John Lee Clark

“The Star-Spangled Banner” holds a peculiar place in the signing community. As deaf Americans, our relationship with it is as complex as our relationship is with our country, a nation where we have been and continue to be oppressed and persecuted. We learn at an early age that all the talk of freedom isn’t always about us. Consider, for example, what a deaf high schooler named Julie Ann Lewis wrote in a poem called “Hear Me America” (1996). It closes with these lines: “My voice is not free– / How can this be / In this free Republic?”

On a more practical level, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is in English, which is not native to deaf culture. Further distancing it from us, it finds its expression most often as a piece of music, sung at important occasions and sporting events. Even when the anthem is accompanied by a signed version, we have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is good to have signing displayed in public, something we cannot take for granted because of oralist campaigns in the past against the public use of sign language. On the other hand, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is almost never signed well or in a way that makes sense in our language. This forces us to wonder if the signing is there for us or more for the pleasure of hearing people who don’t know the difference.

The Super Bowl is a prime example of this problem. Ever since Lori Hilary signed the anthem at Super Bowl XXVI in 1992, signed renditions have been part of the highest-rated television program on earth. This makes these glimpses the biggest exposure our language receives each year. They are much better for ASL awareness than the static I Love You sign. But are deaf people inspired by these performances? Hardly. Only snatches of the signer are shown. Worse, most of the performances at the Super Bowl–and elsewhere–follow the same broken formula.

This is strange, because deaf people have been signing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a long time, since before it became our national anthem on March 3, 1931. The deaf elite, made up mainly of graduates of Gallaudet College, enjoyed “rendering in signs” various poems and songs, as it signified their level of education and facility with the English language. Those who did this well were praised. Take this admiring passage written in an obituary in the Illinois Advance on the death of National Association of the Deaf’s third president, Dudley Webster George (1855-1930):

“He was a master of the English language and of the sign language. Of the correct use and beauty of both he was in precept and example an ardent exponent. No one who ever saw him address a meeting or render in signs the ‘Marseillaise’ or the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ or any other poem will ever forget it.”

We cannot be certain, without watching a film of George’s version, how he executed it. But we do know that “mastery” of reciting poems in those days meant transliteration or something similar to what we today call Pidgin Signed English. Signers would follow the word order of the original English text, delete unnecessary bits like “the” and “of,” and try to sign the words as gracefully as possible. No matter how impressive the bearing of the signer or how beautiful the sweep of the hands, it made little sense as an ASL text. If you taught a deaf child only ASL, without ever introducing English, and he saw “The Star-Spangled Banner” signed, it would have no meaning.

Signed renditions, then, were not ASL renditions at all. Instead, they were a way to present the English text in “signs,” in order that signers “read” the song in the air. This did not mean deaf people weren’t moved by the signing of the song. There is still charm and a kind of beauty in the signed versions, and through ritual use, it can become so familiar that it cannot help but resonate. Still, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been signed again and again for over a century without much improvement. Why has the signed version failed to evolve into a true ASL translation?

The obvious answer is that the signed version has long been expected to accompany the music. The national anthem is signed at every graduation and before every sporting event at every pro-ASL school for the deaf–which means thousands of performances each year–but all of them involve a sound recording and, often, a hearing “coach” leading the deaf signers to make sure they keep time. While a translation, by definition, must needs be linked to the original, the demand that the signed version follow the sound has severely limited the potential for a meaningful ASL version.

The earliest known film of signing of any kind was of, yes, “The Star-Spangled Banner” being signed. Made in 1902 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and labeled “Deaf Mute Girl Reciting the Star-Spangled Banner,” the film clip linked below can be difficult to follow. But also linked below is Susie Koehn’s rendering, made in 1943. What is striking about these two versions is how alike they are. And that same basic version is still performed today. Some new versions may appear to be better, but at closer inspection they use the same transliteration approach.

“Deaf Mute Girl Reciting the Star-Spangled Banner,” 1902:

http://videocatalog.gallaudet.edu/player.cfm?video=11318

Susie Koehn’s version, 1943:

http://videocatalog.gallaudet.edu/player.cfm?video=14188

Amazingly, the 1902 signer got one thing linguistically right that none of the others since has gotten right: For “the home of the brave,” the “Deaf Mute Girl” signed “home brave men,” while most signers close with “home brave.” But proper ASL usage begs the question “Brave what?” Of course, it is an old gender bias to think of the brave as men. A true ASL translation must resolve this issue of what or whom the word “brave” refers to or it must shift the concept. “Home people themselves brave”? “Our home inspire bravery”?

That all of the signed versions have since abstracted the meaning of “the brave” and almost everything else tells us that few have been interested in making the signed version communicate the song to deaf people. The signed versions appear to have been and continue to be more a function of displaying the “beauty” of sign language to hearing people. This would explain why the accuracy of the signed versions as ASL pieces has never been a major concern. Moreover, the national anthem is most often signed when there are hearing people in the audience. It is rare for the anthem to be performed at deaf-only, deaf-run events.

If deaf performers have been used as puppets, signing something that is meaningless in their language, it is no wonder “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not a sacred text in deaf culture. In fact, ASL literature is full of hilarious spoofs and political adaptations. Patrick Graybill, in his one-man show for the renowned “Live at SMI!” series, apes his former hearing teacher’s horrendous signs reciting “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Mary Beth Miller has an even funnier routine in her own “Live at SMI!” video. She performs different versions, from opera style (“OOOooohhhHHHhh ssSSaaAAyyYY cccaaaNNN YYYOOOuuUUuuUU SsSsEsEeee) to fingerspelling alone in the Rochester Method (ohsaycanyousee) to, finally, a sincere rendering that is similar to the one in the above-mentioned films. And the great ASL poet and activist Ella Mae Lentz has adapted it to deliver a political message. In her poem, ASL itself is the banner, persisting in the face of discrimination and language barriers. It closes by saying “Hands are still signing in the land of the Deaf free and the home of the Deaf brave.”

