Voice
Paul Hostovsky
Listen, my daughter is Deaf. Capital D. But she’s hard of hearing. So she hears a lot, for a Deaf person. Which, to the uninitiated, sounds kind of paradoxical, I know. What if I told you that in ASL the phrase “VERY HARD OF HEARING” means the opposite of the English phrase “very hard of hearing.” In ASL, it means a person hears a lot. In English, it means a person hears very little. How can that be? It can be and it is because, as Whitman said, “What will be will be well for what is is well.” Whitman, the eternal optimist. In other words, my Deaf daughter is whole. She is perfect the way she is. In the Deaf world, Deaf is good. It’s a good thing. It’s no cakewalk, mind you, especially among hearing people who don’t see Deaf as a good thing–quite the opposite, actually–but it is, nevertheless, a good and beautiful and blessed thing. And in the Deaf world, Deaf has very little to do with how much a person hears. It has everything to do with language and culture. And ASL, the language of Deaf Americans, has very little to do with English, though it does coexist with English–the biggest bully on the world’s linguistic playground–so English is always trying to push ASL around. But ASL won’t have it. My daughter would probably say, at this point, “Dad, shut up, you’re just confusing people.” And she would be right. But the thing is, it is confusing. It’s complicated. It’s complex, as are most things when you take the time to look at them closely. But confused is good, if it leads to intrigued, fascinated, interested.
So listen, if you’re interested, my daughter is culturally Deaf and audiologically hard of hearing. What that means is her primary language is ASL, and she can hear a little. A lot, actually, for a Deaf person. But not enough to understand spoken English the way a hearing person can understand spoken English. But enough to enjoy listening to music, enough to sing along while listening to Britney Spears or Adele or Black Eyed Peas with her hard-of-hearing Deaf friends. Also, her mother happens to be Deaf. Her best friends are Deaf. Her identity and allegiance are with ASL. Oh, and her father, yours truly, is an ASL interpreter, who learned ASL years before she was a twinkle in his eye. She was born with “a moderate hearing loss” in one ear and “a severe hearing loss” in the other. So said the audiologist. So said the audiogram. And what does that mean? That’s the question I and her Deaf mother put to the audiologist. And being an audiologist, she said it meant that with amplification, hearing aids, possibly a cochlear implant, and rigorous and persistent speech therapy, our daughter could “probably function quite normally in the hearing world.” Her Deaf mother and I didn’t like the sound of that.
We didn’t like the sound of “function quite normally in the hearing world” because we both knew that Deaf people are already perfectly “normal” and quite capable of “functioning in the hearing world.” And there was no way on Earth we would ever allow a surgeon to drill a hole in our daughter’s skull and implant a metal device in her cochlea in order to “help her be more normal.” So we didn’t. We enrolled her in the local school for the Deaf. And she wore a hearing aid for a few years, but then she said she didn’t want to wear it anymore. And we said fine. And she had speech therapy for a number of years, but then she said she’d really rather spend the time spent in speech therapy on more interesting and important things, such as math class, science class, history class, English class–which were all taught in ASL–or basketball practice or soccer practice or track practice. There just wasn’t the time–or the need–for speech therapy, she said. And we said fine.
My Deaf friend Hartmut Teuber, who grew up in Germany, told me there is a word in German that describes the choices we made concerning our hard-of-hearing Deaf daughter. I think he said the word was ertauben. Or maybe it was vertauben. My German is not what it used to be. In any case, it basically means “to make Deaf.” He was implying that the choices her mother and I made concerning our daughter’s speech and language and education–sending her to a school for the Deaf where the language of instruction was ASL, not insisting she wear hearing aids, not insisting she work on her speech, consistently signing to her in ASL even though she had a lot of residual hearing and could probably have learned to “function quite normally in the hearing world” –had effectively made her Deaf. Capital D. We had Deafened her.
