Jim Ross
Body Talk
Soon after my wife Ginger and I met, we discovered we’d both secretly dreamed of learning the sign language used by deaf people. A decade earlier when I was commuting to high school in New York City, on Manhattan’s upper east side, I often crossed paths on the Lexington Avenue subway with students enrolled at a school for the deaf. I didn’t know until decades later that they attended The Lexington Avenue School at 68th and Lex, founded in 1864, starting out in someone’s living room. I watched entranced as they spoke with their hands, faces, eyes, and bodies. Two deaf students signing together looked like dancers performing a pas de deux. They didn’t merely speak with their hands. Their bodies moved across the subway platform, as if they were auditioning for West Side Story. At the same age, Ginger concluded that the use of facial expressions and body language turns signers into Marcel Marceaus. Our fascinations simmered until we met and revealed them to each other.
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In 1976, about a decade after linguist William Stokoe argued that American Sign Language (ASL) is as a full language distinct from English or any other language and has all the expressive power of any oral language, Ginger and I enrolled at Gallaudet, the only university with all programs designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, also founded in 1864. Twice weekly we attended two-hour-long classes in ASL. Some classmates who were hard of hearing and came from the hearing world were taking ASL to enable communications with the Deaf (i.e., signing) community and make connections. Our personable teacher, Will, required that each student tell a joke at every class meeting. We had at our disposal ASL, then called Amaslan, plus finger spelling, and all the facial expressions and body language we dared muster.
Coming up with jokes that lent themselves to signing had its challenges. Most spoken jokes centre around a homonym to form set-up and/or punch-lines. In one type, two same-sounding words are spelled differently and carry different meanings. That type wouldn’t work as a signed joke because there is no possibility of sound with all its ambiguities. In a second type, a word encompasses two or more meanings within a single spelling. As a young researcher starting my career, I was fascinated to see that we were operating on the fringes of the science of humour, especially in translation. Relying on ASL supplemented by finger spelling, we sought out jokes whose set-up and/or punch lines employed the second type of homonym: same spelling, different meanings. Sound differences were irrelevant since we were limited to ASL, finger spelling, facial expressions, and body language. For help, every week we called my Dad, also a researcher, whose encyclopaedic memory enabled him to rattle off jokes on any topic, on demand.
I can still tell my favourite Dad joke from class. It uses more body language than sign. A man on a deserted island sees a woman in a wet suit walking ashore toward him. As she unzips a pocket on her right sleeve, she asks, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ He responds, ‘You mean, you’ve got cigarettes in there?’ as he imitates her hand going ‘in there’, into her right sleeve pocket. As she unzips a pocket on the other sleeve, she asks, ‘Would you like some brandy?’ He answers, ‘You mean, you’ve got brandy in there?’ as he again imitates her hand going ‘in there’. After he swigs some brandy, she begins to unzip the wet suit’s central zipper, and asks, ‘Would you like to play around?’ In response, he reaches down deeply into his imaginary wet suit, and with gusto asks, ‘You mean, you’ve got golf clubs in there?’
The joke’s set-up line uses the second type of homonym but with a twist. In fingerspelling, ‘play around’ and ‘play a round’ are finger spelled identically, but convey very different meanings. They happen to be pronounced identically too (or almost identically, depending on local dialect) but that’s irrelevant because sound doesn’t enter into signing. And its absence is filled by reinforcing uses of body language. To reach my audience, I imagined I was one of the deaf students from the Lexington Avenue School whom I saw years ago on the Lexington Avenue subway. While I received no offers to perform at the Improv, Ginger says the joke was a hit.
After every class Will required that we move to the Gallaudet Rathskeller. One rationale was that we could observe members of Gallaudet’s Deaf community in candid interactions. That proximity also created the possibility that conversations might develop between us and more experienced signers; at another level, some of us might make connections, and gain entre into the Deaf culture. But, the major reason for bringing us there was that we would have no alternative to signing with each other because the juke box blasted at max decibels so deaf students could feel the vibrations. Our Rathskeller time placed us in the heart of Deaf culture and temporarily made us look like members of the Deaf community reaching for a new language. For some hard-of hearing classmates who didn’t yet consider themselves culturally Deaf, it helped bring about their initiation and fostered connectedness.