Ella Mae Lentz:

http://www.ellasflashlight.com/?p=29

As powerful as Lentz’s message is, her poem is still heavily influenced by the classic abstract signed version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For example, she still opens it with the dawn before awkwardly jumping back in time to the previous night by signing “Last night . . .” Nevertheless, it is a successful adaptation because deaf viewers would recognize what it borrows from, the same old version that always starts with seeing something and then the sun coming up.

That the signed versions have been chained, sign for word, to the English version has not passed all unnoticed. The Deaf Pride movement did enlighten some people to a degree that they became uncomfortable with the traditional signed version. A new approach began appearing in the late 1990s at the more progressive bilingual deaf schools, in which the anthem is turned into a kind of short play. Involving choreography, it features various performers enacting different things in the anthem–rockets, the flag–and taking turns signing bits. In some versions, the performers would sign the last lines together. These creative pieces are a bold departure from the traditional approach. Yet the theatrical nature of this method abstracts the meaning of the anthem as much as the traditional version does. We still lack a true ASL translation.

Which brings us to the question of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be translated. First, we must abandon the idea of following the sound recordings. The ASL translation can be signed while the music is playing, and with practice both can end at about the same time, but we must no longer think in terms of the two moving together line by line. The most necessary difference between the two would be moving, in the ASL version, the dawn to near the end. This move would allow us to, at long last, make use of ASL’s cinematic qualities by first setting up the situation. This will, more than anything else, open deaf people’s eyes to the actual content of the anthem. To have a better grasp of the cinematic possibilities, it is instructive to know the story of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” came to be written.

It was two years into the War of 1812 between our young republic and its former mother country, England. After a victory in Washington, D.C., the British were advancing on Baltimore. Before they could enter the city, they needed to destroy Fort McHenry. The largest and strongest ships from the British fleet were anchored in front of the fort, their heavy guns ready to blast away. One of the prisoners onboard the Admiral’s flagship was a beloved doctor, William Beanes. His friends wanted to rescue him and secured an official letter from President Madison stating that the good doctor was not a solider but a private citizen. Now someone had to go to that ship and present the letter to the admiral and ask for Dr. Beanes’s release.

Francis Scott Key and another friend volunteered for the mission, and they went across Chesapeake Bay on a government boat under a flag of truce. They rowed right up to the flagship and were allowed to go on board. The admiral agreed to release Dr. Beanes but said that, unfortunately, they were about to open fire on Fort McHenry. He did not want the Americans to run to the fort and warn the soldiers there, so he charged them to stay away from the shoreline until the fort was destroyed. They could return to their boat and stay on it, and he assured them that they wouldn’t have to wait long because the British guns would flatten the fort in no time.

That’s how Key ended up stuck on that boat, at a safe distance from the fleet. He was not happy about this circumstance, because he was a volunteer soldier and wanted to fight with his countrymen inside the fort. He was also concerned for his brother-in-law, who was the commanding officer at the fort, and he knew the force there was small.

As night fell, the British began their bombardment of the fort. Key and his companions could not see anything except for the “rockets’ red glare” and whatever it illuminated. Every time there was an explosion, they could see the stars and stripes flying. As long as the flag was still waving, the fort was still standing. But at some point during the night, the guns stopped, and there was nothing but darkness. Did this mean the fort was down?

Then “the dawn’s early light” came, but there was a heavy morning fog. They still could not see the fort at all. As the fog thinned and lifted, there it was! The massive star-spangled banner was still waving! Key cried to his companions, “Oh say can you see!” The attack on Fort McHenry had failed. As the ships left and the Americans’ boat made its way toward the shore, Key was already writing down on an envelope the lines of a poem. This poem was printed under the title of “Bombardment of Fort McHenry” and was such a hit that it was being sung in New Orleans within six days, which means it spread faster than the postage. It had three stanzas, and the first stanza became our national anthem but not before it was already our nation’s most popular patriotic songs.

There is much in this inspiring story that can help us create a powerful ASL version that would make linguistic sense and signed as a true ASL poem. To begin with, there’s the chronology, starting with the situation, the Americans stuck on the boat, on the sidelines watching the ships on one side and the fort on the other. The bad signed version doesn’t establish this situation at all; the signer looks ahead and just signs. This leads to some visual contradictions, such as the signer talking about looking over the ramparts and then talking about seeing the flag. How can one see the flag ahead while one is also looking over the ramparts, a position where the flag would be directly above, not ahead of the signer at some distance?

An ASL version would set the ships–or, at the least, one set of the guns involved in the conflict–to one side and the fort and the flag on the other side, and the signer would refer to each side by turns throughout, with the default “narrator” looking ahead being the Americans on the sidelines, watching, helpless, hoping, and with the coming of dawn’s early light, joyous.

Their joy can become our joy when we have “The Star-Spangled Banner” unfurled, full and clear, in our own language. We deserve that, for we are, too, Americans.

[I am grateful for the generous assistance of the following while researching for this article: Jean Bergey of Gallaudet University; Adrean Clark, Creative Director of Clerc Scar; Lawrence Newman, author of SANDS OF TIME: NAD PRESIDENTS, 1880-2003; and Patti Durr and Karen Christie, faculty members in the Department of Creative and Cultural Studies at the National Technical Institute of the Deaf.]

