Iraqi Girl Whose Hearing Was Restored:
An Ongoing Misleading Celebration

Jamie Berke’s posting about whether Iraqi girl will be alive next year got my attention. I checked the article and I became highly disturbed by the headline about restoring one’s hearing. It has been an ongoing ill-advised and misleading term. No human being can restore anyone’s hearing; they can only amplify it. When batteries run low or expire, deafness merges as an inevitable—a reality.

This Iraqi girl does not hear the way hearing people normally hear. Although they both can hear a bird song, she will NOT be able to locate it. Her hearing is amplified, not restored. Amplification may be a miracle but hearing restoration is miraculous. No doctor anywhere has a supernatural power to make the Deaf hear.

How about Ephphatha? Ephphatha is the Greek form of an Aramaic word, meaning “Be opened,” and it was one of the characteristics of early Christians to put the foreign words in Christ’s mouth for one of his miraculous performances in healing the man who was deaf. There is no evidence that Christ spoke in the Aramaic language. Ephphatha has been the same term that inspires benevolence and charitableness toward the Deaf. The term Ephphatha appears on the official seal of Gallaudet University which is attributable to implicit efforts in restoring the Deaf to the hearing society.

What was charitable toward this Deaf Iraqi girl did not restore her hearing at all. It was just ill-advised and misleading. Hearing restoration is just another yet huge hoax.

Oral Education on the Shady Side of Hoax: Creating a Fool

Is JKF a fool? Before considering the various arguments about how oral education created a fool out of JKF, I need to have some appreciation of philosophical understanding of the term education as a process of acquiring general knowledge and developing the powers of reasoning and judgment for life. Oral Education is different. Oral Education is not about language and knowledge; it is about learning how to talk and how to read lips. Oral Education is not a process; it is on the shady side of hoax. And I will argue that JKF is a fool.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Plato (427-347 BC) founded the Academy in Athens which has often been described as the first university. Here people studied works in philosophy, politics, mathematics, theology, and the sciences for almost a thousand years.

Plato was always aware of his audience and wrote mostly in the form of a dialogue, with Socrates as the main character. Plato was skilled in using analogies – ways of comparing one thing with another to bring out their similarity. For example, in one of his books, Cratylus, Plato has Socrates question whether words be replaced by signs used by the Deaf for making meanings. Plato’s best known example of analogical work is the Allegory of the Cave.

This analogy can be found in Plato’s book, The Republic. It is Socrates as a main character who asks his fellow conversers to imagine a cave. Deep down at the bottom of this cave are a group of prisoners who were firmly bound to face in one direction only – the wall of the cave. These prisoners have been in this condition since they were very young and so the wall of the cave is the only life they have ever known. Behind the prisoners there is a bright fire, and between this fire and the prisoners are people walking by carrying artificial objects such as wooden figures of men, plants and animals. The fire casts a shadow of these objects onto the walls for the prisoners to see. The prisoners are not aware of what is happening behind them and so, for them, the reality consists of the shadows that are cast upon the wall of the cave. Even the voices of the people walking behind them they heard only from the shadows.

However, Socrates then tells about one of the prisoners who is freed from his chains, turns around to escape, and sees the sun and the people. The freed prisoner gets confused and painful; the sun is so bright and the people are like some creatures from another planet. The prisoner wants only to return to the safe and secure world that he has known but he can’t. Only over time does he gradually get used to the light, and he realizes it is the source of all things. He returns to the world of the cave and tells the other prisoners what he has seen. No one in the cave understands him, and he became a bumbling fool.

The curious tale of Plato’s Cave works on many levels. What is it meant to teach us? On one level, the audience of the time would have recognized the released prisoner who sees that there is a greater, better, truer world beyond the wall of the cave. On another level, the released prisoner is every philosopher who searches for truth and sees it as their mission in life to teach this truth to others regardless of being a fool.

JKF is now well known for growing up without ASL. She was bound in one direction only – talking like hearing people and not thinking about Deaf people. While a graduate student at Iowa, she was free one Friday evening to accompany her friend to a Deaf club. She saw ASL – the light of the Deaf. JKF did get confused by the language and culture of the Deaf in the beginning but she gradually got used to ASL which, she realized, is the source of all things in Deaf life.

Can JKF today return to the world of Oral Education and tell them about ASL - her newly acquired light? Yes, she can. However, she has since become a fool. For instance, JKF recently bumbled: All deaf people should have the chance to learn all languages and forms of communication that they will need when they grow up.”

Is JKF Deaf?

Yes! There are widespread linguistic and cultural anxieties and insecurities at Gallaudet University. As an intellectual community, we the Deaf now seem to exist in permanent fear of the oblivion in the top university leadership, worrying about whether we can survive the next administration with an indifferent figurehead.

At the same time, at Gallaudet University, we the Deaf appear uncomfortable with the achievements of our own past. The higher education, so often the means to our profession and advancement, now finds itself operating under a cloud of suspicion that it falls under a wrong agenda.

