For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  With ten minutes remaining to our class and the Kerala sun lifting over the palm trees and screwing its vise tighter on the world, I decided to correct some of the mistakes that had been made in the past forty minutes. I looked around the room at the faces. Sweat was beading on the foreheads of some of the men and on the upper lips of some of the women. The armpits of Khom’s white shirt were damp. The ceiling fan didn’t offer much relief, just stirred the hot air onto our heads. I told Jessica that in English there was no such word as understandment or trickical (though I quite liked that one) and asked who knew what the correct words were. Marco raised his hand. “Understanding and tricky.”

  “Right. And also, Jessie, unemployment is a noun and therefore people who do not have jobs cannot be unemployment. Who knows the correct adjective?”

  Marco said, “Unemployed.”

  “And, Pynhoi,” I said, “disability is also a noun. People who have a disability are described with what adjective? Who except Marco knows it?”

  “Crippled!” James blurted.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, yes, you could say that, but the word crippled has negative connotations. Would you refer to yourself as a cripple, James?”

  “Never!”

  Holi said, “Disabled.”

  “Right,” I said. “And, Gyentzen, Holi used the word available earlier. Do you know what that means?”

  Marco began to speak, but I cut him short, told him that I knew he knew the answer but that the question was directed to Gyentzen. Marco smiled in acknowledgment; he knew he was a walking English dictionary.

  “Gyentzen?” I said.

  Gyentzen began with the fist in the palm again.

  “If you don’t know what a word means—and I’m speaking to all of you and not just to Gyentzen—do not let the word go by without asking what it means. This is why you’re here. And, Gyentzen, tell me something: Back in Lhasa, were you also a carpenter?”

  Gyentzen thought. “Carpenter?”

  “A man who makes things out of wood.”

  He looked properly puzzled. “No.”

  “I ask this because you are constantly hammering with your right hand.”

  Martin, who was Gyentzen’s roommate, laughed loudly in recognition.

  “Do you know what hammering is, Gyentzen?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Kyila, please tell Gyentzen what hammering is.”

  Kyila did as I asked, and Gyentzen nearly choked on his own laughter.

  Because I wanted Kyila to practice pronouncing the letter w, I turned then to the word twinkling. Only two people in the class knew what it meant. Unimaginatively I used the example of the stars, and of course that fell flat, for most of the students had never seen the stars or else had seen them so long ago that they couldn’t really remember them. Only Johnson, who was blinded late, and Martin, who was not blind at all, knew what I meant. How to explain to a group of blind people what twinkling is or how a w is shaped? I thought what an odd English class this would be, and I was not quite sure I was prepared to teach it. I said that the quality of twinkling light was a bit like the feel of raindrops on one’s arm. I got out of my chair and lightly drummed my fingertips on the back of the hand of each person who didn’t know the word and tried to attach the sensation to the flickering, pulsating, intermittent quality of a twinkling light. But then, of course, I had to back up and explain what light was like for those few who had no knowledge of it.1

  How to describe light? It was like trying to define life after death or the origin of the universe. I labored to compare the effect of light on the eyes to the effect of heat on one’s skin or strong taste—a wedge of lemon, say—on one’s tongue. I attempted to compare it to a strong smell—mint, cigarette smoke, chlorine. Finally, a few of them said, “I think I understand.”

  Throughout this exercise I was reminded of something I had read: A blind woman who had regained her sight insisted, “You can’t tell a person how anything looks unless he has once had eyes that saw. The words don’t mean a thing to him.” Perhaps blind people didn’t understand, but they often used the language of the sighted, and I thought that to know roughly what a person meant when he said twinkling might be useful to them one day.