[This piece first appeared in Laurent, a publication by Clerc Scar.]

[As part of our mentorship workshop with the esteemed Japanese-American author David Mura, the five 2011 Beyond the Pure Fellows were asked to write a character sketch of ourselves. We were encouraged to do so in the third person. I decided to assume the perspective of one of my sons, imagining what he might say if asked to describe his father. Here's the result of the exercise.]

Daddy is really, really strong. He can lift my whole weight with one hand, one finger almost. This is very good because we can have lots of fun! I love it when he swings me round and round and I’m laughing so hard. I know he gets tired after a while, but I can’t help it. We always say, “Again! Again!” Rochy is heavier than I am, so he always goes first, because Daddy says it’s easier to go from heavy to lighter than lighter to heavy. But Daddy is always fair. If Rochy gets another turn after me, I get another turn, too.

And Daddy always brings candy and cookies. That’s because he goes food shopping most of the time, not Mommy. Three times a week either his friend Rocky or Dawn picks him up. He says they are his friends, but that’s not why they come to pick him up. They are paid to drive him to wherever he wants to go and tell him what they see. I went with Daddy a few times, and he goes really fast. He knows where everything is. When he’s not sure which jar on the shelf is the kind he wants, he asks Rocky or Dawn. If there are any sales, Rocky or Dawn will tell Daddy and he will think about it. When Mommy goes food shopping, she doesn’t bring back candy or cookies, or only a little. I think Daddy buys more candy and cookies because he likes them too.

I love throwing the football with Daddy. He can throw it really, really far. So he waits to make sure I’m far enough straight ahead of him. Then he throws it. Sometimes I catch it. Sometimes not. Then I run closer to where Daddy is standing. I try to hit him with the football. If I hit him, he catches it most of the time. It doesn’t hurt him because it’s a Nerf football. If I miss, he walks near it and moves his cane to find it. I’ve asked him many times how he knows where the football is if he can’t see it. He always says he felt it thump on the grass and he knew where it went. But I still can’t understand how he can find it.

Mommy can see most of the time. But sometimes she doesn’t see what I am saying, so I put my hands under her hands, like I do with Daddy. Then I know for sure Mommy saw what I was saying. Like yesterday, when I asked her for cookies. She said no, not now. So I put my hands under hers and said, “Cookies!” She laughed and gave me one.

I love it when Daddy tells us stories. Like The Three Pigs, but the straws are free, from McDonald’s. And then Lincoln Logs. Then the Legos one. I like Legos and we have a big, BIG box of Legos. The wolf is in a suit because he’s the banker. And there’s the story about the lumberjack. The way Mommy tells it, one of the trees is deaf. So the lumberjack has to spell T-I-M-B-E-R to make the tree fall down. The way Daddy tells it, the tree is deaf and blind. So the lumberjack has to climb up and spell “timber” under a leaf. Whoosh! The tree falls down WITH the lumberjack! The best story of all is the gum story. Daddy is so funny when he plays the man, the jogger, the old lady, and BOTH the boyfriend and the girlfriend at the SAME time!

Daddy reads all the time. Everywhere. In the car, in bed, and even when he goes potty. His books are BIG. Mommy’s books are small and have the words in them. Daddy’s books have tiny bumps in them. Mommy draws really, really good cartoons, just like in the newspapers. Daddy writes. Mommy drew two books, and Daddy has two books too. I think I want to do both when I grow up! Then I’ll have FOUR books!

After the publication of my anthology DEAF AMERICAN POETRY, I came into contact with a number of hearing critics and journalists seeking interviews or comments. Almost all of them were interested in ASL poetry, which pleased me. One leading poetry critic and a professor of literature at Harvard, upon learning of the anthology, immediately asked if it included ASL poetry and went on to say how amazed he was by ASL poetry. I was grateful he even knew that ASL poetry existed.

But then the attention lavished on ASL poetry began to bother me. For one thing, it was usually at the expense of the rest of Deaf poetry created in standard English. For another thing, their praise of ASL poetry is meaningless because they do not know ASL and, to date, there is only a handful of translations in English. How could they know that this or that ASL poem is amazing? Aside from the titles of ASL poems, they would have no idea as to the content. So why are they so interested in what they have no access to while dismissing the English poems by Deaf poets open to them?

The case of Paul Laurence Dunbar can, I think, help us answer this mystery. He was a hearing black poet born in 1872 who became our nation’s first black professional man of letters, although his career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis in 1906. He is now best known for his poetry. He wrote in two general styles, traditional verse in standard English and poems in black dialect. In 1896, the country’s most important literary critic, William Dean Howells, did a review in HARPER’S WEEKLY of Dunbar’s second book of poems. Howells praised his dialect poems by writing, “[He] has been able to bring us nearer to the heart of primitive human nature in his race than any one else has yet done.” Of Dunbar’s work in standard English, Howells said there was nothing “especially notable . . . except for the Negro face of the author.”

Howells’s distasteful treatment notwithstanding, Dunbar was thrilled. The review drew much attention and helped sales. But he soon began to realize how this praise of his dialect work and dismissal of the rest of his efforts limited him. He lamented to a friend in a letter: “One critic says a thing and the rest hasten to say the same things, in many cases using the identical words. I see very clearly that Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse.” Indeed, Howells had set the framework within which Dunbar’s and other black poets’ work would be debated for many years among literary scholars.

But even if Howells had never written that review, I think black poets’ work would still have been discussed in a narrow and superficial way. The prevailing racism would have made sure of that. The dialect poems, being a cute novelty, would have seemed to reinforce white people’s views of black people. Even a blue-blooded Klansman would have smiled benevolently while reading a poem like “Song of Summer,” whose first four lines are:

Dis is gospel weathah sho’–
Hills is sawt o’ hazy.
Medahs level ez a flo’
Callin’ to de lazy . . .

