This was published (part of this chapter) to accompany Susan Schaller in celebrating Deaf people and their visual culture at the British Sign Language Fest, in Guilford, England, 14 October, 2023.  The invitation launched Susan's move to Europe where she continues to write about the power of sharing our stories and poetry. - S. Schaller

We applaud loudly, laugh loudly, and praise the silent brilliance of Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin. The feasts for our eyes were prepared, in part, by the unacknowledged masters of silent art: Deaf people who are still called “dumb” or mute, and often treated as imbeciles. Tragically, even some Deaf people still believe the labels given them, and hide their art from us—and themselves.

     Fortunately, a few people see a glimmer of brilliance in Deaf faces, their articulate bodies and glorious eyes. Leonardo de Vinci saw, and sent his art students to seek and study Deaf vision, triggering one French generation to appreciate Deaf eyes (described well by Nicholas Mirzoeff, in Silent Poetry). Even more fortunately, some Deaf poets, actors and storytellers discover that they have something beautiful, worthy of applause, laughter and praise.

     Bernard Bragg saw something in himself, and slowly made his way backstage in a theater one day. There he bravely approached Marcel Marceau, and timidly asked, without voicing a word, if it were possible that he could act and mime. Marceau invited this Deaf actor to Paris. He took Bernard Bragg on as a student because, I believe, he saw how much this Deaf man and Deaf eyes could teach him.

     Another brave Deaf soul, Dorothy Miles, felt moved to explore her world of vision, in spite of pressure from English society to hide her hands, look as hearing as possible and attempt speech. She moved to the United States and blossomed, nourished by American Sign Language, and through embracing her visual, Deaf self. She met Bernard Bragg and Lou Fant, the man who introduced me to the art and richness of Deaf vision. They, and others who decided to abandon “dumb” behaviors, walked on stage, creating the National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD). For years now, we’ve applauded, laughed and praised NTD and the Deaf brilliance we, hearing people, were too visually challenged to have seen before.

     In January 1993, my family moved to Austria. I enthusiastically made plans to visit Dorothy (Dot) Miles in England. Before any other preparations, I wrote expressing my admiration and hope of meeting her. When I was just eighteen, her creative three dimensional poetry in American Sign Language not only inspired me to learn more signing, but thousands of Deaf people as well. She performed for signers first, then translated her poetry into English for a mixed Deaf/hearing audience. In those days (1960s), putting English second was a revolutionary assertion and a profound act of pride.

     While waiting for word from England, I settled into our flat in an ancient monastery and wondered how I could meet Deaf people. I knew that most schools in Europe forbade signing and, whenever signing is forbidden, the gulf between the hearing and Deaf worlds is wide. Deaf communities are forced underground to sign in their homes and in the privacy of their all-Deaf clubs. I knew I would learn nothing from the hearing community, and didn’t bother to write ahead of time.

     Two weeks after arriving, I decided to visit the local school for the deaf. The German edition of A Man Without Words, had just been published, making my introduction easy. The director welcomed me and immediately listed all of their special programs and classes. She asked me which one sounded the most interesting and where I wanted to start my tour. I thanked her but informed her that I really wanted to meet a Deaf person.

     I knew that if I met just one signing Deaf adult, I would meet Deaf Austria. “Do you have any Deaf adults working at the school?” I asked.  

     First, the director looked surprised, then perplexed and confused. She studied the wood planks in the floor. “Yes, we do,” she answered hesitantly. “Erika, the laundry woman; yes, she’s Deaf.” And with that, she began the tour as if I’d only asked for the time.

     The first room contained kindergarteners, all burdened with gigantic amplifiers around their necks and on their chests with wires leading to their ears. They played like any other group of five-year-olds, knocking these plastic, heavy boxes about and pulling the hearing aids out of their ears. The teachers and aides ran around reconnecting them all the time.

     It took effort to be polite. I wanted to scream, watching adults with wide, unnatural mouths grabbing the faces of these encumbered children and forcing them to look down caverns that were full of teeth and tongues, but empty of meaning. I turned to the director who was waiting for my praise and asked, “Could I meet her?”

