The Perseverance
Page 2
and we would keep losing connection.
But praise my Dad’s mechanical hands.
Even though he couldn’t fix my deafness
I still channel him. My sound system plays
on Father’s Day in Manor Park Cemetery
where I find his grave, and for the first time
see his middle name, OSBERT, derived from Old English
meaning God and bright. Which may
have been a way to bleach him, darkest
of his five brothers, the only one sent away
from the country to live up-town
with his light skin aunt. She protected him
from police, who didn’t believe he belonged
unless they heard his English,
which was smooth as some up-town roads.
His aunt loved him and taught him
to recite Wordsworth and Coleridge — rhythms
that wouldn’t save him. He would become
Rasta and never tell a soul about the name
that undid his blackness. It is his grave
that tells me the name his black
body, even in death, could not move or mute.
Dear Hearing World
after Danez Smith
I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits,
a solar system where the space between
a star and a planet isn’t empty. I have left
a white beard of noise in my place and many
of you won’t know the difference. We are
indeed the same volume, all of us eventually fade.
I have left Earth in search of an audible God.
I do not trust the sound of yours.
You wouldn’t recognise my grandmother’s Hallelujah
if she had to sign it, you would have made her sit
on her hands and put a ruler in her mouth
as if measuring her distance from holy.
Take your God back, though his songs
are beautiful, they are not loud enough.
I want the fate of Lazarus for every deaf school
you’ve closed, every deaf child whose confidence
has gone to a silent grave, every BSL user
who has seen the annihilation of their language,
I want these ghosts to haunt your tongue-tied hands.
I have left Earth, I am equal parts sick of your
oh, I’m hard of hearing too, just because
you’ve been on an airplane or suffered head colds.
Your voice has always been the loudest sound in a room.
I call you out for refusing to acknowledge
sign language in classrooms, for assessing
deaf students on what they can’t say
instead of what they can, we did not ask to be a part
of the hearing world, I can’t hear my joints crack
but I can feel them. I am sick of sounding out your rules —
you tell me I breathe too loud and it’s rude to make noise
when I eat, sent me to speech therapists, said I was speaking
a language of holes, I was pronouncing what I heard
but your judgment made my syllables disappear,
your magic master trick hearing world — drowning out the quiet,
bursting all speech bubbles in my graphic childhood,
you are glad to benefit from audio supremacy,
I tried, hearing people, I tried to love you, but you laughed
at my deaf grammar, I used commas not full stops
because everything I said kept running away,
I mulled over long paragraphs because I didn’t know
what a natural break sounded like, you erased
what could have always been poetry
You erased what could have always been poetry.
You taught me I was inferior to standard English expression —
I was a broken speaker, you were never a broken interpreter —
taught me my speech was dry for someone who should sound
like they’re underwater. It took years to talk with a straight spine
and mute red marks on the coursework you assigned.
Deaf voices go missing like sound in space
and I have left earth to find them.
‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughes
The deaf children were monkey nimble, fish tremulous
and sudden.
Their faces were alert and simple
Like faces of little animals, small night lemurs caught in
the flash light.
They lacked a dimension,
They lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses
to sound.
The whole body was removed
From the vibration of air, they lived through the eyes,
The clear simple look, the instant full attention.
Their selves were not woven into a voice
Which was woven into a face
Hearing itself, its own public and audience,
An apparition in camouflage, an assertion in doubt
Their selves were hidden, and their faces looked out of
hiding.
What they spoke with was a machine,
A manipulation of fingers, a control-panel of gestures
Out there in the alien space
Separated from them.
Their unused faces were simple lenses of watchfulness
Simple pools of earnest watchfulness
Their bodies were like their hands
Nimbler than bodies, like the hammers of a piano,
A puppet agility, a simple mechanical action
A blankness of hieroglyph
A stylized lettering
Spelling out approximate signals
While the self looked through, out of the face of simple
concealment
A face not merely deaf, a face in the darkness, a face unaware,
A face that was simply the front skin of the self concealed and
Separate
After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River
No one wise calls the river unaware or simple pools;
no one wise says it lacks a dimension; no one wise
says its body is removed from the vibration of air.
The river is a quiet breath-taker, gargling mud.