And I suppose Hartmut was right. Because listen: if she were born to two hearing parents who had never met a Deaf person and who wanted more than anything for their child to be able to “function normally in the hearing world,” she would have had a very different upbringing. She would not have attended a school for the Deaf. She probably would have had a cochlear implant, or at least worn hearing aids all day, every day of her life, spending countless hours in speech therapy, attending public schools with hearing children–the only “hearing impaired” child in the classroom–and would probably not have learned ASL, nor met other Deaf children or Deaf adults, nor identified with them or their language. She would have seen them as “them,” as “other,” as “deaf-mutes,” which is the way much of the world–most of the world–sees my daughter as she is today, because she signs and does not speak with her voice.
So, yes, it was a conscious choice we made, me and her mother, to sign to her in ASL, which was already the language of our home, and to enroll her in the school for the Deaf, where at age three–in the Parent Infant Program–she could already understand everything everyone was saying, and say whatever she wanted to say, and be understood by all. That was what we wanted for her more than anything else: to be able to understand and to make herself understood. Speech does not equal language. Speech does not equal intelligence. In fact, speech has historically been taught to Deaf children at the expense of language, at the expense of education. Her mother and I knew plenty of Deaf adults whose experience this had been. In fact, it was the experience of most Deaf adults. We were adamant that it would not be our daughter’s experience.
*
It may sound oxymoronic, but there is music in sign language. Even if you don’t understand a word of it, you probably enjoy looking at it. Most people do. They say it’s beautiful and expressive, that it kind of looks like dancing. And if you’re like most hearing people, you probably also enjoy listening to music. In fact, you might say you can’t imagine a life without music. Well, ASL has its own music, and when you watch Deaf people signing–and especially when you understand every word of it–you can see the music.
Sign language, in the hands of Deaf people, isn’t linear the way spoken languages are linear–one discrete word following on the heels of the next. Rather, ASL is symphonic. It creates meaning simultaneously with the hands, face, eyebrows, eye gaze, lips, tongue, head tilt, shoulder turn–all the various sections of the body’s orchestra creating meaning at the same time. A visual-gestural symphony rising up all at once, like a controlled explosion.
ASL has its own rhythms, assonances, crescendos and decrescendos, riffs and repetitions, most of which have grammatical functions. For example, one beat versus two can indicate the difference between a verb and a noun; a single movement versus a repeated movement can be the difference between simple present and present continuous, or between modified and unmodified verbs. Additionally, much of the grammar of ASL occurs on the face, such as negation, imperatives, interrogatives, adjectives, adverbs, and something called “sound imagery,” a way of visually representing certain environmental sounds with the lips, teeth, tongue and eyes. Hearing people often comment that Deaf people are very animated. And while it’s true that facial expression in ASL also expresses emotion, it’s usually more about grammar than emotion, more about sense than sensibility. More semantic than romantic.
And the thing is, it feels good to sign. The physical pleasure one derives from signing and watching other people signing is not unlike the physical pleasure one derives from making music and listening to music being made. Interestingly, sign and sing, but for two inverted letters, are the same word. A happy accident? Perhaps. And yet, signing and singing are just two different (or maybe not so different) ways that the body expresses energy, shaping meaning and emotion out of thin air, putting it out there for the world to take in. And the manual dexterity required to play a musical instrument is not unlike the manual dexterity required to articulate the handshapes and movements of ASL. In fact, ASL teachers report that hearing people who have learned to play a musical instrument at some point in their lives seem to have an easier time learning ASL than those who never played a musical instrument. Go figure.
But silence, to Deaf people, who are intensely visual people, isn't lack of sound; it’s lack of movement. Sound ismovement, in fact. It’s energy moving in waves. Which is what music is, after all. And when Deaf people look into the faces of hearing people, what they usually see is silence. They see silence because hearing people, for the most part, do not use their faces to express meaning or emotion. Compared to Deaf people, they have very little facial expression when they talk. Hearing people are pretty poker-faced, if you ask Deaf people. And that’s because their intonation is all in the voice, which is invisible to Deaf people.
But when Deaf people look into the faces of other Deaf people, what do you think they see? They see music! Movement, beauty, energy, meaning. They see intonation. They see gymnastic eyebrows, eloquent eyes, adverbial tongues, and all the risible muscles being put to good, resounding use. They see their language, a visually stunning and musical language, full of inflection, anima, soul.
