[Note: ISL Translation to Follow Soon]
There's a particular type of reaction I've been having this
last year or two, when I post online about some new discovery I've made about
the area of Deaf history I am researching. It's best explained like so: Deaf people
are shocked at what I've found - but at the 'wrong' aspect of it; and I get
peeved. This is not an emotion I am proud of at all, but it has to be
acknowledged - and analysed; and in unpicking this emotion I've been feeling,
it's opened up a lot of stuff for me about the place of the 'outsider' or
comparatively-privileged researcher operating within a minority, oppressed
community that I thought I'd share.
So let's say I find some newspaper story about a Deaf inmate
in the workhouse. Let's call him Billy McEvoy. Billy McEvoy is a long term
resident in the workhouse, as were many Deaf people in the period I focus on,
and Deaf paupers are generally portrayed as lacking agency or capacity for
resistance. But in this news story I find, Billy writes a long, well written
and coherent letter of complaint to the workhouse Guardians. The letter is
reproduced in full in the paper, and details in heart-rending fashion his
version of the mistreatment at the hands of the authorities. Elements in
Billy's letter speak of his missing other Deaf people’s company; a feeling of
being victimised because he is Deaf; his application, say, for a position in
the workhouse staff that he feels he is owed. There might be several other
nuggets of detail illuminating aspects of life for poor Deaf people in the
nineteenth century. Horrific experiences of marginalisation, and the dismissive
- often callous - disregard for them as human beings by workhouse guardians.
But also, resistance to hearing oppression and pride in their language and
community. And not least, further proof that Irish Deaf people's written
English during the nineteenth century was excellent.
And I light up! I excitedly throw up the article on Twitter
and Facebook, hoping that a Deaf audience will see the same significance to
this as I do - that same feeling of joy (mixed with sadness, of course) in
discovering the previously unknown. But here's the issue: many, even most, of
the replies from Deaf people on social media don't focus on any of this at all.
Instead, they express their horror and sadness at... the use of the phrases
'deaf and dumb' and 'deaf mute', or even 'dummy' in the newspaper article. And
that's all. This frustrates me. And it shouldn't, of course; I'm ashamed of the
reaction, for many reasons.
I'm an outsider researcher,[1] a hearing person privileged to
be able to explore the lived experiences and histories of a minority community.
And though my work may help to illuminate issues of concern to Deaf people and
coincide with their agendas, it is still, at the very least, unfair of me to
set any agenda in terms of what aspects of my research should be perceived as
more salient or important than others. It's not up to me how the Deaf community
receives my work. How the work is received, in fact, should probably inform its
direction.
But there's also this: after five years of looking at reams
of nineteenth century documentation about Deaf people in Ireland, I’ve seen the
phrases ‘deaf and dumb’, ‘deaf mute’ and the dreaded ‘dummy’ (hereafter written
‘d___y’) so often, that I have almost entirely lost that punch-in-the-stomach
reaction to them that I get when I see them used in, say, a modern tabloid
story. I'm at such a knee-deep stage of research that the use of these awful,
outdated, and currently offensive, terms for Deaf people washes over me. I
might occasionally wince at some headline using the above phrases; I smirk over
some badly-written Victorian 'deaf humour' written by copy editors to stick in
a spare half-inch of column, jokes that use language in a way that
retrospectively lampoon the authors more so than Deaf people.
 |
| Case in point. |
But I have lost - or perhaps more accurately, never really
possessed - something visceral and deeply connected to identity and being, that
reacted when I heard these phrases. I've been involved in the Irish Deaf
community for nearly 20 years now as a researcher and interpreter, and so I can
afford, in some sense, to have post-modern, detached conversations and musings
about labels such as 'deaf and dumb' and 'deaf mute'; to wonder if maybe
medical-model equivalents such as 'hearing impaired' are far worse, in some
way, portraying people as intrinsically broken; to despair at hearing people
who stutter and splutter and hem and haw when trying to describe a person's
'condition', when right-thinking people just say 'Deaf'. You could point out
that Deaf people described themselves as deaf and dumb years ago (even if it
appeared they had a preference for 'deaf mute'[2]). You can even excuse the
older hearing members of your family who will still talk about the village
'd___y' of their childhood, because, well, they are old, they mean well, they
don't really mean it in a prejudiced way.
