Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities

The Search for Proto-NSL: Looking for the Roots of the Nicaraguan Deaf Community

255 0. This manuscript is based upon fieldwork I did in Nicaragua in 1997 supported by a Fulbright Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Additional support to The Search for Proto-NSL: Looking for the Roots of the Nicaraguan Deaf Community Laura Polich It was mid-July, and nearly impossible to breathe in the small office without air conditioning in the deaf association in Managua. Because both audio and video were being recorded, it had been necessary to close the outside windows to shut out the traffic noise from the street, but the blare of television and laughter from the adjoining room meant the door also had to be shut. In this ovenlike atmosphere, Mariana (pseudonym), a deaf woman approximately thirty years old, had been responding for about an hour to questions about her experiences growing up and her present life. But now we were all exhausted, and I moved to bring the interview to a close. “Just one last question before I turn off the camera,” I told Yolanda, the Nicaraguan Sign Language interpreter with whom I was working. Looking at Mariana, I asked in Spanish: “What is it like to be deaf?” Yolanda’s hands went immediately to work, translating my words, and after gravely following Yolanda’s motions, Mariana turned to me and signed her reply. “I am content. I feel contented to be deaf.” Curious, I continued: “If you could change anything, what would you change?” “I’m deaf, that’s all,” Mariana answered. “I would be fine always being this way, being deaf. I feel like myself. I don’t know what to say, but I would be deaf, even if I could be born again, I would be born deaf the second time. It is what I am meant to be. It is the same as for you being hearing.” I persisted. “But what if you would be reborn the only deaf person in Nicaragua —everyone else would be hearing —would you still choose to be born deaf?”0 256 : l a u r a p o l i c h underwrite research costs was received from a National Security Education Program fellowship and a graduate fellowship from the Pan-American Roundtables of Texas. A Multicultural Leadership Grant doctoral fellowship through the University of Texas at Austin supported me while I wrote the dissertation. I wish to express my gratitude to all the informants who generously gave me their time and took pains to explain the Nicaraguan situation to me. “Me the only deaf one? No way. I remember being little and how lonesome I felt, and it wasn’t until I went to school that I felt happy— I met other deaf children —what a wonderful surprise! It’s true that they didn’t use sign language, just gestures without meaning like sign language has. But I was so happy to find myself with other deaf people. If I were the only deaf person, I just know I would have no hearing friends —I wouldn’t be able to understand them!” There was something more here, I thought: “And what if you could be reborn and there would be many, many deaf people —thousands and thousands —but there was no sign language. What if there were deaf people all over the place, but all of them only spoke with their mouths, orally, none ever used their hands —would you still choose to be born deaf?” “No, not that way. If there was sign language, yes, I would still choose to be deaf. It is impossible to understand only through speaking. With writing, you can get a little, but it is only so-so. But with sign language you can learn so much.” When Mariana was born in 1968, Nicaragua reportedly had no deaf community nor any commonly accepted form of sign language used by groups of deaf people in that country. Until she went to school, Mariana believed she was the only deaf person in the world and the only one shut out from understanding the mouth movements that served her parents, relatives, and neighbors so well. On that first school day, the realization that others like her existed was such a high point that even as she narrated the discovery twenty-five years later, her joy was apparent. Still, until she was a teenager, Mariana’s prognosis for participation in society depended upon her ability to master oral communication —a skill with which she, like many other people born with profound congenital hearing...