  Although it wasn’t really necessary for blind people to know the shapes that made up the Roman alphabet, I wanted to convey to them what a w looked like. I asked the students to put the three middle fingers of their left hands flat on the edge of the table and then spread those fingers as wide as possible. Then I told them to trace the outline of those fingers with the index finger of the right hand. They did this, and several of them said, “Ah!” When I announced that the class had come to an end, some of the students reached for their white canes that lay folded on the floor at their feet,2 and they all stood and began to make their way out the door. A few of them walked into the chairs that had not been pushed back to the table; several of them collided near the door, and Victor walked himself into the wrong corner and had to work around the periphery of the room with the tip of his cane tapping low against the walls until he felt the screen door. This was only the second or third time they had been in this building, and some went out the door and turned the wrong way down the hall. I followed them out and redirected them. At the end of the hallway, near the entrance to the building, a few began to stumble up the staircase to the second floor, laughed at the mistake, corrected themselves, and finally found the exit.

  I watched them leave the building and head off down the footpath at the center of the campus. None of them walked in a way that suggested fear, though the campus was still unfamiliar to them. I marveled again at the patience they exuded and the trust they placed in the physical world, qualities that I once would have described as desperate necessity but now perceived as confidence and self-possession. This sense of ease seemed to broadcast a fundamental connection to the world that was, I suspected, deeper and more elementary than the one I had.

  1Most blind people who can be said to have no useful sight are not profoundly blind in the strictest medical sense. Profound blindness describes a completely nonfunctioning retina that has no sensitivity to light whatsoever. Many blind people can see some light in a sensation similar to what you might experience if you lay in the sun and closed your eyes. Your eyes are closed, yet still you see light, and even a color that occupies the spectrum between yellow and red, and if, while lying there, you pass your hand close before your face, your eyes, though closed, will register your hand’s shadow. You cannot truly see, yet your retina continues to function.

  2Most modern white canes are constructed of three or four lengths of hollow aluminum tubing held together by an elastic cord inside, which allows the cane to be folded to a compact size, very like the ribs of a camping tent.

  Perception

  Days at the IISE passed with a regular, unwavering rhythm. Breakfast at six thirty; classes at seven; a general assembly in the auditorium with group discussions, presentations, and speeches by teachers and students alike; more classes; lunch; a break in the hottest hours of the afternoon; a class again in the evening; dinner at six thirty; staff meetings; and then a half-hour power cut. As the days went by, without noticing it, I became used to living among the blind. I became used to the sound of white canes scraping and tapping down the walkway outside my bedroom door, to the clacking sound the folded canes made as the students shook them back to their upright positions at the end of a class. I grew used to the sound of heads knocking against the frame of my bedroom window (it opened outward, like a door, and the wind occasionally pushed it into the path of students hurrying down the walkway). I grew used to the sight of a hundred horizontal finger streaks on the dormitory windows from all the hands that reached out to feel their way along the corridor. I got used to the shocking gunshot sounds of screen doors slamming and to shouting, “Quit letting those screen doors slam! I thought you blind people didn’t like loud noises.” I got used to the laughter and the hoots I received in response to that
comment. I got used to people walking into me, goosing me and tripping me with their white canes, sitting down on top of me, accidentally taking my plate, my fork, my water glass at meals. At the dinner table, I got used to ducking full cups of hot tea that I regularly saw (usually at the last moment from the corner of my eye) barreling toward my head in the hands of passing students. (A good number of people ended up with brown stains down the backs of their shirts as a result of these dining room accidents.) I got into the habit of stating to all present that I was leaving the dinner table or leaving a room so that they would not try to talk to me in my absence. (Sabriye had told me that once, when she was sitting in a restaurant in Germany with her father, she had gotten into a heated political argument with him. At some point her father went to the men’s room without telling her, and she continued to rant loudly and for an extended period to an empty table.) I learned to guide blind companions on a walk using my voice instead of my arm. I got used to the sight of scarred shins and bruised knees, got used to walking past a completely dark room and hearing many voices coming out of it.

  I was, in fact, surprised at how little difference there was between living among the sighted and living among the blind. Blind people at the institute got out of bed in the morning and put on their clothes, went to the dining room, fed themselves, put salt and pepper on their food, made their own toast, ate with forks and knives (except for the few Africans who were in the habit of eating with their hands); after the evening meal, they took turns washing the dishes. They arrived at class on time. They did not have constant accidents or frequently lose their possessions. Nobody fell off a balcony, got electrocuted, caused the school to go up in flames. Nobody drowned while swimming in the lake. Nobody got lost on expeditions into the city. And nobody ever used blindness as an excuse for anything. Nobody ever even referred to his or her own blindness except in a political or sociological context. They were not preoccupied with their blindness. It was just a fact of life.

