Homesign Research Articles

Emergence and evolutions: Introducing sign language sociolinguistics

AbstractThe sociolinguistics of sign languages parallels as well as complements the sociolinguistics of spoken languages. All of the key areas of sociolinguistics, such as multilingualism, language contact, variation, and language attitudes—are of immediate relevance to sign languages. At the same time, sign language researchers using a range of data sources and methods (e.g., sign language corpora, linguistic elicitation, and linguistic ethnography) have showed that the unique natures and features of sign languages allow us to look at all these areas from a different vantage point. First, deficit perspectives on deafness serve to sharply distinguish the reality of sign languages from that of spoken languages. The linguistic status of sign languages has been long contested, and certain forms of signing are still labeled “nonlanguage.” The delineation and differentiation of sign languages, and of sign languages from other signing practices (e.g., gesturing, home sign) has therefore been a key issue. Second, sign languages are used by both deaf and hearing people, in contexts where spoken/written languages, and increasingly also other sign languages are in use, leading to complex multimodal forms of sign–spoken, sign–written, and sign–sign language contact, and to hierarchical constellations of language attitudes and ideologies in relation to signed and spoken languages and variants.

Communication Approaches Used by Parents for Effective Interaction Among Their Deaf Children

The study aimed to determine the communication approaches used by parents whose children were diagnosed with hearing impairment, and how these approaches can lead to effective interaction between them and their children. The study was conducted in two public schools that were offering Special Education (SPED) programs namely Talavera Central Elementary School, Talavera Nueva Ecija, and San Jose West Central School, San Jose City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines. Purposive sampling was used to select the respondents of the study which were the parents of deaf children in the two public schools. All of the parents were asked if they willing to be part of the study. A total of 20 respondents were considered. Interview schedule type of instrument was used to gather the needed data. Results showed that the age of the respondents ranged from 20-59 years old, and 65 percent of them are mothers. Half of 50 percent of them were high school graduates, and almost all had blue-collar jobs with a monthly income of Php 5,000. The meeting was their preferred source of information in which 95 percent of the information that they have received was all about using sign language. They used this information to interact with their child and shared it with other members of the family and this information made them more knowledgeable about the preferred language of their child. They only have a moderate level of knowledge in using the manual approach and the most used was sign language. In terms of the new technology approach, 60 percent were using hearing aids. The problem encountered was insufficient knowledge in the manual approach and they were irritated in using the hearing aid. The other alternative approach used by parents were using pen and paper, home signs, and mobile phones through text messages and messenger applications as modes of communication. There was a significant relationship between knowledge level on sign language and usage level on new technology to effective interaction. There was also a significant relationship between the problem encountered in using a manual approach to the effective interaction between parents and their deaf children, while there was a highly significant relationship between the alternative approach and effective interaction, aside from that all variables didn’t affect the effective interaction between parents and their deaf children.

Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy by Josef Fulka

Reviewed by: Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy by Josef Fulka Edna Edith Sayers (bio) Fulka, Josef. 2020. Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy. Vol. 8 in the Gesture Studies series, edited by Adam Kendon. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (174 pp., $135, hardbound ISBN 978-9027205-03-2; ebook ISBN 978-9027261-48-9). How familiar are you, really, with the philosophy of the French Enlightenment that informed the thought of Épée and Sicard? Could you characterize the era's intense interest in language, its origin, and its role in human thought processes? Are you confident discussing the work of Condillac, which so decisively influenced Sicard, or that of Joseph Marie de Gérando, who used the evidence of deaf education to argue against Rousseau but that has never been available in English translation? Well, join the club: me neither. And we're in good company, because neither was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who studied under Sicard and another Condillac disciple, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown, yet scorned to expose himself to the writing of any French Enlightenment philosophe on the grounds that all these men were infidels! But now, no more excuses, because we have a terrific new book that goes a long way toward repairing this weak point in our understanding of the philosophical roots of our disciplines: Josef Fulka's Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy. Despite its rather pedestrian title, Fulka's summaries and explanations are so engaging, lively, and accessible that I read every single footnote and was sorry when I finally had nothing left to read and had to put the book down. And that's amazing, because, clearly, English is not the man's native language. Yet Fulka, who teaches deaf studies in the Czech Republic, appears to be perfectly at home not only in English, but also in French (he provides fresh translations of [End Page 496] Gérando and others) and, presumably, any number of sign languages, as he makes informed statements concerning home signs, methodical signs, contact signing, and natural sign languages. There is one recurrent "foreignism" (or "deafism"?) in his written English that at first seemed odd but soon felt natural, and that is his use of the word "deaf" as a singular, not collective, noun, as in the noun phrase "the deaf of Chartres" meaning "the deaf man of Chartres." Is this a conscious choice on his part? After showing how the seventeenth-century English philosophers Hobbes and Locke cleared away the medieval claptrap about our minds being endowed with innate ideas, and thus established that everything we know comes to us by way of our sensory perceptions, Fulka makes it obvious why the existence of deaf people posed an interesting question for philosophy: what kinds of things could any person be able to know without auditory input? Fulka begins by explaining that he has organized his study into three parts: (1) philosophers who see deafness as a deficiency; (2) philosophers who see deafness as a difference; and (3) philosophers who see deafness as an opportunity to study the origin of language. As he admits, there is a lot of overlap, but this grouping gives him a rough outline for presenting his material. He cautions readers that in the eighteenth century, there was no clear distinction between gesture and sign language (note that this book is published in Adam Kendon's Gesture Studies), and, further, that any signing deaf persons mentioned in the text would surely be using home signs. He also points out that it was common for nonfiction writers to use fictional or "conceptual" examples, so we should not take their deaf men (and they are always men) to be actual persons. Fulka covers just about everyone who wrote on the topic, not excluding Desloges. He begins with the deficiency model and Condillac's "impossible beginning" of human language. Condillac's "deaf of Chartres" is a young man who, prior to his rather abrupt acquisition of hearing and speech, had had no communication with others, no language and, therefore, according to Condillac, no capacity for abstract thought, imagination, or memory...

The Role of Parents in the Language Development of Children with Hearing Impairment

Language immersion from birth is crucial to a child’s language development. Children with hearing impairment experience great difficulty in the acquisition and use of the spoken language. The majority of children with hearing impairment, mostly born to hearing parents, struggle to develop sign language because it is not the language of the home. They usually end up developing the home sign for survival. Social interaction, as well as the development of moral and social values, get affected. Hearing children acquire the language of the home from the environment because their utterances are continuously reinforced. The child with hearing impairment fails to acquire language because he or she cannot hear. Those born to non- hearing parents acquire sign language from their environments with ease for it is the language of the home. However, they struggle or find it impossible to develop the spoken language. It becomes apparent that parents must play a pivotal role in the child’s language development, be it sign or spoken, since it is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, social interactions and day to day communication.

The reality of every day communication for a deaf child using sign language in a developing country.

Research that focuses on the communication between deaf children and their hearing families is scarce despite the majority of deaf children being born into hearing families where a common communication mode needs to be forged. The aim of the study was to explore, describe and compare the nature of communication across typical daily contexts of a deaf child who uses South African Sign Language (SASL) and who is born into a hearing family with no prior experience of SASL. A case study design which included quantitative and qualitative components was used to observe a nine year old grade one child with profound hearing loss. Spontaneous communication was observed with 13 communication partners in the home context and these included the mother, a sibling and peers. Two educators and 11 peers were observed in the educational context. Surveillance cameras were used to obtain 27 hours of video-recording in the home and 19 hours at the school. Interviews were conducted with the mother, siblings, educators, and the deaf child. It was observed that communication using SASL, albeit minimal, home signs, natural gestures and oral communication were used extensively. Due to a mismatch in the communication mode in the home context communication interactions were fewer and predominantly oral, impoverished and with frequent breakdowns whereas the communication interactions in the school were characterized by SASL, was meaningful and had fewer communication breakdowns. Communication for deaf children within the home is problematic as communication partners are not fluent in SASL.