Disenchanted with our past history yet fearful of our future, we the Deaf appear stuck in today’s leadership at Gallaudet University where a mood of sadness and low expectations influence our discussion and discourses on many fronts - where our Deafness continues to be seen as the problem rather than the challenge. This irrational insight goes against the grain of Deaf history, which teaches that our language and culture called ASL does not lack human ingenuity and endeavor which have propelled us from the caves to something approaching civilization. However, the IKJ-JKF administration not only risks wasting the gains of our past, but also missing opportunities for our future advancement.

Asking the rhetorical question “Is JKF Deaf?” has long been considered a way of emphasizing that something under discussion is an obvious, unquestionable truth. If there are two things of which we are supposed to be certain beyond reasonable doubt, they are that JKF is indeed Deaf, and that bears really do shit in the woods!

ACTIVISM: A Story of my Own

I wrote the following in Mizhkazena's bloqsite. I did some editing.

Every Deaf person has a story about activism. This is mine.

If you have a copy of Jack Gannon's book, Week the World Heard Gallaudet, you will find two pictures of me. Of all the DPN duckies, I am considered crazy and radical. I was EXTREMELY disappointed by IKJ's appointment at the helm (not help) of Gallaudet University because he switched his support between the Board of Trustees and the protest. IKJ was a discussion topic in my graduate classes at American University during and after the demonstration, and we concluded that he was not sincere and genuine. I did share my reflections with numerous colleagues and students at Gallaudet and that was why I was crazy. IKJ was the first deaf icon as if it were really so.

In fall 1990, I got invited to talk to a group of student leaders about activism. My theme was: Education Generates Activism. We discussed how the Soviet regime had collapsed due to higher education that empowers people to understand humanities and hypocrites. Change is inevitable. I asked these students if Deaf Education does inform citizenry. Are we the Deaf the body of citizens to be heard in one voice? Not yet! I believe that my talk had triggered some students to stage some small campus protests which ended with a casualty.

I immediately became a scapegoat. The students got angry at me. The Administration did nothing to minimize their anger. There was an insidious plan at Gallaudet University to remove me from my professoriate. Later in the court, a hearing representative lectured to me about the gag rules limiting and prohibiting my freedom to discuss my unfortunate situation at Gallaudet University.

The term activism was subtly replaced by the term advocacy. I disagreed. Martin Luther King was not an advocate but an activist. Advocacy implies that I support any group for which I am not or cannot be a member. I can advocate women because I am not a woman. I can advocate black people because I am not black. I can advocate children because I am not a child. As for Deaf people, I am an activist. I believe firmly that any Deaf person who says he or she advocates Deaf people, he or she either says to please hearing people or is ignorant of what advocacy entails.

(What about BDA-Black Deaf Advocacy-, you may wonder. Easy! This organization was initiated by the "all-white" NAD back then who wished to advocate African American Deaf people.)

Deaf society--our culture, our heritage, our tradition--has undergone dramatic change just within my lifetime. To live with change, to optimize change, we need to engage in our activism.

JKF’s First Stage: Denial

The memorandum summarizing the recent GUFSSA meeting with President designate Jane K. Fernandes suggests that she is a grim leader whose difficult enterprise was pronounced DUA—dead upon arrival. JKF claimed that the student protest last May had caught her unawares. How was it possible? From her appointment as provost six years ago to her selection as university president last May, she was meted out by powerful faculty criticism. Was she unaware or in the know? I was shocked by her adverse indifference.

Of all the betrayals that JKF must have suffered implicitly, perhaps the most poignant of all is the betrayal of her self. No example of this is more striking than when she remains committed to her unbeknownst, that archetypal leadership which will prevent her from ever becoming a conscious administrator. JKF is in a denial stage, the first stage in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of a grief cycle in which she thinks that it isn’t happening to her. With time, she will go through next four stages: anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Within each of us, Deaf and hearing alike, can be found varying degrees of some, if not all, of these grief stages. Some stages may appear to be more “positive” than others, but don’t be fooled. All of them, however seemingly benign, are dangerous in an overall life. Until JKF is able to identify which particular grief stage, for example, she will be unable to continue as an effective campus leader at Gallaudet University. Some will identify most strongly with one of the stages; others may relate to aspects of many or all of them. Whichever stage(s) JKF should be able to identify with, would become the indicator of how her allegiance to the Gallaudet University community plays out, and thus how she would be most stuck in this archetypal leadership. This is not going to happen for a long time.

We can never afford any inadvertence, indifference, and obliviousness at Gallaudet University. This must never happen. I regret but offer an obituary for the death of JKF’s higher education leadership: “Where darkness and oblivion reigns."

I am in the newspaper today!

http://www.haleakalatimes.com/news/story2188.aspx

I'm really excited about exploring the road less traveled on this beautiful, rural island of Maui in Hawaii.

The Power of Playing in ASL

ASL is the most complexly intelligent and powerful language we the Deaf have. When playing in ASL, there are no rules. Playing in ASL brings out all the language tools we have at our disposal. Playing in ASL is not only fun, it’s one of the most important ways we can nurture our language development. Each of us is unique. We each have our own preferences for how ASL is played. Some like lots of action in ASL; others prefer more poetic, calm play in ASL.