  After countless failed attempts to explain various visual phenomena with examples that would have had meaning only for a sighted person, and after countless failed attempts to use my hands to describe objects and shapes when my hands were invisible to my students, I gradually got used to a much more physical approach to them. Before long I found myself making my points by tapping on their foreheads, holding their heads in my hands, covering their ears, making them trace designs on the table, making them feel shapes that I made with my fingers. I became used to (though never truly adept at) having to describe snow and lightning, steam and fireflies and the moon and a hundred other common sights that they could neither see nor entirely imagine. And I stopped believing that I could ever really hide myself or anything else from them.

  At the beginning of the year, before the entire campus was equipped with wireless Internet, there was only one room in which the Internet was available. Students would bring their laptop computers to this room and send and receive e-mails from there. One afternoon I was sitting in the Internet room alone, typing a long e-mail, when Karin, a twenty-six-year-old Norwegian woman who had been blind since birth, came in and sat down at the opposite end of the room. I was so absorbed in my work that I didn’t pause to greet her. After a few seconds she said, “Hi, Rose. How are you?”

  I stopped typing and looked at her, extremely surprised. “Hi, Karin. How did you know it was me?”

  “The sound of your typing.” She was smiling her slightly crooked smile as she set up her computer. Her eyes were a bit sunken and completely unseeing. “Impossible,” I said. “It could have been anyone at all sitting here typing.”

  “No,” Karin said, grinning now, “it couldn’t. You type faster than anyone on the campus. I always know when you’re in this room from the sound of it.”

  Because it would never have occurred to me to analyze the sound of anyone’s typing, because I never imagined I would be identifiable in this way, I felt weirdly naked and exposed. I asked Karin if everyone on the campus knew the sound of my typing. She shrugged. “Yes, of course.”

  One evening, one of the staff members gave me a coffee mug full of Indian beer, and though Paul and Sabriye discouraged alcohol on the campus, I thought it couldn’t hurt for me to take the mug into the Internet room while I worked on my computer. I went into the crowded room, placed the mug carefully on the window ledge out of the way of any person who might come in and knock it over, and just as I was thinking, Nobody will know there’s beer here, Gyentzen, at the farthest end of the room, said, “I smell beer. Who has beer for us?”

  Again, I was astonished. “Gyentzen,” I said, “you can smell a small mug of beer all the way down there?” Gyentzen laughed and confessed that he liked beer. (In his application to the institute, Gyentzen had described the Tibetan New Year celebration this way: “Homes are cleaned, new clothes are stitched, debts and quarrels are resolved, good food is cooked, and intoxicants are drunk.”) Several other people in the room said that they too could smell the beer. I said, “Well, I’m sitting right on top of it and I can’t smell it. What’s the matter with me?”

  “You are not a mystical blind person!” Jessica jeered.

  As I made my way around the campus, I usually said hello to everyone I passed to alert them that I was there. But one night I was in a particular hurry to get back to my room and as I was going up the footpath, I saw Robbie, a German man who was completely blind, approaching me. Not wanting to stop and talk, I simply decided to pass by without speaking. What harm would it do if he didn’t know who it was? But before I had got within thirty feet of him, Robbie said, “Hi, Rose.”

  I stopped in my tracks, baffled. “How on earth did you know it was me, Robbie?”

  “The sound of your footsteps.”

  This one I found extremely difficult to believe. “Do you mean to tell me that of all the forty-some people who might be walking on this path tonight, you can actually differentiate the sound of my footsteps from everyone else’s?”

  “The shoes you wear have a particular sound.”

  I looked down at the shoes. They were simple sandals, just like the sandals of many of the other women on the campus. “Oh, for God’s sake, they couldn’t possibly have a particular sound,” I said. I did not believe it.

