What's That Pig Outdoors? (32 page)

And, to my wholly undeserved good fortune, it did, and it has for more than fifteen years. Removing the irritant removed the need to drink. And I learned to cope with inescapable social affairs by acknowledging my need for help during them. When possible, Debby would come with me—and still does—to read my lips through the din and “translate” my speech for others while doing the same for me when I cannot understand theirs.

I am not at all certain that my shyness was caused entirely by my deafness and the resultant oversensitivity about my speech. We Kisors have always tended toward aloofness and solitariness. Most of the male members of
the family have always hated crowds, preferring small groups for their social lives. They tend to be inner-directed, caring little what impression they make on the crowd. They also can be irritable and short-tempered. And now that psychologists are beginning to accept heredity as at least as strong a determinant of personality as is environment, perhaps I'm shy and short-fused because my father is, and because his father was, and because (presumably) his father's father was, and so on.

Likewise, perhaps I flirted with alcohol for reasons of social pressure as much as deafness. I became a newspaperman in the 1960s, when it was still considered de rigueur for Chicago newsmen to be able to hold their liquor. The romantic myth of the hard-drinking Front Page newsman was a long time dying in Chicago, where it was born. A great many of my contemporaries are now members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and you'd likely recognize some of their names.

Whatever the ultimate cause of my personality quirks, it took a long time to learn to deal with them, especially to appreciate the hard lesson that it is counterproductive to be stiff-neckedly independent. Striving alone means exactly that—and if I did not sometimes seek the help of others in communicating with the hearing, I would be lost in a desert of frustration. Acknowledging my deafness by seeking aid does not diminish me in any way. How easy that is to admit and how difficult it is to accept!

During the waning years of the eighties I made the pleasant discovery that announcing my deafness, rather than letting it hide invisibly with me in the background (a genuine advantage in many situations), can smooth the way in many social encounters. Before taking a long train trip across Canada in early 1989, for example, I decided to perform an experiment. I'd tell everyone to whom I spoke that I was deaf, even before such a simple transaction as ordering a cup of coffee or pleasantly asking the person across the dining-car table from me where he was from and where he was going.

Almost invariably the stewards and train crew treated me with increased attention and politeness, and my fellow travelers in the first-class club car seemed to think the subject of my deafness a welcome diversion from the long and dusty miles across the flat and featureless provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Almost everyone, I discovered, had an Aunt Matilda or Cousin Hubert who was stone deaf but managed very nicely,
and maybe this new surgical operation the newspapers were talking about would cure them, and did I know anything about it?

Years ago I would bristle if a stranger made my deafness the topic of the moment. But now I recognize that it's an excellent conversational icebreaker, and that it's very easy to go on to other topics once we've worn out that one. Deafness often still frightens away the ignorant and the self-regarding, and that in itself can be a blessing. The subject, however, has reached such a high level in the popular consciousness—thanks to media coverage of events in the deaf world such as closed captioning, the Gallaudet revolution, and Marlee Matlin's Academy Award—that it tends to whet the curiosity of intelligent and informed hearing people.

I still avoid cocktail parties and all similar large-scale social encounters whenever I can, choosing instead a social life of frequent small dinner parties with two or three other couples. But when there are inescapable social and professional obligations to discharge, I'm no longer embarrassed to ask Debby, or a close friend who has developed a knack for lipreading just from having known me for years, to come along and serve as a go-between over the background noise.

What has surprised me since I made this decision is that the need for help has been so infrequent. My imperfect speech and lipreading serve me well in everyday life, with my family and at the office. Like almost everyone else, I spend most of my days among friends and co-workers, all of whom I understand without much difficulty and who understand me with equal facility.

Once in a while I'll ask someone to repeat something. In the event of a large group announcement or discussion—rare in a newspaper city room—I'll often ask a co-worker later to fill me in on what was said so that I can be sure I didn't miss anything. Few ever think to volunteer the information unasked, but that's not because they're insensitive. Rather, it's that they are so accustomed to communicating easily with me that it never occurs to them I might need help. At bottom that's a compliment.

And at home communication presents no difficulty, for I've lived with the people there for years, I know their personalities intimately, and I am accustomed to every nuance of their speech. Only when I'm weary after a long day at work or miserable with the flu will my speech and lipreading flag, and a quick repetition will set things back on the track.

Apart from noisy social encounters, I need almost no aid. Of course, lipreading is useless in certain situations—with a public address system, for example. When a group of hearing people are listening to a message from the squawk box, I'm tipped off by the collective intent blankness that sweeps over their faces. I can easily buttonhole one, explain that I am deaf if he is a stranger, and ask to be clued in. Never am I rebuffed.