Playing in ASL is a skill that takes a lot of time and practice to develop. From day one, Deaf children, if exposed to ASL, develop the kind of concentration, passion, and creative excitement that ASL brings to them. On the other hand, students of ASL as a second language can go from imitating what they see in ASL to using their imagination in ASL. Both Deaf children and ASL students use their hands and fingers for describing different objects. This allows them to do it again… and again… and again…to acquire and incorporate ASL. Through repetition, they figure out how ASL works. This kind of language repetition helps them know what to expect in ASL, how to predict in ASL, and when to boost their self-confidence in using ASL.

Playing in ASL doesn’t always have to be full of action. Looking at books, reading stories, and translating them into ASL do help us to build our imagination and literacy skills. If we choose to act it out, we can have fantasy play in ASL, using items like hats, magic wands and whatever else we can find. When we do, we expand on our ideas and also bring about our thoughts and feelings as we act out through playing in the language we know the best.

Playing in ASL is not a task. It’s fun and spontaneous. Playing in ASL is powerful.

Diversity at Gallaudet University is racist
I am half white (Full disclosure: I was born to Indonesian father and Dutch mother but I look brown, neither Indonesian nor Dutch) and I think diversity is racist. It is racist because it presumes that the color of an African American or the surname of a Hispanic defines her thinking, that somehow she will bring something different to the intellectual table just because she looks African American or her last name sounds Hispanic. Talk about shallowness!

I do generally agree that there must be a way of getting around doing anything substantial about providing Deaf people with the opportunity to better themselves in the way they themselves see fit (as opposed to being told they are better off because Gallaudet University President designate JKF is now trying to articulate between two schools—the Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences Department, that works on cochlear implants, and the ASL Department, that provides education in sign language, deaf culture and deaf history.) Gallaudet University should be the community of alienation, accommodation and affirmation wherein each school pursues its core subject matter. For example, ASL Department is about ASL per se, not “education in sign language, deaf culture and deaf history.”

Some say a degree of diversity is a good thing, but within certain demographics it has overwhelmed the old Gallaudet politics, and there are plenty of people in this or that minority culture for whom the old-fashioned non-cultural politics is more relevant. For most people of any group, including the minority groups, the specifically diversity issues are a small proportion of the actually important yet colorblind issues affecting Deaf people everywhere.

I think that diversity should be pretty much extinct at Gallaudet University, in the sense that Gallaudet is quite welcoming to anyone Deaf. That hasn’t always been true. Language, communication and skin color racism exists in the term of subtle diversity at Gallaudet University.

Beware of Allness: Inside JKF’s Mind

Two roads diverged…. In the August 2006 issue of Education Update Online, President designate Jane K. Fernandes is quoted: “All deaf people should have the chance to learn all languages and forms of communication that they will need when they grow up.” All deaf people? All languages? It is difficult to give an exact figure of the number of Deaf people and languages that exist in the world, because it is not always easy to define who, not what, a Deaf human being is and what a language is. All forms of communication? It is also difficult to define which form of communication is best and effective. No, Deaf people don’t need all languages and all forms of communication. Thank you! Don’t push Deaf children too hard with “all languages and forms of communication.” Thank you! It is an old school of thought. It is also purely an offensive joke!

When we contemplate the extraordinary abilities and accomplishments of Deaf people, it is certainly hard to avoid their language and its embedded culture. ASL enables us to process symbols in our brain or in the mind, which in turn empowers us to abstract elements of our experience and to represent them with discrete mental symbols. It was what we did while growing up. Research by Anita K. Barry in her book, Linguistic Perspectives on Language and Education, suggests that there are numerous possibilities that language may have been invented not by adults but by children. If we create any other form of communication or use any other language for Deaf children, we are in danger of imposing other values on them.

Fernandes’ allness statement is what I feared innocent people would think. That’s why I am so embarrassed. Look here, I am certainly no expert in this “all languages and forms of communication” thing; I have only discovered it in the Education Update Online, so far be it from me to tell what it all really amounts to. But this Fernandes does tell us—all of us, me as well as you—what it all amounts to inside her mind. And if everything she said is true, then what it amounts to compared to everything else I have ever known is like all bananas compared to all oranges. No, I don't know all languages and use all forms of communication. I think I am all but "one traveler."

A Story from my Desk Calendar

I have a teacher's daily desk calendar. It was one of presents for this year that I got from my students which was nice. On Wednesday, September 20th, there is a story page on my calendar that I had deliberately ignored. In its opening sentence it mentions something about a church, and to me all churches practice the tenth coin capitalism. I was clearly not interested. However, for some reason it sat on my desk for a while so I decided to give myself the benefit of doubt. I read it. Alas, I want to share it with you guys. Here it goes:

One Sunday morning in the parking lot of the church, I saw Kelly fall down and skin her knee. She had obviously hurt herself, and her little knee was bleeding. But she didn't cry, even though her face showed the pain she felt. She ran past us into the church, still not crying. I followed her inside to see if I could help. Kelli ran through the foyer looking up into the faces of the women, still not crying.