Hearing people who don’t know ASL can, of course, see the hands and faces and bodies of Deaf people signing, but they can’t really appreciate the music of it, not if they don’t understand what they’re seeing. But when you understand what you’re seeing, you’re wowed by the creativity, the echoes, the assonances, the embodiments and shifts, the flights of playfulness and artfulness, the cinematic effects, and you almost want to stand up and applaud. Because Deaf signers are virtuosos.
*
So listen: what would my daughter be like today if she had had two hearing parents who had never met a Deaf person, who followed the advice of the “experts” and opted for a cochlear implant or bilateral hearing aids, parents who used only spoken language with her, sending her to public schools where she was the only “hearing-impaired” child in the class? Would she be the same person she is today or a different person? That question intrigues me. And it scares me a little. It’s a little like asking what she would be like if she grew up in Italy speaking Italian, or in Iran speaking Farsi. Wow, she would definitely be a different person. Culturally. Linguistically. And yet she would be the same person. She would look basically the same. The same height. Same complexion. Same shoe size. But psychologically, temperamentally, mentally, and emotionally, she would very likely be a very different person.
Listen, I like her the way she is. I love her the way she is. And I know she likes and loves herself. Which is just as important, actually more important. But it wasn’t always this way. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. I remember when she was little (she’s thirty now), and wearing hearing aids, and going to speech therapy (pulled out of class, in fact, in order to attend speech therapy) several times a week, mostly signing but occasionally using her voice with me, with her hearing brother, with her hearing grandmother. And one day when she was shooting hoops with her brother and the neighborhood children, she called out with her voice “I’m open” or “pass me the ball,” and one of the kids laughed at her, pointed at her jeeringly and laughed at the sound of her voice. And it hit her hard. Harder than if someone had thrown the ball in her face. And it hit her that her voice was not like the voices of the other children, that somehow it was different, noticeably, laughably, different. And suddenly she felt terribly vulnerable. And it wasn’t long after that incident that she basically chose to stop using her voice, if she could help it. And in spite of my reassurances that her voice was fine, that her speech was good–that if she worked on it, it would get even better–she chose to give up on speech. And I haven’t heard her speak with her voice in many years.
Does that make me sad? No. What makes me sad is that she was hurt, traumatized, by someone laughing at her in a cruel way. What makes me sad is that she internalized that hurt, and allowed it to silence her. But I am not sad that she chose ASL over spoken English. After all, her mother and I made the same choice when she was three years old. And her voice is alive and well and I hear it when she laughs or sighs or sneezes or yawns or hums or uses it any number of other ways. But she is not her voice. She is her personality, her character, her way. And anyway, voice is overrated. It’s the ultimate instrument, they say, the breath of God, the soul. Give me, please, a break. The souls of Deaf folk are fine and well and perfectly happy the way they are; their personalities are as rich and varied as all the notes on all the musical scales, and then some. And as for God, well, let’s leave God out of it. After all, religionists and oralists have been infantilizing Deaf people for centuries in the name of God. Read the history. It’s all there. And when poets and writers speak of voice, they’re not talking about the vocal mechanism; they’re talking about literary devices, they’re talking about language. Deaf poets are just as well versed in the use of voice and tone in their ASL poems and stories as hearing poets are. And finally, “having a voice,” which basically means having a say in things, having power, having agency, has nothing to do with voice and everything to do with language, the power of language, the power of community and self-advocacy. And Deaf Power is all about language and community.
So listen, yeah, maybe we “Deafened” our daughter. But it’s all for the good. Because the medical establishment and the so-called experts have been perpetrating a cultural genocide against Deaf people for generations, going all the way back to the Milan conference of 1880 and the proscription of sign language in deaf education worldwide, and then the eugenics movement in this country and abroad advocating the forced sterilizations of Deaf people, and also A. G. Bell’s lifelong attempts to pass a law banning marriages between Deaf people. And now, the greatest weapon of all in the erasure of Deaf people and Deaf culture: the pervasive practice of performing cochlear implant surgery on 90% of Deaf infants and children in an attempt to “cure” them of being Deaf, trying to make them “normal,” which amounts to denying them their natural language, signed language, and their natural culture, Deaf culture. And denying a people their language and their culture is, by definition, genocide, according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). And why isn’t anyone speaking up about that?
