1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  Yet the desire to have the deaf speak, the insistence that they speak—and from the first, the odd superstitions that have always clustered around the use of sign language, to say nothing of the enormous investment in oral schools, allowed this deplorable situation to develop, practically unnoticed except by deaf people, who themselves being unnoticed had little to say in the matter. And it was only during the 1960’s that historians and psychologists, as well as parents and teachers of deaf children, started asking, ‘What has happened? What is happening?’ It was only in the 1960’s and early 1970’s that this situation reached the public, in the form of novels such as Joanne Greenberg’s In This Sign (1970) and more recently the powerful play (and movie) Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff. 39

  39. There had, of course, been other novels, like Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). The figure of Mr. Singer, an isolated deaf man in a hearing world, in this book is quite different from the protagonists of Greenberg’s novel, who are vividly conscious of their deaf identities. A huge social change, a change in social outlook, has occurred in the intervening thirty years, with above all, the emergence of a new self-consciousness.

  There is the perception that something must be done. But what? Typically, there is the seduction of compromise—that a ‘combined’ system, combining sign and speech, will allow the deaf to become adept at both. A further compromise, containing a deep confusion, is suggested: having a language intermediate between English and Sign (i.e., a signed English). This category of confusion goes back a long way-back to de l’Epee’s ‘Methodical Signs,’ which were an attempt to intermediate between French and Sign. But true sign languages are in fact complete in themselves: their syntax, grammar, and semantics are complete, but they have a different character from that of any spoken or written language. Thus it is not possible to transliterate a spoken tongue into Sign word by word or phrase by phrase—their structures are essentially different. It is often imagined, vaguely, that sign language is English or French. It is nothing of the sort; it is itself, Sign. Thus, the ‘Signed English’ now favored as a compromise is unnecessary, for no intermediary pseudo-language is needed. And yet, deaf people are forced to learn the signs not for the ideas and actions they want to express, but for phonetic English sounds they cannot hear.

  Even now the use of signed English, in one form or another, is still favored against the use of ASL. Most teaching of the deaf, if done by signs, is done by signed English; most teachers of the deaf, it they know any sign, know this and not ASL; and the little cameos that appear on television screens all use signed English, not ASL. Thus, a century after the Milan conference, deaf people are still largely deprived of their own, indigenous language.

  But what, more importantly, of the combined system by which students not only learn sign language but learn to lip-read and speak as well? Perhaps this is workable, if education takes account of which capacities are best developed at different phases of growth. The essential point is this: that profoundly deaf people show no native disposition whatever to speak. Speaking is an ability that must be taught them and is a labor of years. On the other hand, they show an immediate and powerful disposition to Sign, which as a visual language, is completely accessible to them. This is more apparent in the deaf children of deaf parents using Sign, who make their first signs when they are about six months old and have considerable sign fluency by the age of fifteen months. 40

  40. Though there may be early development of a vocabulary of signs, the development of Sign grammar takes place at the same age, and in the same way, as the acquisition of speech grammar. Linguistic development thus occurs at the same rate in all children, deaf or hearing. If signs appear earlier than speech, it is because they are easier to make, for they involve relatively simple and slow movements of muscles, whereas speech involves the lightning coordination of hundreds of different structures, and only becomes possible in the second year of life. Yet it is intriguing that a deaf child at four months may make the sign for ‘milk,’ where a hearing child can only cry or look around. Perhaps all babies would be better off knowing a few signs!

  Language must be introduced and acquired as early as possible or its development may be permanently retarded and impaired, with all the problems in ‘propositionizing’ which Hughlings-Jackson discussed. This can be done, with the profoundly deaf, only by Sign. Therefore deafness must be diagnosed as early as possible. 41

  41. One may suspect deafness from observation, but one cannot easily prove it in the first year of life. If, therefore, there is any reason to suspect deafness—for example, because there have been other deaf people in the family, or there is lack of response to sudden noises—there should be physiological testing of the brain’s response to sound (measuring so-called auditory evoked potentials in the brainstem). This test, relatively simple, can confirm or rule out the diagnosis of deafness as early as the first week of life.

  Deaf children must first be exposed to fluent signers, whether these be their parents, or teachers, or whoever. Once signing is learned—and it may be fluent by three years of age—then all else may follow: a free intercourse of minds, a free flow of information, the acquisition of reading and writing, and perhaps that of speech. There is no evidence that signing inhibits the acquisition of speech. Indeed the reverse is probably so.

  Have the deaf always and everywhere been seen as ‘handicapped’ or ‘inferior’? Have they always suffered, must they always suffer, segregation and isolation? Can one imagine their situation otherwise? If only there were a world where being deaf did not matter, and in which all deaf people could enjoy complete fulfillment and integration! A world in which they would not even be perceived as ‘handicapped’ or ‘deaf.’ 42

  42. Sicard imagined such a community:

  Could there not be in some corner of the world a whole society of deaf people? Well then! Would we think that these individuals were inferior, that they were unintelligent and lacked communication? They would certainly have a sign language, perhaps a language even richer than ours. This language would at least be unambiguous, always giving an accurate picture of the mind’s affections. So why would this people be uncivilized? Why wouldn’t they in fact have laws, government, police less mistrustful than our own? (Lane, 1984b, pp.89-90)

  This vision, so idyllic for Sicard, is also imagined—but as horrific—by the equally hyperbolic Alexander Graham Bell, whose fear-filled 1883 Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, with its draconian suggestions for ‘dealing with’ the deaf, was prompted by his experience on Martha’s Vineyard (see below). There is a hint of both feelings—the idyllic and the horrific—in H.G. Wells’s great tale ‘The Country of the Blind.’

