villagers were waiting for us by the water, where they farm rambutans. Over the next half hour, the rest of Bengkala’s
deaf arrived. I sat on a red blanket at one end of a large tarp, and the deaf arranged themselves around the tarp’s edge. People were signing to me, confident that I could understand. Gede translated and Kanta provided further assistance. I quickly picked up a few signs, and when I used them, the entire group broke out in smiles. They seemed to have multiple levels and kinds of signing, because when they were signing to me, they were like a bunch of mimes and I could follow their narratives clearly, but when they were signing to one another, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all, and when they were signing to Gede, they were somewhere in between. Some of the hearing people in the village sign better than others, and while Kata Kolok has an exact grammar, purely iconic signs can be strung along without grammatical overlay for people who are not fluent.

The Kata Kolok sign for
sad
is the index and middle fingers placed at the inside corners of the eyes, then drawn down like tears. The sign for
father
is an index finger laid across the upper lip to suggest a mustache; the sign for
mother
is an upward-facing open hand at chest level supporting an imaginary breast. The sign for
deaf
is the index finger inserted into the ear and rotated; the sign for
hearing
is the whole hand held closed beside the ear and then opened while it is moved away from the head, sort of like an explosion coming out of the skull. In Kata Kolok, positive words usually involve pointing upward, while negative ones involve pointing downward; one villager who had traveled told the others that the raised third finger is a bad word in the West, so they flipped the sign and now use a third finger pointing down to indicate
horrendous
. The vocabulary is constantly evolving, while the grammar is fairly static. This language probably took on rules, as many signed languages do, over decades; second-generation language is always more sophisticated and ordered than first-generation.

Local hearing farmers do not have an enormous vocabulary, and neither does this sign language, in which about a thousand signs have been identified by scholars, though deaf people clearly know more signs than that and can combine them to achieve additional meanings. For Western members of the educated classes, intimacy usually
resides in mutual knowledge, and that knowledge is advanced when language unlocks the secrets of the other mind. But some people are less given to articulation: people for whom the self is expressed in the preparation of food and in the ministrations of erotic passion and in shared labor in the field. For such people the meaning embedded in words is secondary, an adjunct to love rather than its method. We had come into a society in which language was not the necessary precondition of familiarity for the hearing or the deaf, nor the primary medium through which to understand and negotiate the world.

When we finished lunch, fourteen men put on sarongs, and two women donned fancy, lacy nylon blouses. Like most deaf people, they could feel the vibrations of the drum, and their dance included movements that seemed to flow from their mimetic language—you could tell when they were dancing about being on a boat, and when they were smoking, and when they were running away. Each woman individually would invite one of the men to dance. One invited me, and I went for it; she hung flowers around my neck as we danced. Then the women remarked that they were all getting hot and tired, as it was incredibly humid, so they stopped. The men offered to show us the martial arts they use as the village security agents. I was interested in the way they mixed signing and the deployment of their hands and feet as weapons. One young man, Suarayasa, resisted joining in the theatrics until he was shamed into it by his mother, and the whole time he was demonstrating his abilities, he was also signing repeatedly, “Look at me!” It was fierce but playful.

The women gave everyone a Sprite, then the men proposed a dip in the river, so we walked down through the elephant grass and hot peppers and went skinny-dipping. The rock wall rose steep above us, and long vines hung down, and the deaf men swung on them. I did somersaults in the water, others did headstands, and we set bait to fish for eels. Some would swim underwater until they were right beside me and then shoot up out of the current. They continued to sign to me, and the communication was exuberant, even joyful. It seemed possible, in that sunset light, to contemplate this as an idyll for the fluent communication it entailed, despite the poverty and disability of the people whom we were visiting.

The next day, Kanta translated from Kata Kolok into Balinese, occasionally addressing me in his limited English; Gede translated Kanta’s Balinese into English, occasionally signing in his limited Kata Kolok; and the deaf Bengkala villagers addressed me directly in animated sign. Communication in this linguistic jumble was established through sheer force of collective will. It was hard to ascertain even the numbers of deaf and hearing people in individual families because everyone had different ideas about what was meant by family: All the male relatives? All the adults? All the people sharing a kitchen? What one could ask was limited because many grammatical structures couldn’t be translated. For example, Kata Kolok has no conditional tense nor any sign for
why
; the language has no categorical words (such as
animals
or the abstract notion of
name
), only specific ones (such as
cow
or someone’s actual name).

We first talked to the family of Pinda, who currently had two wives and had divorced two others. He was father to two living children, a daughter by Ni Md Resmini and a son by another wife; three children from his previous marriages had died. His wives and children were all deaf. Pinda said, “I don’t like the hearing people here. If I ask them for money, they always refuse.” Pinda was vain and wanted to have his picture taken incessantly, but warm, too, and he laughed readily. He said he loved Resmini because she cut grass all day for the cows and never talked. “Hearing people talk too much,” he explained. Resmini said, “I always knew I wanted to marry a deaf man, but I never cared whether my children could hear or not. With a hearing husband, my deaf daughter will probably be richer, and with a deaf husband she will end up fighting like I do. Having too much of a common language with your husband is not an advantage. It makes everyone too emotional.” Pinda seemed to take an obscure pride in this prognosis. “The deaf, if there is something wrong with the wife, he is kicking her out straightaway,” he said. “If she’s been too friendly with another man, she’s kicked out without questions. I would never marry a hearing woman. And I want my son to marry someone deaf as well.” It became clear that it would be harder for him to dominate the family with a hearing woman.

I met the family of Santia, the deaf son of hearing parents, and his
wife, Cening Sukesti, the deaf daughter of deaf parents. The two had been childhood friends. Santia was somewhat slow, whereas Cening Sukesti was vibrant, lively, and intelligent. Cening Sukesti chose to marry him because his hearing parents owned enough land for them to work. She said, “If you are deaf, you are deaf. If you are hearing, you are hearing. That’s simply how it is. I’ve never been jealous of hearing people. Life is no easier for them. If we work hard, we will get money, too. I take care of the cows and I sow the seeds and I boil the cassava. If I lived in another village, I might want to be hearing, but I like it here, and here it doesn’t matter.”

Three of their four children were deaf. When their son Suara Putra was nine months old, hearing friends observed that he could hear. He began to sign at eleven months, though he came to feel more fluent in speech. As a young adult, Suara Putra often translates for his parents. He’d never want to give up his hearing or his signing: “I have two where most people have one,” he said. But he maintained he could have been equally happy being deaf. Half his friends were deaf and the other half, hearing; “I don’t count them that way,” he explained, “because it’s all the same to me.” Nonetheless, he said, “I think my parents like having one hearing child. Yet I’d have less tension with them if I were like them.” Cening Sukesti said that Suara Putra signed even better than his deaf siblings because spoken language had made him more comfortable expressing complex ideas.