Mother Father Deaf

Living Between Sound and Silence

Paul M. Preston

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780674252868
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Sociologia

"Mother father deaf" is the phrase commonly used within the Deaf community to refer to hearing children of deaf parents. These children grow up between two cultures, the Hearing and the Deaf, forever balancing the worlds of sound and silence. Paul Preston, one of these children, takes us to the place where Deaf and Hearing cultures meet, where families like his own embody the conflicts and resolutions of two often opposing world views.Based on 150 interviews with adult hearing children of deaf parents throughout the United States, Mother Father Deaf examines the process of assimilation and cultural affiliation among a population whose lives incorporate the paradox of being culturally "Deaf" yet functionally hearing. It is rich in anecdote and analysis, remarkable for its insights into a family life normally closed to outsiders.

PART III

Childhood Landscapes

Arlene’s Story

When we’d go shopping, I got lost I don’t know how many times. Man, when I got lost, I got lost! People would come up to me and say, “Can I help you? I’m sure we can find your Mamma and Daddy.” And I’m thinking, well just you try. Let’s see you call them over the P.A. system. And knowing my mother, the way she shopped, it would be a while before she found out I wasn’t there.

This one time, we were traveling and we pulled up at a filling station and I was asleep in the back seat. My mother was looking at this road map while my father was in the restroom. I woke up and I told my mother I was going to the bathroom. So, when I came back from the bathroom, the car was gone. I was only five or six and I was scared to death. I just started crying and the gas station man said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “My Mamma and Daddy drove off!” He said, “Oh, they’ll be right back soon as they notice things are so quiet and you’re not talking with them.” I said, “But you don’t understand. They don’t hear anything, they’re deaf.”

It turned out they didn’t get that far, maybe five or six miles down the road before they noticed. They said it was a good thing I had rolled down my window because it was the air that made this wind in the car and my Daddy finally turned around to see what it was and saw that I was gone. Otherwise, who knows how long it would have been.

I got lost lots of other times too. [At this point Arlene sighed, her eyes filling with tears. Her voice began to break.] And I know when my parents are gone, I know I’m really gonna feel lost again.

Since beginning this research, I have traveled more than 58,000 miles—almost 9,000 miles of them driving alone across the American countryside. For nearly twelve months, I crisscrossed a landscape altered by geography and by season. I met informants at home, at work, and on the run: at a punk cafe on the north side of Chicago; a rocky beach on the Pacific; a tavern in the rural South; a sprawling suburban mansion in the northeast. Vygotsky (1978) proposes that each child “grows and develops in an extremely individual cultural-social environment which reflects the complex path of the historical development of the given people and the complex system of economic and cultural conditions of its present-day existence” (p. 27). Considering the diverse lives of these men and women, are there unifying features within their childhood landscapes?

In the previous four chapters, informants’ narratives about their family members provided glimpses of the historical contexts and social forces that contributed to the experience of being a hearing child of deaf parents. Part III shifts from reflections of identity in others to informants’ own remembered experiences. These chapters focus on the routine yet distinct landmarks of their childhoods, and on the emotional threads that connect these childhood experiences to their present adult lives. As Arlene’s story illustrates, many informants’ feelings about their childhood and their parents were not merely lodged in descriptive memoirs of the past. These ongoing responses were very much a part of their adult life, often emerging during the interviews as well.

Sumner, Bateson, and others have used the concept of “ethos” to describe what Clifton (1976) calls “the dominant emotional aspects of consciousness which color and give quality to different behaviors observed in a community” (p. 152). Each of the four chapters in Part III is organized around a major theme that is both evocative and persistent: communication, family roles, difference, and dichotomization. The intensity as well as the response to each of these issues varies among informants. Yet it is the recurrence of these themes—despite the diversity in informants’ age, locale, or family circumstances— which demonstrates a remarkably consistent topography and a unifying ethos among this population.

