The Deaf House

by Joanne Weber

  I began to attend Deaf socials with Patti, who did not help me comprehend any of the signing. Instead, I sat in a steady stream of signs, catching a phrase here, puzzling over a swoop or a long flight to the right or left, observing how the tongue clicked as the hands travelled across the chest. I sat in a shallow riverbed of signs, watching the streams form rivulets around my legs and arms. There was no intervention from anyone, no practice, no exaggerated attempts to explain the meaning of signs I hadn’t seen in class.

  After a few months, I realized that everything about sign language was about circles. They sat in circles, their hands moved from the chest up to the left side of the head, up to the forehead and down to the chin, and then down to the chest again, or the signing was in figure eights, horizontal, vertical, against the chest, away from the head, down to the waist even: a flight of bees and hummingbirds touching down flower to flower.

  The meanings began to slide together like a nearly-completed jigsaw puzzle. The syntax of sign knitted itself into my brain, to the point where I could sign without difficulty: “Want coffee you?”

  I eventually understood that the circles were shapes and paths made by classifiers, a series of handshapes that can represent various actions and motions. The Deaf used the visual space in front of their bodies to made three dimensional models, representations of complex actions with even an index finger. Timidly, I entered into the frenzy of hands slapping, swooping, twisting, sliding, lifting my head in agreement, nodding my understanding, and smiling when a joke was finished. It was as though a sheer curtain lifted before my eyes, the Deaf, who were once shadowy figures behind the curtain, began to take on colour, shape, and form, I’d seen them before in coffee shops, waiting at a bus stop, butting out cigarettes in front of the Social Services building, their bare hands reaching out of the sleeves of their dirty, down-filled jackets. But there was now Allard, whose full moustache rested on his top lip, whose clunky ring seemed to control his dominant hand like a marionette on strings, the president of the Saskatchewan Deaf Association, a lobbying organization that had never made much headway with the government officials, and Mr. Foster, a teacher at the school for the Deaf, who signed with hands bounding in large clear crisp loops, and the Deaf were curious about me, they wanted to know why I’d joined them. One day over a coffee downtown at the little café across from the bus stop, they nodded in sympathy when I told them of my loneliness, frustration, and isolation in school, and were eager to show me new signs, to include me in every Deaf social, tell me that few oral deaf from the Hearing world had come to them, and they were patient with me while I fumbled in their language.

  They signed: “We’ve been watching you.”

  I signed: “Watching?”

  They signed: “Yeah, you were born in Wilkie, right? You were supposed to come to the School for the Deaf. But your parents wanted to mainstream you.”

  I signed: “They did the very best for me.” My wrists felt suddenly stiff. The Deaf nodded as I dropped my hands back into my lap.

  Patti asked: “When are you going to Gallaudet?”

  I signed: “Gallaudet?”

  Patti signed: “The only university for the Deaf in the world. In Washington, D.C.”

  I signed: “They have graduate programs there?”

  The Deaf nodded vigorously.

  Graduate programs in sign language? I’d finally earned a master’s degree in library science after that tortured stay at the University of Alberta. After a brief stint in St. Thomas More College library, with an archival collection, I knew I’d never become a fully-fledged librarian. But graduate programs where the course contents were delivered in sign language? There, the only thing that would prohibit me from understanding the content would be lack of fluency, something I could overcome if I studied ASL. What would my parents think?

  What would my mother say, after all these years she’d devoted to me, to my speech, to my life in the Hearing world? Would she think all her hard work was a waste, that she should’ve taught me in sign language first? How should I answer to all those years of home speech therapy, where my mother whipped out her pad and corrected my pronunciation? How would I express my gratitude to my father’s tender love for me, his guiding me through difficult moments in communicating with others, his generosity in studying deaf education classes at Minot State College so that he could be a better father to me?

