Fluent
Unidentified Boy with Book, John Brewster Jr., 1810.
The Florence Griswold Museum
When you fall in love with a language, you fall in love with the people who call that language home. Once upon a time I took a sign language class. And the teacher was Deaf. She was the first Deaf person I had ever met. And she was very pretty. By the end of the class, I knew enough signs to ask her out. But I didn’t know enough signs to ask her much of anything else after I’d asked her out. Or to understand what she said if I asked her something and she answered in sign language. I did end up asking her out though, but then I wasn’t sure if I’d asked her out on a DATE or on a DESSERT. Because they’re homonyms in ASL: two signs that look the same but have different meanings. There are lots of these homonyms in sign language: SOCKS/STARS, HATE/GREAT, LOYAL/LAZY, EXPERT/BALLSY, the number nine and the letter F. It’s a foreign language. Except it’s domestic. American Sign Language – ASL. As it turned out, it was both a date and a dessert. We went to a coffee place that served pastries. She drove.
I didn’t even know that Deaf people were allowed to drive. I would have thought it was illegal. Which it was, she said, up until the 1940s when the National Association of the Deaf convinced lawmakers that Deaf drivers pose no threat to public safety. Driving is essentially a visual act, she said as we got into her Toyota, and according to statistics, Deaf people make better drivers than hearing people. At least that’s what I think she said – I nodded and smiled a lot without entirely understanding her. There is a sign in ASL for nodding and smiling without understanding: DINOSAUR-NOD. To feign understanding. I did a lot of that. Putting the car in drive, she asked if I’d like to listen to the radio.
You can’t learn ASL from a book, she had told our class. You have to learn it from Deaf people. Because it belongs to Deaf people. And it belongs with Deaf people. Hearing people think they can go out and buy the book and learn sign language on their own, apart from Deaf people. But they can’t. If you try to learn from a book, she said, you end up signing like a book: stiff, flat, square. Do you want to sign like a square? No, of course not. Deaf people won’t understand you and you won’t understand them. The best way to learn ASL, she said, is to MIX with Deaf people. You have to FRATERNISE with Deaf people. The sign FRATERNISE is a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down mixing. So I took her injunction to heart: I asked her out on that date. I wanted to mix with her, to fraternise with her. The date, though it started out a little thumbs-down because of my lack of fluency, ended thumbs-up. I ended up marrying her. But that’s another story.
It may sound oxymoronic, but there is music in sign language. Even if you don’t understand a word of it, you probably enjoy looking at it, right? Most people do. They say it’s beautiful and expressive, that it kind of looks like dancing. And if you’re like most hearing people, you probably enjoy listening to music. In fact, you might say, you can’t imagine a life without music. Well, ASL has its own music, and when you watch Deaf people signing – and especially when you understand every word of it – you can see the music.
Sign language, in the hands of Deaf people, isn’t linear the way spoken languages are linear – one discrete word following on the heels of the next. Rather, ASL is symphonic. It creates meaning simultaneously with the hands, face, eyebrows, eye-gaze, lips, tongue, head-tilt, shoulder-turn – all the various sections of the body’s orchestra creating meaning at the same time. A visual-gestural symphony rising up all at once, like a controlled explosion.
ASL has its own rhythms, assonances, crescendos and decrescendos, riffs and repetitions, most of which have grammatical functions. For example, one beat versus two can indicate the difference between a verb and a noun; a single movement versus a repeated movement can be the difference between simple present and present continuous, or between modified and unmodified verbs. Additionally, much of the grammar of ASL occurs on the face, such as negation, imperatives, interrogatives, adjectives, adverbs, and something called ‘sound imagery’, which is a way of visually representing certain environmental sounds with the lips, teeth, tongue and eyes. Hearing people often comment that Deaf people are very animated. And while it’s true that facial expression in ASL also expresses emotion, it’s usually more about grammar than emotion, more about sense than sensibility. More semantic than romantic.
The thing is, it feels good to sign. The physical pleasure one derives from signing and watching other people signing is not unlike the physical pleasure one derives from making music and listening to music being made. Sign and sing, but for two inverted letters, are the same word. A happy accident? Perhaps. And yet, signing and singing are just two different (or not so different) ways that the body expresses energy, shaping meaning and emotion out of thin air, putting it out there for the world to take in. The manual dexterity required to play a musical instrument is not unlike the manual dexterity required to articulate the handshapes and movements of ASL. In fact, ASL teachers report that hearing people who have learned to play a musical instrument at some point in their lives seem to have an easier time learning ASL than those who never played a musical instrument. Go figure.
Silence to Deaf people who are intensely visual people isn't the lack of sound; it’s the lack of movement. Sound IS movement: it’s energy moving in waves. And when Deaf people look into the faces of hearing people, what they usually see is silence. They see silence because hearing people, for the most part, do not use their faces to express meaning or emotion. Compared to Deaf people, they have very little facial expression when they talk. Hearing people are pretty poker-faced, if you ask Deaf people. And that’s because their intonation is all in the voice, which is invisible to Deaf people.
But when Deaf people look into the faces of other Deaf people, what do you think they see? They see music! Movement, beauty, energy, meaning. They see intonation. They see gymnastic eyebrows, eloquent eyes, adverbial tongues, and all the facial muscles being put to good, resounding use. They see their language, a visually stunning and musical language, full of inflection, anima, soul.
All these years later, looking back at that first date, I think there was a part of me that wanted to be Deaf. Capital D Deaf, which has very little to do with not hearing and everything to do with seeing. I wanted to be fluent. I wanted to see the way Deaf people see. And to belong. To be a citizen of the Deaf world, that vast network of cousins-once-removed that is the Deaf community; the warm, laughing, hugging, candid physicality that is the Deaf culture. I didn’t want to be just a visitor, a guest, a student, a tourist, or an interloper. I wanted to belong, to share that connection I could see she had with her Deaf friends, the ones I saw her chatting with after class, their hands darting, looping, flying, their faces alive, their laughter ringing out.
She had told our class that it was considered a great compliment when a Deaf person says, YOU SIGN LIKE DEAF. And if they mistook you for a Deaf person, that was the greatest compliment of all. Yes, I thought, I want to be Deaf. And across the table from her, in that small coffee shop on that first date with the woman I would eventually marry, that’s what I confessed to her: ME WISH DEAF ME.
She smiled at that. It was a big, sad, beautiful smile. We were young and she was pretty, and animated, and so alive, and I had been emboldened to tell her, to confide in her, that I wished I could be like her; that somewhere deep inside me, I wished I were Deaf. She looked right at me then, long and hard, as though searching my face for something – something pure, simple, limpid, liquid, fragile, perishable, maybe even potentially hazardous – and not finding it there, she wrapped a delicate hand around her latte, which had surely grown cold in the meantime, raised the half-empty cup into the air, and, as if toasting me, said: JUST BE YOURSELF.