I
have been thinking a lot lately about names; their significance, and the
significance of their absence, in the historical record. Names are a backbone
of identity, and a shining declaration of uniqueness. In historical research, a
commonly-occurring name makes an archival trawl into a frustrating scrabble for
a splinter in a forest; a unique and rare name can shine like a beacon among
the chaff. There’s nothing like the thrill of poring over name after name after
name until THAT name registers to your eyes and brain. It can be heart
stopping.
And
for historians, names are the primary anchor to the individuals that we track
and trace through the archives, especially when it comes to the
sketchily-drawn, highly uncommon ‘common people’ that we focus on when we do
‘history from below’. Names ground and unify all
the physical descriptions, records of confinement, and letters by and about
these people. Without their names, we would struggle to locate their ghostly
traces in the archive.
When
it comes to presenting my work to Deaf audiences and telling these stories in
Irish Sign Language, the question of names gains an added layer of complexity.
In ISL, you have the option to talk about the people you research simply by
finger spelling their names. A very straightforward technique, but a rather
plain one - as anyone who knows the way ‘sign names’ work. A sign name in ISL,
as with other signed languages, can contain not just orthography but biography;
a physical quirk, a characteristic tic, a childhood identifier. Deaf culture
(or cultures) exist within, too; in the tradition of name-initial,
surname-initial combination often utilised in St. Joseph’s school in Cabra, for
example, or the number-names given to Deaf pupils corresponding to their coat-
and hat-pegs within the residential Ulster Institution school at Lisburn Road.
I
was tempted, in the past, to create my own sign names for the long-dead Deaf
Irishmen and Irishwomen I have been following. Take John Sinnott; a fearsome
Waterford street fighter, once kidnapped by the IRA. Sinnott, seemingly to mark
the year of his arrival in the Cabra Deaf school, had a tattoo on his arm
reading ’DUBLIN 1888’. Timothy Donovan, sentenced to seven years penal
servitude from his native Cork City, was also tattooed, having ‘T. D’. etched
on his arm. Such obvious physical marks lend themselves to imaginative
renderings into ISL sign-names. ‘88’ on the arm, ‘TD’ on the forearm.
Mary
Wilson, shunned by her husband, living on the streets of Belfast and resorting
to a life of thievery - why not a sign-name like STEAL++ (the sign repeated
twice)? James Brennan, another Deaf person frequently arrested for stealing,
and an ex-Joseph’s pupil - why not the old Joseph’s formula, and a
fingerspelled J tickling a base-hand B? Perhaps most amusing was Patrick Byrne
– an uneducated Deaf Wexford man who spent decades of confinement in prisons
and mental hospitals, with a penchant for fist-fighting, especially with RIC
men. A quick rendition of FISTICUFFS might be an amusing label.
But
I soon began to resist the temptation to use such name-signing strategies. I
think the biggest influence on me was simply reflecting on my position as an
‘outsider’, a non-CODA researcher on Deaf history; an interpreter cheekily
creating his own signs, in the language not his. I had reflected to myself a while back that my own
career in the Deaf community began with an act of cultural appropriation; the
self-definition of my sign-name - a fingerspelled C against the flat palm of an
L to indicate my initials. It was my own idea, crafted after having seen the St
Joseph’s system.
It
didn’t occur to me that the act of giving a sign-name is precisely that;
giving, not taking – a gift received from the Deaf community, who have got to
know you after a period of time, and only then decide what you can call
yourself in their language. But I impatiently skipped ahead, and like a little
Napoleon, grabbed the crown for myself. (The fact that another Deaf person may
actually have had the same sign-name as mine didn’t occur to me at the time;
turns out there’s at least one other C-L out there.) It’s a bit too late to
come up with another sign-name now, widely known as it is, but it has been a
process I needed to re-analyse – that process of taking and not allowing myself
to be given it.
 |
Another nameless ‘dummy’ – the victim
of a crime but rendered nameless here
|
But
deeper levels of analysis reveal themselves when I reflect on other factors. We
will likely never know the actual sign-names of the kinds of people that I look
at; we will never see or know what sign they were known by to Deaf
acquaintances, friends and family. This represents an almost permanent loss of
a pillar of their identity; a part of their being that was almost never
committed to the historical record, outside the ‘oral’ history of folklore and
stories passed down the Deaf generations. It seems rude and irresponsible for
an outsider historian to breeze past such absences, and slap on an improvised
label that follows a formula, or one that picks one of the least flattering
qualities of the person and attempts to encapsulate their whole being in what
amounts to a limited, reductive nickname.
