by Oliver Sacks
When Clerc founded the American Asylum at Hartford with Thomas Gallaudet in 1817, he not only introduced Sign as the medium of all deaf schooling in the United States but also introduced a remarkable school system—one that has no exact parallel in the speaking world. Other residential schools for the deaf soon opened throughout the country, all using the Sign that had evolved at Hartford. Virtually all the teachers in these schools were educated at Hartford, and most had met the charismatic Clerc. They contributed their own indigenous signs and later spread an increasingly polished and generalized ASL in many parts of the country, and the standards and aspirations of the deaf continually rose.
The unique pattern of transmission of deaf culture relates equally to the deaf’s language (Sign) and to their schools. These schools acted as foci for the deaf community, passing down deaf history and culture from one generation to the next. Their influence went well beyond the classroom: commonly, deaf communities would spring up around the schools, and graduates would often remain close to the school, or even take jobs working in the school. And crucially, most of these schools for the deaf were residential schools, as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries point out:
The most significant aspect of residential life is the dormitory. In the dormitories, away from the structured control of the classroom, deaf children are introduced to the social life of deaf people. In the informal dormitory environment, children not only learn sign language but the content of the culture. In this way, the schools become hubs of the communities that surround them, preserving for the next generation the culture of earlier generations.… This unique pattern of transmission lies at the heart of the culture.8
Thus, with great rapidity, in the years after 1817, there spread throughout the States not just a language and a literacy, but a body of shared knowledge, shared beliefs, cherished narratives and images, which soon constituted a rich and distinctive culture. Now, for the first time, there was an “identity” for the deaf, not merely a personal one, but a social, cultural one. They were no longer just individuals, with an individual’s plights or triumphs; they were a people, with their own culture, like the Jews or the Welsh.9
By the 1850s it had become clear that higher education was also needed—the deaf, previously illiterate, now needed a college. In 1857, Thomas Gallaudet’s son, Edward, only twenty years old, but uniquely equipped through his background (his mother was deaf, and he learned Sign as a primary language), his sensibilities, and his gifts, was appointed principal of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and the Dumb and the Blind,10 conceiving and hoping from the start it could be transformed into a college with federal support. In 1864 this was achieved, and what was later to become Gallaudet College received its charter from Congress.
Edward Gallaudet’s own full and extraordinary life lasted well into the present century and spanned great (though not always admirable) changes in attitudes to deaf people and their education. In particular, gathering force from the 1860s and promoted to a large extent in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell was an attitude that opposed the use of signing, and sought to forbid its use in schools and institutions. Gallaudet himself fought against this, but was overborne by the climate of the times, and by a certain ferocity and intransigence of mind that he himself was too reasonable to understand.11
By the time of Gallaudet’s death, his college was world famous and had shown once and for all that the deaf, given the opportunity and the means, could match the hearing in every sphere of academic activity—and for that matter, in athletic activity, too (the spectacular gym at Gallaudet, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and opened in 1880, was one of the finest in the country; and the football huddle was actually invented at Gallaudet, for players to pass secret tactics among themselves). But Gallaudet himself was one of the last defenders of Sign in an educational world that had turned its back on signing, and with his death the college lost—and because the college had become the symbol and aspiration of the deaf all over the world, the deaf world also lost—its greatest and last proponent of Sign in education.
With this, Sign, which had been the dominant language at the college before, went underground and became confined to a colloquial use.12 The students continued to use it among themselves, but it was no longer considered a legitimate language for formal discourse or teaching. Thus the century between Thomas Gallaudet’s founding of the American Asylum and Edward Gallaudet’s death in 1917 saw the rise and fall, the legitimation and delegitimation, of Sign in America.13
The suppression of Sign in the 1880s had a deleterious effect on the deaf for seventy-five years, not only on their education and academic achievements but on their image of themselves and on their entire community and culture. Such community and culture as did exist remained in isolated pockets—there was no longer the sense there had once been, at least the sense that was intimated in the “golden age” of the 1840s, of a nationwide (even worldwide) community and culture.
But the last thirty years have again seen a reversal—and indeed a relegitimation 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 l’Epée 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.14
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”:
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:15
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 1960s 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.16 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:
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 1950s and 1960s, 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.17) 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 1970s the exclusive oralism of ninety-six years began to be reversed, and “total communication” (the us
e 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).18 This was not accomplished without great resistance. Schlesinger tells us that when she advocated the reintroduction of signed languages in education, she received warnings and threatening letters, and that when her book Sound and Sign appeared in 1972, it caused controversy and tended to be “wrapped in a plain brown wrapper as if unacceptable.” And even now the conflict still rages unresolved, and though signed language is now used in schools, it is virtually always signed English and not Sign that is used. Stokoe had said from the first that the deaf should be bilingual (and bicultural), should acquire the language of the dominant culture, but also and equally their own language, Sign.19 But since Sign is still not used in schools, or in any institutions (except religious ones), it is still largely restricted, as seventy years ago, to a colloquial and demotic use. This is even the case at Gallaudet itself—indeed, it has been the university’s official policy since 1982 that all signing and interpretation in class be conducted in signed English—and this constituted an important contributing reason for the revolt.
The personal and the political are always combined, and here both are combined with the linguistic too. Barbara Kannapell brings this out when she traces the influence of Stokoe, of the new consciousness, on herself and how she became aware of herself as a deaf person with a special linguistic identity—“my language is me”—and moved from this to seeing Sign as central to the communal identity of the deaf (“To reject ASL is to reject the deaf person … [for] ASL is a personal creation of deaf persons as a group … it is the only thing we have that belongs to deaf people completely”). Moved by these personal and social considerations, Kannapell founded Deaf Pride, an organization dedicated to deaf consciousness-raising, in 1972.