> Susannah Macready Case #21 - Otherness Deafness Disability Sign Language

How I Became 'Hearing': A Reflection on Otherness & the Deaf Community

June 01, 2009

In 1684, Increase Mather, a Puritan minister in Boston, Massachusetts, published his Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. The purpose of this book was as odd as its title—to record for posterity all the extraordinary works of God which Mather observed or heard about from sources he trusted. Among other stories is one of Sarah Pratt, a deaf woman who was born in 1640, married, prospered, raised her nine children, was converted, participated in church life, and died in 1729, in a small town south of Boston called Weymouth.^[1] Mather didn’t know Sarah himself, but he solicited an account from someone who did for inclusion in his Essay. According to his informant, Sarah Pratt:

understands as much concerning the state of the country, and of particular persons therein... as almost any one of her sex; and (which is more wonderful) though she is not able to speak a word, she has by signs made it appear that she is not ignorant of Adam’s fall, nor of man’s misery by nature, nor of redemption by Christ...^{^[2]}

Mather’s lengthy account of Sarah’s life, her theological understanding, her church membership, her family and her literacy is useful to scholars because it is one of the earliest, and certainly the most detailed of the known sources of information about the lives of deaf people in colonial America. It is useful to Christians, however, because it balances a wonder at Sarah’s ‘otherness’ with a belief that such difference need not exclude her from her family, her society or her church. This apparent tension can bear some examination, especially if Mather’s approach to deafness is, as I argue, both exemplary and rare.

For all the advances in deaf education, in technology, in services, and in legislation, there is still a sense in which modern Australian society has not yet come to terms with the ‘otherness’ of deaf people in anything like so useful a way as Mather’s. This is especially the case when it comes to deaf people with a different language— those who sign. We have lost Mather’s sense of wonder at their difference (assuming on the whole that science will ‘cure’ it), and despite the rhetoric of inclusion we often unwittingly exclude deaf people from family, society and church. For purely practical reasons (there are perhaps as few as six and a half thousand deaf people in Australia who sign)^{^[3]} most people have not had the chance to interact in any meaningful way with this minority.

The Bible makes only a few passing references to deafness, mostly metaphorical or symbolic. When it comes to the treatment of deaf people, there is only one small, significant command in Leviticus 19:14: ‘You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind, but you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.’ The command comes in the middle of a passage which culminates with the command Jesus quotes as the second of the two greatest commandments, ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18).

Working out how not to ‘curse the deaf’ requires a kind of moral imagination that makes us willing to think ourselves into the other’s experience—to treat the other as we would want to be treated in their position. Even with hearing people of our own language and culture, we are liable to make wrong assumptions and miss the mark. So when the other’s experience involves a different culture, language, and a lot of disadvantage, we shouldn’t be surprised that the moral imagination of the privileged majority is baffled. However much good-will we may have, we cannot love others as ourselves without knowing to some extent what it would be like to be them. But for the most part we have only the dimmest inkling of what it might be to live life as a member of the deaf community.

One way to supply this lack—at least in part—is to put oneself in the vulnerable position of being the minority person. For many, travelling overseas will offer this experience. For me, a short language course in Auslan (Australian Sign Language), purely a linguistic enterprise when I began, led me into a community where I am the one who is different—odd, though welcome. My aim in this article is to describe this experience of being the even smaller (hearing) minority within the minority (deaf) community, and, in passing, to supply some information about the deaf community. I wish above all to recommend the experience of ‘being the other’ as a salutary one for the moral imagination.

The first thing that happened to me on contact with the deaf community was that a whole set of assumptions were challenged. There are some myths I will counter here, just to clear the field:

Myth #1: ‘Sign language is universal’

‘Sign language’ is not universal, for the same reason spoken languages are not universal. Signed languages (note the -ed), are natural languages with their own grammar, vocabulary, and communities. No one knows how old they are, but there are some oblique references to deaf people ‘speaking’ with their hands as far back as Plato, and good documentary evidence that there were signed languages in the 17th century if not earlier. If two countries have the same spoken language, it does not necessarily mean that their signed languages will be the same. Auslan is closely related to British Sign Language , but is unintelligible to deaf Americans who know only American Sign Language. Auslan itself has two distinct dialects, Northern and Southern. If you think about it, this makes sense. When you isolate two groups of people long enough, their languages will diverge - England and America provide a good example.

Myth #2: ‘All deaf people sign’

Only deaf people who are exposed to a signed language learn it. Only people who are exposed to German learn German. Deaf children may or may not be exposed to a signed language depending on whether their parents sign, and what kind of school they go to. It is probable that over 95% of deaf children have hearing parents.^{^[4]} Many deaf people grow up in an ‘oral’ education system (one that stresses speech and lipreading as the way to communicate) and learn to sign upon meeting deaf people after leaving school. Needless to say, a deaf person who neither masters a spoken language nor has access to a signed language early in life is at a severe disadvantage in a whole host of ways. This is not as rare as one might hope, because signed languages are often seen as the ‘last resort’ and by the time an oral approach has failed, it may be too late to learn any language properly.

