1989 - Seeing Voices (25 page)

But the last thirty years have again seen a reversal—and indeed a re-legitimation and resurrection of Sign as never before; and with this, and much else, a discovery or rediscovery of the cultural aspects of deafness—a strong sense of community and communication and culture, of a self-definition as a unique mode of being.

De I’Epee had immense admiration, but also reservations, about sign language: on the one hand, he saw it as a complete form of communication (‘Every deaf-mute sent to us already has a language…with it, he expresses his needs, desires, pains, and so on, and makes no mistake when others express themselves likewise’), on the other, as lacking inner structure, a grammar (which he tried to inject, from French, with his ‘methodical signs’). This strange mixture of admiration and denigration continued for the next two hundred years, even among the deaf. But it is likely that, until William Stokoe came to Gallaudet in 1955, no linguist had really confronted the reality of Sign.

One may speak of ‘the revolution of 1988’ and feel, as Bob Johnson did, as, in a sense, everyone did, that this was an astounding event, a transformation, that could hardly have been expected in our lifetimes. At one level, indeed, this is true; but at another level one must see that the movement, the many movements that flowed together to create the explosion of 1988, were many years in the gathering, and that the seeds of the revolution were planted thirty years ago (if not a hundred and fifty years ago). It will be a complex task to reconstruct the history of the past thirty years, specifically the new chapter of deaf history which may be considered to have started in 1960 with Stokoe’s ‘bombshell’ paper on
Sign Language Structure
, the first-ever serious and scientific attention paid to ‘the visual communication system of the American deaf.’

I have spoken about this complex prehistory of the revolution, the complex and tangled skein of events and changing attitudes that preceded it, to many people: to the students at Gallaudet; to historians like Harlan Lane, and John Van Cleve (who compiled the enormous three-volume
Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness);
to researchers like William Stokoe, Ursula Bellugi, Michael Karchmer, Bob Johnson, Hilde Schlesinger, and many others; and no two of them see it the same way.
154

154. I regret that I have not had a chance to discuss this with Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, who being themselves both deaf and scientists, are in a position to see these events both from the inside and the outside; they have provided, in their chapter on ‘A Changing Consciousness’ in
Deaf in America
, the most insightful short account of changing attitudes to the deaf, and among the deaf, in the past thirty years.

Stokoe’s own passions were those of a scientist—but a scientist of language is a special sort of creature who needs to be as interested in human life, in human community and culture, as he is in the biological determinants of language. This doubleness of interest and approach led Stokoe, in his 1965
Dictionary
, to include an appendix (by his deaf collaborator, Carl Croneberg) on ‘The Linguistic Community,’ the first description of the social and cultural characteristics of deaf people who used American Sign Language. Writing of the
Dictionary
fifteen years later, Padden saw it as a ‘landmark’
155

155. Padden, 1980, p. 90.

It was unique to describe ‘Deaf people’ as constituting a cultural group…it represented a break from the long tradition of ‘pathologizing’ Deaf people…In a sense the book brought official and public recognition of a deeper aspect of Deaf people’s lives: their culture.

But though, in retrospect, Stokoe’s works were seen as ‘bombshells’ and ‘landmarks,’ and though, in retrospect, they can be seen as having had a major part in leading to the subsequent transformation of consciousness, they were all but ignored at the time. Stokoe himself, looking back, commented wryly:
156

156. Stokoe, 1980, pp. 266-267.

Publication in 1960 [of
Sign Language Structure]
brought a curious local reaction. With the exception of Dean Detmold and one or two colleagues, the entire Gallaudet College faculty rudely attacked me, linguistics, and the study of signing as a language…If the reception of the first linguistic study of a Sign Language of the deaf community was chilly at home, it was cryogenic in a large part of special education—at that time a closed corporation as hostile to Sign Language, as [it was] ignorant of linguistics.