Stooping down, I stopped her and asked, "Kelli, can I help?"

"No! I need my mama!" She said as she dashed away.

Finally she saw Susan with one of the students in our sign language class. Kelli ran to her mother, pulled her face down so that Susan was looking directly into her face, and then she began to scream and cry just like any other hurt child. But she had waited until she was actually looking into her mother's face because she knew her mother could not hear her cry.

__excerpt from "No One Else Will Do" in Hugs for Women.

I felt a knot in my stomach because (1) I hate a surprise ending; (2) I don't think it's a unique way to tell a story about "sign language"; (3) we need better of this type of writing about ASL.

The Road through the Forest:
The sign glossed as LESBIAN was used for the English word lunch.

Now that I have captured your attention here I want to share with you Arne Naess’ contemporary and ecological philosophy which intrigued me to write this post. I am talking about how interpreter training programs across the nation have shaped us as Deaf people, as Deaf community, as Deaf life. Here is an excerpt from David Rothenberg’s book Is It Painful to Think?

DR (David Rothenberg): Right. However you look at it (the Fifth Symphony), it’s still an abstract structure. Well, OK, how would you use this to talk about some kind of problem in the world, some sort of environmental quandary, since that is your stated aim of this approach?

AN (Arne Naess): Well, let us consider a forest, and discuss plans for building a road through this forest. A technocrat might say the road through the forest is only one one-millionth part of this forest, and it doesn’t matter at all to have that road. But then critics would say, “Well, it should not go through the heart of the forest.” And they say, “Heart of the forest, nonsense! Let’s have facts here,” and for facts, he points out the abstract structure of geography and he says, “This is the real forest, here.” And for him the “real” forest is what I call an “abstract structure.” And if most people are overwhelmed by these abstract structures, they say, “Let us have the road, because this talk about the heart of the forest, and of the different qualities you have in the forest if it is far from any road, that is just subjective, and those who feel them are a small minority.”

DR: Well, what if he instead asks, “You people who are looking at the heart of the forests, what’s your intention, what’s the limit of your consideration? You’re thinking of this as some abstract thing that you want to protect, with a heart and all this. Whereas I am thinking of all the people living on the two sides of the forest, how they use the forest, how they need to communicate with each other. I have a larger gestalt in mind, and your view is too limited, because it looks only at the heart of the forest for you.”

AN: No. Some of the people living around the forest do not communicate only with themselves, but with the forest as well. They go into the woods, and therefore they have a richer part of reality within reach. The more people around who have this and can articulate them what they have, and can point out that what this technocrat has in mind is destructive, the better.

I recently made some small research and discovered some bewildering course descriptions for interpreter students. Implicitly they are developed to discriminate against Deaf people from obtaining a college/university teaching or coordinating position. Let me make a list of course descriptions from various colleges and universities along with their website for your reflections and reactions. And ask whether these course descriptions were developed by hearing “technocrats” presumably to build “the road through the forest”…”one-one millionth part” of the forest? Ask whether it matters at all if Deaf people do not teach or coordinate any of them?

Nashville State Community College (www.nscc.edu)

ASL 2210 Contact Signing I. An introduction to various transliterating systems: Pidgin Signed English (PSE), Signing Exact English (SEE), and other coding systems. Students gain the ability to discriminate between ASL interpretations and varying degrees of English transliterations and learn to distinguish the appropriate context for utilizing each signed system.

University of Louisville (www.louisville.edu)

HV 2474 .C65 1995 ASL / PSE Grammar & Sentence structures: Comparative translations. Demonstrates and explains the difference between sentences in written English, American Sign Language and Pidgin Sign English.

The Community College of Baltimore County (www.ccbcmd.edu)

INTR 221 – English-to-Sign Transliterating. Provides the opportunity to study principles and techniques involved in transliterating from spoken English to a signed form of English; examines transliterating skills such as restructuring, mouthing, and use of ASL features.

Community College of Philadelphia (www.ccp.edu)

INT 255 Transliterating 2-2-3. Transliteration between spoken and signed English messages, focusing on secondary and post-secondary educational settings. Course work includes analysis and interpretation of the macrostructure and microstructure of academic texts, translating frozen texts, and the application of interpreter management strategies frequently used in educational settings. Students work with rehearsed and unrehearsed texts.

Quincy University (www.quincy.edu)

ITP 212 - Interpreting II. Assists students with the process of taking a signed message and conveying it into spoken English. Designed to provide in-class experience of simultaneous sign language interpreting, including interpreting vs. transliterating techniques. Focus on the voice interpreting process, vocal control, voicing techniques, lipreading skills, vocal expression, word choice, and changes that occur in context. Emphasis will be given to the development of voicing and expressive skills in both interpreting and transliterating and rules of ASL and spoken English.

Illinois State University (www.ilstu.edu)

SED330 English Sign Systems. Examines the use of visual English systems in educational settings. Introduces basic school vocabulary and characteristics of English sign systems. Includes sign proficiency exam required for student teaching.

