Writing Deaf: Textualizing Deaf Literature

Abstract

I BEGIN WITH A QUESTION: What does it mean to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a Deaf life into creative texts written in English? This question is larger than the necessities of transliteration and conventions of print. If fiction writers or poets happen to be Deaf-meaning that they consider themselves to be members of the Deaf community and use ASL as their primary language-then they must also consider how writing in English (or other languages) displaces a cultural identity grounded in a visual-spatial language, one that has historically been denigrated, suppressed, and erased from sight. Indeed, it seems that even on the sentence level, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities; turn-taking in sign language cannot easily be slotted into conversation tags (e.g., he said, she said). A sign cannot be said. In English, dialogue without quotation marks is, in effect, speechless. Without the conventionalized use of quotation marks, dialogue shirts inward and inhabits an internal territory, for without quotations, what separates thought from conversation on the page? If one uses the conventions of written English, then the results are awkward and imply a one-to-one correlation between signs and English words (e.g., What's up? Dave signed). Tonal dialogue tags reveal problems with trying to sequence information on the page that, for a signer, would be perceived in a simultaneous, not linear, fashion (e.g., You should have gone to the meeting, she signed, disappointed). So, in effect, if one uses the conventions of printed English, then the story or poem embodies the hearing, not the Deaf, world. To evoke a resistant perspective, some Deaf writers and Deaf poets make use of code mixing, untranslated ASL gloss, and other hybrid forms that show the postcolonial possibilities for textualizing Deaf lives and sign language. It is important to remember that many Deaf people who are creative thinkers and innovative in their use of ASL simply do not bother with writing literary forms of English. Why should they? ASL has a long tradition of visual poetics and a rich traditional linguistic history with many genres-ASL poetry, narratives, jokes, and rap, to name just a few. With the advent of visual recording devices, ASL has its own form of print in that DVDs and videotapes can be watched repeatedly and disseminated to a larger audience. So, for the purposes of writing Deaf, why bother with English? It is, after all, the dreaded and always fragmented, incomplete language of speech therapy: words forced, unwieldy and thick, from mouths. There is also the uneven and sometimes humiliating experience of learning to read and write English, with its idiosyncratic orthography based, in many cases, upon phonetics. So much of English has to be heard in order to be understood and then used. As is the case with other diglossic subcultural groups, the use of written English, for many Deaf people, has been largely seen as utilitarian, a necessary tool for participation in U.S. social institutions. English is, after all, the language of government and business. More to the point, literary English and the attendant displays of hearing cultural norms do not reflect the lived, embodied realities of a Deaf person's life or sign language. Like Singer in Carson McCuIlers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the few deaf characters in literary English are most often written as metaphors for the human (i.e., hearing) condition. Historically, Deaf bodies have been pathologized, and their ears, as one specific site of conflict, have been colonized through attempts to fix deafness. The deafened ear, the silenced body, and endangered soul have all been mapped out by centuries of medical and religious literature. In the long campaign against sign language, Deaf people have been told to sit on their hands and speak up, have been ordered not to marry each other, and, to this day, continue to suffer the effects of an imperialist and audist directive to conform, to speak, and to not unsettle or disrupt the ongoing narratives of the hearing world. …