The sounds of silence

It must have made a comic sight, the officer gazing skywards to speak, and looking down to see and take notes. But making that extra effort often means trying something different and strange.

I would like you to understand me — I speak quite clearly for someone who can’t hear a word she’s saying — and I would like to understand you. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t hear each other. It’s not my deafness that comes between us; it’s the hearing that you take for granted.

You think I live in a world of silence. Hearing people always seem to construe deafness as an absence of sound, because they’ve never known — can’t know — what it’s like.

But it’s not quiet inside my head. I wear twin hearing aids which amplify the sound and pour an electronic scream into my ears. It’s not the same as hearing, of course, but it does make lip-reading easier.

Most hearing-impaired and even profoundly deaf people can hear some sound. It’s the quality — not the quantity — that is compromised by a hearing loss. Part of the frequency spectrum, typically the high frequency consonants which give meaning to each syllable’s vowel, is blanketed off, and the sound on its own is next to useless.

What’s missing is the clarity that gives certainty. Sound lacks the edge of unambiguity that I know — even though I’ve been hearing-impaired since birth — the world must sound like to you.

So I rely on seeing your lips, when you’ll let me. At times I’ll ask you to repeat yourself, and it hurts me when you decide it’s not worth the effort.

All hearing people know the frustration they feel when someone says something they can’t quite catch. “What was that?” they ask. “It doesn’t matter. Never mind,” they’re told. It drives some people to distraction. “If it doesn’t matter,” they may feel like saying, “why did you say it in the first place?”

I know the feeling. I have it every day. I’ve seen you – in a funny way, I’ve heard you – dismiss me as a half-wit because I wasn’t able to pick up what you said on the first attempt.

You thought, because your back was to me, that you could simply cease the conversation and that the inconvenience of my deafness would go away.

Time has taught me to deal with the hurt that causes, just as it taught me to cope with the schoolmates who wouldn’t drink from the water fountain after me for fear of “catching” my deafness, or the groups that would scatter when my back was turned so they could enjoy the sight of my confusion when I turned around and found myself alone. I don’t get angry or even hurt any more. But I feel a little sad.

I’m sad because it could so easily have been avoided. I have made the effort to learn to lip-read so I can speak with you. But so many of you seem to think it’s not worth making the small effort to be heard.

Perhaps your back was to the window, so I couldn’t make out the movements of your lips in the black-silhouetted face.

Perhaps that bushy moustache you so lovingly cultivated covered your lips altogether. The sound of a voice issuing from apparently unmoving lips may be cute, even comical, to hearing people: to me it makes communicating as easy as talking underwater.

Perhaps you just spoke too fast, didn’t try and speak clearly or didn’t wait to ensure I was looking at you before you started speaking.

Whatever the case, my deafness alone did not make the communication fail; your hearing impairment and your uncompromising manner of speaking turned the whole affair into a communication-free zone.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a thin line between making an effort to keep the communication open and treating me like a child or an idiot. There’s nothing worse than a well-intentioned person taking over and compensating for my handicap.

I can’t use a phone, of course. I have a special teleprinter which connects to my phone and allows me to “talk” to others with such machines. But mostly I ask others to make calls for me.

And it fills me with a mixture of embarrassment and anger when my simple request for help is twisted and altered by people who think they know better. I ask someone to make a doctor’s appointment for me. Before I know it, there’s a medical emergency on. My request for a non-urgent appointment becomes a major crisis and the staff at the doctor’s surgery are implored to attend.

So I’m choosy about who I tell that I’m deaf. I make rapid assessments about whether that information is going to make things better or worse. Sometimes deafness can be useful. Ingratiating salespeople or enthusiastic market researchers are easily thrown off the track when I tell them I’m deaf and I’m left in peace.

You get impatient with me when communication fails, I can see it. I get impatient with you too, but I strive not to show it. You can be complacent in your hearing world; I cannot afford that complacency, the luxury of dismissing you, because it’s so bad for PR and will make life that little bit harder for the deaf as yet unborn.

Even with the best will — and the most educated behaviour — from hearing people, the uneasiness and isolation of deafness never goes. The sense of being cut off from others, unable to make the aural links that join hearing people from room to room, house to house, even country to country, never disappears completely.

I still live in fear of breaking down in the car at night and having only the nearby phone box — which you would see as a passport to salvation — to summon help.