Kirkwood University (www.kirkwood.edu)

SI231T Interpreting I. Teaches students how to analyze a variety of types of texts and interpret them into American Sign Language and Conceptually Accurate Signed English. Students contract for a grade. Extensive use of videotaping is required for individualized feedback and skill development.

Georgia Perimeter College (www.gpc.edu)

INTP 2934 Transliteration (3) This course builds a foundation of skills for transliterating from spoken English to signed English. Emphasis is on consistency and conceptual accuracy. Students will receive extensive practice in source materials from academic settings.

The list goes on and on. I'm simply amazed at the same time I am excited that we are going to put a firm stop on any trivial system that aims at bastardizing ASL. Let me now paraphrase Naess' statement that the more we expand and expose college level ASL, the better we can ridicule those speech support sign/sign support speech system (SSSSSSS) "technocrats."

With ALOHA always for ASL!

Auntie Sophie:
Questions and Answers*

Q: I watched JKF sign and speak, and it was a really good lecture. I was on a positive "high" for the moment. Unfortunately, I could not keep this higher level, and I crashed. When returning to my own life routine, after listening to JKF, how can I keep the good feeling with me?

A: This is a common occurence. We must always remember that JKF signs very well inasmuch as she speaks very clearly. This is a great accomplishment there is no limit to what a qualified Deaf Education leader can transmit if we can understand our goal of educational leadership.

The goal of a qualified Deaf Education leader should make himself or herself clear in both signing and speaking. Instead of feeling bummed out, we can instead feel very happy that we do have JKF speak and sign.

It is complete natural for Deaf individuals like yourself to have this kind of reaction, but it is important to remember that if we do what JKF does signing and speaking, eventually this state of unconditional signing-speaking bliss will be held continuously. Over time we will learn to recognize the richness of signing and speaking co-existence. The transmission of JKF is the basis for this kind of development that JKF's girl gang calls "walk our talk."

Q: I understand that if we "walk our talk", the result eventually comes up with something bad. I also understand that if you sign without speak, then the unfortunate situation is to get a truly qualified interpreter to voice good English for you. Is this view correct?

A: Well, you need to understand that "walk our talk" is an unquestionable phrase about black people walking and talking like white people. However, I think your question is talking about cause and effect for deaf people signing and speaking like hearing people.

Gallaudet University is based on the educational philosophy that Deaf people have diversity potential to learn, thrive, and succeed. Our job is to find the way in which each Deaf individual learns best to sign and speak. JKF's ability to sign and speak is a successful story Gallaudet University wishes to exemplify to the world.

Gallaudet University is a federally funded, private institution for Deaf intellectuals who have hearing disabilities and speaking differences. Gallaudet University was established in 1984 under the name of College for the Deafmutes. Thereafter, the name was changed to Gallaudet College and then Gallaudet University. Gallaudet University is led by its President, not a Board of Trustees as thought by some Deaf squabblers, who is dedicated to providing a successful signing and speaking environment.

Gallaudet University is proud of highly trained hearing and non-hearing faculty on campus. Our professors provide with an exciting learning environment that meets students' need to learn how to sign and speak within their field of study.

Our educational goal is to teach our students to sign ASL and talk English. Gallaudet University supports that ASL and English co-exist; therefore, signing and speaking co-esixt.

Q: Can Carl Schroeder sign and speak?

A: GALLAUDET University continues to encourage all deaf people, including Carl, to sign and speak. Like JKF, all deaf people can communicate using perfect ASL and talking perfect English.

If I did not bore you to tears already, I have ... Oh yes, let me emphasize something novel and exciting that Gallaudet University has recently distinguished three types of deaf people:

Type A: NOT deaf enough to sign and speak;

Type B: Deaf NOT enough to sign and speak; and

Type C: Deaf enough NOT to sign and speak.

These labels will be attributed to the JKF wisdom that will eventually be compared to a clear three-side crystal that shines in the color of "signing and speaking coexistence"

Are you still there? Signing and speaking? I hope so, Auntie S

*Blogger's note: Auntie Sophie is very knowledgeable and conveys the new "sign and speak" concept quite well. She is a good example, and, as a fictional woman giving advices, has broken a lot of communication ground. My intent, however, is not to judge or criticize but to simply ridicule the ongoing "sign and speak" practice on Kendall Green.

Ryan Commerson: A Deaf Warrior

Warrior is not like a soldier whose sole purpose is to obey orders. A warrior has the highest self-actualization. A Deaf Warrior, on the other hand, aims at self-empowerment.

Having recently watched Ryan's ASL version of Social Justice at Gallaudet University, I came up with two questions for this post. Who are we as 21st-century Deaf people? What is our purpose at this time in this vast universe? Although there is no simple answer to them, Ryan Commerson has revealed three merging things in his vlog:

1. We the Deaf have a deep-longing to live as powerful people, to share our creativity with our world and to make meaningful connections.