Myth #3: ‘If you can’t hear, you can just lipread instead’

Lipreading is notoriously inaccurate, impossible to do out of context, heavily dependent on other cues like body language, and affected by accents, lighting, beards, background noise, and hands in the way of your mouth. It is, moreover, exhausting, requiring intense concentration. To lipread someone successfully, it is usually necessary to be able to hear at least some speech sounds. Try mouthing the words ‘parent’, ‘married’ and ‘buried’ to yourself in the mirror and see if you can spot any difference.

Myth #4: ‘The correct term for ‘deaf’ is now ‘hearing impaired’’

Not really. If someone identifies with a deaf community and uses a signed language, then generally they prefer to be called ‘deaf’. Often a capital ‘D’ is used to indicate that this is more about identity than about the level of hearing loss. ‘Hearing impaired’ usually applies to people who prefer to use speech, listening and lipreading to communicate, and who do not identify with the deaf community. Sometimes this is also called ‘hard of hearing’. ‘Hearing impaired’ and ‘hard of hearing’ can be catch-all terms, but on the whole Deaf people are likely to be a little put out if the terms are applied to them because it implies that they are not part of the deaf community. ‘Deaf and dumb’ and ‘deaf-mute’ are considered old fashioned, and are viewed as fairly offensive, no matter which group you are talking about.

Once some of my assumptions about deaf people and signed languages had been done away with, the second thing that happened was just a delight—simply falling in love with Auslan the way I had fallen in love with other languages. The thrill of catching a first phrase or sentence, the first successful conversation, the first joke that you get (at the same time as everyone else), and the childish pleasure you feel the first time someone mistakes you for a native signer: ‘Are your parents deaf?’ was music to my eyes (although I never let the assumption persist; my parents are hearing).

The third thing that happened was an ‘othering’ of my own culture. I came home a few times from my very deaf workplace and casually remarked this or that about ‘hearing people’ and how odd they were, I caught myself waving in someone’s peripheral vision at Bible study to attract their attention (rather than just calling their name), and I wondered why it is that those ‘hearing people’ think deafness is a problem at all. To put it in sociological terms, the deaf community has a ‘different center’,^{^[5]} a different norm, and measured against that norm, those who can hear are decidedly peculiar; they may be looked on with humour, a degree of frustration, and even sometimes with an affectionate kind of pity. For a hearing learner of Auslan, the centre of deaf culture, practice, values and language fluency is a strangely desirable place to be. I never wanted to lose my hearing, but being ‘deaf’ became a good, not an evil. Even now I think of ‘deaf’ almost entirely in cultural rather than audiological terms.

However, the last thing that happened was a realisation that no matter how fluent I am in the language, I am not and never will be at that centre. My visual acuity will never be as sharp, I will not share the same stories, I will always look away, breaking eye contact, when I hear a noise behind me. I do not have the same experiences, there are many frustrations with which I cannot sympathise, and occasionally there are some places I cannot or should not go. Measured as a deaf person, I am a decidedly second-rate specimen—perhaps not on the extreme fringe of the deaf community, but nowhere near the centre either. And this is right and proper. I have my own community where I am at that centre of perfect language fluency, agreed values, understood common practice and shared experience.

The acceptance of my liminal position in the deaf community was strangely liberating. Measured as a deaf person, I am inferior, but happily in the deaf community I am measured as a hearing person, and this makes me an equal other. The differences do not disappear, but they cease to be of overwhelming importance. Communication barriers removed, there is no reason in the wide world why a deaf and hearing person cannot work together, serve together or marry and raise children together. Being now fluent in the language, I am a bridge between the two cultures which is fun, as well as being a way to earn a living. I am also in the enviable position—which I share with many bi-cultural people—of being able to evaluate what I do and how I think through another lens, another set of assumptions.

Business man

That lens shows my hearing world as deficient in a number of ways. For example, we hear much about ‘community’, especially in churches, and on the whole we see so little of it in urban Australian life. The deaf community, however, operates as a remarkably cohesive, supportive group of people, on the personal, social and political levels. We could learn a thing or two about care for the weak by looking at the way deaf people interact with those who have additional disabilities; we don’t provide Auslan interpreting in many of our churches, but a deaf church I know provides deafblind interpreting. We could learn about community contribution: I have never seen so many people sitting on so many voluntary committees in all my life. The preservation in the deaf community of the true art of story-telling—a good deaf story-teller can draw a crowd—is almost a miracle in our post-literate culture where we can hardly string a coherent narrative together without having a piece of paper or a keyboard in front of us. Patience with the ‘outsider’ is another striking quality. As a hearing person in the early stages of learning the language, I was fully aware of my vulnerability, but I never had cause to wonder whether my deaf friends needed to be reminded: ‘do not curse the hearing... but fear your God’.

