HEARING, MOTHER FATHER DEAF: Hearing People in Deaf Families

Foreword

Whenever I’m struggling to spell a word correctly, I usually look at my hand. I want to see how my hand (finger) spells the word. It’s one of my idiosyncratic behaviors that my partner and friends have gotten used to over the years, a manifestation of my Deaf cultural connection. When I signed with my parents as I was growing up, I used a lot of fingerspelling—especially when talking with my mom, who went to a deaf school that used the Rochester method. I can’t fully explain the hardwiring involved, but I know that, when it comes to spelling, I trust my hand more than my mouth. And, besides . . . my hand is usually right. Two or three decades ago, most hearing children of deaf parents like myself had to discover on our own that our childhoods weren’t merely isolated novelties—or worse. Each of us had to question, wrestle with, and often unlearn the negative assumptions of deficit and dysfunction so pervasively associated with deafness and deaf people. In the late 1980s, when I first proposed doing a national study of hearing children of deaf parents, my anthropology colleagues questioned what could possibly come out of this. They imagined I would end up with interesting but basically unrelated family histories—and it would certainly have nothing to do with a shared culture. After all, how could a hearing person be culturally “Deaf”? Without an appreciation of the cultural dimensions of deafness, such paradoxical remarks would not make sense. But, as I and many others have increasingly documented, cultural transmission from deaf parent to hearing child is every bit as real and observable as in families from any other linguistic and cultural communities. We now recognize that those of us who can hear but grew up with deaf parents potentially inherit a linguistic and cultural legacy that is unlike that of any other hearing child. As this current volume attests, our bilingual and bicultural heritage provides a unique source of examining and understanding the range of human experience. When I wrote Mother Father Deaf back in 1994, there were many pieces about us codas that I didn’t get a chance to fully explore or explain . One topic received just a few pages of discussion: coda talk. As I pointed out at the time, I started becoming aware of coda talk only toward the end of my research. Although I believed that somehow this Foreword hybrid language mirrored our bilingual and bicultural heritage, coda talk seemed too complex to fully address at such a late date in my research. Moreover, I’m a medical anthropologist—not a sociolinguist; I felt that coda talk merited more in-depth investigation and analysis by those trained in linguistics and related fields. And, to be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what this phenomenon was—nor whether, as some codas suggested , coda talk was too private for public disclosure or even a mockery of Deaf people and sign language. Coda talk was something I noticed not only among the other codas that I met or interviewed for my research, but also in myself as well. Whenever I came back from spending time with other codas, I found myself struggling to stay monolingual—especially if it involved spoken English. My hearing coworkers and friends would look quizzically when I blurted out some odd phrase or word order. Sometimes, when hesitating for just the right spoken word, I found myself signing first—and only then would the spoken word come. What had happened to me? I’d always felt comfortable with spoken English. I not only have a B.A. and M.A. in English, but I even taught English for several years. But, my transposing and blending wasn’t just limited to spoken English . My sign language was affected as well. After being around codas, later on, whenever I was signing with my parents or deaf friends, I noticed how aware I was of what was coming out of my mouth—and it wasn’t necessarily the corresponding English word for the sign. For example , when I signed “I’m finished,” I was mouthing and sometimes saying “fish.” Fish? True, many American Deaf people mouth something approximating “fish” when signing “finished,” but now I was actually saying it aloud. “Fish!” And, when I looked down at my right hand signing “finished” . . . well, it did sort of look like the sign for fish. Coda talk is only one of several phenomena of...