Loud and clear

The deaf community believes it has been misunderstood and misinterpreted for too long. Now it wants to be seen — and heard — as a group with its own cultural identity.

They’re coming out and they’re proud. It’s the language of a group of minority impatient for change. But this is not the gay community, it is the Deaf, with a capital D. The way they like it spelled. A label of shared cultural identity regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, education or nationality.

Misunderstood and misinterpreted. For too long, they say, they have been foreigners in their own land. It is their turn to assert independence and individuality and worth. To display the strength they find in shared unique experiences and, like the hearing – whom the deaf regard as the “others” of the dominant oral culture – offer society their individual skills and talents.

They are not a big community. It is estimated one in every 1000 babies born in New Zealand are born or become profoundly deaf in childhood and never have access to a spoken language. At a rough estimate they number about 4300. And in many there burns anger and bitterness at past education policies, albeit well-meaning, that demanded they learn oral English – a mode of communication so totally foreign to many that to be proficient was often unattainable.

Wasted years spent trying to produce sounds they could never hear robbed many of a true education and the ability to reach their potential.

For 100 years New Zealand followed an international dictum in deaf education that eliminated all signing. Deaf children’s natural recourse to communicating with sign language of their own was forbidden.

Children at schools for the deaf were punished for signing but it became their shared clandestine language, used for socialising, for sport, for meaningful conversations. Thus, the deaf in New Zealand and other countries developed their own languages, each as distinct to the country as any spoken and built according to the cultural needs in the same way that oral languages develop.

In 1979 it became internationally accepted that a century of oralism had done little for most deaf and in New Zealand an English form of signing was introduced but it was not until 1993 that New Zealand Sign Language was accepted.

It became part of the first bilingual (NZSL and English) class at the Kelston Deaf Education Centre in Auckland. The Van Asch Deaf Education Centre in Christchurch (previously Sumner School for the Deaf) followed suit.

The deafs’ own stories have little documentation because most express themselves best face-to-face using sign language. And also because hearing people tend to super-impose their own impressions of deafness; to regard the deaf as “unfortunate”. Yet inside the deaf world, calling oneself deaf is not a description of a disability, more a cultural identity. Lack of sound is not dwelt on because most hear some sound that they use in their own way. Rather, their world is one of sight.

Which is why Wellingtonian Rachel McKee has written a book incorporating life stories written by the deaf, and called it People of the Eye.

McKee has worked as a New Zealand Sign Language and American Sign Language interpreter for many years, earning a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. With her husband, deaf American David McKee, she researches and lectures in deaf studies at Victoria University.

The course trains those who are fluent signers to teach the language and also teaches NZSL to hearing students. The couple have two boys, aged three and seven months and say their elder son learned signing before he could talk.

Signing, they say, comes more easily to small children because control of the big muscles comes before speech muscles. “Here’s our next signer” they say of their chortling youngest.

Hearing people tend to think of signing as the deaf alphabet, says McKee, but this is just a tiny part, used for spelling out proper names or addresses. Most sign language is not spelled words because this relies on English, and deaf people don’t operate with a hearing language, they think in concepts.

Because they don’t hear names spoken they have their own names for each other, often arising from schooldays and based on physical characteristics and known almost exclusively within their own community.

The roots of sign language are mime and gesture. As McKee says, “Hands, movement, space, facial expression, body stance and movement of the head and shoulders. Facial expressions show not just feelings or attitude but grammar, too. For example, the difference between a question and a statement can be seen in the eyebrows.”

However, because of their oral education, New Zealand deaf people often mouth words with signs because they have some knowledge of the spoken language though they may feel uncomfortable with it. In the United States McKee found this much less.

An aptitude for languages and, in 1985 a chance sighting of a newspaper advertisement for New Zealand’s first course for sign language interpreters, gave McKee entry to the deaf world and lead to further study.

Now about 11 to 15 interpreters are trained annually at the Auckland University of Technology. Translators are available for a range of services and everyday life transactions. People, she says, are noticing more interpreting and therefore accepting that signing really is a language.

In 1987 in the US, she says, interpreters were already widely used for the deaf. There were no bars to particular vocations simply because the deaf could not speak or pass as hearing people. But in New Zealand at that time the highest occupations among the deaf were skilled tradesmen (though many lacked qualifications because of a literacy barrier) and a handful of white-collar workers.

McKee believes that had there been a different educational system in New Zealand, many more people would by now be self-confident professionals, academics and artists.

Today, parents of deaf children are encouraged to use sign language because it’d recognised as vitally important that children start early. Yet there are still some parents and educationists who are resistant to signing and prefer oral teaching.

“Most naturally want their child to be like them. Their first instinct is to want a child to use their language and succeed orally and the oral teaching method feeds that desire,” says McKee.

In the past parents did not discover how ineffective oral teaching really was till children were teenagers and by then it was too late.

Signing was also presented to parents as likely to stigmatise their child. “But today, parents are more likely to meet deaf adults and realise they can lead normal lives. They grow up, get an education and a job, have families and communicate in sign language, and are perfectly happy. So parents are more likely to accept that this will be okay for their child.”

McKee says that the deaf community can now assert its identity and is positive about being deaf. And deaf Maori are beginning to use sign language to explore not only their deaf identity but their Maori identity too.

McKee says that in writing the book she wanted to show the span and breadth of deaf people’s lives and also put them into a community, organising themselves politically and socially so others can see deafness in that light, and not as a social problem.

Photo captions: Author Rachel McKee and husband David communicate by signing. McKee says her book proves the breadth and span of deaf people’s lives.