The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

6. A Six-Month Plan

61 6 A Six-Month Plan Iwas exuberant.Everything was going well,and I was mindful of my good fortune. I had moved into my new apartment away from the inner city area but still close to the river,had enough paid work to keep financially afloat, and was buoyed by my friends’enthusiasm for my “deaf project.”At the bottom of my red tote bag was a mess of notes on deafness scribbled on the torn-off edges of newspapers, lipstick-stained serviettes, yellow Postits ,and business cards.These were the accretions of the many conversations in coffee shops, conference rooms, and the verandahs of my friends’homes that I had had in between my policy projects for the Queensland Law Reform Commission and the Office of the Public Advocate. I went to conferences and seminars on deaf identity, deaf advocacy, and deaf education, and learned about advances in the diagnosis of deafness and hearing loss in newborn babies, along with the latest in cochlear implants and hearing technology. I shook off the weirdness of deaf people being studied—it was so anthropological, so Margaret Mead-ish—and stumbled into debates about signing versus speaking.One English hearing academic told me that he preferred to sign rather than speak. I thought this was peculiar at the time, and still do. I felt as though I had come out of a closet. Everyone I met wanted to know about my “deaf project.” How was I getting along with it? What 62 Part Two was I learning? One friend was forthright in her excitement. “Great! Now you are letting us talk about it! I’ve been too scared to ask you questions before. You’ve always put up such a shield.” I pressed her. “What do you mean?”She answered by telling her own story of discovery.She was a teenager when, through a casual comment to her father—“Don’t I look Jewish in these photos?”—she stumbled on the realization that her mother was Jewish. More than this, almost all of her mother’s family had died in concentration camps during World War II; her mother, then just a young girl of fourteen, had escaped from Germany on the eve of war. My friend’s parents had kept this a secret from their daughters because her mother dreaded the consequences of exposure, even in the benign Brisbane suburbs of the 1970s, and her father supported her mother throughout her fear-locked silence. My friend said: “It’s a strange thing to discover an identity you own that you didn’t know about.” Later, she wrote, Looking back, I think my determination to claim my Jewishness is an equal and opposite reaction to the power of the denial of Jewishness in our home [. . .] what is hidden and repressed in our natures will try to force its way into the open. I also believe that I was rejecting the shame attached to our identity. I speculated about the possible parallels between this friend’s experiences and mine.My mother had been vigilant and successful in her determination to raise me as a full-fledged hearing person.In fact,her vigilance in keeping me apart from the deaf world had bordered on inflexible. What emotions lay there? And why had I been such a willing and complicit partner for so long? My friend’s use of the word “shame” shook me. Surely, my mother wasn’t ashamed of my deafness? Or was I the person carrying that shame? No,no,no; that couldn’t be right.No,it wasn’t right.But there was no arguing with the fact that, historically, deafness was deemed a terrible affliction. For the first time in my life, I immersed myself in reading other people’s accounts of deafness. Stories from the Deaf community did not speak A Six-Month Plan 63 for me, as the framing of deafness as a separate linguistic and cultural entity had not shaped my life. Nor was I drawn to the militancy of identity politics that used terms such as “oppression”and “oppressors”to deride the ambitions of parents and educators to teach deaf children to speak. This seemed hostile and did not sit well with me; I had benefitted so much from integrating into the world of the maligned “oppressors.” (Over time, as I became more attuned to the politics of Deaf rights, my views mellowed, but...