The Role of Iconicity in Home Sign Language

The Role of Iconicity in Home Sign Language

Emerging linguistic features of Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language

AbstractIn Sao Tome and Principe there are approximately five thousand deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Until recently, these people had no language to use among them other than basic home signs used only to communicate with their families. With this communication gap in mind, a project was set up to help them come together in a common space in order to create a dedicated environment for a common sign language to emerge.In less than two years, the first cohort began to sign and to develop a newly emerging sign language – the Sao Tome and Principe Sign Language (LGSTP). Signs were elicited by means of drawings and pictures and recorded from the beginning of the project. The emergent structures of signs in this new language were compared with those reported for other emergent sign languages such as the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language and the Lengua de Señas de Nicaragua, and several similarities were found at the first stage.In this preliminary study on the emergence of LGSTP, it was observed that, in its first stage, signs are mostly iconic and exhibit a greater involvement of the articulators and a larger signing space when compared with subsequent stages of LGSTP emergence and with other sign languages. Although holistic signs are the prevalent structure, compounding seems to be emerging. At this stage of emergence, OSV seems to be the predominant syntactic structure of LGSTP. Yet the data suggest that new signers exhibit difficulties in syntactic constructions with two arguments.

Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language.

We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.

Key cognitive preconditions for the evolution of language.

Languages are socially constructed systems of expression, generated interactively in social networks, which can be assimilated by the individual brain as it develops. Languages co-evolved with culture, reflecting the changing complexity of human culture as it acquired the properties of a distributed cognitive system. Two key preconditions set the stage for the evolution of such cultures: a very general ability to rehearse and refine skills (evident early in hominin evolution in toolmaking), and the emergence of material culture as an external (to the brain) memory record that could retain and accumulate knowledge across generations. The ability to practice and rehearse skill provided immediate survival-related benefits in that it expanded the physical powers of early hominins, but the same adaptation also provided the imaginative substrate for a system of "mimetic" expression, such as found in ritual and pantomime, and in proto-words, which performed an expressive function somewhat like the home signs of deaf non-signers. The hominid brain continued to adapt to the increasing importance and complexity of culture as human interactions with material culture became more complex; above all, this entailed a gradual expansion in the integrative systems of the brain, especially those involved in the metacognitive supervision of self-performances. This supported a style of embodied mimetic imagination that improved the coordination of shared activities such as fire tending, but also in rituals and reciprocal mimetic games. The time-depth of this mimetic adaptation, and its role in both the construction and acquisition of languages, explains the importance of mimetic expression in the media, religion, and politics. Spoken language evolved out of voco-mimesis, and emerged long after the more basic abilities needed to refine skill and share intentions, probably coinciding with the common ancestor of sapient humans. Self-monitoring and self-supervised practice were necessary preconditions for lexical invention, and as these abilities evolved further, communicative skills extended to more abstract and complex aspects of the communication environments-that is, the "cognitive ecologies"-being generated by human groups. The hominin brain adapted continuously to the need to assimilate language and its many cognitive byproducts by expanding many of its higher integrative systems, a process that seems to have accelerated and peaked in the past half million years.

Deafness and Dominance: Analyzing The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Production of To Kill a Mockingbird