  The deaf themselves have had occasional impulses to deaf separatism or deaf ‘Zionism.’ In 1831 Edmund Booth suggested the formation of a deaf township or community, and in 1856 John James Flournoy the establishment of a deaf state, ‘out west.’ And in fantasy the idea is still active. Thus Lyson C. Sulla, the deaf hero of Islay, dreams of becoming governor of the state of Islay and making it a state ‘of, by, and for’ deaf people (Bullard, 1986).

  Such worlds do exist, and have existed in the past, and such a world is portrayed in Nora Ellen Groce’s beautiful and fascinating Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Through a mutation, a recessive gene brought out by inbreeding, a form of hereditary deafness existed for 250 years on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, following the arrival of the first deaf settlers in the 1690’s. By the mid-nineteenth century, scarcely an up-Island family was unaffected, and in some villages (Chilmark, West Tisbury), the incidence of deafness had risen to one in four. In response to this, the entire community learned Sign, and there was free and complete intercourse between the hearing and the deaf. Indeed the deaf were scarcely seen as ‘deaf,’ and certainly not seen as being at all ‘handicapped.’ 43

  43. There have been and are other isolated communities with a high incidence of
deafness and unusually benign social attitudes to the deaf and their language. This is the case on Providence Island in the Caribbean, which has been studied in great detail by James Woodward (Woodward, 1982), and is also described by William Washabaugh (Washabaugh, 1986).

  Perhaps the Martha’s Vineyard example is not that rare; perhaps it may indeed be expected to occur whenever there are significant numbers of deaf people in a community. There is an isolated village in the Yucatan (discovered and originally filmed by ethnographer and filmmaker Hubert Smith, and now being studied linguistically and anthropologically by Robert Johnson and Jane Norman of Gallaudet University) where thirteen adults, and one baby, out of a population of about 400, are congenitally deaf—here again the whole village uses Sign. There are other deaf relatives—cousins, second cousins, etc.—in nearby villages.

  The Sign they use is not ‘home sign,’ but a Mayan Sign that is clearly of some antiquity, because it is intelligible to all of these deaf people, even though they are scattered over hundreds of square miles, and have virtually no contact with each other. This is quite different from the Central Mexican Sign used in Merida and other cities—indeed, they are mutually unintelligible. The well-integrated, full lives of the rural deaf—in communities that accept them wholly, and have adapted by themselves learning Sign—is in great contrast to the low social, informational, educational, and linguistic level of the ‘city’ deaf in Merida, who find themselves fit (after years of inadequate schooling) only for peddling or perhaps riding bike-taxis. One sees here how well the community often works, while the ‘system’ does badly.

  In the astonishing interviews recorded by Groce, the island’s older residents would talk at length, vividly and affectionately, about their former relatives, neighbors, and friends, usually without even mentioning that they were deaf. And it would only be if this question was specifically asked that there would be a pause and then, ‘Now you come to mention it, yes, Ebenezer was deaf and dumb.’ But Ebenezer’s deaf-and-dumbness had never set him apart, had scarcely even been noticed as such: he had been seen, he was remembered, simply as ‘Ebenezer’—friend, neighbor, dory fisherman—not as some special, handicapped, set-apart deaf-mute. The deaf on Martha’s Vineyard loved, married, earned their livings, worked, thought, wrote, as everyone else did—they were not set apart in any way, unless it was that they were, on the whole, better educated than their neighbors, for virtually all of the deaf on Martha’s Vineyard were sent to be educated at the Hartford Asylum—and were often looked at as the most sagacious in the community. 44

  44. Besides its exemplary school for the deaf, the town of Fremont, California, offers unrivaled work opportunities for deaf people, as well as a rare degree of public and civic awareness and respect. The existence of thousands of deaf people in one area of Fremont has given rise to a fascinating bilingual and bicultural situation, whereby speech and Sign are used equally. In certain parts of town, one may see cafes where half the customers speak and half sign, Y’s where deaf and hearing work out together, and athletic matches where deaf and hearing play together. There is here not only an interface—and a friendly one, between deaf and hearing—but a considerable fusion or diffusion of the two cultures, so that numbers of the hearing (especially children) have started to acquire Sign, usually quite unconsciously, by picking it up rather than deliberately learning it. Thus even here, in a bustling industrial Silicon Valley town in the 1980’s (and there is a somewhat similar situation in Rochester, New York, where several thousand deaf students, some with deaf families, attend the NTID), we see that the benign Martha’s Vineyard situation can re-emerge.

