Ghostliness and Un/Belonging as a Hard-of-Hearing Writer
Deafness is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Lacking, or defective in,
the sense of hearing’, a definition which posits full hearing as the norm, from which
deafness is a deviation.
Yet many disagree with this definition, believing that
deafness is not a disability at all, but a culture, with its own language – sign. The
culture is transmitted through this language and the institutions and communities
which teach it. However, for those who are hard-of-hearing and who don’t sign, there
is no place for them to belong in this community. Rather, with a long history of the
suppression of sign language, which has only reverted in the last forty years or so, the
onus on a partly deaf person is to belong to the world of hearing as much as possible.
Brenda Jo Brueggemann, a hard-of-hearing rhetorician, refers to this as ‘passing’, in
the sense of trying to pass as a hearing person in order to fit into the dominant culture.
While this does lead to a sense of ghostliness or unbelonging, such unsettlement can
also produce creative results.
The Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, together with Laurent Clerc,
opened the first American school for the deaf, the Connecticut Asylum for the
Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, in 1817.
In 1857, Thomas
Gallaudet’s son Edward became principal of the Columbia Institution for the
Instruction of the Deaf and the Dumb and the Blind, hoping that it could become a
college with federal support. This eventuated in 1864, when the National Deaf Mute
College was founded in Washington, D.C. It was later named Gallaudet College, and
then became known as Gallaudet University.
In 1987, the hearing president of the Gallaudet resigned. In the one hundred
and twenty three years since its inception, the university had never had a deaf
president. The students made it clear that they wanted the next president to be deaf.
By mid-February, the search committee narrowed the search to six candidates – three
hearing, three deaf. On March 1, three thousand people attended a rally at Gallaudet
to indicate to the board of the trustees that the Gallaudet community wanted a deaf
president. Four nights later, on the night before the election, a candlelight vigil was
held outside the board’s quarters. On Sunday, March 6, choosing between the three
finalists, one hearing, two deaf, the board chose Elisabeth Ann Zinser, ViceChancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina – the hearing
candidate.
The students were outraged. They demanded the resignation of the newly
appointed hearing president and the chair of the board of trustees, and the
reconstitution of the board with a 51% majority of Deaf members (it was at that time
composed of seventeen hearing members and four Deaf). They moved buses in front
of the gates, which were barricaded with bicycle locks, and deflated their tyres. The
lockout kept people from coming onto campus, while forcing the Board of Trustees to
receive the protesters’ demands. These were ignored, and the students walked on
Capitol Hill.
Seven days after the appointment of the hearing president, their
demands were met. Elizabeth Zisner resigned and was replaced by I. King Jordan,
Gallaudet Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences who was deaf. The d/Deaf spoke
loudly with their hands and actions, a visible presence to which the world listened.
It is apt, then, to consider the etymology ‘belong’, as the word comes from the
Old English tern gelang, meaning ‘at hand’, or ‘together with’.
The Gallaudet
students’ collective use of speech with their hands indicated their belonging to a
community of deaf people, and to their desire to be led at that university by a person
who was one of them. Oliver Sacks, in Seeing Voices, illuminates how poetically this
togetherness can manifest. Visiting Gallaudet, he was exposed to Sign poetry and
theatre, to silent philosophy, chemistry and mathematics classes, and to ‘the
wonderful social scene in the student bar, with hands flying in all directions as a
hundred separate conversations proceeded’ (129). Sign, the movement of hands, was
a marker of belonging at this leading institution for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
Sign language is a much easier mode of communication than lipreading and
speech, both of which require enormous reserves of energy.
Laurent Clerc, co-
founder of Gallaudet University, recognised this, and became responsible for a
renaissance in the education of the deaf through sign language, which flourished
throughout the nineteenth century.
However, towards the end of the nineteenth
century, the deaf began rapidly to lose the advances they had made in terms of
education through sign language and oralism increasingly held sway, largely through
the tireless promotion of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Bell,
whose wife was deaf and communicated through lipreading, devoted his ‘great
prestige, personal fortune and tireless efforts’ (Lane 340) to the cause of oralism, that
is, of teaching deaf people to speak. He was propelled not only by a fear of difference
and a compulsion to make the deaf conform, but a desire to enable the deaf to
communicate with the hearing. He disliked sign for it cast the deaf adrift, away from
the hearing community and into their own.
