[170/365] quadruple consciousness
Jun. 19th, 2019 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistYesterday I listened to the podcast version of this episode of Radio 4's Word of Mouth, a show about language. This one's an interview with someone I'd never heard of before but fell in love with in about two minutes, Raymond Antrobus.
Because he started with a poem called "Sound Machine." Here's some of it:
It's revealing that the host, Michael Rosen, starts to ask him if "when you're signing you're the deaf person and when you're speaking you're the hearing one" but admits this only after he's caught himself, saying, "that's crazy, that doesn't work." But this is how a lot of people think. Antrobus connects this back to W.E.B. Dubois' "double consciousness," the necessary consciousness black people have to have of the white world. He says for him, as well as that, he also has to have a deaf person's consciousness of the hearing world. "Quadruple consciousness," he says.
Rosen goes back to being a tourist, saying that sometimes when he's giving a talk there's a sign language interpreter and he's tempted to stop talking and pay attention to what they're doing. The only reason he gives for why this is a bad thing is that if he stops talking, they won't have anything to sign. But as I say, I think it's a bit touristy. It's a bit like my hatred of my USian family and friends who are happy to admit to my face now that they don't always pay attention to what I say because they're so enchanted by my accent. How people talk isn't really there for our entertainment. Yes it's natural to be interested in sign language if it's novel to you -- everyone is interested in language; this is one of the first things I learned when I started having "I'm a linguistics student" as an answer to "What do you do?" -- but this kind of stuff is still icky. "I'm waving my arms about," Rosen actually says, "and then they're waving their arms and I'm thinking... 'am I doing a form of sign language?' "
Antrobus is very diplomatic about this, as I probably would've been if I were there, but since I was in my kitchen I was able to shout "No, you're not!" You numpty. Yes (almost) everyone gestures when they speak but that's not a language. You haven't just spontaneously invented sign langauge by "waving your arms about" or because you "do a lot of extreme gestures." You'd have to put a lot of time into learning a sign langauge just like you would any spoken language. No one thinks they've spontaneously learned or invented a spoken language every time they imitate the Swedish Chef. But we hearing folk think "extreme gestures" is all there is to signed languages and it aggravates me immensely.
I like what Antrobus says about BSL "resisting" standard English, about BSL users who don't feel that standard English represents them and their culture. He talks about signing very differently than he talks about his speech: since there are many frequencies he can't hear, there are speech sounds he had to learn to make by feel. He says "criticism" haltingly and then repeats it forcefully, a brave and vulnerable example of how difficult speech is for him. He says "it's a word I always need a run up for, because there are three sounds in that word that I don't hear." He rightly says that it's bizarre to make sounds he's never experienced, and that it's harmed a lot of deaf people to be told that they're a failure because they can't do something they've never been able to appreciate the value of.
He tells a funny story about dialects: he went to Birmingham and tried to say "I live in Hackney" but what means "live" to him means "toilet" in Brum dialect I guess so he was informed that he'd said "I go to the toilet in Hackney." He's been to New Zealand too, which has the BSL fingerspelling alphabet but goes off in its own direction from there. And there's Māori sign language there too with its own roots (Rosen asks if it goes back before the British "settling" [sic] it, as if it wouldn't have occurred to the Māori people to do it before colonization.)
Rosen talks about langauges as other rooms, says if he's in France he eventually ends up speaking French without it being too much work and feeling he's gone into "the French room," and seemingly envious of Antrobus being able to "slide between these different roomes" -- he talks about sliding nearer the beginning of the conversation too, kind of enviously almost but also it almost sounds like he's denying Antrobus the stability that he feels: he goes to the French room but this black British deaf person slides between, hm. Antrobus points out "there's blood on the walls in some of those rooms." Rosen asks if it's his blood or if "it goes back "20 years, 50 years, 200 years," again an oddly point-missing question in the context of colonialism. Antrobus replies "Oh, hundreds of years, centuries of blood on those walls," with a voice that sounds the way faces look when they're described as having "a faraway look."
He moves right on to a quote from an American deaf history academic: "The root of oppression for deaf people is being forced to speak," and he talks about the fear and intimdation he had about speech therapy, the fact that he'd leave feeling like a failure. Rosen surprised me again with how utterly brazen he was about "putting himself in the shoes of the teacher: 'well, this is going to enable you to do this, Raymond!' " but Antrobus points out what was missing from that therapy relationship when he was an awareness of deafness as a cultural identity. Blindness is not an identity in the same way at all; nothing is in the same way as deafness, but I definitely think my childhood was filled with adults who focused entirely on "doing these difficult, confusing things you're bad at will enable you!" and no one acknowledged that I was being made to do things that were scary or difficult or being called a failure. I genuinely hated "failing" eye tests as a kid, since I was so good at other tests. And that got laughed at, so I laugh at it now, but maybe things would've been different if my childhood hadn't all been about shaping me into a form the sighted world can tolerate.
Anyway, I've practically transcribed a bunch of the interview (real transcript in pdf is here) and all I really wanted to say was how interesting I always find hearing about deafness as the other big sensory impairment which is so often relatable to me but is so different too. And I'm really going to have to look up more of Raymond Antrobus's poetry, since I really loved both examples he read (the other is "Jamaican British"; here's a video of him reading it) on the show.
Because he started with a poem called "Sound Machine." Here's some of it:
My sound system playsTo be the deaf child of a man who scavanged parts to build sound systems and dub himself over songs is a hell of a thing. His dad was apparently always uncomfortable with calling him deaf, called him "limited" instead and thought "deaf" was an insult. Antrobus went through experiences I recognize well: of being ostracized for speaking to deaf friends and signing/wearing hearing aids around hearing friends, getting embarrassed and stopping signing and wearing his hearing aids as a kid.
on Father’s Day in Manor Park Cemetery
where I find his grave, and for the first time
see his middle name Osbert, derived from Old English
meaning God, and Bright. Which may have
been a way to bleach him, darkest
of his five brothers, the only one sent away
from the country to live uptown
with his light skin aunt. She protected him
from police who didn’t believe he belonged
unless they heard his English,
which was smooth as some uptown roads.