Deafness and Dominance:Analyzing The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Production of To Kill a Mockingbird Maureen McDonnell (bio) The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2011 production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers complicated ways to think about characters’ relationships to justice, entitlement, and community. By casting noted Deaf actor Howie Seago as Bob Ewell and reconsidering the character’s language use, the production exploits the gap between the playscript and the audience members’ interpretations.1 The casting allows for both gestural and verbal languages in the courtroom, thereby creating a conspicuous interval in the courtroom scene. This layered language usage allows audience members to witness an “open space lying between…two parts of the same thing; a gap, opening.”2 Any production of To Kill a Mockingbird offers a sinister version of Ewell, certainly. However, Seago uses his character’s hearing status and language usage as “intervening portion[s] of something,” advancing Ewell’s violent agenda in opportunistic ways that expose how marginalization operates in Maycomb.3 Seago’s iteration of Bob Ewell and the performance of Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell offer additional interpretative possibilities for audience members. The pair’s use of home sign, a shared gestural language, offers another vector for onstage characters to see the abuse within the Ewell home—thereby challenging the Ewells’ respectability within the courtroom. However, their language usage also clarifies Mayella’s resentment of and resistance to her father. Through Seago and Flood’s characters’ spoken and signed dialogue, this production creates a vital new space to understand the damning and restorative power of language and community. [End Page 475] OSF, a much-awarded Shakespeare Festival, had a long-standing tradition of diverse casts prior to Howie Seago’s hiring in 2009.4 Able to perform in spoken English, American Sign Language (ASL), or a modified ASL, Seago offers a number of linguistic opportunities for his characters. Seago’s linguistic flexibility becomes central to the production’s exploration of characters’ perceived respectability and, as a result, of their deemed credibility. Such credibility is at stake in the accusation that Mayella was raped, a claim that dooms Tom Robinson. Director Marion McClinton cast hearing actor Susannah Flood as Mayella Ewell,5 established in this production as a CODA (Child Of Deaf Adults).6 Flood’s performance recuperates Mayella, a character frequently demeaned and discounted within the text and in literary scholarship. This Mayella’s linguistic affiliation with her father undermines her respectability within the court, as her gestures paradoxically reveal both her father’s exploitation and a means of her rebellion. With these casting choices in place, audience members are asked to consider characters that navigate multiple vectors of identity, including those that are racial, gendered, linguistic, or class-based. Susannah Flood speaks to this navigation, reporting that “the director was interested in the idea that two minority groups would have more possibilities for contention because they are both disenfranchised. They’re slightly more resentful of the other rather than making it a clear story between Blacks and Whites.”7 The additional identities performed by Seago and Flood—whose Mayella is confirmed as an incest survivor in this production—unsettle easy notions about how Maycomb citizens understand, implement, and are subject to justice. The dramatically central Maycomb court is ostensibly where citizens voice their narratives and where juries evaluate speakers’ respectability and credibility. The Ewells’ gestural language derails this process, both enabling more complex negotiations between the Ewells and the court and resulting in unexpected leverage for Mayella. This paper focuses on how this production stages these negotiations. Setting the Stage: Bodies and Language The OSF production team’s casting and stage design reinforce the range of perspectives within the play. The decision to cast Seago and to stage the Ewells’ signed communication allows the pair to have both public and [End Page 476] private interactions during the trial. The casting of two actors as Scout highlights the historical perspective of Lee’s adult first-person narrator (as personified by Dee Maaske, who comments on and reminisces about the dramatic action) and Scout as a child (performed by young Kaya Van Dyke).8 Onstage throughout, Maaske’s presence and the occasionally doubled gestures and...

Arguing about innateness

This paper lays out the components of a language acquisition model, the interconnections among the components, and the differing stances of nativism and empiricism about syntax. After demonstrating that parsimony cannot decide between the two stances, the paper analyzes nine examples of evidence that have been used to argue for or against nativism, concluding that most pieces of evidence are either irrelevant or suggest that language is special but need not invoke innate ideas. Two pieces of evidence - the development of home sign languages and the acquisition of Determiners - do show not just that language is special but that the child has innate syntactic content. The existential claim that nativism makes - there is at least one innate syntactic idea - is an easier claim to verify than the universal claim that empiricism makes - there are no innate syntactic ideas.