2. We the Deaf people have suffered an inordinate amount of language bigotry that has left us deeply wounded.

3. If our wounds remain untreated, we the Deaf will be unable to reach our full potential as strong people.

We the Deaf have experienced an ordinate amount of language oppression at a very early age. JKF, for example, was first betrayed by her own parents who did not know how to effectively deal with her "differentness"--an euphemism for her being unable to hear. Her mother who cannot hear too taught her to pretend that she wasn't different from others, even though JKF, on some level, knew she was. From her own betrayal, JKF learned to become an inevitable opportunist.

How opportunistic is JKF? When I was in college back in 1973, I studied under JKF's husband James who was the coolest "skateboard" professor on campus. James, yes, that was how we called him back then, introduced me to his vast collection of famous speeches by Deaf people, especially speeches by Laurent Clerc and some other Deaf leaders during WWI and WWII. We had fascinating discussion about them, and he explained that he was interested in how words were selected for speeches by these Deaf people, especially Laurent Clerc who addressed Congress. Boy did I admire his work, and he was genuine. Today James' original work--notes, comments, and articles/letters/speeches--became JKF's book propaganda. I flipped over her opportunist stance. She does not display any behavior that makes her a Deaf Warrior.

While Gallaudet University praises JKF's doctoral work covering ASL and literature, we have yet to see her dissertation. Was it written for publishing? Publishing is important to our intellectual and academic life. JKF needs to expose her doctoral work to constructive criticism so she could participate in the lifelong learning process that is the essence of our literacy, namely ASL literature. Instead, we read about the murkiness regarding her tenure award, "prepared by Dr. Karen Kimmel, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Technologies" as posted in www.9thprez.com.

The good news is, we will continue to discover the root causes of academic hypocritism implicitly practiced and projected at Gallaudet University. The bad news is, the Administration and the Board of Trustees will not be able to see those "root causes." They are working so hard among the trees they can't see the forest.

I've made my own Deaf Warrior vow, and whatever it transmits to my readers can only be within the range of my vow. As Deaf Warrior I must not spend way too much time with trees to see the forest. Ryan, thank you for making me see the forest where the trees are.

Another response to Ridor's Observe But Do Not Interfere

Carl Schroeder Says: September 23rd, 2006 at 2:46 am

Ridor’s readers:

I believe I began to tell some people that, after IKJ replaced JKF with Roz, IKJ should be advised that he was overstaying his welcome at Gallaudet University. Research shows that a University presidency is best if it lasts only for seven to eight years. The IKJ’s 10th anniversary was understandable but I thought IKJ would be more honorable and respectful if he bowed out to make good future precedences in that the Gallaudet University presidency be short and sweet. Well, I was criticized for being too radical, liberal and crazy. I should not have said so because IJK is all too icon and historical. I was also accused of being embittered with Gallaudet, which was far from truth. (Ricky can vouch this that I asked him from Gallaudet University to talk to my ASL students at Montgomery College several years ago.)

Right now I am watching Gallaudet University with awe. As former SBG president (1979-80), I couldn’t help but feel humble to realize that the seeds for student leadership were planted over years, and today they are definitely workable and meaningful.

May my story become your story in that no one should overstay his or her welcome. Mahalo for everything!

My response to Ridor's Observe But Do Not Interfere: September 22nd

Carl Schroeder Says: September 22nd, 2006 at 2:11 pm
First, I want to thank Patti for posting the letter about “purebloods” and “mudbloods.”

“I shall be telling this with a sigh…” (Line 16 in The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost) Is the “sigh” regret or satisfaction? Does it offer regret or satisfaction? This “sigh” line is the first line in the last stanza of the poem, and it echoes the first stanza with the same words and phrases: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” I have two interpretations leading to my own “sigh”: (Interpretation 1) The speaker hesistates before he took the less-traveled road; (Interpretation 2) The speaker stands for a long time before choosing the road less-traveled; (my own “sigh”) Like the speaker, I’ve hestitated many times before I decided to do something. Here I go….

In ten years from now, somewhere on the road I’m embarking, these women authors will be understood as six racist (Diversity is racist because it practices race profiling, period!) “musketeerettes” sword-fighting with nobody. They simply staged a fearsome and frightening fight for the benefit of status quo and diversity at Gallaudet University. What a sigh!

A Dirty Jewish Myth


One day the scientists decided that mankind no longer needed God, so one of them went to Him, bearing the news. "God," he said, "we don't need you anymore. We can do our own miraculous things. We can clone people on our own. So why don't you just get lost?" God was patient and kind. "Very well," He replied. "If that is how mankind feels, then let us resolve this with a contest. Let us see who can make a man." "Sure," said the scientist, "that's fine with me." "But there is one condition," said God, "We will do this just the way it was done the first time when I created Adam." "Sure, no problem," said the scientist. He bent down to grab a handful of dirt. "No, no, no," said God. "You go get your own dirt."

Label of the Year at Gallaudet: Mudbloods

I noticed. I laughed. I worried.

“Mudbloods” is a brand new unknown label, and, ladies and gentlemen, another label, however predictable, precedes it: “purebloods”. Stories about mud can be funny but stories about labeling Deaf people can be a bloody shame.