     Seeing confusion on her face, I added: “Erika, the laundry woman.”

     The director looked most definitely annoyed. She assented reluctantly, but forced me to visit two more classrooms. She then hurried down a hall and led me down a wide staircase into the basement where she pointed to a doorway. Then hurrying, she almost ran up the stairs before anyone could see the director in the basement. We never met again.

     I entered a small room lighted with only a bare bulb, and saw a short-haired woman sitting hunched over a sewing machine. Erika immediately noticed me as I walked in and looked surprised, her face a big question. I signed, “Hello, I want to meet you, my...” She interrupted and said something in garbled German, pointing into another room and then pointing at the door behind me. I guessed that she thought I wanted someone else, so I signed, “No, I want to meet you.”

     She stared at my signs and my mouth which had not formed words, and looked completely baffled. “Are you Deaf or hearing?” she asked in Austrian Sign Language, which I understood because DEAF was the same sign in ASL and HEARING was easy to figure out.

     “HEARING,” I copied, using my first Austrian sign.

     To my surprise, she turned to her work with a kind of helpless, frustrated shrug, and ignored me. After a few seconds, she turned back to me and signed, very slowly and carefully, “Are you DEAF or HEARING?”

     “HEARING,” I signed again, without hesitation.

     Erika became flustered, looked exasperated and fixed her sight on the cloth in the machine. Behind the machine, I suddenly saw my book, the German edition. I grabbed it, pointed to my name on the cover, then pointed to me.

     She looked at me as if I was stark raving mad and grabbed the book back angrily. Again, I began to sign an introduction, “My name is S- U-S-A-N.” I knew she wouldn’t understand the American signs, but I hoped she would understand the finger-spelled name and realize what I was doing.

     She stared at my hand which had just spelled my name and blurted out her question: “Are you DEAF or HEARING?”

     “HEARING,” I answered once again.

     “Nein, nein,” she said and signed as if correcting a child or an imbecile, then signed again very slowly, “Are you DEAF or HEARING?”

     It was my turn to become flustered and exasperated, not believing how this simple introduction could become so ludicrously complicated. I grabbed the book again, pointed to the name and signed, “mine.”

     I grabbed a pen that was on the work table and signed my name in the book. Erika was furious and grabbed the book back. Again, she went back to her work. Then abruptly, trying a different strategy, she began to tell me about the book. Even though I didn’t understand the Austrian signs, I knew she was referring to the book and describing Ildefonso, my former student.

     “I know,” I signed; “He’s a friend of mine.”

     Luckily, the American sign for “friend” is close to the Austrian sign, and caused Erika to stop. Instead of frustration, she had one moment of curiosity. I took advantage of this first open look, and signed, “I’m American and…”

     Erika jumped in and seized our common sign - “American” - looking quite relieved now knowing why I was “weird.” In that laundry room, I discovered that the sign for the United States is one of the very few international signs.

     From that moment on, we had no communication problem. We began to trade American and Austrian signs, and finally met. The cause of the big barrier was this: at that time in Austria, hearing people, with very few exceptions, knew any signs and did not sign. Erika could not imagine that a hearing person would want to learn a visual language and talk with a Deaf person. She thought I was either crazy or dim to keep answering “HEARING.” And I’d never experienced a community where only Deaf people learned to sign.

     Another hurdle involved a sad and funny bit of history I had just entered. Traditionally, Deaf Austrians, schooled without signs, signed secretly on the playground and in hallways and alleys. The bridge between their signing and the German language never existed until a two-handed alphabet was invented by hearing Austrian teachers who compromised their oralism by allowing this visual aid in teaching speech. Deaf people hated it, in a way, because their oppressive speech teachers had invented it. But it was a tool, and became the Austrian finger-spelling for their names and German words.

     Until just two years before I arrived in the laundry room, the two-handed finger-spelling had been used by all Deaf Austrians. The president of the national Deaf association met several times with other European Deaf people and, especially, with the energetic, Finnish president of the World Federation of the Deaf. She suggested (with great zeal, no doubt) to the Austrian that if Austrian Deaf people adopted the one-handed finger-spelling (used in most of the western world), they would become more international and more related to Deaf culture. Whereupon, Herr Dimmel, president of the Austrian association, began to tour the country and order his Deaf subjects to throw out the “hearing” two-handed alphabet and adopt the “Deaf” method.