The
level of detail and richness of description in institutional archives can often
trick the researcher into an illusion of completeness, but we must be careful
to remember that such archives are ‘unstable’, as Catharine Coleborne reminds
us. Truly, we can come across treasures that help us reclaim individuals from
obscurity; such records can “contain histories of people who would otherwise
have remained virtually invisible”, and she reflects that “it is something of a
paradox that we know such a large amount about institutionalised people when
they were hidden from public view in their own lifetimes”. But “for the
researcher… finding archival remains can still evoke an excited sense of
‘completeness’, even while the material only reveals a little more about an
individual’s history.” And as detailed as my
files become, their edges also become apparent. Despite the reams of material I
have accumulated - newspaper accounts rich with detail, dozens - even hundreds
- of court papers and petitions scanned - despite the fact that I know more
about Patrick Byrne than any other Deaf figure I have looked at, I still do not
know him, and am not in a position to name him.
This
also raises points from Foucault’s writings on power at work in surveillance -
the descriptions, categorisations, and classifications of prisoners and mental
patients. How do we know of the existence of these Deaf individuals? How do *I*
know of them? Through the records created by a host of institutions who aimed
to rehabilitate, make penitent, discipline or punish. The 'medical gaze' frames
and defines the asylum records I see; where I see photographs, I see only those
photographs that the prison system took and that still survive. I read their
letters, but only those found within asylum and court and prison files,
writings framed and defined by these experiences of confinement and
institutionalisation. I don’t get to see candid shots of them smiling, signing;
very few of their surviving letters show hints of their fullest selves or
happier times. Where they are illiterate, they do not even have the chance to
speak against the system; they ‘speak’ not at all in the record, though if we
‘listen’ carefully, we may derive some understanding of their voices and
agency. But do we know enough of them, from this limited and darkening lens, to
bestow such a gift or curse or insult? Given that these people have lost so
much during their lives – some their liberty, some their families and children,
for many a chance of a decent education – it seems that papering over their
authentic selves, as revealed through a harsh and unsympathetic archive, with a
sign-name representation based on the views of the institution seems an insult
indeed.
Given
names, by contrast - those given at birth or baptism by parent or guardian -
have an authenticity and clarity. In much of my readings of the history of
institutions in Ireland and elsewhere, simply coming across the names of
inmates can open up a formerly hidden reality, bring it to refreshing light.
But this apparently simple act of naming can present its own concerns.
Ethically, we are bound to treat such records of institutionalisation with
care, compassion and dignity, which in many cases implies preserving anonymity
- a deliberate act of non-naming done out of care and respect.
 |
| South Dublin Union workhouse, 1867 –
a ‘deaf mute’ is admitted to the workhouse, no name given. www.findmypast.ie |
Helen
Rogers has dealt with these ethical challenges, asking “how [do we] balance
public desire for education and entertainment? How to make records accessible
and where to preserve anonymity? How to convey painful historical experiences
which touch directly on the personal experiences of those currently living with
the effects of crime and punishment?” While Rogers, in her blog Conviction: stories from a nineteenth
century prison,
does not anonymise, she nevertheless feels that “for most of us, and certainly
those studying the pre-1900s, our responsibility rests in the integrity with
which we represent these histories.” She reminds us that “[c]aution and
sensitivity should be taken when dealing with the recent past and within the
life-time of those affected, or cases involving criminal insanity”. For surviving family
members, but also for the individuals themselves, we are urged to beware the
sensationalising of naming these people – possibly shaming them – by recounting
incidents of pain, loneliness, poverty, shame and stigma.
For
certain categories of records, using names of individuals for records less than
100 years old is (legally or contractually) forbidden; for others, it is
frowned upon, or archivists urge appropriate and respectful use. Certain
domains of experience have their own imperatives, particularly those impinging
on present concerns and traumas, such as historical research on child sexual
abuse, where for “historians working with these public documents, retrospective
anonymising of the names of victims and survivors – by not republishing this
material – is obvious”. But when it comes to other identifying information,
such as the names of institutions where abuse took place, “it can be argued
that failure to republish historical information reinforces the mantle of
secrecy that has for too long protected those in positions of power and
influence.”