Ted is alert and simple.
Ted lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound
and responses to Sound.
Ted lived through his eyes. But eye the colossal
currents from the bridge. Eye riverboats
ghosting a geography of fog.
Mississippi means Big River, named by French colonisers.
The natives laughed at their arrogant maps,
conquering wind and marking mist.
The mouth of the river laughs. A man in a wetsuit emerges,
pulls misty goggles over his head. Couldn’t see a thing.
He breathes heavily. My face was in darkness.
No one heard him; the river drowned him out.
For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent
When three deaf women
were found murdered,
their tongues cut out
for speaking sign language,
the papers called it
a savage ritualistic act —
but I think the world
should have gone silent,
should have heard the deaf
gather at Saint Vincent,
should have heard the quiet
march towards Port-au-Prince.
‘The British government did not recognise British Sign Language until 2002’
BSL ZONE (DEAF HISTORY)
Before, all official languages
were oral. The Deaf were a colony
the hearing world ignored
and now, the irony, that the words noise
and London are the same sign in BSL.
It is getting so loud
au
diologists are preparing
for the deafest generation
in heard history.
In Montego Bay, a sign
written on the outside walls
of the Christian deaf school says
Isiah 29:18 In that day the deaf shall hear
above a painting of a green hill paradise.
Harriott, the only Deaf teacher in the school,
tells me no one speaks sign well enough
to enter any visions of valleys.
My Dad never called me deaf,
even when he saw the audiogram.
He’d say, you’re limited,
so you can turn the TV up.
He didn’t mean to be cruel.
He was thinking about his friend
at school in Jamaica who stabbed
another boy’s eardrums with pencils.
Dad never saw him in class again.
Maybe that’s what he was afraid of;
that the deaf disappear, get carried away
bleeding from their ears.
Conversation with the Art Teacher
(a Translation Attempt)
Shit and good my education. Hearing teachers not see potential. This my confusion life, 90s hearing teachers not think I can become artist because of deafness but funny thing, Deaf girl does GCSE art in six months and go on to get degree. I have proved many wrongs. I am costume designer, teacher, artist. At school I said, “I want to be a costume designer.” Teacher says, “I can’t.” I can’t? So harsh. My father, hearing, signs. Says I can follow dream and lucky me, I did. Proving people wrong is great but tiring. Was I born deaf? You asking lots of questions! OK, yes, in Somaliland, I was about two, meningitis. Seven other children in my hospital ward, all died. My father worked around Europe and took me with him. English hospital saved me. I still know some Somali sign. Wait, you write down what I say, how? You know BSL has no grammar structure? How you write me when I am visual? Me, into fashion, expression in colour. How will someone reading this see my feeling?
The Ghost of Laura Bridgeman Warns Helen Keller About Fame
They’ll forget you, but not
until men have sat close, touched
your hands, asked their questions.
What is divinity? Eternity? Insouciance?
Your name will be scratched into reports
naming you proof that those born
deaf or blind or both are worth
an incapable God, a fragmented sermon.
They will want to know if “intelligence”
has a hand shape. It took one man
called Dickens to open my story
to the world and call it how he saw,
how he heard. Your danger is
in his language. Don’t let them twist
your silence –– the ear and eye
are at the seat of their perception.
We are centuries away from people
believing our stories without
perversion, without pity. Their speech
will never really find a way into us,
will always be the sound
of our separation. Who is testing
God’s hearing when you ask if my blood
is dead? If I am dead, where is my thinking?
Beware of Alexander Graham Bell.
Decibel is his word.
He never receives you. O Helen,
don’t trust what you cannot say yourself.
The Mechanism of Speech*
His tongue was too far forward
His tongue further back
His tongue too high, too low
His incorrect instrument
his difficult power
to muscle
meaning
* Lectures delivered before the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf by Alexander Graham Bell. An erasure.
Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated
‘If a written word can stand for an idea as well as a spoken word can, the same may be said of a signed word’
HARLAN LANE
My BSL teacher taught me about affirmation and negation, saying, in sign: if you are crying and someone asks, “are you crying?” you must answer with a smile and nod to affirm, “yes, crying.”