However we deaf manage to handle our problems, one of the greatest we face is that deep and bitter animosity among ourselves. The world of deafness often seems Balkanized, with a warlord ruling every mountaintop. The old battle between oralism and sign still rages, with periodic skirmishes among specific schools of sign languages. Occasionally I am asked to join the battle, usually on the oralist side. At one time I did. For a two-year period in the early 1970s I spoke to organizations of parents of deaf children, urging them to try to teach their children to speak and lipread rather than use sign language. This was a mistake, I learned to my chagrin when I found myself in the center of the cross fire between stiffnecked oralists and adamant signers. The one tried to use my example, the other to discredit it. Fed up, I called down a pox on both their houses and left the world of the deaf to its own battles.

Since then, of course, I've learned that there are compelling arguments for teaching sign to the prelingually deaf. And if I have learned any wisdom from forty-six years of postlingual deafness, it is that my life cannot and should not serve as a model for that of anyone else. Individual experience and potential varies so greatly that each case of deafness must be judged by itself.

Yet I think I've earned the right to an opinion or two, even if they're not what some people want to hear. Some of them, for instance, insist on asking, “What if you had a deaf child? Would you rely on the oral method?”

The easy answer is “Yes.” The honest one is “I don't know. It depends on circumstances.”

If a child of ours lost his hearing after acquiring language, as I did, Debby and I would have no hesitation in opting for the purely oral method
if
the child displayed the linguistic precocity that seems to run in my family. We would also seek to make use of residual hearing as much as possible, if the
child had any. If the child was born deaf, that would be a much knottier question. That under the right circumstances the oral method can succeed has been proven, however anecdotally, by the example of Ann Percy, among other deaf-born children who grew up as productive and fulfilled members of the hearing culture, using English as their primary language. If our baby was undoubtedly bright and alert, and we could locate a private teacher of the deaf with the gifts of Doris Mirrielees who could live with us, instructing us in the teaching of our child, I'd give considerable thought to this method. We would be committed and confident—and we could afford it.

But if there was any question about the infant's abilities, or if I could not find such a gifted teacher immediately, I'd plunge right into teaching the infant sign—and learning it myself—so that it would acquire language as early as possible. As soon as it was old enough, I'd encourage it to learn speech and lipreading as a second language. I'd give the child every possible chance to become a member of the larger English-speaking community, the same one to which I belong, as well as to the signing culture.

And, in any case, if my child could not master oral communication sufficiently and instead displayed an affinity for the signing world, I'd not swoon in despair. In fact, I'd plunge wholeheartedly with my child into the special culture of the deaf. Though they are perhaps limited in ways the successful oral deaf are not, the signing deaf are just as valuable and productive members of society, their lives just as rich and full as those of the oral deaf.

For the same reason, I wouldn't discourage a successful oral deaf child from learning sign. He may display a talent for languages of all kinds, and that should be encouraged. Being able to walk confidently among both the oral and the signing worlds might give him an advantage the purely oral do not have: another choice among groups with which to socialize.

There is one firm warning I would give every parent of a deaf child: Be wary of ideologues who belittle other methods of communication, and be doubly suspicious of those who declare that the decision on the education of the deaf child belongs wholly to the professionals of special education. Too many such blinkered souls exist. Not long ago I heard about a very bright deaf-born child in a Chicago suburb whose speech and lipreading abilities were phenomenal, thanks in great part to his parents, brilliant and
aggressive types who had made his early education their business, favoring the “cued speech” method of communication. That's a little-known but increasingly popular method in which the hearing speaker's hand is held near the mouth so that the fingers can perform special signs, or cues, that help the deaf child discriminate among sounds not easily lipread.

This family unfortunately lives in a suburb whose special education establishment has opted completely for sign language. The parents asked that their child be taught with hearing children in regular classes—but the special education teachers refused to entertain the notion. As soon as he entered school, they said, he would learn sign language and be educated with the signing deaf only with that method of communication.
They
were the experts, not the parents, and only they would make the decisions.

This appalling arrogance is also evident elsewhere. At Gallaudet University, several researchers have had promising results in using computers to teach the signing deaf to speak more intelligibly. When a report of their work appeared in
The New York Times
, the story quoted a famous advocate of sign language as disparaging the research, declaring that the researchers' time and money would be better spent improving the students' sign language.

Another vexing problem is that the deaf themselves can be as mulish on the subject as their educators. When my name is mentioned among members of certain organizations for the deaf in the Chicago area, it often is dismissed with the comment: “Henry Kisor doesn't admit his deafness.” And that's true by the standards of the New Orthodoxy that has taken over much of the world of the hearing-impaired in the last two decades. To a large number—perhaps the majority—of those who live and work in the world of the deaf, one cannot “admit” one's deafness unless one embraces sign language and joins the deaf culture. Not to do so, they say, is a tragic self-denial that approaches apostasy.

Once again, I agree that for the majority of the deaf, especially the prelingually deaf, signing and identifying oneself with the culture of deafness is the most appropriate course. Those who do so more often than not become productive and happy human beings. No longer are they forced down unrealistic avenues by the stern oralist Old Orthodoxy that demanded they all learn to speak and lipread in order to become successful
members of a world that often despises them and would rather forget them.