Paul Hostovsky
Listen, my daughter is Deaf. Capital D. But she’s hard of hearing. So she hears a lot, for a Deaf person. Which, to the uninitiated, sounds kind of paradoxical, I know. What if I told you that in ASL the phrase “VERY HARD OF HEARING” means the opposite of the English phrase “very hard of hearing.” In ASL, it means a person hears a lot. In English, it means a person hears very little. How can that be? It can be and it is because, as Whitman said, “What will be will be well for what is is well.” Whitman, the eternal optimist. In other words, my Deaf daughter is whole. She is perfect the way she is. In the Deaf world, Deaf is good. It’s a good thing. It’s no cakewalk, mind you, especially among hearing people who don’t see Deaf as a good thing–quite the opposite, actually–but it is, nevertheless, a good and beautiful and blessed thing. And in the Deaf world, Deaf has very little to do with how much a person hears. It has everything to do with language and culture. And ASL, the language of Deaf Americans, has very little to do with English, though it does coexist with English–the biggest bully on the world’s linguistic playground–so English is always trying to push ASL around. But ASL won’t have it. My daughter would probably say, at this point, “Dad, shut up, you’re just confusing people.” And she would be right. But the thing is, it is confusing. It’s complicated. It’s complex, as are most things when you take the time to look at them closely. But confused is good, if it leads to intrigued, fascinated, interested.
So listen, if you’re interested, my daughter is culturally Deaf and audiologically hard of hearing. What that means is her primary language is ASL, and she can hear a little. A lot, actually, for a Deaf person. But not enough to understand spoken English the way a hearing person can understand spoken English. But enough to enjoy listening to music, enough to sing along while listening to Britney Spears or Adele or Black Eyed Peas with her hard-of-hearing Deaf friends. Also, her mother happens to be Deaf. Her best friends are Deaf. Her identity and allegiance are with ASL. Oh, and her father, yours truly, is an ASL interpreter, who learned ASL years before she was a twinkle in his eye. She was born with “a moderate hearing loss” in one ear and “a severe hearing loss” in the other. So said the audiologist. So said the audiogram. And what does that mean? That’s the question I and her Deaf mother put to the audiologist. And being an audiologist, she said it meant that with amplification, hearing aids, possibly a cochlear implant, and rigorous and persistent speech therapy, our daughter could “probably function quite normally in the hearing world.” Her Deaf mother and I didn’t like the sound of that.
We didn’t like the sound of “function quite normally in the hearing world” because we both knew that Deaf people are already perfectly “normal” and quite capable of “functioning in the hearing world.” And there was no way on Earth we would ever allow a surgeon to drill a hole in our daughter’s skull and implant a metal device in her cochlea in order to “help her be more normal.” So we didn’t. We enrolled her in the local school for the Deaf. And she wore a hearing aid for a few years, but then she said she didn’t want to wear it anymore. And we said fine. And she had speech therapy for a number of years, but then she said she’d really rather spend the time spent in speech therapy on more interesting and important things, such as math class, science class, history class, English class–which were all taught in ASL–or basketball practice or soccer practice or track practice. There just wasn’t the time–or the need–for speech therapy, she said. And we said fine.
My Deaf friend Hartmut Teuber, who grew up in Germany, told me there is a word in German that describes the choices we made concerning our hard-of-hearing Deaf daughter. I think he said the word was ertauben. Or maybe it was vertauben. My German is not what it used to be. In any case, it basically means “to make Deaf.” He was implying that the choices her mother and I made concerning our daughter’s speech and language and education–sending her to a school for the Deaf where the language of instruction was ASL, not insisting she wear hearing aids, not insisting she work on her speech, consistently signing to her in ASL even though she had a lot of residual hearing and could probably have learned to “function quite normally in the hearing world” –had effectively made her Deaf. Capital D. We had Deafened her.
