In the June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, there is an essay, "Unspoken Truths," not advertised on the cover, written by Christopher Hitchens. I read it with interest, not just because I know a friend currently reading his memoir, Hitch-22, but also because that friend described the book as essentially his swan song. Hitchens has esophageal cancer. His voice is forever changed -- gone.
In "Unspoken Truth" Hitchens ruminates on the links between talking and writing; it's a beautifully-written essay. But then I came across this sentence that sent me to a whole 'nother intellectual plane:
"Indeed, I don't know of any really good writer who was deaf, either."
I don't know what it says about me that I began to debate him mentally.
First point of contention: any good deaf writer?
I've spent the last several months telling anyone who'll listen that I've spent the better part of my time in my MFA program reading books from deaf writers whenever I could, especially memoirs. I found that a large portion of the books by deaf authors I read aren't very well-crafted.
Josh Swiller's The Unheard, for me, stands heads and shoulders above the rest. I heartily recommend Madan Vashishta's Deaf in Delhi as well, but I always warn: for his story, not for his wordsmithing. I've heard good things about Ann Clare LeZotte's T4, but put it down once I saw it was written in verse (sorry, poets). She's apparently quite lauded in certain writer's circles.
Otherwise, I struggle to come up with titles worthy of reading. They plod. They self-pity. They're insular. They're inaccessible. They bumble over their own words. They magnify either disability or sensory difference over some thinly-written story.
I wish more deaf people would get themselves published (and not self-published -- unlike the success stories some rare writers have had, one only needs to look at the well-intentioned but sadly-executed fiascos of Mindfield and Gather the Weeds to know that's a path to be avoided). We can do it, I know we can! Maybe I just haven't read enough.
So Hitchen's declaration that good writing and deaf writers aren't friends? Ouch. What deaf writing has he been reading?
But then I move on to my next point: good writing and neither deafness nor deafhood do not necessarily correlate. It has more to do with a commitment to the work, the craft itself of writing. This I argue, specifically because immediately following the above sentence, Hitchens writes:
"How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbe de l'Epee, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts?"
Humph. So Hitchens has read up a bit on deaf history. Yay for him. But I think he's making a huge jump here from the mellifluous acts of vocalizing to the pleasure of a finely-wrought sentence. (And belying his own ignorance about a language not his own, by the way.)
Annie Dillard once wrote in her "Notes for Young Writers," and I once giggled when I read it too:
"Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go... Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations."
I love that she uses music as her metaphor, hinting at the meaningful spatial characteristics of language that is found even (or maybe I should say especially) among visual communicators -- people like us deafies.
I have always hated the explanation of commas as pauses. "If you come across a comma, take a breath, and then continue reading," I've been told. That's good advice, if you're orating. But breathing and pausing aren't essential to reading, not any more than they are to sitting on the toilet. Understanding and appreciating and savoring the production at hand? Most definitely. And yes, that applies to both beautiful prose and turdpiles.
I once attended a workshop with other writers (mostly of memoir) where our facilitator told us to write generative poems based on our favorite lines out of a central poem she furnished. When we were done, we were to do a vocal popcorn-like exercise where one person would begin reading the central poem out loud, and then others would interrupt with lines from their individual poems. I was wearing a hearing aid, so I could hear the effect -- different voices crossing the room, louder and softer, rumbling and sharp, gentle and giggly. I could sense the change in the meaning of people's poetry -- a reverie on the color blue transitioned into an erotic reading of a hand on a head, which then slid into a jangling locomotive limerick about joints and hammers and cogs and keys.
I sat by, a silent observer. The instructor had asked me if I wanted to hand off my poem to one of my interpreters to read in my stead. I had nodded and smiled at her benevolence, and then sat there, my poem resolutely in my lap. And then the workshop was over. The other participants left, congratulating each other on their wonderful-sounding work. I left, rolling my eyes.
After one other similar read-aloud exercise the same day, I made some snarky comment about writers' obsession with hearing their words through the air to one of my interpreters. "What is the big deal?!" I asked. I'm pretty sure I appended it with a few four-letter words too.
"Oh, but if you could hear it, you'd get it," she said.
"I know," I whimpered. She hadn't backed me up, hadn't stood with me in solidarity against the belief that sound somehow made words holier. She and her ears had betrayed me, the sole deaf writer in my program.
My problem, perhaps, is that words spoken aloud do have weight. Spoken word competitors, speechwriters, poet laureates, and my own teachers tell me this. I have no evidence with which to argue otherwise.
But I have plenty to suggest good writing doesn't absolutely require a receptive ear. It needs a receptive mind. I just finished reading Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling this weekend. She is a guru of the simple, elegant, compelling narrative.
Upon finding her father dead, the protagonist narrates:
"Iosif was dead. I'd hardly begun to know him, and he was dead. I had begun to like him, and he was dead."
Repetitive, like poetry. Spartan, like invisible writing should be. And wrenching, as sudden grief should be.
Guess what? I didn't have my hearing aid on when I read that.
In the paragraph Hitchens writes, just before the line that damns all writers like me to a career of perceived mediocrity, he says:
"The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful."
He's agreeing with me. He's misunderstood about deafness as an impediment to writing, but he and I agree about writing that is satisfying.
I leave Hitchens to lament the loss of his voice. That loss and the nonexistent loss of deaf writing's merit do not correlate, I conclude. Hitchens is free to yearn for his speech back, and I wish him the best.
Me? I'm going to stay right here, happily cursing blank pages on my laptop. For, to paraphrase a 19th century British poet who wrote stoically standing against circumstances life handed him, both perceived and actual:
I am the captain of my prose.