The oralist method was also bolstered by the eugenicist argument, given voice
by Bell in his Memoir Upon the Formation of a Variety of the Human Race (1884),
that the deaf should not marry other deaf people in order to deter further incidences of
deafness, because ‘the production of a defective race of human beings would be a
great calamity to the world’ (41). The best way to prevent marriage among the deaf,
wrote Benjamin St. John Ackers, in his essay ‘Deaf, not Dumb’ (1884), ‘is by
teaching and training the deaf on the “German” system, so as to make them mix with
and be as much like their hearing fellow-creatures as possible’ (43). Tutoring the deaf
in the use of sign was also to be avoided, he continued, for it produced a different way
of thinking about language to written and spoken English.
This in turn made
communication with the hearing even more difficult, and ‘[i]f the deaf are unable to
mix comfortable with hearing persons, they will naturally shrink from them; be drawn
to others like themselves; marry those similarly afflicted and so, alas, too often hand
down and increase the evil’ (Ackers 44). The consequence of the suppression of sign
was, as Oliver Sacks describes, ‘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’ (139), for belonging to the
dominant, hearing culture was seen as a passport to success, while sign language was
associated with deviance. In the last few decades, however, there has fortunately been
a resurgence of sign language, and its use in universities such as Gallaudet has helped
to cement deaf identity and to nourish the sense of belonging to a deaf community.
However, not all deaf people can sign, and not all of them identify as Deaf.
As there is a range of hearing losses occasioned by a number of factors, the diversity
within the deaf community is enormous. There are the Culturally Deaf, whose first or
primary language is sign language; those born deaf, or deafened in early childhood
who may or may not use sign; deaf people who communicate with lipreading,
deafened adults who identify as hearing due to the late onset of deafness; hard of
hearing people who are neither fully hearing, nor fully deaf, and children of deaf
adults who are fluent in sign (Pray and Jordan 169). Often, deaf people distinguish
themselves within the community by referring to themselves as Deaf or deaf. Those
who are Deaf ‘see themselves as a linguistic subgroup like Latinos or Koreans. The
Deaf feel that their culture, language, and community constitute a totally adequate,
self enclosed and self-defining sub-nationality within the larger structure of the audist
state’ (Davis 881-882) and they do not perceive themselves as disabled. ‘Deaf’ then
describes this group culturally, whereas the lowercase ‘deaf’ is used to refer to the
condition of deafness. In its simplest terms, the capitalisation is a way of creating a
definition through either cultural or medical terms. A question then arises when one
has an audiogram (a graph representing the range and sensitivity of a person’s
hearing) that clearly indicates one has a hearing loss, and yet does not identify with
nor belong to Deaf culture. In other words, how can a deaf person belong when they
are between these two definitions, when they are deaf, but not Deaf?
When I was nearly four, I contracted bacterial meningitis which left me with
no hearing in my left ear, and half in my right. On a range of mild, moderate,
moderately severe, severe, profound and totally deaf, this was a diagnosis of severelyto-profoundly deaf. As I was speaking by the time I became deaf, my speech was
largely unaffected. I can read lips and body language well and hear higher pitches,
and people tend not to realise I have a disability until I tell them. I am unable to sign,
although I can finger spell the alphabet laboriously. I largely consider myself a
hearing person, although I can’t hear in conversations of more than three people, or at
noisy bars and parties, or in dark rooms when there is no light by which to lipread, or
when someone has turned their head away.
This, of course, has ramifications, particularly when growing up in an
extroverted family which placed an enormous emphasis on socialising. Being unable
to keep up with my bright and noisy siblings and theatrical cousins, I have often felt
inadequate, lonely, isolated and not-quite-present.
This experience is also elucidated by Brenda Jo Brueggeman in Lend Me Your
Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Brueggeman, a rhetorician who is hardof-hearing, poetically describes herself as being in a place between ‘hard’ and
‘hearing’:
As one whose life has been spent always feeling one step behind in a
conversation, usually caught in the exchange between two speakers and
never quite ‘there’ at the moment any one person is speaking as I
scrabble to process what I have heard, to fill in the many missing high
frequency consonants that I haven’t heard, to attend to ways that
minimize background and interfering sounds, to construct a more
accurate picture from the context surrounding the conversation
(reading lips, attending to body language, noting facial expressions,
trusting tone)— as such a one, I do anything but stand still (8).
