Deaf Identities in the Making: Local Lives, Transnational Connections

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Who am I? Who are we? Where am I going? Where are we going? What is this life all about? These are all important questions related to identity. However, identity is a tricky concept. It connotes sameness and is used to differentiate oneself from others, natives from foreigners, deaf people from hearing people, and so forth. At an individual level, sameness is connected to the process of becoming and creating oneself. At a collective level, it is about group formations and the process of becoming a member by achieving recognition as an equal to other members in certain ways. This also implies a negation: I am, and we are, not the same as members of other groups. The identification process, therefore, calls for recognition of being different. These processes are never easy. One of the key lessons I have learned, as a hearing person who has been immersed in deaf life through my anthropological research, is that the phrase “being at home among strangers” (Schein 1989) goes to the heart of the identity question. This is about deaf people’s frequent departure from 1 ✥ biological roots and the hearing, settled world, and their search for “equals” in distant places. Therefore, the travelogue narrative style predominates in many deaf stories and the “life is a journey” metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) often occurs. The hearing community regularly links equality and sameness to territorial co-presence and given the metaphorical form “similarity is proximity.” By extension, the hearing community has a reversed understanding of distance: “difference is spatial distance” (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 59). Deaf experiences seldom support this general pattern. More often, there is a fundamental breach with such expectations, because spatial closeness in the shape of a hearing family and neighborhood often confirms the difference of the deaf subject as a child. Spatial distance, on the other hand, often implies sameness and equality, because signing fellows who turn into friends often come from distant places (Schein 1989). Deaf identities should therefore “be concerned with routes rather than roots, as maps for the future rather than trails from the past” (McCrone 1998, 34). This book, thus, is about emerging deaf identities and deaf routes. Deaf identities are always in the making, and if settled, only temporarily so. To capture the identification processes involved, my perspective is a narrative one: identity as temporarily produced through autobiographical accounts or capsule life stories. THE DEAF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LEGACY The cultural traditions of Deaf communities are transmitted to new generations of deaf people through folklore, myths, rituals, capsule life stories, and other artifacts, which both travel and are stored in archives. Signed and written stories both inform and are informed by deaf traditions and are well fit for revealing key obstacles that are extended to contemporary deaf lives. The current fashions in autobiographical “show off” reflect cultural streams of contemporary life. Performance is put in the foreground, increasingly highlighting the fluidity of identities. There is, however, no reason to doubt the seriousness with which identity seekers engage in their quest. Recognized identities will continue to be scarce resources, especially for those who in no way can take their “given” selves for granted. Oppressed and marginalized people are thus engaged in identification processes where 2 INTRODUCTION the stakes are high. To succeed in their identification endeavors, they are often restricted to a limited number of alternatives. This has also been decisive in the scarcity of deaf autobiography, because literacy has been and still is less than widespread. This is partly because a written language represents most deaf people’s second language. This has also reduced the possible mass of a deaf readership. The early written autobiographies thus have come from exceptionally “well-educated” deaf people (for instance, Earnest E. Carkins 1924 and David Wright 1969), who either have been deafened (that is, are post-lingually deaf) or are hard of hearing and able to access the national language through aural reception. Their stories often highlight the faculty of reading and writing as a specific trait of their lives and as a means of connecting to or “making it” in the hearing world. Today, the situation is somewhat different, because deaf-born people’s mastery of these skills has increased. At the same time, confidence in using sign language has also increased. The result is that a growing number of deaf autobiographies are being produced in both...