But of course, I can afford to become inured to this
terminology - because of my hearing privilege; because it's not about me. I
will never have that instinctive hurt, that wound, that feeling I cannot even
dare to try and guess at describing, that comes from being called something so
dismissive. I'm especially thinking of ‘d___y’ and thinking in terms of
equivalence with what I’ll call the ‘N word’ - used, despicably, to describe
African Americans. I’m not saying it’s ‘the same’, but there are some
ramifications to this line of thought that lead me to a comparison where my own
reactions to words are concerned. Because what is my own personal reaction to
seeing these terms used so consistently, so often?
My reaction to the ‘D-word’ puts me in mind of the movie
Blazing Saddles, still a favourite of mine, where the 'N-word' seems deployed
self-consciously, as a way to ridicule its users; the rednecks who drawl the
word are painted as buffoons, and the racism on display is made to look as
ridiculous as racism is, the use of the N-word being a hallmark of that idiocy.
Similarly, I see nineteenth-century headlines with 'd___y' used in all
seriousness, in headlines such as 'A D___y In Trouble', 'Sympathy for the
D___y', etc. – and I have lost the reaction of rage; instead, confronted with
these words in their historical context time and time again, this ridiculous
bigotry, I snicker. It seems a cartoonish buffoonery in print, a jocular
example of how awful the past was (and by implication how much better it is
today); and eventually, I can get to the stage I don't even register the word
when I enter d___y into a newspaper search archive, or note down that our
friend Billy McEvoy is marked down in the workhouse register as being a d___y.
But this is not the reaction of Deaf people, who do not have
the luxury of comforting themselves that ‘this is all in the past’. This is not
a ‘past’ that has disappeared. The D___y word still has currency. ‘Deaf and
dumb’ still has currency. Terms that have become, for me, a familiar - and
eventually, unremarkable - feature of the historical territory, something to
chuckle off, something to historicise, remain for millions of Deaf people
viscerally hurtful words, an abnegation of their humanity, labels that can
traumatise and re-traumatise. I do not want to shrug off or become immune to
these terms. And I need to realise why this is crucial.
______________
All this puts me in mind of recent controversies that connect
to these considerations of language, and my ‘outsider’ status. I have always
been aware of the profound unhappiness of much of the stories I have stumbled
upon. If you exclude the positivity and community that has been found – and is
still found – by Deaf people in residential schools in Ireland, each kind of
institution I look at in my dissertation is a place where no-one wants to be.
More often than not, there is compulsion – directly in the case of courts and
prisons, as well as mental institutions; indirectly in the case of workhouses.
Deaf people ended up there due to a series of cataclysms, marginalisation,
missed opportunities and mistreatment. Many times, these stories end after
years behind walls, still in these institutions, buried in featureless
makeshift graveyards.
But if I am proposing – as I think I must – that these
experiences were to some degree, unique to Deaf people – uniquely Deaf
experiences of pain and suffering – what does that make me? How can I justify
or explain my role in their documenting? A grandiose part of me feels a
responsibility to ‘uncover’ and ‘share’ these stories. An emancipatory and
reflective historiographical approach would seem to require that I acknowledge
my self in the process. And not that I’m an unconditional fan of their work,
but postmodern historians might insist that in constructing these narratives
based in historical sources, that I am in some sense constructing, not a
scientifically ‘neutral’ and ‘impartial’ account of events, but something more
akin to an intensely personal work of art.[3]
With these in mind, I want to look at two recent enough news
stories around the idea of 'cultural appropriation' that have caused me to
think about the nature of my work, given my outsider status. Firstly, the
Vanessa Place controversy. Place is a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles,
who hit the headlines in 2015 when she opened a Twitter account that aimed to
tweet, line by line, every word of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the
Wind. The aim behind this was provocatively stir up discussion of the racist
heritage of the United States, the legacy of the book and movie in relation to
racist caricature and language, and explore the nature of ‘clicktivism’ and
social media in relation to discussion of arguments around these issues. But
Place is a white, queer female, and her project generated vociferous criticism
from African-American activists infuriated at her apparent recycling of racist
language and imagery, regardless of purpose. In the subsequent Twitter-based
furore, activist groups demanded that Place’s work be boycotted, that she be