  How should I explain to my parents that I wanted to be Deaf? That I actually wanted to be Deaf, that I must go into a foreign land to become Deaf? That I must travel for many days, months, and perhaps even years, and I might not even come back as the one they knew. Should I say to my mother and father: Look, you’ve made the wrong decision, you should have let me be Deaf, should have let me learn sign language, should have sent me to the school for the Deaf in Saskatoon? Should I tell them: You’ve been wrong all along? I should be Deaf, not Hearing. I must go now to the Deaf world and you can’t come with me?

  Armed with books on Deaf education, sign language, and Deaf culture, I arrived in Wilkie for a visit. After doing supper dishes, I spread the books out on the table, and opened one for my mother to read.

  I said: “See, Mom? See this passage about American Sign Language being a real language? It’s just a different modality. It’s got all the linguistic requirements to be called a bona fide language.”

  My mother nodded her head slowly. Her face was strong. Her lips were firm. Her small eyes staring through her large, rimmed glasses, she read the passage again. She replied: “Yes, that makes sense.”

  Heartened, I led her to another passage, this time about speech discrimination, the lack of which divides the signing Deaf and the speaking deaf. I asked: “Mom, why do I only wear one hearing aid?”

  “You would never accept another aid. You kept tearing it out of your right ear.”

  I asked: “Could I hear with it?”

  “You could hear sound, but you couldn’t make sense of it. Our audiologist recommended that we leave you alone and let you just use a hearing aid on your left ear.”

  I sat back at the table, looking at my mother, whose eyes were brimming with tears. I asked: “You mean, that the only thing that divides me from the signing Deaf is that I can hear with one ear?”

  She said: “You have very good ability to discriminate speech in that one ear. Your right ear has no speech discrimination ability whatsoever. This means that no matter how much we tried with speech therapy, we couldn’t teach you to make use of the residual hearing in that ear.”

  I thought: The Deaf have told me how they hated to wear hearing aids, how it caused them headaches, how the noise they heard through hearing aids was meaningless. They told me how they threw them away, hid them, fed them to dogs, placed them under wheels of cars.

  “What if my left ear was like my bad right ear?”

  “Well, then you’d have to sign.”

  “Would you have let me do that?”

  “Of course. We knew we had to give you language. That was more important that being able to hear and to speak.” Mom’s gaze was steady as she stood up. She left the kitchen. I heard the low hum of the television set in the living room where my father sat. I knew he was listening to our conversation. I suddenly remembered his words to me during high school, when we walked uptown to get the school mail, how he touched me on the arm, suddenly turning to me, his words carefully chosen: I wonder if we should have let you be Deaf, instead of pushing you so hard.

  JOHANNA

  I am writing a community literacy plan for Deaf and hard of hearing learners of all ages in Saskatchewan. It’s a government-funded report and I slog through weekends, evenings, summer holidays, Christmas, and Easter. It includes a lengthy literature review which constitutes about seventy five percent of the report. My motivation for writing this report dries up about half way through the year which is: shame. I’ll shame the government, educational administrators, teachers, and parents over their deliberate ignorance of the needs of Deaf learners from the cra
dle to the grave. I want to believe that this report will stop the suffering of many Deaf people.

  JOANNE RESEARCHER: “But who is going to read this thing?”

  RETIRED TEACHER OF THE DEAF MURRAY: “Don’t worry, some schmuck in the government will get paid to read it.”

  This doesn’t help. I am floundering in the rubble of words, losing heart, losing energy.

  WEARY RESEARCHER: “I’m exhausted.”

  DEFINITELY RETIRED TEACHER: “We’ll go out to Sylvan Lake. A change is as good as a rest. You can work in the car.”

  DISILLUSIONED RESEARCHER: “But who is going to read this and be impressed enough to develop programs based on fact instead of emotion and prejudice?”

  HAPPY WANDERER: “ . . . ” (Shrugs) frustrated wanderer: “Even the federal government is closing down research divisions, laying off scientists. Who is going to . . . ”

  IRRITATED WANDERER: “Don’t give away your joy.”