I married a deaf man and we have an adopted deaf child. Most of my time, at work and play, is spent with deaf people. Perhaps it seems like we are a culture as separate as Vietnamese or Greeks. And it is a bit like that. We have, after all, our own language — which — because it relies on hands and signs — transcends the linguistic barriers hearing people face.

Life gets a little easier every day. When we had our first child, I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to hear it crying in the night. My husband rigged up a 200-watt bulb above the bed, activated by a microphone swinging in a sock above the bassinet. It was adjusted so that a whimper, or even a little cry, wouldn’t flick on the light but a full-throated “come-and-help-me” roar would.

Television New Zealand’s decision to subtitle at least some of the nightly news bulletins from this week is great news. I’ve lost count of the number of frustrating times I’ve read a reporter’s lips saying something like “Panic gripped the small community of…” only to disappear from the screen and be replaced by a picture of the town whose name I’m left to guess.

We look forward to the expansion of subtitling to most programmes — rather than the scattered and arbitrarily selected programmes.

Life as a hearing-impaired person is at least as funny as it is frustrating. We all have stories of leaning on the car horn for several minutes — the best ones involve someone rolling over while asleep in a car and setting the horn off in the small hours of the morning — until the stares of passers-by turned into more explicit protest.

Have you ever seen — outside the slap-stick movies — someone walk past one of those precariously stacked displays in a supermarket where a hundred cans of baked beans form a huge pyramid? When a hearing person knocks the bottom row with the nose of the supermarket trolley, all hell breaks loose. Deaf people can give it a clip, accidentally of course — and stride blithely on, leaving the chaos in their wake.

And if we start laughing, or clap, during a play or film, at a time when you see no need for applause, don’t worry. Verbal humour passes us by, but we find plenty to amuse ourselves in things you might never notice or think funny, in little visual gags which go straight over your head.

I hope that this week — and this article — will have done something to make you more aware of how life is for the 35,000 or so hearing-impaired people in this country. We make an effort each day to hear you because our lives literally depend on it. Our job is made immeasurably easier when you try and meet us half-way. Thanks for listening.

Coming face to face with the world view of a deaf person can be alarming to the hearing: the direct expression of thoughts so often held in silence, the implicit (or explicit) criticism of our self-centredness can seem aggressive, even bitter.

Yet what remains after a few hours talking to Jennifer Brain is the impression of a woman filled with more passion than anger. Her dedication to improving the lot of the hearing-impaired is obvious — even without listing the array of jobs, paid and unpaid, that she carries out. But more than that, she impresses as a woman of sparkling good humour, resourcefulness and courage.

It was not always so: by her own admission, Brain was resentful and frustrated as a child and teenager. In a mainstream class at the local school, she was assisted by classmates rostered by the teacher to shout the lessons in her ear.

The effect — apart from giving her a long tirade of distorted and effectively useless sound — was to single her out and make her feel humiliated. Unsurprisingly, she resented it.

Things changed when she moved to the school for the deaf, then at Titirangi, where she spent what she remembers as six happy years. Here she could develop friendships with other deaf, and “not feel like a freak any more.”

Brain identifies almost matter-of-factly a turning point in her life when she found the iron in her soul that was to make her the tireless worker for deaf rights that she is today.

She told her teacher that she had ambitions to practise medicine and was told that she should rather aspire to being a kitchen-hand.

“I told my mother that I was insulted and hurt and she stood there and said to me, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’”

Despite that, Jennifer remembers lacking confidence until well into her 30s — she is now 48 — when she did one of the leadership courses she now runs for younger deaf.

Looking at her now, it is hard to imagine. She is president of the New Zealand Association for the Deaf — the umbrella organisation for the country’s deaf clubs, social and sporting centres for deaf people only — and is the Deaf Resource Co-ordinator, the link between the deaf community and the Kelston Deaf Education Centre.

She is part of the team which, under her predecessor NZAD president, Hilary McCormack, pushed successfully for wider availability of subtitling through Teletext.

And she is on the working party which is pushing for the establishment of an interpreter training course at ATI (incredibly there is only one full-time deaf interpreter in the Auckland area) so that deaf people can have access, through signing, to the riches of higher education.

Picture caption: Jennifer Brain shows how to say, “I love you.”