1989 - Seeing Voices

by Oliver Sacks

  Legislation for the handicapped, with its emphasis on equal access, takes no note of these special needs and requirements; even worse, it threatens the dissolution of a unique educational system which has also been fundamental in providing linguistic and cultural continuity for the deaf. Very recently (1989) the state of Connecticut threatened to close the American School for the Deaf, the Hartford Asylum which was founded by Clerc and Gallaudet in 1817, which was not only the founder, but has been the guardian of deaf education in the United States for 173 years. Fortunately what would have been a rash and irrevocable move was postponed at the very last moment—but similar actions continue to threaten residential schools across the country.

  The deaf student population, of course, is not homogeneous: it includes many postlingually deaf pupils, who are not native signers, and who do not identify themselves with the deaf community or with Sign; pupils such as these may indeed prefer to be mainstreamed. But there will always be prelingually deaf students whose early education and enculturation will be best accomplished in residential schools, and who must have at least the option to going to such schools, and not be mainstreamed by force. But such schools, founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, may have an anachronistic, Dickensian atmosphere. They need to be preserved, one feels—but modified, made more open, made less Victorian. Thus the old via Nomentana school in Rome, modified, is now enjoying a new lease of life, not only as a school, but as a club, an arts and theater center, and a research center for the deaf—and one to which, now, some hearing pupils and their parents also come (Pinna et al., 1990).

  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. 148

  148. There is nothing quite equivalent, in the hearing world, to the crucial role of residential deaf schools, deaf clubs, etc.; for these, above all, are places where deaf people find a home. Deaf youngsters, sadly, may feel deeply isolated, even estranged, in their own families, in hearing schools, in the hearing world; but they can find a new family, a profound sense of homecoming, when they meet other deaf people. Schein (1989) cites these words from a young deaf man:

  My sister told me about the Maryland School for the Deaf…My immediate reaction was one of anger and rejection—of myself. I reluctantly accompanied her to the School one day—and at long last began to come home. It was literally a love experience. For the first time, I felt less like a stranger in a strange land and more like a member of a community.

  And Kyle and Woll (1985) cite a contemporary account of Clerc’s visit to a deaf school in London in 1814:

  As soon as Clerc beheld this sight [the children at dinner] his face became animated: he was as agitated as a traveller of sensibility would be on meeting all of a sudden in distant regions, a colony of his countrymen…Clerc approached them. He made signs and they answered him by signs. This unexpected communication caused a most delicious sensation in them and for us was a scene of expression and sensibility that gave us the most heartfelt satisfaction.

  By the 1850’s 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, 149 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.

  149. There was soon a division of the ways, with blind pupils being educated separately from the ‘deaf and dumb’ (as the congenitally deaf, with little or no speech, used to be called). Among the two thousand deaf students at Gallaudet now, there are about twenty students who are both deaf and blind (most with Usher’s syndrome). These students, of course, must develop astonishing tactile sensibility and intelligence, as Helen Keller did.

  Edward Gallaudet’s own full and extraordinary life 150 lasted well into the present century and spanned great (though not always admirable) changes in attitudes to deaf people and their education.

  150. See Gallaudet, 1983.

  In particular, gathering force from the 1860’s 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. 151

  151. The protagonists in this struggle, Bell and Gallaudet—both the sons of deaf mothers (but mothers with completely different attitudes to their own deafness), each passionately devoted to the deaf in his own way, were about as different as two human beings can be (see Winefield, 1987).

  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. 152

  152. There has been one realm where sign language always continued to be used, all over the world, despite the changed habits and proscriptions of educators—in religious services for the deaf. Priests and others never forgot the souls of their deaf parishioners, learned Sign (often from them), and conducted services in Sign, right through the endless wrangles over oralism and the eclipse of Sign in secular education. De l‘Epee’s concern was religious in the first instance, and this concern, with its prompt perception of the ‘natural language’ of the deaf, has remained steadfast despite secular vicissitudes for two hundred years. This religious use of Sign is discussed by Jerome Schein:

  That sign has a spiritual aspect should not surprise anyone, especially if one considers its use by silent religious orders and by priests in the education of deaf children. What must be seen to be fully appreciated, however, is its singular appropriateness for religious worship. The depth of expression that can be achieved by signing defies accurate description. The Academy Award won by Jane Wyman in 1948 for her portrayal of a deaf girl in Johnny Belinda undoubtedly owed much to her beautiful (and accurate) rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in Ameslan.

  It is perhaps in the church service that the beauty of sign becomes most evident. Some churches have sign choirs. Watching the robed members sign in unison can be an awe-inspiring experience (Schein, 1984, pp. 144-145).

  In October of 1989 I visited a deaf synagogue in Arleta, in Southern California, for the solemn Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) services. More than 200 people had gathered there, some coming from hundreds of miles away. A few people spoke, but the entire service was in Sign; the rabbi, the choir, and the congregants all signed. At the reading of the Law—the Hebrew Torah is written on a scroll, and portions of this are read by dif
ferent congregants—this ‘reading aloud’ took the form of signing, a fluent translation of biblical Hebrew into Sign. Some extra, special prayers had been added to the service. At one point, where there is a communal atonement, of the form ‘We have done this, we have done that; we have sinned through doing this, we have sinned through doing that…‘ an extra ‘sin’ was added: ‘We have sinned through being impatient with the hearing when they failed to understand us.’ And an extra prayer of thanksgiving was thrown in: ‘Thou hast given us hands, that we might create language.’

  The Sign choir was especially astonishing; I had never before seen such large sweeping signs, or signs in unison—nor had I seen signing not in the usual sign-space used for human, social discourse, but high up, above the shoulders, towards Heaven, to God. (There was an atmosphere of great devotion, although, just in front of me, there was a middle-aged woman gossiping on the hands with her daughter, nonstop, a Sign yenta who reminded me of the murmuring and nattering of synagogues at home.)

  The congregants gathered long before the service, and stayed till long after—it was an important social and cultural, as well as religious, event. Such congregations are exceedingly rare, and I could not help wondering how it would be for a deaf child to be brought up in Montana or Wyoming, without a deaf church or deaf synagogue in thousands of miles.

  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 de-legitimation, of Sign in America. 153

  153. This happened not only in the United States, but throughout the world—even de l’Epee’s school, when I visited it in 1990, had become rigidly ‘oral’ (de l’Epee, I felt, was surely turning in his grave).

  The suppression of Sign in the 1880’s 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 1840’s, of a nationwide (even worldwide) community and culture.

  But the last thirty years have again seen a reversal—and indeed a re-legitimation 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 I’Epee 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. 154

  154. I regret that I have not had a chance to discuss this with Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, who being themselves both deaf and scientists, are in a position to see these events both from the inside and the outside; they have provided, in their chapter on ‘A Changing Consciousness’ in Deaf in America, the most insightful short account of changing attitudes to the deaf, and among the deaf, in the past thirty years.

  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’ 155

  155. Padden, 1980, p. 90.

  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: 156

  156. Stokoe, 1980, pp. 266-267.

  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 1960’s 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. 157

  157. But Klima and Bellugi relate how, at a 1965 conference, when Chomsky spoke of language as ‘a specific sound-meaning correspondence,’ he was asked how he would consider the sign languages of the deaf (in terms of this characterization). He showed an open mind, said that he did not see why the sound part should be crucial, and rephrased his definition of language as a ‘signal-meaning correspondence’ (Klima and Bellugi, 1979, p. 35).

  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 themse
lves 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.)