disinvited from conferences and removed from academic panels.[4]
Place’s project raises questions about the artistic use of
imagery and language that is considered unacceptable and deeply offensive to
people of colour regardless of ‘benign’ intent. Some of Place’s critics asked
whether “these works successfully perform an anti-racist critique, or do they
unnecessarily retraumatize people of color (and black Americans in particular)
for sensationalist purposes?” Critic Lillian-Yvonne Bertram describes Place’s
piece acting in a “nonchalant” way, which “implies carelessness, a lack of
sincerity when confronted with thoroughly traumatic material”. The project
raised “any number of questions about the ethics of engaging with traumatic
materials at what seems to be little or no risk to oneself”, and Kim Calder
wonders if these
engagements with black trauma raise the question of whether a person who does not ‘own’ a trauma, so to speak, has any right to engage it, despite, or because of, their historical responsibility for that trauma… How could someone who doesn’t authentically know an experience have something to say to those who have an embodied sense of that experience? In addition, if a work is to commit the sin of representing a trauma that is not one’s own, which might cause pain to readers whose direct experience it is — does such work not have a responsibility to tell us something new, or make a difference in the world somehow? [5]
Of a similar vein, but dealing with perhaps more traumatic
content, is the painting of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth lynched in
1955. Till’s mother had urged that her son’s body be displayed in an open
casket at his funeral to ‘let the people see’, the resultant fury helping to
spark the Civil Rights movement among black Americans. After listening to tapes
of Till’s mother, white female artist Dana Schutz created a piece of art depicting
Till in his open casket. “‘I don’t know what it is like to be black in America,
but I do know what it is like to be a mother,’ she said, explaining her desire
to engage with the loss of Emmett Till's mother. ‘In her sorrow and rage,’ she
wrote, ‘she wanted her son’s death not just to be her pain but America’s
pain.’”[6]
But the artwork met with a fiercely negative and outraged
reaction from sections of the African-American community. A petition was begun
to not only have the work removed from the Whitney Museum, but destroyed;
“Detractors argued that a white woman ought not render such a subject...
protester Hannah Black, a black artist from Britain, [argued] that a white
artist has no right to paint a lynching victim.” Jonathan Blanks of the Cato Institute’
Project on Criminal Justice felt that “[a]s far as artists are concerned ...
risk is inherent to what they do...
Slavery is America's Original Sin, and the racism that evolved to
perpetuate it is an inextricable part of our social fabric. Whenever any artist
tries to confront that, they inherently invite expressions of the often
chaotic, almost inarticulable pain that exists as a part of black experience in
America.”
So here I stand, a member of the hearing majority, with our
own Original Sins against Deaf people. - oralism, language deprivation,
institutionalisation, disempowerment. Can I afford for a second to be
'nonchalant' with words and language that can still cause such pain?
______________
How to relate this, then, to my writing of experiences that
are not mine, that are so traumatic and so particularly Deaf, as I have myself
defined them? What are the boundaries and considerations I need to have? Or
should I walk away?
It isn’t a new consideration for me. Shortly after I began as
a registered PhD student, I made a decision to restrict the scope of the
dissertation to pre-1924. Prior to thia, I had in mind a grand historical tour
between 1800 and the 1950s, going right the way up to the changeover to oralism
in Cabra. But that changed for a number of reasons. First, and probably
foremost, was the sheer workload that would be involved in covering both
British-administered and Free State Ireland in the one work.
I also had concerns about methodology – as well as some
of the things I’ve mentioned above. It made no sense to write about 1950s Irish
Deaf people without interviewing people, using an ‘oral’ history approach –
which when applied to elderly Irish Deaf people, especially Deaf women, throws
up all kinds of considerations in terms of procedures, language,
confidentiality and trust. And there would be the huge responsibility of
portraying the potentially traumatic, non-shared (with me) lived experiences of
people that were still alive, and able to be potentially deeply hurt by my treatment
of their stories. Which is not to say that after restricting my period to
1816-1924, that I just say, ‘everyone I research about is dead, so it’s grand’.
Methodologically, and ethically, yes, it gets easier to deal with the issues.
But there remains a very strong feeling that I need to do the memories of these
individuals – this community, or communities – justice.