  So I don’t. Now, the new research becomes even more fascinating. I pore over academic journals, books, government reports, unpublished PhD theses in the car while Murray drives with his dark glasses on. I sneak looks at him from time to time. He might as well be wearing a uniform and a cap.

  Just over the Saskatchewan border, I realize I’m the one being paid to read, to learn, to plan better lessons for my students. Now I understand that even words of truth can make me bitter. These words in a government report won’t shame anyone into action. Why would I even want anyone to be propelled by shame? Love, which is freely chosen, is freely given. Better to be reading and writing in silence, in contemplation. Indeed, the silence in joy is a kind of mortar, building a house for me, for my students.

  Nineteen

  MY FATHER HUGGED ME AS I stood with my large suitcase, waiting to board the plane to Toronto: “This is like a finishing school, Joanne.”

  From Toronto, I would fly to Washington, D.C. to attend a graduate program in the education of the Deaf at Gallaudet University. Last night, my sisters Ruth and Carol made me a cake decorated with brown hands spanned on a bed of white icing. I clutched the wooden Jerusalem cross, Sister Sarah’s farewell gift, which hung from a leather thong around my neck, as I looked down at the cake, at the hands that were to convey my new language instead of my mouth and voice.

  Mom said, smiling: “You’ll finally have the personal power you never had.”

  I thought: What an odd thing for my mother to say. She’s been thinking about my journey toward the Deaf community although she and I have been working on my pack list, running downtown for last minute items. And: I’d never have known. Mom usually shrouds herself and her thoughts in hard work.

  My sisters and brother stood in awkward silence as I cut the cake.

  I thought: Do they know I’m about to leave their world for one they cannot enter?

  My stomach lurched as the plane sped on the runway, its roar over-tasking my hearing aid and running down the battery quickly. I sat in silence as the plane climbed into the clouds. I fussed: What will this newfound power look like? Will I be able to do things I’ve never been able to do?

  I nibbled on the peanuts and remembered Sister Sarah’s words: “Hold your questions with reverence, Joanne.”

  I was grateful for the tall sister in brown, her sleeves pooling on the table, the lady of situations, pregnant with possibilities, insights, and bodies waiting to be accepted, and looked down wonderingly at my hands resting in my lap, and heard Sister Sarah, again: “You have a Deaf body.”

  By the time I walked through the airport in Washington to the sliding doors where the taxis were waiting, my ears were humming. As I stepped out onto the greasy grey asphalt and hailed a taxi, the August heat assaulted me. Through the windows of the cab, I saw the Black ghetto — a long street of stores barricaded with wrought iron bars with garbage licking the curbstones, that leads up to the gates of Chapel Hall — whose porticos open out onto Kendall Green in the centre of the Gallaudet University campus. Chapel Hall was glowing in the evening, its red bricks and porticos softened in the heat. The clock tower nestled against low grey clouds — the oldest building on the campus, built in 1870, an ancient watch over the hordes of Deaf students who had traversed its gates for over a century. I hoisted my backpack and walked to the dorms at the back of the campus, edged my way past students signing in clusters, and heard an occasional whoop rocket out of the groups, tried not to look at a student describing a girl he had seen the night before at the Deaf bar, making shapes with his hands, describing her voluptuous breasts.

  I told myself: It’s eyedropping, don’t be so rude.

  I shielded my eyes in the lowering sun. I was to live on the twelfth floor in Carlin Hall. During the elevator ride, I imagined: I will step out into a long hallway like Thornfield Hall, punctuated with ten doors on either side.

  To my surprise, I found few doors. My own door opened into a suite with a foyer looking into three rooms.

  The front foyer of Thornfield Hall flashed into my mind, the long forgotten delight of being able to see inside many windows and rooms at once, the lights, the opening and closing of doors, the solitary figure at a window, the tête-à-tête in a gaily-decorated room, a shout or perhaps a gesture laden with meaning.

  Then I remembered: Everyone signs here.

