Writing Deafness (review)

Writing Deafness is one of a very few books of its kind that reflects on what “deafness” means in the popular imagination. Recalling Toni Morrison’s call to explore an Africanist presence in American literature (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination [1993]), Krentz assigns himself the task of doing the same with deafness. American writers, from the time of early America to the modern literature, have written about deaf people and their condition. What cultural work does “deafness” serve in the writer’s imagination? If blackness positions whiteness, what work does “deafness” do for the American novelist? If deafness is the opposite of “hearing-ness,” or being able to hear, then it should do the same kind of work that blackness does for whiteness—or does it?

Krentz carries an authority for pursuing such a project. As he describes himself, he began losing his hearing through childhood and adolescence and is now deaf. Because he has learned American Sign Language (ASL) as an adult and has since lived among signing deaf people, he has inherited their long history in America as well. As a deaf author, the project feels more personal and intimate in his hands.

By the first chapter, Krentz has quickly drawn numerous parallels between race and deafness. He evokes W.E.B Du Bois’ notion of a “color line” to argue there is too a “hearing line,” where a real and imagined distance is written into the American experience between those who are hearing and those who are not. The hearing gaze upon the deaf and see in them the promise of their own possibilities. Krentz lays out the history of deaf children in the U.S. from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth to bear out his claim of forced segregation. From the time that the first public school for deaf children was founded in 1817 through the mid twentieth century, when hundreds of residential deaf schools were built, deaf children spent their lives in the company of other deaf children and hearing caretakers. The history of asylums or institutions for the “deaf and dumb” formed cultures of separation, where deaf children were left by their families to attend school, and then when they left the care of their schools, they remained apart as adults. The use of a sign language, wholly different from speech, further exacerbated this dimension of separation. Hearing people speak; deaf people do not. What changed in the nineteenth century, Krentz says, is that the proliferation of deaf schools and the populations of deaf children brought together because of these schools created a newly visible presence of the deaf, causing deaf and hearing people both to write about their separate and different selves. But is this enough to draw a parallel with blackness?

Krentz admits that moving from race to deafness, specifically this type of disability, has its metaphoric limits. Deaf people did not experience the rage and violence that African Americans did; they were not lynched, nor were deaf children who left their deaf schools chased down by mobs. It would not be accurate to describe deaf people’s history as marked by massive acts of pure violence. Instead, deaf people suffered more from the malignancies of indifference and neglect. Their bodies were often experimented upon, including medical acts that can only be called gruesome. They were physically punished for using sign language in schools. Sexual fondling and abuse is disturbingly common in many deaf institutions. Among the earliest documents of one of the first deaf schools in the U.S. is a lengthy investigation by its board of directors into reports that the school’s hearing principal was forcing himself upon deaf women in their rooms. Such acts of violation are persistent even to this day. The attorney-general for the state of Maine released a report in 1982 describing allegations of long-term sexual abuse of deaf teenage boys at the Maine School for the Deaf where a hearing principal was accused of performing acts of sexual bondage on the...