     I had no idea that finger-spelling my name would have such an effect on poor Erika. When she saw me finger-spell with one hand quickly, she saw me as Super Deaf. I hadn’t understood what was triggering the Deaf-hearing question and innocently kept responding with “hearing.” In Erika’s mind, one couldn’t be that quick with one-hand letters and be hearing.

     Announcing that I was American, finally and fortunately, got us out of the loop. Erika bounced up in excitement, finally understanding my introduction, and became my host. She led me upstairs and began to introduce me to the teachers as they were leaving their classrooms and the school for the day. She signed excitedly as she explained who I was and held up my book. Every person looked confused and lost.

     I had no desire to meet these people who had worked for years, even decades, with deaf children and had never bothered to learn enough visual communication to meet them or understand them. Thus, I decided not use my voice to interpret Erika’s signing. Instead I continued to sign with Erika as I accompanied her out of the school.

     We left the teachers looking baffled, just as they had left their students looking baffled every day - for all of their childhood. Erika took me to the Deaf club that evening and introduced me to all of her friends. Over and over, people asked me if I was Deaf or hearing when they saw me sign and finger-spell, and didn’t believe me when I answered truthfully. The few who did believe me, immediately dropped their hands and started speaking.

     I signed that I didn’t understand German (my first complete Austrian-Sign sentence) and that I preferred signing. Even so, a few never could sign to me. They were thoroughly brainwashed that speech, and speech alone, was the only way to talk to a hearing person—even in their own Deaf club.  Unlike Bernard Bragg or Dot Miles, they had swallowed the hearing society’s messages and were ashamed of themselves.

     Deaf Austrians began telling me their stories that night as I quickly learned as many Austrian signs as possible (one of my first lessons was that the American sign for “yes” is the Austrian sign for “idiot”). All the Deaf people I met over the age of 40 had been physically beaten for mispronouncing sounds they could not hear. All had learned that they were inferior to hearing people and that their signing was not only inferior to German, but was not even a language. Many expressed their gratitude that I, a hearing person, took an interest in them, implying that it was a complete sacrifice on my part.

     As I watched their stories - and their deference to a hearing person - I regretted being as polite as I’d been at the school for the deaf. The teachers I met there had never considered these children fully human. Education was not the goal of the school. Not one deaf child had ever been able to pass the test to enter gymnasium - the high school required for anyone wishing to attend university.

     The only time I ever experienced this kind of treatment of school children was when I was a substitute teacher in the Coachella Valley in the California. Ninety-nine percent of the children in that desert town were raised in Spanish-speaking homes, shopped at stores and went to churches and movie theaters where the only language they heard was Spanish. The first time these children heard English was when they went to school. And along with the new language came the message that they must learn and speak English properly. The children there must have been completely baffled by the demand to learn English, wondering what the school and the English-speaking Anglo teachers had to do with their lives.

     During my short teaching career there, I never saw one Anglo Saxon teacher make a personal connection with his or her Mexican-American student, and never heard one word of Spanish from a teacher. (Fortunately, this has changed.) As with the Austrian teachers, a basic message of equality was not as important as the message: to succeed, you must be like us.

     Because it involves identity, one’s natural language is part how we see who we are. We use language so much to define ourselves that we cannot easily separate ourselves from our symbolic expressions. We do not hold on to our native accents only because of physical or biological limits.

     From Quebec to Turkey to Indonesia, and to all countries with indigenous peoples ruled by conquering immigrants, there are or have been language wars. Native Americans, Gaels, Kurds, and thousands of other groups have suffered heavy losses. Hearing parents cannot imagine teaching their baby a different language from theirs. Yet, ironically, deaf babies of Deaf parents grow up bilingually. The first visual language provides their brains the tools to learn their society’s spoken language.