Specifically
for my own research, I have at times been frustrated when creating a picture of
someone’s life at the bisecting effect of these considerations. Patrick Byrne,
who I mentioned before, entered the Dundrum Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1898 and
stayed there until his death in 1916. That much is public record, revealed
through prison records, a death certificate, and some papers held in the
National Archives dealing with a petition of his while in Dundrum. The archives
of Dundrum itself (now held in the Central Mental Hospital) are also
fantastically useful and revealing, and Dr Harry Kennedy in particular was very
helpful in my research there. In a disused wing of the hospital, I leafed
through old casebooks and found – among other old friends – the file of Patrick
Byrne.
But
due to the confidentiality agreement that researchers must sign when accessing
the archives, not a thing can I tell you about what I saw in those pages. I could only tell you by
anonymising Patrick, by using a false name and writing about his time within
Dundrum by consciously delinking those details from anything else I would write
about him from public records. He becomes two different people to everyone but
myself. These archives help lay out a detailed and rich landscape in my head
for these individuals, but I cannot tell this story to others without splitting
the tale in two.
I
do understand and appreciate these conditions, and respect them utterly. But
when it comes to the more ‘borderline’ cases - where some researchers have been
known to name, and others to anonymise - what do I do? Other types of
institutionalisations and stories of pain and harm do not have the same formal
necessity to anonymise, leaving only ethical and moral considerations. Entrants
to workhouses, pre-1918 lunatic asylum admissions, Deaf women who have been
sexually assaulted; their names were plastered all over the newspapers, thrown
online and now accessible merely by paying a subscription. They have been
named, and I too can name. So do I name, and in the process do I shame? And if
I do not, do I continue to hide the stories of these individuals?
Two
considerations. Firstly, one justification for anonymity is often to protect
surviving family members from embarrassment or upset. But it is accurate to say
that while Deaf Irish people did indeed marry – to both Deaf and hearing
spouses – throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rate of
marriage was nevertheless extremely low. Deaf people did make families, and
indeed multi-generational Deaf families did exist, but the number of Deaf
people married with children was so small that it is fair to say almost none of
the Deaf individuals I have looked at have had children, and therefore almost
none would have direct descendants. This isn’t universally the case – I did
make contact with the great-grandson of a Deaf prisoner I have been
researching, who has been nothing but supportive and interested in what I’ve
found. But for most Deaf people that I look at, there is almost no one alive
today who is directly descended from them - which in itself, is a huge sadness.
No one to remember them as direct ancestors, no one to celebrate them, and feel
pride in them and pain for them. And maybe that means we should do more to tell
about them – including using, where we can and with the utmost respect and
dignity, their given names.
And
another fact of Deaf history I have come across constantly, a disturbing and
saddening phenomenon of the archive; the legions of the unnamed. Workhouse
registers listing as entrants ‘deaf and dumb woman’, prison records telling of
a ‘dumb boy’, countless court cases where we get nothing more detailed about
the defendant than that they are ‘a dummy’, and on occasion even when Deaf
people act as witnesses - the newspapers insist on naming their tormentors and
not them. I have written before of the shocking use of these terms, but in this
context, what shocks more is that they are used as substitutes for names, where names may not even be known - or merely considered unimportant. Some
examples are shown here.
 |
A female workhouse inmate known only
as ‘The Dummy’ dies in Ballyshannon workhouse, 1862. www.findmypast.ie
|
The
reasons behind this namelessness are often obvious; any deaf person without an
education would have grown up not knowing their own written name, and therefore
could not convey it to a clerk or prison administrator. This is not to take away
from the fact that deaf men and women used guile and cunning and intelligence
to navigate an Ireland that had barely any opportunity for deaf people to be educated. Others had perhaps
been educated but had wandered the country so long that they had lost ability
to convey their name to others. Both sign-names and written names – if either
existed – completely lost to us, that foundation stone of their personhood lost
to the mist. Others, as we can see from the newspaper clippings, may have had
given names, but these were not counted as important pieces of information. ‘Dummies’
they were, ‘deaf mute’ the only identity that mattered to the journalist or
editor.
Deaf
people in the archive struggle against namelessness, against anonymity, and
against those clerks, administrators and reporters who did not know - or care -
who they were, and in the process they were dehumanised. To me, it seems an act
of resistance - and for the hearing Deaf historian, a kind of reparation - to
challenge this by active naming. These Deaf people were people. While their
authentic sign-names and situated Deaf cultural identities should not be
replaced or plastered over, we should not avoid opportunities to name them,
celebrate them and tell their story with humility, reverence, warmth and
respect.
References