Going to the Rathskeller led to some memorable exchanges. My most educational one occurred one night when I tried to order dinner. After I used a combination of signs and finger spelling to turn in our order, the deaf student worker behind the counter reared back his head, looked at me as if I were crazy, shook his head vigorously, shrugged his shoulders, and orally said, ‘Mister, you just ordered a pepperoni penis. We don’t serve those here.’ Evidently, my thumb position was off. For ‘pizza’, I was supposed to make a ‘p’ followed snappily by an ‘a’. I formed the ‘p’ properly. However, to form the ‘a’, I was supposed to hold my thumb erect alongside my closed fist. Instead, I wrapped it over the first two closed fingers. The difference between pizza and penis was a mere slip of a thumb. After looking duly contrite, I adjusted thumb position, and delivered my request with flair. ‘I’m on it’, he said.
Ginger became choreographer for the Gallaudet modern dance group, Good Vibrations. She had completed her bachelors in modern dance the year before. Her strategic advantage was her ability to hear rhythmic subtleties. Some dancers could feel those subtleties. They shared the collective advantages of being imbued with Deaf culture and accustomed to using body language as both intuitive and intentional components in communication. For them, dance became another vehicle for using body language to communicate and entertain. Watching them rehearse reminded me that in high school I thought the deaf students communicating in sign language on the subway looked like dancers. Maybe I’d been onto something.
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Flash forward about fifteen years, Ginger and I have brought two children into the world. Our daughter’s kindergarten teacher was Linda Jordan, who happened to be married to I. King Jordan, a dean at Gallaudet. Three years later, Linda took a job at Gallaudet around the time it awarded an honorary doctorate to my then new favourite actress, Marlee Matlin, who had just won an Oscar as best actress for Children of a Lesser God. And then the seventh President of Gallaudet, which in its 123 years had only hearing Presidents, resigned. The board announced three finalists to become Gallaudet’s eighth President: one hearing, the second deaf since birth, and the third, I. King Jordan, deaf due to a motorcycle accident at age 21. Student efforts to promote selecting a deaf President garnered support from U.S. President George Bush (the first one) and key Senators on both sides of the aisle. After the board selected another hearing President, claiming ‘a deaf person cannot function in a hearing world’, Gallaudet students, faculty, staff, and alumni launched an escalating series of Deaf President Now protests and issued four demands, including selection of a deaf President.
The protests shut down the Gallaudet campus and extended to Capitol Hill. The hearing candidate resigned. A week later, Jordan—who came to Gallaudet as a college Freshman twelve years earlier—was announced as Gallaudet’s new President. What’s little remembered now is that a faction protested against Jordan too, claiming that because he wasn’t born deaf, he wasn’t truly one of them and couldn’t appreciate what it’s like growing up without hearing. In other words, he couldn’t embrace being Deaf with the sense of collective pride that they shared. The flip-side arguments were that Jordan’s years as a hearing person would enable him to communicate more effectively with the hearing world; and, that nobody questioned his pride in being Deaf during his years as dean at Gallaudet. Jordan served as Gallaudet’s eighth President from 1988 until 2006. When Gallaudet’s ninth President was announced, protests again broke out, partly on the grounds that Jordan’s successor wasn’t deaf enough.
Does someone with an acquired deafness have the same right to call themselves deaf as those born that way? Within the Deaf community, being deaf isn’t regarded as a pathology or deficiency but a mark of pride, the defining characteristic of their culture. However, those who lose their hearing can either view their becoming deaf as a pathology to be overcome so they can remain functioning members of the hearing world or they can embrace sign language and the Deaf community. The science of Deafness and deafness has explored such questions but, to a large degree, they relate more to what defines the Deaf culture and how the Deaf culture stretches to embrace those with acquired deafness. The Deaf culture can be viewed as a political entity and even a movement, and like any political movement, it rightfully identifies that which it views as marks of pride, to counter what those outside the Deaf culture may view as pathology, disadvantage, deficiency, or weakness. Rejection of terms like ‘hearing impaired’ in favour of ‘hard of hearing’ is an example of the repudiation of the pathologizing of deafness. For the Deaf culture to be strong, it must be based on pride, and in large part that pride derives from developing facility in sign language.
