Angels and Outcasts : An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature

No Sound

;Vo SOlAnd by 31AliIAs Wiggins EDITORS' PREFACE The following excerpt from No Sound by Julius Wiggins, present editor and publisher ofthe Silent News ("America's Most Popular Newspaper for the Deaf'), contains numerous insights into the deaf experience. Wiggins was, of course, unusually successful for a deaf person of his time, and so has reason to write of his life. He does not record the difficulties, the embarrassments, the rejections which he must have experienced; instead we find successes and good times. There is, however, the experience of the hope for a medical miracle bringing his hearing back, and the episode with the hearing aid. In this connection, we find what probably seems startling to hearing people: deaf people who have never heard don't wish to hear and couldn't handle it if they did. This is startling because we have all been duped by the television episodes where a person who has been blind all his life, or deaf, suddenly, through some miracle, regains his or her lost sense. We all cry, the character in the drama cries, all is right with the world, and we go to bed, happy in the thought that there really is justice in the world. What we forget is that sensory data must be processed by our brain and translated into meaningful perception : a person who has never heard before or seen before would undergo great trauma trying to re-adjust to a world in which a flood ofnew, totally confusing sensory data crashed in upon the brain. The only analogy I can think of for a "normal" person is ifsuddenly that person gained an intense 315 • From DeafAuthors • sensitivity to radio waves, TV signals, radar, telephone transmission, gamma rays, xrays, and so on, and was therefore constantly bombarded with signals that were contradictory , overwhelming, totally confusing. It would take maybe a year or two, assuming the experience did not bring on insanity, to begin to develop a filtering and "descrambling" mechanism. As Wiggins points out, deafpeople do not want to hear (for who would, given the kind of experience I've just described?), they merely want to know what's going on. What Wiggins makes us aware of is the obsession with sound and hearing that hearing people develop when they come in contact with deaf people. The lack of hearing is what hearing people notice, of course, so it is understandable , but still no less exasperating. People always notice obvious differences: differences in skin color, differences in facial features-but, just as people cannot change their skin color or ethnic background, neither can they change their lack of hearing, and to remind people of that which makes them "different" certainly doesn't help smooth human relationships . Black people don't want to be white; deaf people don't want to hear. This is simple, or seemingly so, for one is what one is, but for the dominant majority it is a truth that is impossible to understand or remember. Deaf people don't want to know that they will be treated decently only ifthey can seem like hearing people (lip reading, learning speech, using only English), they want to know that they will be treated decently because they are human, with all the rights to life that any other human has. Otherwise, how condescending it is or how belittling-but there have always been enough Uncle Toms trying to be white, or hearing, to perpetuate such condescension. What the Uncle Toms don't realize is that Uncle Tomming offers a fake promise: even after one becomes "white" or "hearing," one still is not accepted-if anything, one is even more despised , and now not only by the majority, but by his own group as well. From this brief excerpt, we see that Wiggins was (and still is) a happy person. We do not find laments at not being 316 • No Sound· accepted by hearing people. We do not see him pining away at the back of concert halls, longing for just one sweet note to inspire his soul. We do not see him wandering the streets, hoping to gain some sense of the hustle and bustle he so sadly misses (as does John Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter). And this is an important point, for we find deaf characters in fiction who are used to personify the loneliest and most isolated characters that authors can...