I thought about Charles Dickens. About everyone laughing and crying in 1843 while he performed Doctor Marigold. The story is of a Cheap Jack trader pushing his cart through east London, who adopts a deaf girl called Sophy after losing his own daughter, because grief never leaves, it just changes shape. Dickens visited deaf schools, interviewed the students before shaping his story.
So let’s love that Sophy and Doctor Marigold invent their own home signs. Let’s love that Sophy goes to a deaf school, learns to read. Let’s laugh when two deaf people fall in love. Let’s laugh when Sophy writes a letter to Doctor Marigold hoping the child is not born deaf. Let’s laugh at the people who hope their child is born with a pretty voice. Let’s speak in the BSL word order — sign you speak? — while celebrating and rolling our eyes at the signature sentimental ending. It’s said that as Dickens read in Whitechapel, hearing people cried in the street when Sophy spoke (an unexplained miracle).
I want my BSL teacher to sign to everyone in 1843, are you crying? I want everyone to smile and nod, yes, crying.
The Shame of Mable Gardiner Hubbards
‘Where in literature are the deaf seen truly, with deafness just one condition of their lives, acting in concert, with deaf and hearing people, not living as isolates?’
LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY (poet & teacher, 1814)
I shrink at any reference to my disability,
leave dinner halls with table edge marks in my chest
from hours leaning in. I lock myself in ladies’ rooms
to rest, away from noise, to not be the girl going gah gah.
To pass as normal I rehearse my listening in mirrors.
My lips move and I wait for the right time to nod. A nod
restores my civility. I burned to absorb every decibel.
Look, ladies with perfect responses. A child drops
a spoon and their ears know where it landed.
Breed out our deafness, sterilise the shame of our species.
I love the man who forgets I cannot hear,
who plays piano and recites Shakespeare.
Everything he does shakes the floor; his name is Bell.
Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris
When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car
the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.
I use the past tense though this is irrelevant
in Daniel’s language, which is sign.
Sign has no future or past; it is a present language.
You are never more present than when a gun
is pointed at you. What language says this
if not sign? But the police officer saw hands
waving in the air, fired and Daniel dropped
his hands, his chest bleeding out onto concrete
metres from his home. I am in Breukelen Coffee House
in New York, reading this news on my phone,
when a black policewoman walks in, two guns
on her hips, my friend next to me reading
the comments section: Black Lives Matter.
Now what could we sign or say out loud
when the last word I learned in ASL was alive?
Alive — both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal,
index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky.
To Sweeten Bitter
My father had four children
and three sugars in his coffee
and every birthday he bought me
a dictionary which got thicker
and thicker and because his word
is not dead I carry it like sugar
on a silver spoon
up the Mobay hills in Jamaica
past the flaked white walls
of plantation houses<
br />
past canefields and coconut trees
past the new crystal sugar factories.
I ask dictionary why we came here —
it said nourish so I sat with my aunt
on her balcony at the top
of Barnet Heights
and ate salt fish
and sweet potato
and watched women
leading their children
home from school.
As I ate I asked dictionary
what is difficult about love?
It opened on the word grasp
and I looked at my hand
holding this ivory knife
and thought about how hard it was
to accept my father
for who he was
and where he came from
how easy it is now to spill
sugar on the table before
it is poured into my cup.
I Want the Confidence of
Salvador Dali in a 1950s McDonald’s advert,
of red gold and green ties
on shanty town dapper dandies, of Cuba Gooding Jr.
in a strip club shouting SHOW ME THE MONEY,
of the woman on her phone in the quiet coach,
of knowing you’ll be seen and served,
that no one will cross the road when they see you,
the sun shining through the gaps in the buildings,
a glass ceiling in a restaurant
where knives and spoons wink,
a polite pint and a cheeky cigarette, tattoos
on the arms, trains that blur the whole city without delay.
I want the confidence of a coffee bean in the body,
a surface that doesn’t need scratching;
I want to be fluent in confidence so large it speaks from its own sky.
At the airport I want my confidence to board
without investigations, to sit in foreign cafés
without a silver spoon in a teacup clinking
into sunken places, of someone named after a saint,
of Matthew the deaf footballer who couldn’t hear
to pass the ball, but still ran the pitch,
of leather jackets and the teeth