SEVEN

A Song You Never Heard Before

Sure, everybody’s different than their parents. But there’s this one thing—I don’t exactly know how to describe it. It’s like we [signs “look into”] like we see into the Deaf world because of them, but we’re also hearing. And, no matter how hard either of us tries, they can’t ever be hearing and we can’t ever be deaf ... I don’t know, it’s like when I try to explain music to my parents. My Mom is always wanting me to explain music. And if your parents aren’t deaf, you can’t understand. It’s like me telling you about a song you never heard before. I can try all sorts of ways, but until you hear it, you can never really know what it’s like. Not really. [Shakes his head and signs “cant”]

Rafael sat cross-legged on the floor of his living room trying to explain the difference between being deaf and being hearing. Imperceptibly, he shifted to trying to explain his own life. At the heart of Rafael’s narrative is his concern with communication—trying to express feelings, convey information, share experiences. What does it take to communicate with others? Is there some inevitable wall that exists no matter what the subject, no matter how skilled the presenter, no matter who the audience? Must each of us acknowledge that all communication is ultimately flawed—is it, as Rafael describes, like trying to explain “a song you never heard before”?

It would be easy to overestimate the significance of sign language among hearing children of deaf parents. One-fifth of all informants did not use ASL or any other sign system; this group included not only those whose parents were oral, but several informants whose parents’ sole form of communication was ASL. Yet, despite varying language competencies and uses among informants, these men and women shared a more elemental arena of communication: sound and silence. These two aspects of communication were part of informants’ daily lives, present in their most ordinary routines. I begin this chapter by examining sound and silence—two properties that might be considered commonsense and second nature. Yet informants’ narratives reveal that even these supposed universals are subject to cultural interpretation. Because informants incorporate the cultural systems of both the Hearing and the Deaf, their understandings of sound and of silence reflect this dual and often conflicting heritage. I will also evaluate particular modes of language—speech, writing, signs, gestures, facial expressions, and body movements—within a cultural context. In particular, I see talking as a culturally defined method of communication that not only determines how informants express themselves to others but shapes preferences for how others communicate with them. In the remainder of the chapter I examine informants’ relationship to the languages of English and American Sign Language, and the implications of being bilingual between two languages that emerge from such fundamentally opposing extremes of sound and silence.

Language

Language has been hailed as a distinctly human mode of communication—often considered to be the primary attribute of our species. In both arts and sciences, language has provided a mirror for the broader culture as well as for the individual soul. Writers have debated at great length the relationship between language and self. Sapir and Whorf described the interrelatedness of language and thought, while others have proposed their arbitrariness. The particular language that is learned and the uses of language within a child’s early environment are universally recognized as significant influences on psychosocial development.¹ Studies have examined language shift and language maintenance, the relationship between language and gender, language and personality. Despite this vast and sometimes conflicting array of language theories, researchers and writers share a nearly universal bias. The studies and the expressions of language all presume one element, one that has implicitly been incorporated within the domain of “language” for both researcher and layperson. It is a quality simple in its recognition and profound by its absence: sound.

Hockett (1960) identified thirteen design features that set language apart from other forms of communication. According to Hockett, the first criterion of language is that it is a vocal-auditory channel of communication: produced through the mouth and/or nose, heard through the ears. This fixation with sound extends to writing as well. “True writing,” Henderson observes, “is more commonly considered a surrogate for language—a system of graphic signs which conveys the equivalent of spoken communication” (1976, p. 409). Cole (1982) defines language as comprising “a set of symbols and a set of rules (a grammar) used in a meaningful way that permits communication. The symbols are expressed orally by sounds, or they can be communicated in a written form” (p. 3).

Equating language with sound is not merely the province of theoreticians and researchers. Common terms and synonyms associated with language indicate the pervasiveness of this association: “speaker,” “listener,” “talk,” “speech.” Grosjean (1982) finds that the United States is generally more tolerant of linguistic minorities, but he also observes:

Although the official policy toward linguistic minorities has been neither one of encouragement nor one of repression but more a policy of toleration, the general attitude of the nation (as compared to its laws) and of the Anglo-American majority has been that members of linguistic minorities should integrate themselves into the English-speaking society as quickly as possible (p. 62).

