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The Relationship between Language Experience and Language Development: A Report from Norway
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speech? One is left dead and completely isolated. Thus, for these reasons, and because my experience lends them credence, you can well believe how very lonely I am; and since I cannot rid myself of this unsparing and lasting loneliness, I want to combat my idleness by busying myself with this little treatise, which one might well say is neither good nor even ordinary, but rather completely bad. (25) Here you can almost imagine Teresa as a modern-day scholar: “It’s only a draft . . . I know it’s not very good.” The problem seems to have been, however, that it was very good. And her readers were not fooled by the ruse of her deafness as a mask for her real disability at the time—her gender . Much like Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism at age eleven, there was apparently some “wondering” about Teresa’s own “wonder” and her ability to write such a text. So, she had to go back and defend her authorship —and do so as a woman this time—in Wonder at the Works of God. She hardly mentions her deafness in the second text except—and this is important—to continue to cite it as the source of her seeking consolation in the first place and turning, as it were, to the wonder in the works of God. “Autobiography,” writes Leigh Gilmore, “provokes fantasies of the real” (16). Teresa’s own wonder, her coming to the groves of the infirm and finding consolation there, as well as the wonder with which her audience receives her “little treatise,” proves the provocative and real fantasy of writing (as) deaf, writing (as) she. Moreover, both author-wonder and audience-wonder in Teresa’s case are paradoxically wondrous. First, they are constructively wondrous, since they draw her toward what Egan calls “mirror talk,” bringing her into being as Belenky’s “constructed knower”— making meaning, mapping identity, becoming visible, recovering understanding of herself in the world. Yet the wonder is also, as Teresa herself calls it, “malicious” for “although it is said that their wonder is flattering , to me it seems offensive and clear that they offer me scathing insults and not empty praise . . . This can ruin the substance of my writing and undermines greatly the benefit and grace that God wrought for me” (88). In this passage, as she encounters the inherent oppression in her reader ’s “wonder,” Teresa is beginning to understand the power—and paradox —of writing. Plato himself worried a great deal about this power and paradox. As Jacques Derrida describes the Platonic distrust of writing in Signature Event Context: “A written sign is proffered in the absence of the receiver. How to style this absence?” (1478). How to style the absence of an audience for a deaf woman autobiographer ? This is a problem with which Teresa was most certainly grappling. And as she pondered this in 1452, perhaps we can authorize an under84 Brenda Jo Brueggemann standing of that absence by simply chalking it up to “the times.” But 550 years later, another deaf woman autobiographer is—or rather was—still wrestling with much the same problem as she writes what I would also call a “consolatory treatise.” Anne Bolander’s “as-told-to” autobiography, I Was Number 87, was published by Gallaudet University Press in 2000. (And Bolander’s authoring this book through the hand of another, Adair Renning, is surely an interruption and eruption worth noting.) I Was Number 87 is a story, as the subtitle declares, of “a deaf woman’s ordeal of misdiagnosis , institutionalization, and abuse” multiple times over. It begins with her early placement into a startlingly abusive institution for determined mental retardation (she is, in fact, deaf)—the Stoutamyre “School of Special Education.” Cixous was apparently buzzing in Bolander’s ear as well: why don’t you write? Near the end of the book, Bolander (as written through/with Adair Renning) confesses from her own groves of the infirm: As I began to share the story of my life with the doctors, I also started to reconstruct the journal I had kept in high school, which Linda had destroyed. The doctors provided me with loose-leaf paper and a ballpoint pen, and I began by writing my earliest memories. The medications I was taking helped to keep me calm during the writing but I often had flashbacks at night. Now, instead of banging my head against the wall, I wrote. I wrote about Margie, Warren, Pat, St...