Can You See Me Now?

Image Gallery Blair Kelly / www.blairkellystudio.com

For most deaf Americans, being deaf is not the inability to hear but rather the ability to perceive life in a different way from hearing people. For many, it’s a blessing.

I first decided to take up American Sign Language as a teenager. Sadly, I had no deaf friends or family members with whom to practice ASL. I didn’t know any deaf people at all, in fact. I was driven mostly by fascination with the silent language itself, which is powered by a clarity and expressiveness absent from everyday spoken English.

There is an illustrated diagram in my ASL textbook explaining that to properly ask a question in ASL you first make a statement and then shrug your shoulders, cock your head to one side, and open your eyes wide, perhaps adding an inquisitive expression to your face. To a hearing person, this feels like overkill—like donning a Greek theater mask every time you need to find the bathroom. But communicating with your whole body is a fundamental part of ASL. It’s a visual idiom, a language of the eye.

Modern deaf poetry is filled with intense imagery, as in J. Schuyler Long’s “The Poetry of Motion”:

In the poetry of motion there is music if one sees,

In the soaring birds above us there are moving symphonies.

There is music in the movement of a ship upon the wave

And the sunbeams dancing o’er it, that the minstrels never gave.

. . . in harmony of motion there are songs that Nature sings.

And there is music all around us if we have the eyes to see.

What deaf people have realized about themselves in the past century is that being deaf opens up a new mode of experience. ASL is the language of that experience. They are creating their own world. But it’s a world they have to defend.

Deaf activists have argued for decades that deafness is not a defect but a character trait, even a benefit. In their 2011 book The People of the Eye, authors Harlan Lane, Richard C. Pillard, and Ulf Hedberg go one step further. They assert that deafness is an ethnicity that, like all officially classed ethnicities, must be given its due politically and culturally [and grammatically, which is why the classification is capitalized throughout the rest of this piece].

Deaf identity is based not on religion, race, or class, say the authors, but “there is no more authentic expression of an ethnic group than its language.” And language is the core of American Deaf life. With the emergence of Deaf schools, literacy allowed Deaf people to better communicate in the hearing world. As ASL developed, Deaf Americans could better communicate with each other, and with this came the creation of a Deaf culture, even a new way of being.