It is useful to attend to Brueggeman’s use of place and time in this description of her
hearing process. She is always ‘one step behind’ and never fully present in the act of
hearing; the sense of time that she experiences is not that which a hearing person
might experience. She is in a space between the present, in which the words are being
spoken, and the past, in which the words have been spoken but she must struggle to
retrieve them. Likewise, she is never still, but rather is constantly journeying to find
the words and the context. She simply cannot be, or belong, in a place, for she is
someone is someone not quite there. In other words, she is a ghost.
The most recognisable characteristic of ghosts is their tendency to haunt. One
definition of this verb, from the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘to resort to frequently
or habitually; to frequent or be much about (a place)’, while among the definitions of
the word as a noun is ‘A place of frequent resort or usual abode’. The associations of
these words are thus bound up with journeys (for the ghost or being constantly
returns), and place (being that to which the ghost journeys).
This can be seen in
Brueggemann’s actions, in that she constantly returns to the words and context of a
sentence to piece together meaning from it.
Aside from haunting a place to seek meaning, there are many other reasons
why ghosts might want to undertake a journey. Some ‘were thought to appear to
memorialise the tragic end to human lives, such as those of suicides, while other souls
were so attached to their earthly routine that they returned out of habit to repeat their
daily actions over and over again’ (Davies 4). Others have not been properly buried,
or have messages to deliver to the living (Davis 2-3). These reasons indicate that the
ghost returns because it has been displaced, most obviously from life by death, but
also by trauma, and so it attempts to get back to where it belongs.
When I contracted meningitis, my parents were living on a property in country
New South Wales. My mother took me to the local doctor, who told her to take me to
the hospital, another hour’s drive away, immediately. There, I brushed against Death
with a respiratory arrest, but pulled through. A few weeks later, my parents, realising
something wasn’t right, took me to the audiologist, who diagnosed my hearing loss.
Death might have lost the fight, but he’d taken part of me with him to the
Underworld. I became detached from the world of the hearing, as though he had
stained me through their interaction.
I tried again and again to return to the world from which I had been excluded,
and sometimes I made it for, like Brueggemann, I was good at lipreading and piecing
things together. Yet a hearing-aid could only do so much, and when I didn’t speak
because I couldn’t hear all the threads of a conversation, I became invisible and
returned to my ghostly realm. Such invisibility is an issue with which hard of hearing
people have long grappled.
The former eugenicist policies regarding the suppression of sign language and
difference have remained ingrained among many of the hard of hearing. We are
taught, whether overtly or subconsciously, that to be successful we need to hide our
deafness and to act, on those occasions when we can’t hear, as though we can. I refer
to this as ‘faking it’ (and have often been amazed by how a smile and nod in the right
place offers much encouragement).
Brueggemann terms it more seriously as
‘passing’. She notes, ‘[t]he self esteem in passing, in being able to fit into the
dominant culture and in being able to communicate effectively in what Giroux calls
that culture’s “social grammar”, is no small goal for many deaf students’ (40).
Likewise Donna McDonald, in her doctoral thesis 'Hearsay: how stories of deafness
and deaf people are told', writes that:
For as long as I can remember, and certainly for all of my adult life, I
had been careful to avoid being identified as ‘a deaf person’ … Some of
my early silence about deaf identity politics was consistent with my
desire not to shine the torch on myself in this way. I did not want to
draw attention to myself by what I did not have, that is, less hearing
than other people’ (9).
I, too, had grown up with this desire not to draw attention to myself as a disabled
person. I rarely disclosed that I was deaf, unless I was struggling desperately in a
conversation and had to simply concede that I couldn’t hear.
I pushed myself
academically and socially to prove that deafness was no hindrance, and that I could be
just as good as, or better than, a person with hearing.