It was not that Dunbar’s dialect poems did not challenge racist sentiments. The charm of the dialect itself made it easier for white readers to deflect Dunbar’s challenge, without knowing that they were denying his message. When the message is expressed in standard English, however, it may have been harder to deny. In fact, some of Dunbar’s poems would have seemed downright unpatriotic and treasonous. Take the first stanza of his early poem “Ode to Ethiopia”:

O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heels,
With thy dear blood all gory.

The black community loved such poems. When Dunbar met Frederick Douglass, who was then U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, the great man asked the young poet to read “Ode to Ethiopia” first of all. But I can just imagine well-meaning white law clerks squirming in some discomfort while listening to the poet read these lines.

Is something similar happening today, with ASL poetry being automatically praised while the standard English poems are largely ignored? Could it be that some hearing critics, in their ignorance or bigotry, are unwilling to listen to the cultural, anti-medical perspective from which many Deaf poets write? Perhaps. I suppose an audist would not like reading a poem like James William Sowell’s “The Oralist” (1913):

All you care to do on earth is to make a show,
Claim the power of miracle to see the people stare;
For you have an audience everywhere you go,
Oralist, whose traffic is a little child’s despair.

Oralist, O oralist, show your silken hose,
Little souls are sacrificed that you may wear such clothes;
Little souls and beautiful, pure from God’s own hand;
Halting feet that lamely walk; wistful eyes that plead,
Hearts but could you only read them, could you understand,
You would throw away your creed and give to them their need.

Oralist, O oralist, work to get your laws
Force the baby lips to lisp, laugh at all their flaws.
Minds they have as sound as yours but for hours you waste;
Spirits as impervious yearning for the light;
See! Their baby hands they lift, pleading that in haste
You may see the wrong you do and will cease to smite.

Oralist, O oralist, turn your head aside,
Know you not the pitying Christ for sins like yours has died?

As neat as the comparison between black poetry and Deaf poetry may be, there is one major difference that makes Deaf poetry’s predicament worse. Unlike white critics, hearing critics don’t even have access to ASL poetry, at least not yet. They do not know what the ASL poets are SAYING. They do not know whether an ASL poet is being ironic, earnest, brilliant, or pedestrian. They cannot begin to consider the art being displayed before their waxen eyes. This means the very idea of ASL poetry, nothing more, is enough. The novelty alone satisfies their notions of deaf people as different, strange, freakish, a special class whose language is “beautiful.”

But the blame cannot rest on hearing people’s shoulders alone. Those who should know better are not helping matters any. The academic literature on ASL poetry is quite large. But even for knowledgeable scholars, ASL poetry remains a linguistic novelty. For them, the very possibility of poetry being created in ASL is enough. In the meantime, there has been very little study made of Deaf poetry–not only the poems that are in English but also the actual cultural content of ASL poems.

And many ASL poets themselves, in their own way, handle their work as if it is very special. It is natural for a poet to hold dear her own creations, but that’s not what I mean. One way in which they keep ASL poetry sealed in its novelty status is by refusing to allow their work to be translated into English. Almost all of the people I know who have created ASL poems say their poems cannot be translated. What they may not realize is that refusing translation means refusing literature itself. As Edith Grossman explains in her book WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS:

“Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. . . . And their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live.”

Yes, translating ASL poetry would mean mangling it. But it will be a confirmation of the original, and translation would help us understand ASL poetry in ways we cannot understand it when it stands alone. Perhaps because many ASL poets encountered doubts in others as to whether ASL is a language, not to mention skepticism as to whether their work is really poetry, they feel defensive, protecting it by exalting it up to the skies, as something pure and untouchable. I sympathize, but it is well past time we understand that ASL is a mere language, one of many lowly, earth-bound languages in the world, made of magic, certainly, but also made of dirt.

Do hearing critics and audiences want translations of ASL poetry? Not really. Remember, the very idea of ASL poetry is enough, and they are happy. They do not want more because they have no idea what they may be or may not be missing. But if there are more ASL poems available with rich full translations, their very availability will attract, intrigue, and compel deeper responses.

We in the signing community are also to blame for ASL poetry’s being trapped in limbo. There are two things we are doing wrong. First, we praise ASL poetry too readily. I shall never forget one lecture on Deaf poetry I was presenting at St. Catherine University. I performed, on purpose, a lousy ABC poem about baseball. It was just the various motions of a baseball game. I may have executed it with some grace, and it may have been a good exercise, but it had no message or any other redeeming artistic qualities. Yet my predominantly Deaf audience cheered. Most of ASL poetry being produced are mere exercises in this way—dazzling eye candy, but no meat.

We need to become more discriminating, praise what is good, smile politely at what is mediocre, and blast what is bad. We need to watch more ASL poetry and develop refined tastes, thus creating higher expectations and challenging poets to compete. Put simply, we need to WANT better ASL poetry. Then better ASL poetry WILL be created.

The second way in which we do ASL poetry harm is by thinking that we cannot create it ourselves. After the pioneering generation of ASL poets–Ella Mae Lentz, Clayton Valli, Peter Cook, Patrick Graybill, and Debbie Rennie–there was . . nobody. No one has come forward to create a body of work remotely approaching the quality or breadth of any of those poets. We seem to be in such awe of ASL poetry that we have decided it is beyond our abilities. I confess I thought I could not possibly create an ASL poem, but I have since learned that ASL poetry is just one way to express myself in ASL, just as writing poetry is one way to play with the English language. One doesn’t have to be a Shakespeare to enjoy writing poetry; one doesn’t have to be a Valli to sign some things differently for the sheer joy of it.