Labeling people is the product of strained leadership. For example, President Nixon was well known for labeling others to get into power and eventually to loose it. Labeling at Gallaudet University has become necessary because it's fun (1) to deliberately confound Deaf people with the unknown; (2) to have a good laugh at their expense; and (3) ultimately to maintain the status quo, ensuring Deaf people remain disempowered while the privileged few entertain a new mental plantation. Can you now notice why I laughed and worried?

What do I mean by “to deliberately confound”, “to have a good laugh”, and “to maintain the status quo”? Gallaudet University is now in a leadership transition, and it is also a good time to use a rotational grazing system that requires moving Deaf people around Kendall Green. By giving them labels, they simply get confused and by nature they need to go where they could become clear again … in the light of new mental plantation at Gallaudet University. I understand this is not something to laugh about; however, for the most part Deaf people are easily misunderstood. Their language easily misinterpreted. Their culture easily misclassified. Their labels easily mishandled. Are Deaf people still stuck in the mud in higher education? Are they still dragged through the mud? Are they still mud in your eyes? See why I laughed? But I became worried. To paraphrase Ovid’s opening statement in Metamorphoses, my mind leads me to something new, to tell of labels changed to other bodies.

Here are ten reasons to change the status quo at Gallaudet University:

10. Especially in a time of transition, alumni are a very important part of the Gallaudet community. (Brenda Jo Brueggemann in the August 1, 2006 letter to Gallaudet Alumni)

9. Dr. Fernandes embodies the qualifications, skills, character, and commitment to the university that are essential to success and high achievement. (Donna Ryan in the March 9, 2006 letter to the President Search Committee.

8. As president, Jane Fernandes will empower members of the Gallaudet community to see that the present is a new opportunity for bold change that cannot imitate the past if it is to ensure the future. (Jane Norman and Carol McCaskill objecting Lillian Topkins)

7. It is this very knowledge of and appreciation for all influences on deaf life and deaf culture that will allow her to be a president to all deaf people. (Shirley Schultz Myers on the nomination of JKF)

6. It is easier to sling mud at her [JKF] because she is a woman. (Barbara Kannapell, May 12, 2006)

5. Girl, you have what it takes. (Darius McCall, former SBG president)

4. I have said, and will continue to say to those who expressed disappointment in my selection, that there is indeed more that unites than divides us. (JKF in the address to the Iowa Association of the Deaf on the occasion of the IAD 125th Anniversary Celebration)

3. In fact, some of the best decisions that have a very positive long-term effect are not popular to begin with. (Wayne Sinclair, one of my favorite teachers at MSD)

2. I hope we can count on your support. (IKJ)

1. “Certifying only one deaf background as acceptable is reactionary and exclusionary-we cannot have a world of “purebloods” and “mudbloods” in a socially just and inclusive university community.” (Now why labeling "purebloods" and "mudbloods"?)

In these past six months, numerous labels have materialized as playing cards: "Deaf absolutists", "not deaf enough", and now "mudbloods". Why labeling? Mudbloods is now the Label of the Year at Gallaudet, and I am very worried!

The Zebra Storyteller and the Deaf

I've read many, many stories but this particular story about a cat speaking another language. It reminisces me about how hearing people use our language only to make some Deaf individuals "fit to be tied." I developed some lead questions after this story for our thinking. Here it goes:

The Zebra Storyteller by W. Spencer (1993)



Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic.

That language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa.

Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet.

"Hello there!" says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic. "It certainly is a pleasant day, isn't it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing; isn't the world a lovely place to live today?"

The zebra is so astonished at hearing a Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why--he's fit to be tied.

So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den.

The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet magnon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow ties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court.

He began boasting to his friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact that he hunted zebras.

The delicate noses of the zebras told them there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion.

One day the storyteller of zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots for stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly the eyes brightened, and he said, "That's it! I'll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That'll make 'em laugh!"

Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him, and said, "Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn't it?

The zebra storyteller wasn't fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he'd been thinking about that very thing.

He took a good look at the cat, and he didn't know what, but there was some-thing about his looks he didn't like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him.

That is the function of a storyteller.

Some questions to ponder and philosophize:

For the most obvious reason, I like this story. It requires my imaginations to revulse myself with questions about Deaf life. My first question to lead other questions here is: What is inappropriate about a cat speaking Zebraic? Why does the cat speak Zebraic perfectly and yet we are told that this is "inappropriate"? What does "fit to be tied" mean? Why is the cat able to tie up a zebra and to kill it? Why is the cat fashion conscious? Why do superstitious zebras think that they are being preyed on by ghosts of lions? Why does the zebra storyteller kill the cat? Who does the cat remind us of? How are zebras like Deaf people? Can a Deaf storyteller do what the zebra storyteller did to the cat? What then is the job of a Deaf storyteller?

ASL Teaching Technique:
From Nothing to What-ism

"What is your technique?" I have been asked of teaching ASL more than any other question. And how does one acquire technique; and how long does it take? And, in my wildest possible guess, these questions might have been asked in ancient Greece, according to Plato in CRATYLUS, of which language I know nothing. Yet, I'm fully conscious of nothing that might be called technique; but there are specific things to be accomplished by every ASL instructor and definite ways of accomplishing them.