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In 2009, I joined the planning committee for the 40th anniversary reunion of my graduating class from Georgetown University. My job was to find the lost. Among them was James Woodward, who stayed on to earn his doctorate there in the sociolinguistics of ASL. Woodward is the one who, in 1972, while still a doctoral student, suggested using deaf (with a lower case d) to refer to the audiological condition of deafness, and Deaf (with an upper case D) to refer to Deaf culture and the Deaf community. This convention has been accepted within the Deaf culture and in scholarly literature in English and, to a lesser degree, in other languages.
In searching for Woodward, I was able to determine that he spent years at Gallaudet, staring immediately after our graduation, and worked closely with Stokoe in securing ASL’s acceptance as a full language distinct from any other. I figured out that Woodward was splitting his time between China and Vietnam but had no means of contacting him. Out of desperation, I called the office at Gallaudet where he used to work, because I knew he was continuing to study the emergence of and adaptations in sign languages in various cultures around the world. All I hoped for was an email address. Instead, when I asked how to reach him, I was told, ‘He happens to be here today. Hold on, I’ll transfer you.’ My heart leapt. Woodward and I talked for over an hour. My agenda dissolved as I became intrigued.
Woodward spent lots of time talking about the emergence of sign language on Martha’s Vineyard and its impact on ASL. Historically, a significant portion of the population of Martha’s Vineyard passed along hereditary deafness to their children. Because of its disproportionately large deaf population, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) emerged in the early 1700s as an evolutionary derivative of Old Kent Sign Language in England, with influences from French Sign Language. Because virtually everyone on Martha’s Vineyard gained some facility in MVSL, deafness presented no barrier to public life and deaf people were fully integrated into the general population. Hearing children were taught MVSL in their early years. Hearing residents often used MVSL in communicating with each other. The last person born into MVSL died in 1952, but efforts continue to document MVSL. It lives on because hundreds of signs from MVSL were incorporated intact into ASL. Recently, some schools on the island began incorporating ASL into their curricula.
In a larger sense, Woodward’s point was that historically, wherever sizeable numbers of deaf people are present, they create a form of sign language or derive one from other sign languages that have entered their culture. Starting with the influence of French Sign Language on ASL, he has applied comparative linguistic techniques to study sign language varieties in such places as Costa Rica, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Shanghai, Thailand, and Vietnam. In addition to studying comparative relationships of sign language, he has endeavoured to document endangered sign languages, such as Hawai’i Sign Language. Twenty years ago, Gallaudet honoured him as an international leader in promoting the well-being of Deaf people around the world. The last I knew, Woodward was still shuttling between The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Dong Nai University in Vietnam.
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Nearly half a century has passed since Ginger and I first took ASL at Gallaudet. We hardly appreciated then that we were present during a formative period in gaining acceptance globally for ASL as a full language distinct from all others. We drank beers and ate pizza in the Gallaudet Rathskeller surrounded by members of the Deaf community as Deaf Pride was emerging. The Lexington Avenue School, whose students I watched with awe as they signed on the platforms of the Lexington Avenue subway, cashed in on its pricey Manhattan real estate and moved to more affordable Queens. Ginger and I held onto sign language for use in noisy bars and restaurants. That we passed onto our kids too.
Recently, our two youngest grandchildren, both hearing, began to learn such ASL signs as ‘more’, ‘food’, and ‘thank you’ in preschool as early as three months old, long before they could speak a single word. They’ve held onto their use of sign and the number of signs in their repertoires has grown exponentially. They’ve in turn passed their rudimentary facility in ASL on to family members. Of late, they’ve been giving us a refresher course. ‘Put your body into it’, urges Ginger, the former dance teacher who forty-five years ago served as choreographer for the Gallaudet dance group, Good Vibrations. ‘Think of yourselves as dancing with your hands, your arms, your whole bodies. This is body talk.’ AQ