There was certainly very little impact among his fellow linguists: the great general works on language of the 1960’s make no reference to it—or indeed to Sign at all. Nor did Chomsky, the most revolutionary linguist of our time when, in 1966, he promised (in the preface to
Cartesian Linguistics
) a future book on ‘language surrogates…for example, the gesture language of the deaf’—a description that placed Sign below the category of real language.
157

157. But Klima and Bellugi relate how, at a 1965 conference, when Chomsky spoke of language as ‘a specific sound-meaning correspondence,’ he was asked how he would consider the sign languages of the deaf (in terms of this characterization). He showed an open mind, said that he did not see why the sound part should be crucial, and rephrased his definition of language as a ‘signal-meaning correspondence’ (Klima and Bellugi, 1979, p. 35).

And when Klima and Bellugi themselves turned to the study of Sign, in 1970, they had the feeling of virgin soil, of a totally new subject (this was partly a reflection of their own originality, the originality that makes every subject seem totally new).

More remarkable, in a sense, was the indifferent or hostile reaction of the deaf themselves, whom one might have thought would have been the first to see and welcome Stokoe’s insights. There are intriguing descriptions of this—and of later ‘conversions’—provided by former colleagues of Stokoe, and others, all of whom were themselves native signers, either deaf or born of deaf parents. Would not a signer be the first to see the structural complexity of his own language? But it was precisely signers who were most uncomprehending, or most resistant to Stokoe’s notions. Thus Gilbert Eastman (later to become an eminent Sign playwright, and a most ardent supporter of Stokoe’s) tells us, ‘My colleagues and I laughed at Dr. Stokoe and his crazy project. It was impossible to analyze our Sign Language.’

The reasons for this are complex and deep and may not have any parallel in the hearing-speaking world. For we (99.9 percent of us) take speech and spoken language for granted; we have no special interest in speech, we never give it a second thought, nor do we care whether it is analyzed or not. But it is profoundly different for the deaf and Sign. They have a special, intense feeling for their own language: they tend to extol it in tender, reverent terms (and have done so since Desloges, in 1779). The deaf feel Sign as a most intimate, indissociable part of their being, as something they depend on, and also, frighteningly, as something that may be taken from them at any time (as it was, in a way, by the Milan conference in 1880). They are, as Padden and Humphries say, suspicious of ‘the science of others,’ which they feel may overpower their own knowledge of Sign, a knowledge that is ‘impressionistic, global, and not internally analytic.’ Yet, paradoxically, with all this reverent feeling, they have often shared the hearing’s incomprehension or depreciation of Sign. (One of the things that most impressed Bellugi, when she launched on her own studies, was that the deaf themselves, while native signers, often had no idea of the grammar or inner structure of Sign and tended to see it as pantomime.)

And yet, perhaps, this is not so surprising. There is an old proverb that fish are the last to recognize water. And for signers, Sign is their medium and water, so familiar and natural to them, as to need no explanation. The users of a language, above all, will tend to a naive realism, to see their language as a reflection of reality, not as a construct. ‘The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity,’ Wittgenstein says. Thus it may take an outside view to show the native users of a language that their own utterances, which appear so simple and transparent to themselves, are, in fact, enormously complex and contain and conceal the vast apparatus of a true language. This is precisely what happened with Stokoe and the deaf—and it is put clearly by Louie Fant:
158

158. Fant, 1980.

Like most children of deaf parents, I grew up with no conscious awareness that ASL was a language. It was not until my mid-thirties that I was relieved of this misconception. My enlightenment came from people who were not native users of ASL—who had come into the field of deafness with no preconceived notions, and bound to no points of view regarding deaf people and their language. They looked at the signed language of the deaf with fresh eyes.

Fant goes on to describe how despite working at Gallaudet and getting to know Stokoe well (and even himself writing a sign language primer using some of Stokoe’s analysis), he still resisted the idea that it was a real language. When he left Gallaudet to become a founding member of the National Theater of the Deaf, in 1967, this attitude persisted among him and others—all productions were in signed English, because ASL was considered ‘bastardized English not fit for the stage.’ Once or twice Fant, and others, almost inadvertently used ASL in declaiming on stage, with electric effect, and this had a strange effect on them. ‘Somewhere in the recesses of my mind,’ Fant writes of this time, ‘was a growing awareness that Bill was right, and that what we called ‘real Sign Language’ was in fact ASL.’

