Forbidden Fruits in Our Hands

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Raymond Luczak’s poem “Gazelles” appears in the June 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

The worst thing a hearing parent can do for a deaf child is to make it clear that signing is forbidden. (Happily, the belief that signing interferes with a deaf child’s ability to learn how to speak has been proven erroneous.) However, it is human nature to seek out the forbidden. Intense longings can develop for such forbidden fruits. Once such a dream takes root, it’s very difficult to expunge its stump even though the tree has been chopped down. The roots of want run very deep. So it was with me.

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For five years in the Ironwood Catholic school system, I was the only deaf student in hearing classes. I didn’t know Sign, but I was a good lipreader with powerful body hearing aids under my shirt.

It is rather ironic that, given how speech therapists have historically demonized Sign, my best friend in those five miserable years was Mrs. Eleanor Fraites, a speech therapist. She dyed her hair a burnt orange, painted her nails red, and wore purple lipstick and loud solid colors. She carried two bulging bags—one that held her three-ring binders crammed with strategy plans for her many hearing students with speech problems, and the other a box of Froot Loops. She motivated her students by rewarding them with a Froot Loop or two. Bribery? Perhaps, but it was apparently effective.

She was my best friend because she never talked down to me. For instance, she didn’t seem fazed by my question of what the word “erotic” meant. (I was in sixth grade and had read the word somewhere.) Because she knew that I couldn’t easily absorb the colloquialisms spoken around me by osmosis, she taught me idioms. It is thanks to her that I grasped phrases like “raining cats and dogs,” which would’ve thrown me off-balance as a lipreader. Wait a minute—why are they talking about cats and dogs now? Weren’t they just talking about the weather?

Then one Monday in October she gave me the assignment of writing a few limericks, five-line poems with two rhymes. The next day my grandmother had a stroke, and she died that Saturday. On Sunday afternoon I suddenly remembered that my speech homework was due the next day. Considering that it was nearing Halloween, I wrote about a witch who’d been tossed into a ditch. I didn’t dwell on whether my poems were any good; it was just homework. And yet, as I wrote my first poem, something inside me clicked. I was eleven.

Soon after, I reveled in writing one limerick after another. Counting syllables and rewriting lines to accommodate my chosen rhymes felt magical. It wasn’t long before I began playing with free verse. Mrs. Fraites knew I was writing poetry, but she didn’t demand to see more after seeing my first limericks, nor did I share my poems with anyone. From the way no one talked about poetry or deafness, I gathered that neither should exist. But they both did. The guerilla act of writing became my weapon of refuge in a hearing world that didn’t know what to do with me, that sometimes even wished I didn’t exist. After all, I had to slip into the darkness of my bedroom closet with a flashlight in order to learn the manual alphabet in secret from my brother David’s Boy Scout Handbook.

I don’t recall what Mrs. Fraites thought of my initial attempts, but I suspect she liked them enough to encourage me to keep trying. Either way, I remain grateful that no one told me my poetry in those days was god-awful, or I’d have given up right then and there. It was necessary to write badly for a long time before I could write a decent poem. I had to delude myself into thinking that everything I wrote was genius or I wouldn’t have persisted—I had no emotional support system then; I felt orphaned within my own hearing family of eight siblings.

When I learned American Sign Language (ASL) in my first week at Gallaudet University, I felt I’d finally found my true family.

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Some hearing people have strange ideas about ASL. They apparently think that if they master the manual alphabet, they feel entitled to say, “I know sign language,” even though fingerspelling is hardly the focus of ASL. Not only that, ASL is not “English on the hands,” nor is it “broken English.” It’s far more complex than that, and I’m not even talking about the use of spatial space! There have been numerous attempts to create a notational system for ASL (i.e., the written equivalent of ASL), but there hasn’t been an overwhelming agreement by the Deaf community on any particular approach, and probably the notational systems folks have experimented with have proven too complicated to learn. Thanks to the proliferation of low-cost video cameras built into our smartphones, the need for a notational system isn’t as pressing as it was back when video cameras were too expensive for the average consumer. Today we can easily videotape ourselves signing and post it online, or use a video-texting app to send each other video-texts.

Using ASL gloss in my work was a happy accident. ASL gloss is simply using English words and ASL idioms in the ASL sign order. Just to be clear: there is no standardized ASL gloss system at all. I don’t think it’s possible to convey even a fraction of all the rich nuances of an ASL sentence on paper. For instance, there are no mentions of facial expressions (i.e., emotional inflections), the location for each person (or animal) referenced in the signing space, the spatial relationships between these people, the sign dialects (e.g., Deaf people in Minnesota sign “favorite” differently than anywhere else in America), and so on. On an intuitive level, ASL makes perfect sense to me, but it may seem inscrutable to most non-signers. ASL is incredibly complex, so the ASL gloss in my work is extremely sparse.

So how did I end up using ASL gloss in my work? It’s very difficult for me to look at my work in English and then sign it in ASL at readings, so I eventually came up with my own approach. Here’s what I do: I create two sets of printouts. With the first set, I translate my English into ASL and, with the second set, denote my translation in ASL gloss. I rehearse my gloss enough so that I don’t have to rely too much on reading my printout, as ASL requires eye contact. The ASL interpreter will read both printouts in advance and voice the English text when I’m onstage. Once, after a reading I gave, a hearing person asked to see my printout. I showed her my gloss. The seemingly odd bits of English on the paper fascinated her. Not long after, I began wondering about using gloss in my poetry.

At a workshop sponsored by Zoeglossia earlier last month, I shared a printout of a gloss-only poem (without showing the original English version). Aside from my interpreters, no one else around the table knew ASL. It was clear that hearing people needed some form of context to better appreciate the gloss, so now when I submit my ASL gloss poems, I often include the English version in a second column, which is what you see with “Gazelles” in this issue of Poetry. After all, context is the key we usually need whenever we enter the room of a new poem. Sometimes a poem can seem so confusing at first that we need some initial guidance to intuit where to go while reading.

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Poetry has saved me, which is why I continue to write it. I seek not only salve but also a voice that can cut through the din of my siblings babbling around the dinner table. My hands, however silent they seem to hearing people at first, have amplified my voice.

What about other folks who have yet to find a means to amplify their voices?

Perhaps if we were to “outlaw” poetry in the way that Sign was forbidden to Deaf children (and in some quarters, many deaf children with cochlear implants still aren’t allowed to sign today), we might find ourselves with a wonderful epidemic of closeted poetry-addicts. The only cure for them would be reading even more banned books of poetry and ingesting one horse-pill metaphor after another until that closet door collapsed to reveal entire families breaking forth into the sunlight with their own poems—poems shining either with clichéd awfulness or diamond brilliance.

In other words (or perhaps should I say “signs”?), my ASL gloss for the phrase “poems shining either with clichéd awfulness or diamond brilliance” would be: “poetry category two, point-there sign-sign same-old-same-old boring, point-over-there sign-sign shine-outward champ finish.”