  Intriguingly, even after the last deaf Islander had died in 1952, the hearing tended to preserve Sign among themselves, not merely for special occasions (telling dirty jokes, talking in church, communicating between boats, etc.) but generally. They would slip into it, involuntarily, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, because Sign is ‘natural’ to all who learn it (as a primary language), and has an intrinsic beauty and excellence sometimes superior to speech. 45

  45. I recently met a young woman, Deborah H., the hearing child of deaf parents, and a native signer herself, who tells me that she often falls back into Sign, and ‘thinks in Sign,’ whenever she has to puzzle out a complex intellectual problem. Language has an intellectual no less than a social function, and for Deborah, who hears, and lives now in a hearing world, the social function, very naturally, goes with speech, but the intellectual function, apparently, is still vested for her in Sign.

  Addendum (1990): An interesting dissociation or doubleness of verbal and motor expression is reported by Arlow (1976) in a psychoanalytic study of a hearing child of deaf parents:

  Communication by motor behaviour became a very important part of the transference…[W]ithout knowing it, I was receiving two sets of communication simultaneously: one in words, a form in which the patient ordinarily communicated with me; the other in gestures [signs], as the patient used to communicate with his father. At other times in the transference, the motor symbols represented a gloss upon the verbal text the patient was communicating. These motor symbols contained additional material which either augmented or more likely contradicted what was being communicated verbally. In a sense, ‘unconscious material’ was making its appearance in consciousness by way of motor rather than by way of verbal communication.

  I was so moved by Groce’s book that the moment I finished it I jumped in the car, with only a toothbrush, a tape recorder, and a camera—I had to see this enchanted island for myself. I saw how some of the oldest inhabitants still preserved Sign, delighted in it, among themselves. My first sight of this, indeed, was quite unforgettable. I drove up to the old general store in West Tisbury on a Sunday morning and saw half a dozen old people gossiping together on the porch. They could have been any old folks, old neighbors, talking together—until suddenly, very startlingly, they all dropped into Sign. They signed for a minute, laughed, then dropped back into speech. At this moment I knew I had come to the right place.

  And, speaking to one of the very oldest there, I found one other thing, of very great interest. This old lady, in her nineties, but sharp as a pin, would sometimes fall into a peaceful reverie. As she did so, she might have seemed to be knitting, her hands in constant complex motion. But her daughter, also a signer, told me she was not knitting but thinking to herself, thinking in Sign. And even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane—she was dreaming in Sign. Such phenomena cannot be accounted as merely social. It is evident that if a person has learned Sign as a primary language, his brain⁄mind will retain this, and use it, for the rest of that person’s life, even though hearing and speech be freely available and unimpaired. Sign, I was now convinced, was a fundamental language of the brain.

  TWO

  I first became interested in the deaf—their history, their predicament, their language, their culture—when I was sent Harlan Lane’s books to review. In particular, I was haunted by descriptions of isolated deaf people who had failed to acquire any language whatever: their evident intellectual disabilities and, equally seriously, the mishaps in emotional and social development to which they might fall prey in the absence of any authentic language or communication. What is necessary, I wondered, for us to become complete human beings? Is our humanity, so-called, partly dependent on language? What happens to us if we fail to acquire any language? Does language develop spontaneously and naturally, or does it require contact with other human beings? One way—a dramatic way—of exploring these topics is to look at human beings deprived of language; and deprivation of language, in the form of aphasia, has been a central preoccupation of neurologists since the 1860’s: Hughlings-Jackson, Head, Goldstein, Luria all wrote extensively on it—and Freud too wrote a monograph in the 1890’s. But aphasia is the deprivation of language (through a stroke or other cerebral accident) in an already formed mind, a completed individual. One might say that language has already done
its work here (if it has work to do) in the formation of mind and character. If one is to explore the fundamental role of language, one needs to study not its loss after being developed, but its failure to develop.

  And yet I found it difficult to imagine such things: I had patients who had lost language, patients with aphasia, but could not imagine what it might be like not to have acquired language to begin with.

  Two years ago, at the Braefield School for the Deaf, I met Joseph, a boy of eleven who had just entered school for the first time—an eleven-year-old with no language whatever. He had been born deaf, but this had not been realized until he was in his fourth year. 46

  46. It is all too common for deafness not to be noticed in infancy, even by intelligent and otherwise observant parents, and for it only to be diagnosed belatedly when the child fails to develop speech. The additional diagnosis of ‘dumb’ or ‘retarded’ is also too common and may remain throughout life. Many large ‘mental’ hospitals and institutions tend to house a number of congenitally deaf patients called ‘retarded’ or ‘withdrawn’ or ‘autistic’ who may not be any of these, but have been treated as such, and deprived of a normal development, from their earliest days.

  His failure to talk, or understand speech, at the normal age was put down to ‘retardation,’ then to ‘autism,’ and these diagnoses had clung to him. When his deafness finally became apparent he was seen as ‘deaf and dumb,’ dumb not only literally, but metaphorically, and there was never any real attempt to teach him language.