But it was only in 1970, when Fant met Klima and Bellugi, who asked him innumerable questions about ‘his’ language, that the change occurred:

As the conversation proceeded, my attitude underwent a complete conversion. In her warm, winning way, she [Bellugi] made me realize how little I really knew about Sign Language, even though I had known it from childhood. Her praise for Bill Stokoe and his work made me wonder if I was missing something.

And then, finally, a few weeks later:

I became a convert. I ceased to resist the idea that ASL was a language, and submerged myself in studying it so that I could teach it as a language.

And yet—despite talk of ‘conversion’—deaf people have always known, intuitively, that Sign was a language. But perhaps it required a scientific confirmation before this knowledge could become conscious and explicit, and form the basis of a bold and new consciousness of their own language.

Artists (Pound reminds us) are the antennae of the race. And it was artists who first felt in themselves, and announced, the dawn of this new consciousness. Thus the first movement to stem from Stokoe’s work was not educational, not political, not social, but artistic. The National Theater of the Deaf (NTD) was founded in 1967, just two years after the publication of the
Dictionary
. But it was only in 1973, six years later, that the NTD commissioned, and performed, a play in true Sign; up to that point, their productions had merely been transliterations, in signed English, of English plays. (Although during the 1950’s and 1960’s, George Detmold, dean of Gallaudet College, produced a number of plays in which he urged the actors to move away from signed English and perform in ASL.
159
)

159. ASL lends itself extremely well to artistic use and transformation—far more so than any form of manually coded or signed English—partly because it is an original language, and therefore a language for original creation, for thought; and partly because its iconic and spatial nature especially allows comic, dramatic, and aesthetic accentuation (the last section of Klima and Bellugi’s book is especially devoted to ‘The Heightened Use of Language’ in Sign). In ordinary discourse, however, few deaf people speak in pure ASL—most will bring in and incorporate expressions, signs, neologisms from signed English, as suits the needs of communication. Even though, in linguistic and neurological terms, ASL and signed English are wholly distinct, there is for practical purposes a continuum, from forms of signed English at one extreme, through various forms of ‘pidgin’ signed English (PSE), to pure or ‘deep’ ASL at the other.

Once the resistance had been broken, and the new consciousness established, there was no stopping deaf artists of all sorts. There arose Sign poetry, Sign wit, Sign song, Sign dance—unique Sign arts that could not be translated into speech. A bardic tradition arose, or re-arose, among the deaf, with Sign bards, Sign orators, Sign storytellers, Sign narrators, who served to transmit and disseminate the history and culture of the deaf, and, in so doing, raise the new cultural consciousness yet higher. The NTD traveled, and still travels, all over the world, not only introducing deaf art and culture to the hearing but reaffirming the deaf’s feeling of having a world community and culture.

Though art is art, and culture is culture, they may have an implicitly (if not an explicitly) political and educational function. Fant himself became a protagonist and teacher; his 1972 book
Ameslan: An Introduction to American Sign Language
was the first Sign primer on explicitly Stokoean lines; it was a force in assisting the return of signed language to education. In the early 1970’s the exclusive oralism of ninety-six years began to be reversed, and ‘total communication’ (the use of both signed and spoken language) was introduced (or reintroduced, as it had been common enough, in many countries, a hundred and fifty years before).
160

160. Teachers and others are now being encouraged to speak and sign simultaneously; this method (‘Sim Com’), it is hoped, can secure the advantages of both—in practice, though, it fails to do this. Speaking itself tends to be slowed down artificially, in order to allow the signs to be made, but even so, the signing suffers, tends to be poorly performed, and may in fact omit crucial signs—so much so that those for whom it is designed, the deaf, may find it unintelligible. It should be added that it is scarcely possible to sign ASL and speak simultaneously, because the languages are totally different: it is hardly more possible than speaking English and writing Chinese at the same time—indeed, it may be neurologically impossible.