And I suppose Hartmut was right. Because listen: if she were born to two hearing parents who had never met a Deaf person and who wanted more than anything for their child to be able to “function normally in the hearing world,” she would have had a very different upbringing. She would not have attended a school for the Deaf. She probably would have had a cochlear implant, or at least worn hearing aids all day, every day of her life, spending countless hours in speech therapy, attending public schools with hearing children–the only “hearing impaired” child in the classroom–and would probably not have learned ASL, nor met other Deaf children or Deaf adults, nor identified with them or their language. She would have seen them as “them,” as “other,” as “deaf-mutes,” which is the way much of the world–most of the world–sees my daughter as she is today, because she signs and does not speak with her voice.
So, yes, it was a conscious choice we made, me and her mother, to sign to her in ASL, which was already the language of our home, and to enroll her in the school for the Deaf, where at age three–in the Parent Infant Program–she could already understand everything everyone was saying, and say whatever she wanted to say, and be understood by all. That was what we wanted for her more than anything else: to be able to understand and to make herself understood. Speech does not equal language. Speech does not equal intelligence. In fact, speech has historically been taught to Deaf children at the expense of language, at the expense of education. Her mother and I knew plenty of Deaf adults whose experience this had been. In fact, it was the experience of most Deaf adults. We were adamant that it would not be our daughter’s experience.
*
It may sound oxymoronic, but there is music in sign language. Even if you don’t understand a word of it, you probably enjoy looking at it. Most people do. They say it’s beautiful and expressive, that it kind of looks like dancing. And if you’re like most hearing people, you probably also enjoy listening to music. In fact, you might say you can’t imagine a life without music. Well, ASL has its own music, and when you watch Deaf people signing–and especially when you understand every word of it–you can see the music.
Sign language, in the hands of Deaf people, isn’t linear the way spoken languages are linear–one discrete word following on the heels of the next. Rather, ASL is symphonic. It creates meaning simultaneously with the hands, face, eyebrows, eye gaze, lips, tongue, head tilt, shoulder turn–all the various sections of the body’s orchestra creating meaning at the same time. A visual-gestural symphony rising up all at once, like a controlled explosion.
ASL has its own rhythms, assonances, crescendos and decrescendos, riffs and repetitions, most of which have grammatical functions. For example, one beat versus two can indicate the difference between a verb and a noun; a single movement versus a repeated movement can be the difference between simple present and present continuous, or between modified and unmodified verbs. Additionally, much of the grammar of ASL occurs on the face, such as negation, imperatives, interrogatives, adjectives, adverbs, and something called “sound imagery,” a way of visually representing certain environmental sounds with the lips, teeth, tongue and eyes. Hearing people often comment that Deaf people are very animated. And while it’s true that facial expression in ASL also expresses emotion, it’s usually more about grammar than emotion, more about sense than sensibility. More semantic than romantic.
And the thing is, it feels good to sign. The physical pleasure one derives from signing and watching other people signing is not unlike the physical pleasure one derives from making music and listening to music being made. Interestingly, sign and sing, but for two inverted letters, are the same word. A happy accident? Perhaps. And yet, signing and singing are just two different (or maybe not so different) ways that the body expresses energy, shaping meaning and emotion out of thin air, putting it out there for the world to take in. And the manual dexterity required to play a musical instrument is not unlike the manual dexterity required to articulate the handshapes and movements of ASL. In fact, ASL teachers report that hearing people who have learned to play a musical instrument at some point in their lives seem to have an easier time learning ASL than those who never played a musical instrument. Go figure.
But silence, to Deaf people, who are intensely visual people, isn't lack of sound; it’s lack of movement. Sound ismovement, in fact. It’s energy moving in waves. Which is what music is, after all. And when Deaf people look into the faces of hearing people, what they usually see is silence. They see silence because hearing people, for the most part, do not use their faces to express meaning or emotion. Compared to Deaf people, they have very little facial expression when they talk. Hearing people are pretty poker-faced, if you ask Deaf people. And that’s because their intonation is all in the voice, which is invisible to Deaf people.
But when Deaf people look into the faces of other Deaf people, what do you think they see? They see music! Movement, beauty, energy, meaning. They see intonation. They see gymnastic eyebrows, eloquent eyes, adverbial tongues, and all the risible muscles being put to good, resounding use. They see their language, a visually stunning and musical language, full of inflection, anima, soul.