  My roommates, all graduate students, and I, were to live in the three rooms. I sat on the bed and looked at the white walls, and knew: I won’t put up any pictures. Not even a family photo on my desk. I closed my eyes. Silence moved into my body. In the silence, I was swimming in an ocean, along with other creatures of the sea: flipping, floating, bubbles running alongside my body as if I were a mermaid, with room for me to do backflips as everyone moved away politely, every creature in the silent waters making room for me, the sudden spaciousness, amazed, I was an amphibious creature, at home in both land and water.

  Nancy came in first. Blond curls framed a square face. Her smile was easy as she flashed a quick hello with her short, strong fingers. I instantly liked her, and I liked her more when she bounced on her bed and announced that she was from Arkansas.

  She was a Hearing teacher in training. She said: “The Hearing actually want to be a part of this Deaf world.”

  I thought: I’ve never heard of such a thing.

  After a few days, the absence of voices felt natural. The flutter of hands erupted in every corner of every building and out in the sparkling green bowl in the middle of the campus. The vowels found in the English language left me. I didn’t hear the long “aaaa” in my head anymore. Instead, hand shapes were imprinted on my brain. The handshape A was now useful for a number of signs, like: try, establish, help, sorry. The A was more important now than in the sign class in Saskatoon, where the Hearing either mouthed it, or spoke forgetfully as they tightened their fists, leaving the thumb out on top, into As. I realized: The Hearing think that A is a vowel.

  In small classes, we sat in a circle. In large classes, inquisitive students formed a line at the side of the room, ready to stand before the professor in full view of all the other students. It was all too easy now. I wondered: Do I deserve this life of ease, where communication is this accessible? At night, I wrote in my journal: Love is building a house according to an unknown design for a mysterious purpose. Nobody knows about this secret house. I have privacy for the first time, away from being tested, evaluated, rehabilitated, assessed as to how closely I can approximate a “Hearing person.” I ended each journal entry at night with a quickly drawn picture of myself sleeping in a house that love was building.

  But a month later, I was still not sure about this newfound privacy. I came to Gally with an aching right hand, which had been diagnosed as tendonitis. Six months after I began learning sign language, my right wrist became pinched and my fingers swollen. I couldn’t hold a pen and had begun to scrawl childishly with my left hand. Every word I finger spelled brought about excruciating pain.

  People warned me: “That sort of thing doesn’t go away, especia
lly if you’re signing all the time.”

  I wondered at this cruel irony.

  The Deaf told me: “It’s the result of learning to sign later in life. Twenty-five years of unused muscles resulting in pain just when you need sign language more than ever. There is nothing that can be done.” My entire arm ached as if a small and narrow silver plate was trying to work its way up the surface of my inner wrist in order to insert a stiletto knife into my index finger.

  In the evenings, with my right hand encased in ice packs, I began to do my assignments with my left hand, in an uneven, loopy script that looked like the effort of a five-year-old child. One evening I couldn’t sleep. To forget the insistent dull ache in my thumb, index finger and wrist, I reached for my journal, and began to write with my left hand. The childish scrawl, the nearly inch high letters opened something inside of me.

  On impulse, I addressed my left hand: “Who are you?”

  I didn’t expect anything but a flippant remark, but this tumbled out in poorly formed letters, slanted to the left.

  How do you think I felt, forever locked up here while you excelled in school and received all the praise? Your love affair with words, you and your poetry and philosophy. Did you ever ask me what I really thought and felt? No. You just fabricated feelings out of thin air. If you wanted feelings, I could’ve given you my anger and my resentment, even my hatred.

  She was a child in a little red coat, her voice raw and animal-like, but this shadow child, her small white hands flashing in the dark wasn’t finished yet. My left hand continued its rough scrawl: No one has ever known me. All they see is you. You got all the attention, the praise, the applause, and the awards, while I got nothing. Who gives me an award for being Deaf? Come and see me. I’m just asking you to see me for as long as you want at 9:30 sharp every evening. You can stay for two minutes or for two hours but you must meet me at 9:30 sharp or else I will die.

  I thought: She’s holding me hostage.