Signs of Home

Signs of Home

Housing characteristics and indoor environment in relation to children’s asthma, allergic diseases and pneumonia in Urumqi, China

In order to evaluate the prevalence of childhood asthma, allergic diseases and pneumonia in Urumqi City, China, as well as its associations with housing and home characteristics, a cross-sectional study was performed in 4618 children (81.7% response rate, average age 4.7±0.9 year, boys accounting for 53.7%). Questions on children’s asthma and allergic diseases were from the International Study on Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) and were integrated with questions on the home environment from the Dampness in Buildings and Health (DBH) study, slightly modified to account for Chinese building characteristics and life habits. The prevalences of physician diagnosed asthma, allergic rhinitis (AR) and pneumonia were 3.6%, 8.7% and 40.9%, respectively. One fourth of children reported wheezing and more than 40% AR symptoms in the last 12 months. Controlling for confounding factors, positive associations were found for home mold/dampness and wheezing (adjusted odds ratio, aOR 1.33, 95% CI 1.07–1.66), AR symptoms (1.34, 1.09–1.64) last 12 months and physician diagnosed pneumonia (1.33, 1.09–1.62). Floor material by wood, PVC or carpeting; and walls by wallpaper, painting or wood material, were positively associated with AR symptoms. Home environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) was positively associated with wheezing (1.23, 1.04–1.46) and pneumonia (1.25, 1.07–1.45). In conclusion, there was a relatively high prevalence of asthmatic and AR symptoms and diagnosed pneumonia in preschool children in Urumqi. Home signs of mold growth or dampness, windowpane condensation, as well as ETS and interior surface materials emitting chemicals were risk factors for allergic symptoms and pneumonia.

"Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb": Angeline Fuller’s Strategic Sentimentality and the Development of an American Deaf Identity

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most deaf Americans were isolated, both from one another and from the communities in which they resided, by linguistic barriers. At the time, no common American sign language existed, meaning that deaf people who did not speak English had to resort to a series of home signs invented with their families to communicate. The formation of the first permanent schools, beginning in 1817 with the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, began to change this situation.1 The language developed at these schools allowed the Deaf to begin identifying themselves as a distinct cultural group and to articulate their own history, customs, and values.2 Writing played a critical role in spreading this sense of community beyond school walls. As Christopher Krentz has noted, writing “has the ability to shape and share cultural identity and to produce relationships between groups. Through writing, people can support or subvert power arrangements, not to mention concepts of reality and order.”3 For Deaf authors in particular, writing provided a space where communication could occur without the barriers often imposed by face-to-face encounters, allowing them to forge relationships with deaf people from around the country. While some early Deaf writing fell into the trap of uncritically repeating stereotypes about deaf people, much of this literature took advantage of the medium to question what it meant to be deaf in America and, in so doing, to begin to outline a Deaf cultural identity.4 Angeline Fuller’s “Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb,” which appeared in her book The Venture (1883), participates in this project by providing one of the first literary accounts from a Deaf perspective. Throughout

A novel system of telling the time: The case of midday and midnight as focal points in a home sign language

Previous studies on clocks have mostly worked on the development of clock knowledge. It is implicitly assumed that there seems to be no basic difference in the way people read a clock. This study highlights a big difference found in the language of a home signer. She reads the clock by referring to midnight and midday. For example when we say “nine o’clock (in the morning)” she would say - or rather gesture - “three to midday”, or when we say “two o’clock in the morning” she would gesture “two after midnight”. This study looks for the root of this difference and will suggest that it is influenced by religious beliefs. Key words: Home sign language, clock, midday, midnight, prayer.

Sign Language Acquisition and Use by Single-Generation Deaf Adults in Australia Who Attended Specific Educational Settings for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children

This article examines the acquisition and use of Australian Sign Language (Auslan) by 53 profoundly deaf adults (31 male, 22 female) who attended educational units for deaf and hard of hearing children. The results indicate that, regardless of age, the acquisition of sign language, particularly Auslan, by deaf people occurred primarily through association with other deaf individuals. Participants reported that little (if any) specific teaching of sign language occurred in these special schools. This had had an impact on the quality of their signing and possibly the extent of their signing lexicon since they would have used home signs and school signs. This study concludes that schools must provide comprehensive instruction in sign language and that it must be taught by qualified teachers who are fluent in Auslan.

Grammatical Subjects in home sign: Abstract linguistic structure in adult primary gesture systems without linguistic input.

