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Nearer My God To Thee FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH Douglas Baynton, 1996 People often use some form of the word "silent" when writing about deaf people. It seems to be almost obligatory in the titles of books about deaf people, such as The Other Side of Silence or They Grow in Silence, that sort of thing. Deaf people themselves have also used the term since the nineteenth century. But if you look closely at how it is used, you notice that deaf and hearing people use it in quite different ways. For hearing people, the term usually suggests an absence within which deaf people supposedly live, just as blind people are said to live in darkness. Deafness is simply a lack, a void where something ought to be. Deaf people appear to live in a world of silence, and to a hearing person that seems horrifying. We imagine living within this absence -- in this emptiness, this world without the constant sound that surrounds most of us all the time -- and it frightens us. Of course this is inaccurate on a very basic level. Just as most blind people have some sight, most deaf people have some hearing. They may have little hearing at certain pitches -- most commonly in the speech range -- or the sounds may be quite distorted, but sound is very much a part of their world. And if a person does hear practically nothing, you have to ask what the concept of silence means to them. Silence is experienced as a temporary absence of sound. It is a relative term. For one who has never heard, or not in a long while, it is meaningless as a description of experience. Now, there are many organizations of deaf people that use the term "silent," such as the Chicago Silent Drama Club and the Silent Hoosiers, and deaf community newspapers that have names like the Silent Worker and the Silent World. The word identifies something as belonging to the deaf community. But it's not used to talk about experience. You rarely find deaf people using it in the kinds of phrases that hearing people use, such as "living in silence." So for hearing people "silence" emphasizes the horror of deafness, this great emptiness. For deaf people it emphasizes a social relation. Hearing people speak, they communicate through sound. Deaf people communicate silently. For deaf people it's not the experience of not hearing that "silence" suggests, but instead the act of communicating without talking. So it really means very different things when deaf people are using it from when hearing people are using it. |
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