His aunt loved him and taught him
to recite Wordsworth and Coleridge – rhythms
that wouldn’t save him.
It's revealing that the host, Michael Rosen, starts to ask him if "when you're signing you're the deaf person and when you're speaking you're the hearing one" but admits this only after he's caught himself, saying, "that's crazy, that doesn't work." But this is how a lot of people think. Antrobus connects this back to W.E.B. Dubois' "double consciousness," the necessary consciousness black people have to have of the white world. He says for him, as well as that, he also has to have a deaf person's consciousness of the hearing world. "Quadruple consciousness," he says.
Rosen goes back to being a tourist, saying that sometimes when he's giving a talk there's a sign language interpreter and he's tempted to stop talking and pay attention to what they're doing. The only reason he gives for why this is a bad thing is that if he stops talking, they won't have anything to sign. But as I say, I think it's a bit touristy. It's a bit like my hatred of my USian family and friends who are happy to admit to my face now that they don't always pay attention to what I say because they're so enchanted by my accent. How people talk isn't really there for our entertainment. Yes it's natural to be interested in sign language if it's novel to you -- everyone is interested in language; this is one of the first things I learned when I started having "I'm a linguistics student" as an answer to "What do you do?" -- but this kind of stuff is still icky. "I'm waving my arms about," Rosen actually says, "and then they're waving their arms and I'm thinking... 'am I doing a form of sign language?' "
Antrobus is very diplomatic about this, as I probably would've been if I were there, but since I was in my kitchen I was able to shout "No, you're not!" You numpty. Yes (almost) everyone gestures when they speak but that's not a language. You haven't just spontaneously invented sign langauge by "waving your arms about" or because you "do a lot of extreme gestures." You'd have to put a lot of time into learning a sign langauge just like you would any spoken language. No one thinks they've spontaneously learned or invented a spoken language every time they imitate the Swedish Chef. But we hearing folk think "extreme gestures" is all there is to signed languages and it aggravates me immensely.
I like what Antrobus says about BSL "resisting" standard English, about BSL users who don't feel that standard English represents them and their culture. He talks about signing very differently than he talks about his speech: since there are many frequencies he can't hear, there are speech sounds he had to learn to make by feel. He says "criticism" haltingly and then repeats it forcefully, a brave and vulnerable example of how difficult speech is for him. He says "it's a word I always need a run up for, because there are three sounds in that word that I don't hear." He rightly says that it's bizarre to make sounds he's never experienced, and that it's harmed a lot of deaf people to be told that they're a failure because they can't do something they've never been able to appreciate the value of.
He tells a funny story about dialects: he went to Birmingham and tried to say "I live in Hackney" but what means "live" to him means "toilet" in Brum dialect I guess so he was informed that he'd said "I go to the toilet in Hackney." He's been to New Zealand too, which has the BSL fingerspelling alphabet but goes off in its own direction from there. And there's Māori sign language there too with its own roots (Rosen asks if it goes back before the British "settling" [sic] it, as if it wouldn't have occurred to the Māori people to do it before colonization.)
Rosen talks about langauges as other rooms, says if he's in France he eventually ends up speaking French without it being too much work and feeling he's gone into "the French room," and seemingly envious of Antrobus being able to "slide between these different roomes" -- he talks about sliding nearer the beginning of the conversation too, kind of enviously almost but also it almost sounds like he's denying Antrobus the stability that he feels: he goes to the French room but this black British deaf person slides between, hm. Antrobus points out "there's blood on the walls in some of those rooms." Rosen asks if it's his blood or if "it goes back "20 years, 50 years, 200 years," again an oddly point-missing question in the context of colonialism. Antrobus replies "Oh, hundreds of years, centuries of blood on those walls," with a voice that sounds the way faces look when they're described as having "a faraway look."
He moves right on to a quote from an American deaf history academic: "The root of oppression for deaf people is being forced to speak," and he talks about the fear and intimdation he had about speech therapy, the fact that he'd leave feeling like a failure. Rosen surprised me again with how utterly brazen he was about "putting himself in the shoes of the teacher: 'well, this is going to enable you to do this, Raymond!' " but Antrobus points out what was missing from that therapy relationship when he was an awareness of deafness as a cultural identity. Blindness is not an identity in the same way at all; nothing is in the same way as deafness, but I definitely think my childhood was filled with adults who focused entirely on "doing these difficult, confusing things you're bad at will enable you!" and no one acknowledged that I was being made to do things that were scary or difficult or being called a failure. I genuinely hated "failing" eye tests as a kid, since I was so good at other tests. And that got laughed at, so I laugh at it now, but maybe things would've been different if my childhood hadn't all been about shaping me into a form the sighted world can tolerate.
Anyway, I've practically transcribed a bunch of the interview (real transcript in pdf is here) and all I really wanted to say was how interesting I always find hearing about deafness as the other big sensory impairment which is so often relatable to me but is so different too. And I'm really going to have to look up more of Raymond Antrobus's poetry, since I really loved both examples he read (the other is "Jamaican British"; here's a video of him reading it) on the show.
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Date: 2019-06-20 03:08 pm (UTC)For instance, I remember there's something about in BSL there is an arc going from in front of the face to the side of the ear that's used to represent time. I think it's really interesting how the medium of gesture provides building blocks, such as 3D space around the person signing, that are completely different from those in spoken languages.
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