Brueggemann, too, believed she should act as though she could hear. Then
she started taking sign language classes and went to Gaudellet University, and, at the
age of 30, she ‘came out’ about her deafness. In her book Lend Me Your Ear, she
describes the similarities between deaf and queer culture:
Deaf people have often been curiosities, ‘queer’ in their ‘strange’ and
‘silent’ way; gay people have just as often been silenced, speechless in
dominant heterosexual histories and discourse. From these positions,
deaf and gay individuals ‘pass’ – playing out and through a politics of
passing, balancing borders of (non) existence in their daily interactions
and relationships … Hearing, like one’s sexual orientation and
relationships, cannot readily be seen (152).
Again, Brueggemann’s use of the term ‘passing’ suggests movement and journeying
to and from the worlds of the deaf, the hearing and somewhere in between them. She
uses the term ‘(non) existence’ to demonstrate how she seems not to feel fully alive in
either world. In the shadow of the dominant groups of hearing and heterosexuality,
the deaf and gay groups seem to lose substance. To become visible, they need to
assert themselves with a voice.
For the deaf, such visibility is achieved through sign language, as
demonstrated clearly by the signed protests at Gallaudet. For those who are deaf and
yet not Deaf, however, interactions with hearing people sometimes require constant
explanation, or requests for light by which to see a face, or to speak more slowly and
clearly, all of which is awkward with a person one might have only recently met.
Sometimes it’s easier simply to give up and retreat from the conversation, becoming
invisible and ghostly again.
Poor ghosts, some might think: they are to be pitied for their dissatisfaction,
for being deprived of life and a place, for their muteness and abjection. Yet is being a
ghost so entirely impoverishing? Does not a ghost, in travelling between worlds, in
being forced to question and to readjust, not have a sensibility that is eerie, richer,
more unearthly and extraordinary? Certainly, my deafness, my unsettlement and lack
of belonging, have all contributed to making me a better writer.
Being unable to participate in conversations, for example, means I observe
people instead, gathering details of their clothes, stance, facial hair and expressions
for character descriptions. In addition, having lost most of one sense, the others have
become stronger, so I pay a great deal of attention to textures, smells and visual
details such as colour and light, using them to set my scenes. The position of being an
outsider means that I can empathise with others who are on the margins, such as
Indigenous people, migrants, or gays and lesbians, thereby becoming attuned to other
voices.
This trait is one also developed by Brueggemann, which helps her in her work
as a rhetorician: ‘I shift stances and voices often. And this business of stances and
voices – of shifting and sifting them – exploring all their available means – conducts
the business of rhetoric at large’ (8). Deafness, in these instances, has resulted in an
active listening to and deployment of voice. Indeed, it is arguable that, had I not
become deaf, I would never have become a writer — someone vested in creating
voice — at all.
My first memory is of lying on the trampoline under the apricot tree at home
as the pain from the meningitis dripped down my back. My second memory is of
sitting on the hospital bed with my father as he read me a story about Strawberry
Shortcake. My third memory is of pulling a cardboard box of coloured letters from
their place beneath the dresser and of pestering my mother, ‘Can I do my words?’
These three memories, strung together, can be read as a narrative for my own move
towards writing. Meningitis caused my deafness and subsequent retreat into books
for solace, which, in turn, encouraged me to write.
From an early age, I consumed books obsessively, not simply because I
enjoyed reading, but because it was easier to move into other worlds than to interact
within my own. For example, when I stepped onto on the school bus in the mornings
with my brother and sister, I always found a seat on the left hand side of the bus, so
that if someone spoke to her, she’d be able to hear them better, with my good ear.
After another two stops, my cousins were all on board, and with nine Whites
cavorting about, the bus became noisier and noisier. By this stage, I had pulled a
book from my bag and begun reading. It wasn’t that I disliked playing with my
cousins, but rather that the effort required to hear amidst that cacophony was simply
too much. It simpler to engage with the people in my book, whom I could understand
intimately and effortlessly. I would enter another world, drawn back to earth only by
the appearance of familiar landmarks, or the slowing of the bus, and became used to
listening to other voices in my head. In other worlds, too, I wasn’t rubbed raw by the
sense that I didn’t fit in. After all, we are all deaf while we are reading, for sound is
an intrusion.
