Deafness as Conflict and Conflict Component

Writers of D/deaf autobiographies or biographies face something of a dilemma when incorporating deafness into the stories they tell. This includes writers of D/deaf fiction because many such works are based on the same personal experiences from which autobiographies and biographies are derived. At heart, autobiographies and biographies are merely stories, and stories cannot exist without some type of conflict. The tension might be complex or simple: a crisis of identity or a fight to keep a residential school open. It might be found in a decision to move from one state to another or in a collapsing marriage.

Because D/deaf autobiographies and biographies are in some sense about deafness and because no autobiography or biography can ever be complete unless it captures the discord inherent in the subject's life, several questions arise: What is the fundamental relationship between deafness and conflict? As we approach the task of relating and reliving the tensions of a D/deaf life through the craft of storytelling, does deafness become the central conflict, or does deafness instead become merely one component of it? Or does it perhaps become some mixture of the two?

One of my own autobiographical fiction projects involves the life story of Daniel Tallerman, a hard-of-hearing teenager struggling to survive the abuses of a violent alcoholic father, as well as those of both the hearing and the Deaf communities.¹ The mistreatment he endures, along with the identity conflicts he experiences from being repeatedly placed in and pulled out of mainstream schools and deaf institutions, slowly brings on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Daniel Tallerman's experiences are at least somewhat autobiographical in the sense that they happened to me, but they are also fictional in the sense that events that happened far apart were moved closer together for the sake of drama. In addition, Daniel's character and encounters are molded from and completed by the real-life experiences of my siblings and friends. For example, in the short story "On the Bottom," Daniel has an older brother named Wayne, who has a cognitive disability. My own older brother, Steven, also has a cognitive disability. As another example, the short story "Listening for the Same Thing" largely revolves around Daniel's relationship with his girlfriend, Jenny. The character of Jenny is based upon an actual person whom I dated in my early teens.

I mention these facts only to illustrate that autobiography and biography are capable of working their way into fiction, and vice versa. The question of how deafness relates to conflict is one that stretches across genres, and its implications are at once fundamental and unavoidable. Neither autobiography nor biography nor fiction can survive without discord. Without it, we are left with boredom. Without it, what we have is the lack of a point, a theme, and a plot. Human beings, whether deaf or hearing, are motivated to do the things they do. Through an analysis of motivation, we come to an understanding of character (in autobiography, biography, and fiction). By examining how the motivations of one character interfere with those of another, or how competing motivations collide, we come to an understanding of conflict.

Conflict is not just a clash between people, as would immediately appear to be the case in Daniel's life. His father not only is an alcoholic who alternately abuses Daniel and neglects him but also makes fumbling, dismal attempts to be a father. His mother exists in a state of perpetual denial. He is buffeted between the worlds of Deaf people and hearing people, anxious to escape the torment of his home life at the residential institution he attends. Yet his deaf schoolmates constantly pick fights with him because he cannot sign. He frequently misses Jenny while he is away at school, but when he visits her on weekends, hearing teenagers mock him and antagonize him because he is deaf.

If these are examples of conflicts between people, they are also examples of conflicts within people. Why is Daniel's father an alcoholic? We don't know, but we are given...