Hearing people who don’t know ASL can, of course, see the hands and faces and bodies of Deaf people signing, but they can’t really appreciate the music of it, not if they don’t understand what they’re seeing. But when you understand what you’re seeing, you’re wowed by the creativity, the echoes, the assonances, the embodiments and shifts, the flights of playfulness and artfulness, the cinematic effects, and you almost want to stand up and applaud. Because Deaf signers are virtuosos.
*
So listen: what would my daughter be like today if she had had two hearing parents who had never met a Deaf person, who followed the advice of the “experts” and opted for a cochlear implant or bilateral hearing aids, parents who used only spoken language with her, sending her to public schools where she was the only “hearing-impaired” child in the class? Would she be the same person she is today or a different person? That question intrigues me. And it scares me a little. It’s a little like asking what she would be like if she grew up in Italy speaking Italian, or in Iran speaking Farsi. Wow, she would definitely be a different person. Culturally. Linguistically. And yet she would be the same person. She would look basically the same. The same height. Same complexion. Same shoe size. But psychologically, temperamentally, mentally, and emotionally, she would very likely be a very different person.
Listen, I like her the way she is. I love her the way she is. And I know she likes and loves herself. Which is just as important, actually more important. But it wasn’t always this way. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. I remember when she was little (she’s thirty now), and wearing hearing aids, and going to speech therapy (pulled out of class, in fact, in order to attend speech therapy) several times a week, mostly signing but occasionally using her voice with me, with her hearing brother, with her hearing grandmother. And one day when she was shooting hoops with her brother and the neighborhood children, she called out with her voice “I’m open” or “pass me the ball,” and one of the kids laughed at her, pointed at her jeeringly and laughed at the sound of her voice. And it hit her hard. Harder than if someone had thrown the ball in her face. And it hit her that her voice was not like the voices of the other children, that somehow it was different, noticeably, laughably, different. And suddenly she felt terribly vulnerable. And it wasn’t long after that incident that she basically chose to stop using her voice, if she could help it. And in spite of my reassurances that her voice was fine, that her speech was good–that if she worked on it, it would get even better–she chose to give up on speech. And I haven’t heard her speak with her voice in many years.
Does that make me sad? No. What makes me sad is that she was hurt, traumatized, by someone laughing at her in a cruel way. What makes me sad is that she internalized that hurt, and allowed it to silence her. But I am not sad that she chose ASL over spoken English. After all, her mother and I made the same choice when she was three years old. And her voice is alive and well and I hear it when she laughs or sighs or sneezes or yawns or hums or uses it any number of other ways. But she is not her voice. She is her personality, her character, her way. And anyway, voice is overrated. It’s the ultimate instrument, they say, the breath of God, the soul. Give me, please, a break. The souls of Deaf folk are fine and well and perfectly happy the way they are; their personalities are as rich and varied as all the notes on all the musical scales, and then some. And as for God, well, let’s leave God out of it. After all, religionists and oralists have been infantilizing Deaf people for centuries in the name of God. Read the history. It’s all there. And when poets and writers speak of voice, they’re not talking about the vocal mechanism; they’re talking about literary devices, they’re talking about language. Deaf poets are just as well versed in the use of voice and tone in their ASL poems and stories as hearing poets are. And finally, “having a voice,” which basically means having a say in things, having power, having agency, has nothing to do with voice and everything to do with language, the power of language, the power of community and self-advocacy. And Deaf Power is all about language and community.
So listen, yeah, maybe we “Deafened” our daughter. But it’s all for the good. Because the medical establishment and the so-called experts have been perpetrating a cultural genocide against Deaf people for generations, going all the way back to the Milan conference of 1880 and the proscription of sign language in deaf education worldwide, and then the eugenics movement in this country and abroad advocating the forced sterilizations of Deaf people, and also A. G. Bell’s lifelong attempts to pass a law banning marriages between Deaf people. And now, the greatest weapon of all in the erasure of Deaf people and Deaf culture: the pervasive practice of performing cochlear implant surgery on 90% of Deaf infants and children in an attempt to “cure” them of being Deaf, trying to make them “normal,” which amounts to denying them their natural language, signed language, and their natural culture, Deaf culture. And denying a people their language and their culture is, by definition, genocide, according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). And why isn’t anyone speaking up about that?