I think we can learn a lesson from the sixteenth century. Most of the poetry was written in Latin by educated clergymen and aristocrats. Then two French deaf poets, Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, along with three other poets, helped to break down the ivory wall around poetry. What they did was use common French vernacular to write poems that anyone in France could read or listen to. This led to poetry emerging from people in all walks of life. Today kindergarteners dabble in poetry at school everywhere. Of course, very little poetry wins wide recognition, but poetry serves many functions other than attaining fame.

Now, the elegance and dynamite with which the pioneering ASL poets performed their work still impresses me and overwhelms me. But I believe ordinary ASL diction can make for ASL poetry that is just as great. Much of the best contemporary poetry in English are written in language that is stubbornly plain, free of flourishes. Perhaps my poem “Rebuilding” is a good example, not of what is best but of plain language being used in a poem:

My grandfather spanked her. Half of the time
my mother didn’t know why. He didn’t have the signs
to tell her. After she got married and gave birth
to three deaf children, he wanted to say something
to us. His hands creaked to life. Buildings
were all he could tell us about. The sod hut
he was born in. The red barn on the farm.
The basement he put his family in while building
a house above their heads. The Ramsey Hospital
where he was foreman and where I and my sons were born.
The Ramsey County Jail we always pointed out
on our way to visit Grandma and Grandpa.
The bird houses in his green garden.
It didn’t matter what kind of building
it was, as long as it was with his hands.

This poem is so plain it is almost not a poem. But, somehow, a subtle pattern, a bit of compression, one or two small choices, make it a poem. What I am trying to say is that poetry is not far from what we sign every day. A few small steps can turn a casual account into a powerful poem. It is not hard, and I would love it for there to be more ASL poems that use colloquial ASL. We can still have fancy signing, but there should be more than that.

How wonderful it is that language yields itself so easily to poetry. Poetry is already in our hands, if only we would believe that it is there and that we can and should bring it out into the open. Yes, much of it would be unworthy of wide attention. Yes, audism will dictate the dialogue about our community’s poetry for a while yet. Yes, it will take a long time for translations to become widely available. Yes, the next generation will be slow in coming. But, at this very moment, what we can do is get our hands a little dirty playing in the mud of poetry, making it less of a novelty and more natural to us.

[This article first appeared in Clerc Scar.]

From time to time, I would be startled when one of my friends or acquaintances decides to “leave” our community. They are always non-natives, often people who found their way into our world as adults
after excruciating childhoods as the only deaf one in their families and schools. One woman who recently did this said that “the Deaf community is a snake pit of backstabbers!” Another friend who walked out on my local deaf-blind community wrote a blanket email accusing everyone of rejecting him.

The reason why their departures seem so sudden to me is that, as far as I could tell, the Deaf community isn’t a snake pit of backstabbers and the deaf-blind community did accept that man. These incidents remind me once again how differently people can experience the same thing, in this case, our community. So differently, in fact, that you would think they were talking about different planets.

Some who performed the Exit Stage Left act have suggested that they were mistreated and disrespected because they’ve been mainstreamed or because they don’t sign ASL fluently. They charge me and other natives of being “insensitive.” They say we are “lucky” and that the reason nobody stabs our backs or rejects us is that we went to Deaf schools and because we sign like water. (Never mind that we are subjects of gossip as much as anyone else.) Based on this argument, the community is at fault, and they’ve been unjustly forced to “quit” our community. (Never mind that no one asked them to leave.)

Now, I’m not saying that people aren’t sometimes mistreated in our community. As a deaf-blind member of our predominantly sighted signing community, I am no stranger to being discriminated against or being avoided like the plague. Sexism and racism exist in our community just as they do in society at large. This problem of certain members abandoning our community happens even when these types of bigotry don’t apply. There have been black Deaf members leaving black Deaf folk, deaf-blind leaving deaf-blind, feminists leaving feminist friends. How could there be such discrepancies in how people feel about our community?

If there’s one thing that can make people interpret the same thing in opposite ways, it’s expectations. For example, I visited a sculpture garden with a friend. This place had a famous piece which we would encounter for the first time. We found that it was seventeen feet tall. I was impressed, but my friend was disappointed. Why? Because I thought it would be only five, maybe eight feet tall, while my friend expected it to be thirty, even forty feet tall. Such is the distorting power of expectations. Could it be that some members, especially those who come in later in life, carry great expectations for what our community should be?

One sure way to find “evidence” that says there’s something inherently wrong with our community is to have certain expectations for what would be “right” that our community should fulfill. Our community should be nice to everyone and accept everyone. Our community should not allow gossip. Our community should be patient. Our community should never condone labels. Our community should understand, should know better, should behave, should act more mature, should be more professional, should be more welcoming. Should, should, should. And since all of those shoulds refer to fine ideals, we who love our community are at a loss how to respond. It’s not like we can say, “It’s fine that we are immature, and backstabbing is great!” So we have no answer to the bitterness, hurt, and rage bubbling up in those members until they leave weeping.

A quick consideration of their typical background—mainstreaming, lonely childhoods, communication deprivation–makes me realize that this background is ripe breeding grounds for great expectations. Human beings are social animals. When some are unfortunately isolated, it is natural that they should long to have contact with others. They talk to themselves, they create imaginary friends, they retreat into fantasy worlds. Games, movies, and books are easier to understand than real life. Doing homework on time and getting straight As are safer than venturing out into the hallways and back lots and risking awkward encounters or ambushes.

