Seeing voices

I met my first deaf person when I was sixteen. I don’t remember dealing with it very well; it was not long after my family and I had arrived in a new area, with Dad working at a new church, and I was very much one of the ‘new minister’s sons’. I was talking to her after church one night, and without noticing it, I had to repeat myself several times to get the message across. She was quite clearly frustrated by it, because she finally told me that she had a hearing impairment. For some reason, that shocked me – she didn’t look like she should be deaf (which is a dumb thing to think, after all), and her voice sounded normal. I stuttered and stumbled through conversations by virtue of exaggerating my mouth movements, shaping cavernous /o/s and forming teethy /ee/s for her. In hindsight, I know it helps some hearing-impaired people to lipread (as confirmed by meeting another hearing-impaired girl at a party recently, who relies solely on lipreading), but I imagine it’s also a bit humiliating for the hearing-impaired person to be talked at in a manner that appears hugely condescending.

J sometimes signs when she talks to me. I found out later that many hearing-impaired people do it without thinking; it’s a kind of thinking-out-loud with your body, instead of your voice. I’m confused by the disparity between what she’s saying and the sculptures her hands form in the air – she does it so quickly that I can’t even start correlating signs with words. But I remember thinking that it was beautiful to watch someone sign.

There are two primary sign languages in Australia that I know about: signed English and Auslan. There are differences between them – Auslan uses its own grammar and syntax rules, whereas signed English uses the same grammar as spoken English. That makes Auslan attractive to me, because you don’t have to sign all the little words to communicate the same thing. However, I don’t actually know the correct grammar for Auslan signing, so I’m pretty much up the creek. Anyway, when Lorien took up a community Auslan course in order to better communicate with any hearing-impaired children she encountered in her future as a special-ed primary teacher, I decided to sponge off her in order to better communicate with J.

It starts slow, and only gets slower as you go on. First, I learned how to fingerspell. Each letter has its own unique sign – the letter A’ is touching your left thumb with your right index finger, and ‘B’ is making the ‘OK’ sign (index finger touching thumb) with both hands and touching the two formations together. It’s intuitive, most of the time. Then, learning partly from J and partly from a dictionary, I progressed into single-word signs – ‘thank-you’, ‘please’, and ‘sorry’ were the first words I could say in this new language. They’re still the words I use most in my conversations with J, if you factor in ‘OK’ as well. Over about six months, I got to know somewhere between forty and eighty words. Not enough to have a conversation entirely in sign, but good enough to clarify what I mean.

“I like some of Jung’s stuff,” I tell J. We’re talking after church, as we do, and I’m filling her in on the more boring points of my uni course.

“What?” J asks. The look on her face tells me she’s missed something, probably due to my muttering as I speak.

“I said, ‘I like some of Jung’s stuff’.”

“You like who’s stuff?”

OK, now’s your chance. Realising that the word ‘Jung’ would just look like an /oo/ speech-sound, I’m now all revved up to fix my mistake in sign. But my confidence precedes me, and I stumble through shaping the letters in the psychoanalyst’s name, even though there are only four of them. The downward stroke of the J comes before the little-finger ‘U’, which I always mix up with other vowels. Then there’s the two-finger touch of ‘N’, and finally the double-fisted ‘G’ to finish. J heads me off at the pass and guesses it by the ‘N’.

There’s always the danger of mis-expressing yourself in sign. As J speaks a mixture of Auslan, signed English, and foreign-nation sign, it’s common for me to use an Auslan sign and get a curious look (actually, it’s far more common for me to ask her what the sign is for a certain word, but that’s beside the point). The word for ‘sugar’, for example, is vastly different between the two languages: for signed English, it involves touching the cheek, while for Auslan, you extend the index and middle fingers together, bunch the rest of your fingers into a fist, turn the whole thing palm up, and flick your wrist twice to the left (or something like that).

And, of course, there is the faux pas of accidentally saying something you don’t intend. The sign for ‘Sydney’ is, unless you’re careful, easily transformed into the sign for ‘sex’, and the signed English sign for ‘do’ is one finger away from a sign for ‘gay’. To wit:

We are sitting in the back of the church after the meeting, speaking in the strange marriage of speech and sign. I am trying to impress both J and myself by signing fairly quickly, but as a result, I’m making mistakes.

[I think I do], I sign in response to a question. I have to say the words as I sign them to concentrate; one day, I hope to be good enough to be able to sign without vocalising.

“You’re what?” J asks me.

I backtrack in my head. “What do you mean?”

J holds up her right hand, turns it side on, and brings her thumb and index finger together. “This is ‘do’,” she instructs me. Then, she opens her hand again and, this time, brings the middle finger and thumb together twice, in quick succession. “This is ‘gay’.” She pauses and looks askance at me. “Are you trying to subconsciously say something?”

We laughed about it; it’s another mishap hearing people can easily make.

I aspire to one day be good enough to be able to sign-interpret during church. It has taken me a while to realise exactly how much of church is oriented towards hearing people; the singing and the music, the confessions (spoken in paragraphs by whoever is leading), the sermons, the congregational prayer. J has been getting by on copies of the sermon text and someone writing notes for all the spoken parts, but having fulfilled this duty for her, I realise how much you have to omit in order to keep up. There are some churches who have full-time interpreters, but they tend to be big churches and, in some cases, do not teach the Bible soundly. I suppose that’s a big dilemma for hearing-impaired Christians who feel more comfortable with sign – in a church meeting that caters primarily to hearing people, where can one go to meet with God’s people in sign?