  “Yes, they do,” Robbie said, “and you also walk faster than just about anybody here. I always know when it’s you.”

  I was startled. If Robbie always recognized me, then probably everybody else did too. My fantasy of anonymity was destroyed. I understood once and for all that I could no more conceal my identity from a blind person than from a sighted person. I said good night to Robbie and continued on to my room, feeling transparent and vulnerable and wondering how many people I had insulted by passing by without saying hello. If they could identify me by the sound of my voice, I could understand that—I was capable of doing that too—but by the sound of my typing? The sound of my footsteps? The smell of my shampoo or soap or beer? What else was I unwittingly doing that my blind colleagues could identify as particularly my action and not someone else’s? I was surprised that I hadn’t anticipated how much the blind could know about me, what signals they received from my particular behavior, and by how intimate their knowledge of me sometimes seemed. Whatever Robbie knew of me, he probably knew effortlessly and without thinking about it. Because he was adapted to a sightless world, he was attuned to data and signals to which I myself was oblivious. Robbie and the others had noticed things about me that I had never stopped to notice about myself. This was not the result of some supernatural mystical ability or sixth sense, the kind of powers the blind have had pinned to them for ages; it was simply that the blind, like the rest of us, have a human need to recognize, to differentiate, and, above all, to connect with the people around them. My blind students knew me and connected with me in ways that I had never imagined possible.

  When I asked my students to write an essay, I expected them to write it not in Braille but on a computer in an electric format that I could read. B
raille is a beautifully useful tool for the blind, but since they were here to learn how to pass their ideas on to the world at large, which included a great number of people who were not blind, they had to know how to write effectively and type what they wrote on a keyboard. This was possible for blind people with a screen-reading program that read back to them what they had typed. The students who came from the more affluent countries—Japan, South Africa, and Europe—already had very good computer skills, could type quickly, and owned their own laptops. The rest either were still learning or had no skills at all. Occasionally I would go to the computer lab, an air-conditioned room in the classroom building with a bank of computers against one wall, and help the students as they wrote their essays. Those who already had good computer skills generally needed little help. They sat in front of the monitors, their fingers running quickly over the keyboards, while a flat electronic voice spoke their words back to them. (The voice was a speedy, monotonous babbling that sounded precisely like the muttering of a flock of farm ducks. It was a sound one heard all day long, all over the campus.) But the rest struggled, poking slowly at the keyboard with one finger, fighting with a cursor they didn’t know how to control. Those who had a little vision tried, against the stern admonishments of Arky, the computer teacher, to actually read the letters on the keyboard and screen by pressing their faces to within an inch of them. Arky derisively called this “nose reading.” Eric, a man from Ghana who had very weak vision on which he stubbornly continued to try to depend, would enlarge the font on his screen to an enormous size, then put his face to the screen and attempt to see it. Eric’s eyelids had fleshy red growths at their edges and were generally swollen and sore-looking. He had no tear ducts, so he had to continually lubricate his eyes. It was painful to watch him struggling to see with these weak and damaged eyes. It was not only costing him a tremendous amount of time and effort but also preventing him from learning how to use the computer without sight, which eventually he would be forced to do, as his vision was ever diminishing. If he had simply closed his eyes and learned how to operate the computer without trying to see it, his work would have been much easier. But it is a monumental task to persuade a man to surrender a lifetime’s pattern of behavior, a lifetime’s identity as a sighted person, and get him to accept that he is blind. The English professor John Hull spent a tremendous amount of energy and psychic pain rejecting his blindness before he realized that “one must recreate one’s life or be destroyed.” The poet Stephen Kuusisto, author of Planet of the Blind, a memoir about losing his sight, described that process: “Why should it take so long for me to like the blind self? I resist it, admit it, then resist it again, as though blindness were a fetish, a perverse weakness, a thing I could overcome with the force of will power.” By all accounts, abandoning life as a sighted person feels like a kind of death and yet the death is wholly necessary before a productive life as a blind person can begin.