The expected assimilation is not merely toward a particular language, but a spoken language. In contemporary American culture, the belief in sound as the basis for language and for communication has achieved unquestioned supremacy. This belief appears to be shared by many other cultures as well.²

Within the past two decades American Sign Language has begun to challenge traditional assumptions about the fundamental elements of language (Woodward 1972; Klima and Bellugi 1979; Padden and Humphries 1988). ASL has emerged from intriguing curiosity to recognition as a complete and separate language.³ No longer considered a stepchild of English, ASL has developed a sizable research following; many of these studies are oriented toward linguistic analyses and classifications. Ironically, linguistic recognition of ASL was precipitated largely on the basis of its inherent structural and morphological characteristics—qualities that are considered fundamental to more traditional sound-oriented languages. Although the growing acceptance and recognition of ASL represent an important milestone of Deaf history, its identification and classification as a bona fide language have glossed over a more fundamental feature of ASL. Whatever its similarities to other languages might be, ASL is not a spoken language. It is not based on sound.

Silence

As a reminder of the dangers of inaction, gay activists have introduced a slogan that captures the horrors of the Holocaust: “Silence = Death.” Those of us who do not speak out are lost. Promotional ads for the movie Alien warned: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Cloaked in passivity and darkness, silence has come to mean the opposite of sound, of communication, of life. Paradoxically, silence also brings respite from a hectic and overstimulating life: a moment of silence; silence is golden. Unless we are given clues to the character of silence— “chilling,” “peaceful,” “ominous”—how are we to know what it means? Both ambiguous and paradoxical, silence embodies a void without shape and without meaning. All these versions of silence reflect a world of hearing people, a world of sound.

Silence has also become synonymous with deaf people. Explicit titles on the Deaf such as They Grow in Silence, Growing Old in Silence, The Other Side of Silence, and In Silence or implicit ones such as Outsiders in a Hearing World and When the Mind Hears draw from this association. For most people, the pairing of deafness and silence is automatic. Like many informants, Roger recalled a typical response when someone found out his parents were deaf: “Oh, it must have been so quiet around your house.” As we shall see later in this chapter, deaf households, in fact, were often not quiet: sound is quite familiar in the everyday lives of deaf people and their children. The discussion here, however, focuses on this presumed realm of the Deaf: silence. Given the often paradoxical and ambivalent meanings attached to silence by those who hear, what place does silence have in the lives of these informants—men and women who stand within the crossroads of Hearing and Deaf cultures?

The Deaf community has often embraced the association with silence—in national newsletters such as “Silent News,” “Silent Worker,” “Silent Advocate”—or in the names of Deaf organizations like “The Silent Club.” The sign for silence is among the most fluid and beautiful of signs: both hands are held prayer-like over the mouth, then slowly and steadily spread apart and downward; a related sign is “peace.” When describing their parents’ attitudes about silence, informants frequently invoked a state of serenity without any sense of doom or lack of communication. While recognizing the advantages of certain environmental sounds such as a siren or loudspeaker, many informants explained that their parents equated sound with noise—bothersome, obtrusive, and sometimes morally corrupt. Donna explained:

My Mom always told me she was glad she couldn’t hear all that noise. All those bad ugly things people say all the time. She was glad she didn’t have to deal with it.

Many men and women echoed their parents’ positive associations with silence. Sidransky (1990) describes silence as “peaceful, almost musical, a lilting harmony that gives me rest and ease” (p. 282). Many other informants were similarly comforted and transported by silence.

Silence also characterized interactions between informants’ deaf families and hearing people. Instead of tranquillity, silence here represented an uneasy and awkward stillness. This version of silence came from both hearing and deaf people: hearing people who were unsure how to talk with deaf people; deaf people who became unusually guarded about any attempts at sound. Carl explained:

Oh, I don’t know, it just feels too quiet. It’s not the same as when ...