Language ordinarily emerges in young children as a consequence of both linguistic experience (for example, exposure to a spoken or signed language) and innate abilities (for example, the ability to acquire certain types of language patterns). One way to discern which aspects of language acquisition are controlled by experience and which arise from innate factors is to remove or manipulate linguistic input. However, experimental manipulations that involve depriving a child of language input are impossible. The present work examines the communication systems resulting from natural situations of language deprivation and thus explores the inherent tendency of humans to build communication systems of particular kinds, without any conventional linguistic input. We examined the gesture systems that three isolated deaf Nicaraguans (ages 14-23 years) have developed for use with their hearing families. These deaf individuals have had no contact with any conventional language, spoken or signed. To communicate with their families, they have each developed a gestural communication system within the home called "home sign." Our analysis focused on whether these systems show evidence of the grammatical category of Subject. Subjects are widely considered to be universal to human languages. Using specially designed elicitation tasks, we show that home signers also demonstrate the universal characteristics of Subjects in their gesture productions, despite the fact that their communicative systems have developed without exposure to a conventional language. These findings indicate that abstract linguistic structure, particularly the grammatical category of Subject, can emerge in the gestural modality without linguistic input.

A Descriptive Analysis of Pointing and Oral Movements in a Home Sign System

Two deaf sisters (71 and 68 years old) use a home sign system that appears to have developed without input from conventional sign or spoken languages. Their home sign consists primarily of various pointing gestures and oral movements. Pointing gestures were found to be part of lexical terms and refer not only to the present person, object, or place but also to nonpresent objects. Moreover, some pointing gestures were referentially redundant and occupied fixed positions in sentences, suggesting that they were used as grammatical terms. In addition, oral movements were frequently used together with manual signs, and their functions may be classified as lexical, adverbial, and grammatical. Finally, grammatical components of this home sign system were compared with those of conventional sign languages in an attempt to reveal some shared characteristics in the gestural mode of communication.

International cournol duopoly and R&D subsidies under demand uncertainly

Establishing a third-market model of international Cournot duopoly where home and foreign firms choose optimal R&D levels under demand uncertainty, this paper reexamines results on R&D subsidies proposed by Spencer and Brander [Review of Economic Studies 50 (1983): 707–722]. It is assumed that R&D subsidies consist of fixed and variable parts, demand uncertainty is of the additive type, and firms are risk averse. It is shown that signs of the effects of a change in a home fixed R&D subsidy are definitely determined, but those of a change in a home variable R&D subsidy are ambiguous, and, as a result, signs of optimal home R&D subsidies are also ambiguous even if the foreign R&D reaction curve is downward-sloping.

Secretsand a New Civic Consciousness

Farah's works have often used Somalia as an example to frame their critique of the postcolonial state by declining the cult of the merely unique that Somali nationalism posits. Especially since his last two novels, Maps and Gifts, he has so absorbed the lessons of postmodernism,1 namely, subjectivity as the disavowal of collective affiliation and general rules, comprehensive norms, or hegemonic systems of thought (Rosenau 54), as to undermine the linguistic or mythological foundation of Somali nationhood. Secrets is of course a mysterious family saga whose action seems to focus on the hero, Kalaman, especially his struggles against family scandal and the seemingly unreasonable demand of a boyhood love, Sholoongo, that he give her a baby. Notwithstanding its domestic preoccupation, Secrets is still a sequel to Maps and Gifts in that, like them, it deals with conflicts and movement of signs depicting the problematic of Somali nationhood. Generally, the shared cultural codes on which the Somali society depends for defining marriage, kinship, and statehood are somehow questioned, if not renegotiated, in all three novels. As in Maps, the all-embracing national community with its utopian promises of social harmony and individual freedom again delivers death and violence in Secrets. In fact, rather than concluding on solid signs of home and community, Secrets, like Maps, ends on exile and flight. In all of them, moreover, there is a sharp turn to discursivity as nar? ration establishes its own point of departure and seems to register the lim? itations on and the problems of novelistic discourse in a culture in crisis. In short, the problematic of the postcolonial state in Secrets is grounded in and enhanced by the unusual focus on the status of and struggle over the resources of fiction itself.