And then they meet other Deaf people. It’s a new world. There exists a community! A culture! Could this—? Could they–? Yes, it’s a family, and yes, they can become part of it and at long last belong. And this is
great. It really is.

But ours is also a community of ordinary people. The social climate is, well, normal. There is normal competition. There are natural bondings and divisions. Love, hatred, compassion, envy, admiration, intolerance—they’re all part of life in our community, as they are in any other.

Through my conversations with non-natives, I have learned that many of them grew up in a social vacuum where they did not have access to all the finer points of human interactions. This seems to have the result that some grow up with a thin social skin. When they enter the signing world, the first community they have full access to, they enter unarmed and are vulnerable. So things like rumors can be confusing and hurtful. They can become paranoid, worrying about what others think of them. They are afraid that everyone will believe everything that’s said about them, and that they will be rejected, left out and left behind again. The ground beneath their feet can seem so unsteady.

When I encounter this mixture of longing and fear, I want very much to assure them that it’s all right, that they do belong, that they are accepted, and to please not worry. But I have learned that this assurance cannot be magically given or surgically implanted. Our warmth, hugs, and encouragement can help, but this assurance, this security, this identity must be born in their very beings. Ultimately, it is their responsibility.

Sometimes they want our community to be different, to fit their idea of a dream community. It is true that our community needs to change, and always keep on changing, with the flow of our human needs. But our community does have certain social structures and rules, and it sometimes cannot accommodate certain attitudes and behaviors. While notions of universal peace and acceptance are beautiful, the reality is that our community’s success depends as much on our flaws and limitations as on our virtues. In the struggle between the base and the ideal is life. It is up to them to reconcile themselves with the foundations of our community, or not.

I think that an awareness of expectations is important for our making peace with this phenomenon. We who love our community should not feel bad for failing to meet those great expectations. No community on Earth can meet them. When members leave us, they will encounter the same humanity everywhere else. We hope that their life journeys will lead them to us again, this time with a richer understanding of who we all are.

[This essay first appeared in Clerc Scar. It is also available at Deaf Echo.]

When people learn of my accomplishments, they often marvel because I am both deaf and blind. Never mind that one of the extraordinary things I can do is pick my nose. Seriously, though, there are those who know me well and respect my work as a poet and independent scholar. For them, there’s something else about me that is strange: My lack of a college degree.

I did go to college and on scholarship, too. But my three attempts at formal higher education over a decade all failed.

No, this isn’t because deaf-blind people who aren’t Helen Keller can’t do it. Deaf-blind people can do anything. The question isn’t whether or not we can or should do something, but how we are going to do it. Being deaf-blind, in and of itself, is never the problem; the problem lies elsewhere, in lack of access, in bigotry and ignorance, in narrow rules and definitions that discriminate against and exclude us.

We are capable of gaining knowledge, thinking critically, and synthesizing and applying information and ideas. Yet only a handful of deaf-blind people have graduated from college. Because the leading cause of deaf-blindness–Usher syndrome–is a progressive condition, there are many deaf-blind people who hold degrees that they obtained while they still had the use of hearing or sight. Going to college fully deaf and blind is another story.

How did those few succeed in college? Almost all of them had full-time companions who might be described as their co-students. It was a team effort going beyond the mere utilization of the companion’s eyes and ears and interpreting services. Helen Keller, the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college, had Annie Sullivan Macy. Robert J. Smithdas, the second person to do so half a century later, had John Singer (who was literally a co-student, registered and all). Mae Brown, the first one in Canada twenty years after, had Joan MacTavish.

An illuminating note: MacTavish would later pioneer the training and professionalization of intervenors–or support services providers as they are called in the United States or communication guides as they are known elsewhere–and this role now has a code of conduct and rules to guide both parties. But MacTavish confessed in her biography of Mae Brown, “I cannot see Mae and I succeeding if we had been obliged to work within [the code of professional conduct]. As a team, we worked equally.”

Such collaborations have become unacceptable, not only to institutions of higher education but also to the increasingly empowered and independent-minded deaf-blind community. Thanks to disability rights legislation, schools must provide disabled students with “reasonable accommodations.” For deaf-blind students, reasonable accommodations may include American Sign Language interpreters for classroom sessions, notetakers, certain aids and equipment, and transcription of textbooks into Braille. One would think that, given all of these wonderful services, deaf-blind students would be more successful in college today. Why isn’t this the case?

Because schooling at the college level is biased against Braille readers. There is a reason why hearing blind students rely almost exclusively on audio books and readers, even if they prefer Braille. Each school credit represents a standard amount of reading, paperwork, and hours of study a student is expected to perform. That is, a hearing and sighted student. Audio reading is slower than reading by sight, so hearing blind students do find themselves working harder. Braille reading is even slower, meaning deaf-blind students have to spend three to five times as many hours as other students to read the same materials. Using signing readers is a poor alternative, not only because it is equally slow but because there will be much lost in translation, leaving the student underequipped to write good papers based on the language of the original readings.

Slow reading shouldn’t be made into a disadvantage. I have found that it helps me absorb what I read at a deeper level. I am often dismayed by how little others read into what they sweep through with their eyes. It’s like the difference you would get between moving a cup quickly under running water and moving another cup slowly under the same running water. Being the cup that has more water in it after each run is a big reason I have no trouble pouring plenty into my papers.

But I have never been able to hand in all the due papers. I always got behind in reading. I would either submit my assignment late and swallow the automatic grade drop or skip it altogether, so I could read in advance for the next assignment in hopes of making it on time for that one. No matter how much your professors may rave about your work, the controlling factor is whether or not you complete everything, however poorly. Since I did not have access to “getting by,” I had no choice but to do good work and fall behind and ultimately fail.