     In “Languages Under Attack” from Flutes of Fire, Leanne Hinton summarizes a language war that occurred in the early 1900s in native American schools. Hinton describes “forced eradication of the students’ native languages [which was] backed up by severe corporal punishment.” Deaf people in history, and worldwide, understand forced eradication policies painfully well. Their difference from the mainstream population is usually seen in a negative light. Since their superior visual thinking and expression remains unnoticed and unappreciated, the objective is to fix their hearing and their speech—to remove their difference.

     Signing draws attention to their difference and, therefore, is often forbidden. Conforming to the norm can look benevolent on paper in stated concerns for the welfare of the Native American or the deaf or Spanish-speaking child. The root of assimilation policies, however, is related to fear of difference. And this fear always leads to some form of oppression. Policies don’t rise out of a vacuum. They are extensions of the attitudes and opinions of individuals and communities.

     I observed that waiters in Austria seemed extremely slow to respond to customers who wore non-Austrian faces. In one café, I saw an older woman escort a young woman to a table. She sat across from her, then looked away while sipping her coffee. In a minute, I realized the younger woman was deaf and unable to speak clear German or understand the older woman.

     The younger woman must have been her daughter for every muscle in the older woman’s face was strained as if crying out, “Burden, burden, burden; look what I have had to endure.” The mother was trying to have coffee “alone” and her only communication to her daughter was to stop any behavior which brought attention. Through harsh looks and slaps on the hands, her daughter was constantly being punished for not being able to look, sound and act as a “normal” person. The mother sat rigid and glanced around in an apologetic manner as if to ask forgiveness for having such a child. (When I mentioned the mother to a Deaf Austrian, he told me a story I would have had trouble believing before I’d frequented Austrian cafés.)

      The month I arrived in Austria, Deaf citizens finally gained an audience with parliament after months of petitioning and preparation. Many meetings and plans preceded the big event. The wife of the president of the Austrian Association of the Deaf was to be the spokesperson. When the historic moment arrived, she announced she would speak for herself. No one, Deaf or hearing, understood what she said. Members of parliament only saw a very handicapped person in front of them. I wonder if any member realized that her only handicap was that she pretended to be hearing.

     Regardless of how much pressure to conform to hearing norms, many Deaf people could not learn their parents’ German, and they were reminded daily in gross and subtle ways by their parents, teachers and society, that they had failed. They believed they and their signing were inferior, and that they must never sign in front of a hearing person. (It was almost impossible for me to learn Austrian signs if the signer believed me to be hearing. Nonetheless, I kept trying.)

     While studying Austrian Sign Language, I was asked to give a talk in southern Austria and to offer advice on how the Austrian Deaf community might improve their situation. At first I was at a loss. It would be arrogant and ineffective for me, an outsider—hearing and non-Austrian—to point out what I thought they should do with their lives. I decided to simply tell them what I had observed in my own country, and describe what American Deaf people had done to improve their lot.  

     Before my invitation, I received a letter from England. A friend of Dot Miles informed me that Dot had died tragically, just two weeks before we moved to Europe. At that point, I knew what I had to take to southern Austria. In honor of Dorothy Miles, I would perform some of her poetry. In preparation, I asked about twenty people what was their sign, the Austrian sign, for “poetry.” Only one person showed me any sign—the American sign. This was the evidence that convinced me that these people believed they had no language.

     I saw beautiful expressions, clever jokes and heart-breaking stories at the Deaf club when they didn’t notice my hearing eyes. I knew they had poetry in their clubs and their homes, but they hid it and were ashamed.

     Poetry always celebrates individual or tribal differences. Whatever else it is, it is always a celebration of a specific language. Oppressed groups must begin their emancipation with self-acceptance—seeing their unique and equal selves. Almost immediately, the result is poetry—the group’s expression of their unique and equal contribution to the human community.

     African slaves were stripped of their names, their languages and their poetry. The only accepted avenue for group expression was through their masters’ language, religion, and Christian traditions. The Africans were not completely conquered. They used metaphors and analogies, singing and chanting about the enslaved Children of Israel. They sang to and for one another about the Promised Land, without enraging their masters. They created new poetry. Poetry thrives when people are forbidden to express the truth.