It’s easy, at a surface level at least, to counter the
assertion that ‘hearing people should not write about Deaf historical trauma’ by
offering the observation that historiography is not art, like that of Place and
Schutz, but a form of quasi-scientific inquiry; relying on facts supplied by
critically evaluated sources. However, the position of ‘history as science’ has
taken a pounding by postmodernists, who insist on the impossibility of
objectivity in history writing, and the historiographical text as a literary
construction - a text - and so in ways as amenable to analysis as a form of art
as any painting or poem.[7]
Another argument of mine might point to the profusion of
hearing authors who have written, and continue to write, about the suffering
and oppression of Deaf people at the hands of hearing society – and are lauded
by the Deaf community for having done so: Harlan Lane, for example, wrote When
the Mind Hears, still a core text for Deaf history,[8] which details the
injustice and oppression towards Deaf people in the switch to oralism in
America and elsewhere. Lane is hearing, and still to this day is not a fluent
signer. Owen Wrigley, who grumbles about Lane’s work as representing a form of
‘hearing Deaf history’ that focuses more on hearing ‘benefactors’ than Deaf
people themselves, is himself a hearing
historian.[9] Closer to home, Edward J Crean’s passionate and polemical work
Breaking the Silence was one of the first books in Ireland of its kind to
document the linguistic abuses experienced by Deaf children in the Cabra
schools from the 1940s onwards – writing unashamedly and proudly as a hearing
parent of a Deaf child, who did not sign.[10]
The world is certainly a better one because of the work of Lane,
Wrigley, Crean, and others. The involvement of hearing historians in
documenting the darker aspects of Deaf history continues today. Gunther List
feels that hearing people have a kind of duty to do Deaf history that lays bare
past structural inequalities and oppression of Deaf people. He states that Deaf
historians should not be expected to shoulder the “burden of presenting,
entirely from their own resources, historical record of negative interaction
between majority and minority… minority historians should not have to provide
the necessary revision of the history of the majority”. List conceptualises his
interest as an outsider to Deaf culture as a “focus on deaf people’s historical
conflicts with that group to which I myself belong”.[11] List’s formulation is
one that I agree with and utilise.
There is a third counterpoint: the fact that to date my own
research has been met with near-universal welcome from Irish Deaf people
themselves. I have presented often, almost always in ISL, and from a local or regional
Deaf perspective whenever I could. I’ve been requested to present at Deaf clubs
and events on the strength of word of mouth/hand. That’s not to say there may
not be some disquiet; I’ve talked previously about the danger of becoming theeverblogger, drowning out the quiet, consistent work of Deaf historians with
constant social media barrages, increasing ‘presence’ at the expense of the
true experts in Deaf history - community insiders with a rich pedigree of
research experience. I am keenly attuned to suggestions that I may be
‘colonising’, and am thankful that no such accusations have come toward me as
yet – but aware that indeed they may. I keep in touch with Deaf Irish
historians and offer support and collaboration where it is wanted, and above
all, notify people about sources.
Here is another counterpoint that is weaker, but deserves
discussion: that the traumas I research and describe arise from old patterns of
Irish institutional behaviour and practice, which have become extinct as the
institutions have shuttered, and represent a Deaf experience that is in some
way ‘over’ – and by implication, perhaps more ‘safe’ to discuss and analyse.
But is this really the case? It is true that in Ireland today, no Deaf child is
placed in a forbidding concrete residential institution, returning to their
families twice a year only, and educated purely through signed language;[12]
nobody Deaf or hearing goes to a workhouse or poorhouse; courts provide
interpreters, as do prisons in Ireland;[13] Deaf inpatient numbers in
residential mental health care facilities seem to be dropping, and Deaf
psychiatric care is improving, with a recognition that Deaf people have
specific language needs within the healthcare system.[14]
But to insist that the horrors of the past have passed for
deaf people obscures the fact that this history is not history. Deaf people are
often still poor and unemployed;[15] are still chronically underserved by the
justice and mental health systems, and cannot expect to have an appropriately skilled professional
interpreter in the courtroom or therapist’s office as a matter of course.[16]
Given the injustice that persists – institutionalised injustice, if not exactly
occurring within bricks-and-mortar institutions - it would be incredibly
inappropriate for me to encourage Deaf people, even indirectly, to ‘look on the
bright side – things were worse 100 years ago’.
None of these counterpoints is on unassailable ground, and my
thinking process and action needs to constantly be reviewed in light of all the
above. I do not see myself walking away from the project, and in all of my
honesty, I think it would be the Deaf community’s loss if I did. It may be true
that the individuals I research may be discovered and written about by other
historians – I positively plead for it to happen – but I feel that in my work,
I can bring a perspective that is new, that is my own, that is also of benefit
to the Deaf community in its current struggles against oppression. There is
some vanity in that, but also many examples I can refer to, to back it up. The
research is still mine, the process mine; and while I intend that
non-possessively, I cannot not own and not embed myself in what I am doing.