Doing coursework and gaining an education are two different things. Helen Keller, Robert J. Smithdas, and Mae Brown all took their exams without their companions. What they demonstrated by passing them was that they learned what they were supposed to learn. But it is doubtful that they would have fulfilled all the course requirements without the active participation of their co-students.

That a good chunk of traditional schooling involves meaningless hoops for students to jump through is well known and much lamented by educators who care about genuine learning. But such things are put up with because they make it possible for schools to mass-produce large numbers of students in the classic capitalist manner. Almost all the curricula and syllabi are streamlined around the assumption that students are hearing and sighted and can read at a certain speed. Schools are navigable for many students. But for deaf-blind students, they are nearly impossible.

Nearly. There are a few deaf-blind students today who are managing. To be one of them, one must meet a set of daunting requirements. One must be brilliant. One must be driven. One must have no social life or responsibilities outside of school. And one must be prepared to sacrifice many more years than what is required of most students. There may be reasonable accommodations, but those deaf-blind students must put in unreasonable effort.

I find this appalling, particularly when there are dim-witted students with lukewarm ambitions who hold down part-time jobs and party all the while making faster progress toward graduation. I may be blind, but I can see a bad deal. Since I had goals that would have benefited from my earning advanced degrees, I thought I could sustain the losses in such a lopsided deal. After three attempts that produced no results, however, I have learned that some things in life just aren’t worth it. Still, I would like something to be done about higher education for deaf-blind students.

We live in a society obsessed with credentials, and it is not right for any group of people to be so effectively barred from earning them. True, there are many responsible parties in this problem. For example, employers must be faulted for not being willing to invest in discerning the true qualifications of potential employees instead of taking advantage of their lack of credentials to turn them down. But institutions of higher education have a responsibility to *all* communities and populations. If someone is capable of learning, accessible and effective resources must be made available. If someone gains knowledge and expertise, proper recognition is due. Equal effort must be rewarded with equal credit.

An ideal educational system for deaf-blind students does not demand unreasonable accommodations or concessions. It demands a return to the roots of higher education, where quality takes precedence over quantity and true learning and facility over mere schooling. Such an opportunity is not just for deaf-blind students but is for all students. The problem in education that deaf-blind students expose, I suspect, affects everyone. So the solutions promise to benefit everyone, too.

[This article first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.]

Books discussed in this essay:

DEAR TRUTH
Paul Hostovsky
Main Street Rag, $14

BENDING THE NOTES
Paul Hostovsky
Main Street Rag, $14

Both books are available at http://www.paulhostovsky.com/publications.html

*****
To read Paul Hostovsky’s poems is to stumble upon something rare and wonderful. Too many gifted poets get sucked up in academic theorizing, causing their work to become unreadable, and too many poets who do write clearly lack the magic glue that makes words stick. Hostovsky has the good glue all over his hands, and interesting things have a way of ending up in them, including deaf people and ASL.

In his day job, Hostovsky is a staff ASL interpreter with the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston, where he works mainly with deaf-blind people. In an interview, he told The Main Street Rag that:

“How I got into [interpreting and the worlds of the deaf and the blind] is the proverbial long story–which I guess is why I keep writing about it–but I guess the short answer is, I fell in love. First I fell in love with Braille, then with sign language, and then with lots of deaf and blind people, some of whom I have married. But for a long time I didn’t write about it, because I didn’t know how. I had tried writing about it, but the results were always either too sentimental or too esoteric.”

It will help us appreciate the challenge that Hostovsky faces when we remember that hearing poets have been patronizing deaf people and romanticizing silence since before the Elizabethan age. In fact, poets have indulged in sentimentality so often while being so narrow in what they say about deafness that the English language itself poses an almost physical barrier against anyone attempting to write honestly about deafness and sign language. It is as if the English language has a mind of its own, and no matter how sincere our intentions, it is English’s corrupt, audist blood that spills onto the page, not our enlightened views. Few readers realize what a triumph it is when someone writes fresh content about deaf people.

One way to do this is to take something tradition has used and turn it on its head. For example, hearing poets have often referred to birds and their song to dramatize, say, the isolation of a girl who does not hear the birds. It was deaf poets like Earl Sollenberger who began catching the birds with their hands to make them our allies. From the deaf cultural perspective, birds now represent signing, their wings becocming hands flying in the air. Hostovsky’s poem “Feeding Nancy” is a fine additition to this new tradition. Nancy is his favorite ASL teacher, but she is now bedridden with multiple sclerosis, no longer able to sign. He visits her to feed her

and to mourn the death of her beautiful
eloquent hands
lying heavy and cruel now as poached
game at the feet

of the heartbroken girl
who taught those birds how to talk
and sing—
this is crueler than Beethoven going deaf,
the loss
of the music of these birds.
It wasn’t

enough that her teachers
at the school for the deaf punished the birds
for singing,
whacked them with a ruler, locked them up
and let them starve—
little cages of bone inside a cage—
till her friends sprung them

and they were happy,
happy at last to be among their own,
and they couldn’t
stop talking, and they couldn’t stop singing,
because this
is the most beautiful singing the world has ever seen.

I love how Hostovsky brings Beethoven into this poem about an unknown ASL teacher, to say that what the teacher had to offer was, and is, more important than the world-famous composer could have ever hoped to offer. While such high praise for ASL borders on the sentimental, and would have been gauche in almost any other hearing poet’s hands, the poem is grounded in the reality of the teacher having suffered oralist repression. So it is a fact, not a fancy, that her and her friends’ liberation is so important that there are a few things in the world that is as important, as beautiful.