     “The roots of poetry,” writes Olga Carlisle, in Poets on Street Corners, “are buried deep in Russian history—a history of oppression and violence. … Poetry is the perfect means of expression for a suffering people.”

     Osip Mandelstam said, “Poetry is power.” Mandelstam chose to express his poems of truth even though they ushered in his imprisonment and death. He described himself when he wrote: “O my Fatherland, for your love, I’ll walk through life in an iron shirt. For my execution, I’ll find a handle for the ax.”

     Deaf Austrians, as a group, had not yet fully acknowledged the truth of their servitude to their hearing masters and had yet to create their version of Negro spirituals. Unlike Mandelstam who said the Russian word in and of itself is a symbol, they had yet to discover the symbols which represented them and told their stories. They had not yet shouted their symbols in defiance.

     So without a sign for poetry, I traveled to Villach in southern Austria to sign Dot Miles’ poems. I stood in front of a large Deaf audience and managed to introduce myself without an interpreter. Then I asked them what the difference was between everyday conversation—I mimed a hearing person casually speaking—and opera. I mimed a person singing with a wide open mouth, and in a dramatic pose. Everyone immediately answered with the Austrian sign for music—for the hearing culture’s beloved music, they had a sign.

     I used their sign for music and told them that Deaf people could make visual music with their signing. I shared what I had learned when I began to meet Deaf people. Americans first celebrated their Sign music on stage before they demanded anything from the hearing world. An inspired Deaf poet from England who helped Americans with their SIGN-MUSIC had recently died, I announced, concluding that I wished to honor her by showing them some of her MUSIC. I asked them to watch the MUSIC and I would translate the American signs, after they saw the poems.

     Dorothy Miles, along with other Deaf poets, celebrated what was unique to signing—sculpting the shape of the poem independent of the individual signs and meanings, for example, or experimenting with hand shapes. One poem started low and to my right and the signs moved upward, in an arch to the left and then gradually down and to my center, and then out to the audience. Miles gradually transformed one sign into another, or slightly changed one sign, in order to attach it to the next. Some of her transformations are magical. Their beauty needed no translation.

     While performing, I sensed the appreciation of the audience. I knew they would see Deaf music and understand the poet’s love of signing even though individual American signs had little or no meaning for them. The poem “Autumn” describes leaves falling from a tree. The poet’s hands are leaves and wind until the poet herself becomes the leaves, and they have eyes. In English, the words are “falling leaves awhirl in playful winds turn to watch people passing by.”

     After they saw a translation and the poems again, a young man jumped to the center of the stage and began a story: all the leaves from one tree had fallen except one. The remaining leaf was scared to jump, quivering and whimpering to the crowd below, which encouraged it to join them. The man received a great round of applause. Before he was back in his seat, another person was up performing. As I walked backwards, no longer a participant, I felt goosebumps rise. Before my eyes, Deaf Austrians were discovering themselves.

     Afterwards, people lined up to meet me. One by one they approached and introduced themselves. They celebrated while in line; there was a new pride. An impatient boy stared at me while he pranced back and forth, waiting for the line of adults to end. Finally, he seized my attention and demanded to see the tree poem again. I performed a smaller, quicker version for this eight or nine-year-old, then reminded him that it was in American Sign Language.

     He signed, “I know, I know. Do it again. And again.”

     He quickly signed the second I had finished. As I signed it the third time, I watched his studious and eager eyes, devouring every movement and hand shape. During the fifth encore, his face lit up with complete confidence. He thanked me, turned and disappeared into the crowd.

     I pictured that boy on the playground the next day sharing his new set of forbidden signs. Through Deaf clubs and soccer matches, the forbidden Deaf music would spread to other Austrian, Swiss, German and Czech playgrounds.

     I had a feeling that the boy would not introduce Dot Miles’ art with the sign for “music.” A new sign for self-expression would emerge along with new poems. When I think back to that night of joy, pride and celebration, I will cherish most the memory of the look of confidence on that young boy’s face, the face of a determined general.

     He had a plan.

© susan schaller, 2023