My dissertation, along with any papers, vlogs or blogs that
come from my PhD research, are always going to be creatures of fierce
contradiction: intensely personal reflections on, and treatments of, some of
the darkest and most painful moments and suppressed memories of the Irish Deaf
community, moments and memories that will resonate viscerally with Deaf people
- in a way they will not, with myself. Therefore it is not - cannot be - an
unthinking process of finding, documenting, disseminating. The subject matter deserves
more humility, consideration and
reflection than describing myself as someone who ‘brings these stories to
light’; I have no wish to display any purloined Elgin marbles in a ‘dark
tourism’ museum of my own making, especially if they speak directly to the
trauma of those who have suffered, as a class, as a culture, as a community -
and continue to suffer. The journey continues.
Some minor edits and corrections made, 4 April, 10.10pm GMT.
_____________________________________________________
[1] Gill Harold makes good use of this term and explores its implications:
Gill Harold, ‘Deafness, Difference and the City: Geographies of Urban
Difference and the Right to the Deaf City’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, National
University of Ireland, Cork, 2012), passim.
[2] Graham O’Shea, ‘A History of Deaf in Cork: Perspectives
on Education, Language, Religion and Community’ (Unpublished M.Phil. Thesis,
University College Cork, 2010).
[3] See Peter Brickley, ‘Postmodernism and The Nature of
History’, International Journal of Historical Learning Teaching and Research 1,
no. 2 (1999) for a discussion of the debates between such writers as Evans,
Hayden White, Keith Jenkins etc. on these points.
[4] Edward Helmore, ‘Gone With the Wind Tweeter Says She Is
Being Shunned by US Arts Institutions’, The Guardian, June 25, 2015; available
from
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/25/gone-with-the-wind-tweeter-shunned-arts-institutions-vanessa-place;
Kim Calder, ‘The Denunciation of Vanessa Place’, Los Angeles Review of Books,
June 14, 2015; available from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-denunciation-of-vanessa-place/.
[5] Calder, ‘The Denunciation of Vanessa Place’.
[6] Conor Friedersdorf, ‘What Does “Cultural Appropriation”
Actually Mean ?’, The Atlantic, April 3, 2017; available from
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/cultural-appropriation/521634/.
[7] See Hayden V White, ‘The Burden of History’, History and
Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 111–34; Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and
Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now’, History and Theory 38, no. 1
(February 1999): 1–24.
[8] Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
(New York, 1989).
[9] Owen Wrigley, The Politics of Deafness (Washington, D.C.,
1996); Wrigley declares that“[p]ainting psychohistories of great men struggling
to attain a place in the history of hearing civilizations has little or nothing
to do with portraying the historical circumstances of Deaf people living on the
margins of those hearing societies.”
[10] Edward J Crean, Breaking the Silence: The Education of
the Deaf in Ireland 1816-1996 (Dublin, 1997).
[11] Günther List, ‘Deaf History: A Suppressed Part of
General History’, in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New
Scholarship, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, D.C., 1993), 116.
[12] Marc Marschark and Patricia E Spencer, Evidence of Best
Practice Models and Outcomes in the Education of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing
Children: An International Review, National Council for Special Education
(Trim, Co Meath, 2009); available from http://www.nabmse.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/07/1_NCSE_Deaf.pdf;
accessed 2 August 2014.
[13] John Lawrence, ‘Irish Jails Home to Prisoners of 66
Nationalities’, Irish Times, December 5, 2016; available from
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/irish-jails-home-to-prisoners-of-66-nationalities-1.2892735;
accessed 4 April 2017.
[14] Brendan Kelly, Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry
in Ireland (Dublin, 2016). Despite the title, this is a general history of
psychiatry in Ireland, but does cover recent developments for services for Deaf
people over four pages.
[15] John Bosco Conama, Carmel Grehan, and Irish Deaf
Society, Is There Poverty in the Deaf Community?: Report on the Interviews of
Randomly Selected Members of the Deaf Community in Dublin to Determine the
Extent of Poverty Within the Community (Dublin, 2002); Pauline Conroy, Signing
In, Signing Out: The Education and Employment Experiences of Deaf Adults in
Ireland (Dublin, 2006).