As I grew older, it was only a short step to writing my own voice. On visiting
a careers adviser as I neared the end of my schooling, I was told that I needed a
creative outlet to express my frustration with being deaf. I was surprised that he had
sensed my isolation, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been: most Deaf people who
belonged to a community could express themselves with sign language, but I had no
one I could talk to about being so out of place. As soon as he mentioned creative
writing, I knew this was what I wanted to do. It was sign language in another form,
after all, creating words on a page rather than in the air.
To my surprise, I found the careers advisor was correct. I began writing
journals, literally pouring my self and my difficulties into page after page, all the time
improving as a writer of short stories, poetry and novels. Now, having practiced my
craft for fifteen years, I have lately wondered if there is not something in this state of
unbelonging, of ghostly traversing and listening to voices in other worlds, that
predisposes one to writing.
In her book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Margaret
Atwood observes that ‘the mere act of writing splits the self into two’ (32) and that
there are two selves that make up a writer:
the person who exists when no writing is going forward – the one who
walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car to be washed, and
so forth – and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal
personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking,
takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing (34).
This other self travels to the Underworld to talk to the dead, take their stories, and
enlarge upon them for their readers. As Atwood continues:
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from
here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must
take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all
must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how
you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless
treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and
allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of
the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change (178-179).
As with Brueggemann, Atwood describes movement from the present to the past and
back again in order to create meaning. The writer steals or recovers the stories from
the dead and, as the everyday person who walks their dog, crafts them into something
readable, just as Brueggemann takes what she has heard and fashions it into
something that makes sense.
Perhaps, then, there is something in partial deafness, in moving between
worlds, that predisposes one to the creation of meaning and story. Perhaps that brush
with Death when I contracted meningitis meant that I was more receptive to the
voices of the Underworld. As the author Hilary Mantel writes, using terminology
similar to Atwood’s to describe her processes:
One part of you deals with the day-to-day; it goes to Tesco. The
other part goes down by night – or in sessions of thought as dark as
night – into the subterranean passages between the lines, where your
accumulated experience and technical expertise shed no more light
than a birthday cake candle; where you hope to find not words, but
images, hobgoblins, chimeras, piles of Medusa heads (4).
The trauma created by deafness, while unpleasant, does offer a reservoir of
experience upon which to draw. My hobgoblins are isolation, my chimeras are those
who ostracise me through thoughtlessness or cruelty, my Medusa heads are the people
who overlook me when I do not speak up. This exposure to the unpleasant side of
human nature, even if these various actions are never intended, brings a darker shade
to my writing that lends it richness and depth. However cold it is being kept on the
outside of a conversation, or something not quite real, or someone that doesn’t
belong, I could never deny that it has not made me a better writer. Or that, without
deafness, I would never have retreated to other worlds through their words, or be a
writer at all.
Ghosts are unsettled creatures, moving between worlds as they seek a place to
belong. Those who are hard of hearing, who are deaf but not part of Deaf culture, are
also ghostly, moving between the present and the past as they try to construct
meaning from what they hear, or between the worlds of the hearing and the Deaf.
While the latter are made visible through their use of sign language, those who are
partly deaf are often overlooked as their impairment is not readily apparent. Such
invisibility, while not welcome, is not necessarily detrimental. It had the effect, in my
case, of prodding me towards books and writing, of making me an observer, and of
taking me to the Underworld – that place where one finds the stories, and crafts them
into life.
Ghosts, in frequenting the space between, become pluralistic and
multivalent. They are never truly deaf, nor ‘defective’ in hearing, as the Oxford
English Dictionary would have us believe. Rather, they listen to other voices, which
in turn contribute to their own.
Works Cited
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Rosa Praed. London: Chapman & Hall, 1884, pp. 38-53. Print.
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Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
Bell, Alexander Graham. Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.
Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1969. Print.
Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness.
Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 1999. Print.
Davies, Owen. The Haunted: a Social History of Ghosts. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007. Print.
Davis, Colin. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of
the Dead. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2007. Print.
Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: a History of the Deaf. London: Penguin Books,
1988. Print.
Mantel, Hilary. ‘Author, Author.’ The Guardian 28th June 2008.
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Pray, Janet and I. King Jordan. ‘The Deaf Community and Culture at a Crossroads:
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Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: a Journey into the World of the Deaf. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989. Print.