Seen in the light of this experience, an interaction with deaf people becomes less like an act of charity (although deaf people were certainly charitable to me) and more like the initiation of diplomatic relations with another country, a country with an enviable language, culture and heritage. Of course kindness may be involved, but there needs to be wonder and a little bit of fear and trembling too. The relations between two countries can be delicate, precarious things.

Having been the vulnerable minority for a time, I can see now why deaf people receive with skepticism or opposition attempts to cure deafness, and why they are constantly perplexed at deaf education programs that exclude signing from the curriculum. If I had a supportive and cohesive community where I was perfectly comfortable, and a language I could know intimately, I wouldn’t want to be ‘cured’ of such blessings either. If I were offered the chance to be half-included in another community instead, where I still wouldn’t necessarily be perfectly fluent in the language, still wouldn’t quite understand the practices of those people, and still wouldn’t share their experiences, I would be skeptical too.

And yet this is precisely what the hearing world has offered to deaf people throughout history. It’s what we often offer to minority communities—to the other in general—the chance to become broken or inferior copies of ourselves. There have been exceptions, but on the whole we hearing super-powers have had a rather colonial approach to relations with smaller deaf ‘nations’.^{^[6]} Along with this ‘colonial’ approach comes a deliberate effort to eliminate the language of the colonised people. The ‘golden age’ of deaf education stretched from 1760 to the late nineteenth century, ending almost as suddenly as it had begun. The 1880 ‘Milan Conference’ and the ‘Paris Conference’ which followed 20 years later were highly influential in removing signed languages and deaf teachers from classrooms around the world.^{^[7]} In the living memory of deaf people in Australia the experience of deaf education was one in which signed language was at best frowned upon and at worst actively punished in the classroom, and deaf teachers of the deaf are still fairly rare. Even now, signing is effectively the last resort in many education programs.^{^[8]}

The historical oppression of deaf people and their languages has led in recent years to a counter-movement by deaf people within a human rights framework. While the aims are good and the methods effective, the rights-based approach does not sit easily within a Christian theology of social responsibility. Biblical theology tends to emphasise responsibilities rather than rights, requiring those in the position of strength not to abuse their power. In the case of deaf people this is downright terrifying because hearing people on the whole don’t know enough to fulfil those responsibilities without, in effect ‘cursing the deaf’: either excluding them, or assuming that their difference has been comfortably eliminated. Despite all the talk and legislation, the abuse of power is common, systemic, and for the most part invisible, except to deaf people themselves. ‘There are strong views on one side, and there is blissful ignorance on the other’.^{^[9]}

However, if we are willing to experience for a while what it is like to be the minority, what it means to be pulled away from our comfortable centre, then we might also gain an insight into the experience of those who have had that centre denied, who have had its validity challenged, or its very existence doubted. We might then be able to maintain Mather’s marvellous paradox—indeed it was the Paul’s first—of neither eliminating difference nor ignoring it, but rather wondering at it and learning from it. We might even understand something more about God’s grace. Contradicting our instinct for the elimination of difference, God does not give deaf people just the bare minimum to make up for a physical deficit, but an abundant over-compensation: a community and language that the rest of us might well envy.

One more historical example may help demonstrate what it can look like to live with difference. In 1794, a few years after Mather wrote about Sarah, a man called Jonathan Lambert moved from Barnstable, a town near Weymouth, to Martha’s Vineyard, an island just off the coast of New England. Lambert was the first of many deaf people known to have lived on the island over next two centuries. The deafness was due to a recessive genetic trait in some of the earliest families to settle there. The average number of deaf people was 1 in 155—very high indeed.^{^[10]} Almost everyone on the island would have known someone who was deaf, grown up with them, worked with them, lived with them, or seen them in church. The hearing people seem to have adapted to this without a second thought. As one man put it, ‘everyone here spoke sign language’.^{^[11]} Nora Ellen Groce documented memories of elderly Vineyard residents in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She asked one elderly (hearing) informant about two deaf men:

‘Do you know anything similar about Isaiah and David?’

‘Oh yes!’ she replied. ‘They both were very good fisherman, very good indeed.’

‘Weren’t they both deaf?’ I prodded.

‘Yes, come to think of it, I guess they both were’, she replied. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’^{^[12]}

Fishermen

Paradoxically the path to overcoming difference is not, it appears, to eliminate it, but to learn from it and adapt to it. After all, we are the strange ones from the other point of view, although we don’t know it until we see ourselves through other eyes. One writer wryly comments that he ‘became hearing at the age of twenty-one’.^{^[13]} I became hearing at the age of twenty-four, but whatever your age, I recommend the experience.

Susannah Macready has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Sydney. She became involved in the deaf community in 2004, and has worked in deaf organisations ever since.