So this is a great poem in the deaf bird tradition. Now what? What else could we write that would work? It is to Hostovsky’s credit, and a sign of his commitment to his calling as a poet, that he didn’t, couldn’t, get stuck in just one mode. His work is a study in shifting approaches; he has poems that are entertaining lessons (“Deaf Culture 101″), philosophical (“Poem in Sign Language”), personal (“Deaf Ex”), and realist portraits that are also parables (“Dracula’s Rat”). And Hostovsky has hit upon an ingenious method. As he told The Main Street Rag, this device is to take “the persona of the ignorant or uninitiated speaker.” This has yielded some neat results. In “Away Game at the School for the Deaf,” the narrator is a hearing high school basketball player witnessing the deaf world for the first time:

Maybe we were thinking EARS
instead of HANDS.
Stepping off the bus, we glimpsed
a flicker, then a flitting
from a sleeve. We felt
annoyed, then afraid,
like spotting an ant on the tablecloth, then
another and another till it hit us:
what we had on our hands was a nest,
a population:
everyone here signed
except for us . . .

Indeed, this approach works much better than a lecture. Maybe most basketball players wouldn’t be so attentive and think much of going to a deaf school for a game, but if a player did, this is what he would have thought. Maybe Leonard M. Elstad had the exact same reaction. He was on the Carleton College basketball team nearly a century ago when it played against the Minnesota School for the Deaf. The experience was profound enough for him to go on to study in the Normal program at Gallaudet before becoming superintendent of MSD and then president of Gallaudet.

Less plausible but still effective is “Deaf,” in which a farmer is telling us about this deaf boy who is good with animals. One day, the non-signing farmer and others circle around the boy, who is telling them about what he’d just aw happen on the road.

He was the only witness when the
neighbor’s dog
got run over, and he told us the whole story
with his whole body, how the pickup
swerved to avoid her, grazing
her shoulder, the angle of impact
throwing her into the woods.
We all stood around, ignorant
of what happened exactly, hoping
and fearing as his story unfolded
and he embodied first the dog running, then
the truck braking, then
the dog then the truck then the dog
so we had the feeling we were seeing it all
just as it happened, and just as it was happening,
but in slow motion and with a zoom lens
and from six different camera angles.

Even though signers are familiar with the cinematic qualities of visual vernacular, it is a bit of a stretch to think that someone ignorant of ASL would recognize this, much less describe this feature. But this doesn’t matter, because it’s still a poem that does its job well within poetic license, and non-signing readers will learn a great deal without thinking it is something they’re not supposed to know until they’ve taken a workshop under Bernard Bragg. Information like this about the rich possibilities of ASL should be easy for hearing people to appreciate, and this poem is one good way to make this information approachable.

“Deaf Love Poem” is another interesting example, but one with a different angle. Whereas the basketball player and the farmer talk about deaf people, the speaker in this poem is talking TO a deaf person, on whom he has a crush after watching her watching the interpreter in class. He notices that there’s a lag in time between what’s spoken and then interpreted in ASL, so that there is a “space” between the class’s laughter and the deaf woman laughing. He says:

I want to slip inside that space and sit
across from you, legs crossed, hands
folded in my lap. If I made myself very
small, inconspicuous, insignificant as
another pair of antennae on the wall,
just watching you, quietly, watching the
interpreter, could I, could we, fit?

What I admire most in this poem is the delicacy with which Hostovsky presents the speaker’s desire. Certainly a great many hearing people have experienced a wish to connect with a deaf person, but equally true is how uncertain, how tentative they can be when they act upon this desire, if they do at all. That the speaker is in love makes this even more precarious. I suspect that Hostovsky was in a similar position before, perhaps when he first encountered ASL. But since that time, he has grown bold and assertive enough to make a valuable contribution to signing community literature.

There is one more aspect of Hostovsky’s work I’d like to discuss. An example of this is “Little League,” which was broadcast on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. The great Garrison Keillor read this poem aloud to thousands of listeners:

When the ump produces
his little hand broom
and stops all play to stoop
and dust off home plate,
my daughter sitting beside me
looks up and gives me a smile that says
this is by far her favorite part of baseball.

And then when he skillfully
spits without getting any
on the catcher or the batter or himself,
she looks up again and smiles
even bigger.

But when someone hits a long foul ball
and everyone’s eyes are on it
as it sails out of play . . .
the ump has dipped his hand
into his bottomless black pocket
and conjured up a shiny new white one
like a brand new coin
from behind the catcher’s ear,
which he then gives to the catcher
who seems to contain his surprise
though behind his mask his eyes are surely
as wide with wonder as hers.

As listeners smiled with the girl in the poem, it’s a safe bet that nobody knew that Hostovsky’s daughter is deaf. And they didn’t need to know. This is in stark contrast with other poems by hearing parents of deaf children, most notably Paul West in his collection WORDS FOR A DEAF DAUGHTER. (Notice that the title refers to the daughter as an “a” and not “my,” suggesting that West is holding her at arm’s length.) Most have trouble seeing past their kids’ “disability,” or else they are unable to recognize them in such a way that their deafness is absorbed completely into their whole beings. The same goes for hearing lovers, colleagues, teachers–if a hearing poet writes a poem about a deaf person, it’s almost guaranteed that deafness, or silence, or signing, or music will be central to the poem. Whether or not Hostovsky mentions a subject’s deafness depends on the poem. His brilliant and humane discretion in this matter lends a wonderful honesty and freshness to his poems.

[This piece first appeared in Clerc Scar.]