There are two indisputable facts about this art of teaching ASL that may be considered carefully and with profit: that our language instrument is our movement; that we work with, and by means of, signs. ASL is a movement language; signs must always be in the motion.

I think there are many who are particularly sensitive to all parts of signs, and most particularly to the movements. I am one of these. Throughout my childhood and youth I signed, studied signs, wanted to be an instructor of the language I know the best. Very early my capacity for listening was acquired. When I enrolled in Gallaudet University, the world's only center of higher learning exclusively for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., I found that one of the first essentials was to be able to listen to myself. To listen with accuracy and honesty to all parts of signs I used: the hand shapes, the palm orientations, the locations, the non-manual cues, and, the most important of all, the movements. They are the rainbow colors of ASL, and I was fortunate in having some good college buddies whose movements in ASL could trigger my laughter or tears.

I have never ceased to be grateful for my own intuition for ASL, but I could also never forget what Professor Emeritus Shirley Stein, a CODA, said about ASL. She was one of the greatest tenors in what I'd call "the golden age of ASL critics," but she stopped early that she might teach. In the course, Semantic Aspects of Communication, she argued that some certain parts of ASL (pointing, indexing and classifiers) were what she called Deaf-ism. Her what-ism term!

So what! By telling my story, I become objective in my own experience. I separate it from myself. I either pin down certain truths or make up others. In this post, I started with an incident that truly happened, like the question of my ASL teaching technique, and I carried it forward by introducing a situation that generated the term Deaf-ism which was made up. However, this nonetheless helps to clarify and explain my purposes here. And yet I remain skeptical of the term Deaf-ism as a valuable tool for my ASL teaching technique. Linguistics informs me that all parts of signs, perceptible and imperceptible, are meaningful linguistic units. End of discussion!

The Best Cartoon I've Ever Seen!

Yes ... This is my boy!

These pictures were taken a month after Justin began at Wingate University in North Carolina.

Yes ... This is my girl!

This is my daughter Vivienne in my class shirt at Gallaudet University! I'm proud!

How Dangerous Can This Be?
Notice: PERSONS ATTEMPTING to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
__The opening of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Here on Maui, far away from the D.C. Deaf elitism, I have to ask myself whether Mark Twain could fathom an era of First Amendment suppression at Gallaudet University. With the 28 June memo "Guidelines for Expressive Activities and Assemblies" at Gallaudet University taking center stage in campus debates, the selection of Jane K. Fernandes couldn’t be more timely. To be sure, we all could be escaped from our collective journey without being prosecuted, and no one of us gets shot, I need to ask if anyone has been banished for attempting to find out about the truth in the following text prepared and published in JKF’s 9thprez blogsite by Professor Kimmel, CLAST Dean:

1. In November 2004, chair of the ASL and Deaf Studies Department, Dr. MJ Bienvenu informed the dean of CLAST, Dr. Karen Kimmel, that the department members unanimously decided to request that Dr. Jane Fernandes be appointed to full professorship and receive tenure in the ASL and Deaf Studies Department because of her expertise, scholarship, and many contributions to the field of ASL and Deaf Studies. When queried by the dean, Dr. Bienvenu stated that this request was initiated by the department. Dr. Fernandes had been asked if she were interested after the department members discussed the concept. She stated that Dr. Fernandes did not initiate this request.

2. The dean contacted Committee A (Committee on Faculty Welfare) chair, Dr. James Nickerson, to alert him to the request. The dean asked him to review the documents. He stated that there should be no problem with the request.

3. In February 2005, Dr. Nickerson reviewed all applications for tenure, appointment and promotion. He signed the ASL and Deaf Studies Department's request for Dr. Fernandes' appointment to full professor (the A-1 form) and the Department's request for tenure (the A-5 form).

4. The requests for promotion, tenure, and appointments are sent to the dean's administrative assistant and reviewed for completion by a member of Committee A. Dr. James Nickerson, chair of Committee A, reviewed and signed the requests. The dean had pulled the Fernandes file to determine if she held degrees and had experiences that fit with the department's allied fields. The dean noted that Dr. Fernandes has served as chair and faculty member of the Sign Communication Department (formerly the ASL Department and now the ASL and Deaf Studies Department) in 1987 and had taught ASL at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. and in Hawaii. Her degrees in French and comparative literature fit within the department's allied fields as other members hold degrees in English and English literature. The knowledge of second languages, literatures and cultures was considered to be an important aspect of Dr. Fernandes' potential membership in the Department. (Not thinking of the next step, the dean then filed this request folder in her file cabinet.)

5. The administrative assistant prepared the documents for the Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee review (note that Fernandes' file is in the dean's filing cabinet).

6. In March, the CLAST Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee met to review and make recommendations regarding promotion, tenure, and appointment requests for CLAST faculty. The dean filed their recommendations in her filing cabinet and noticed that she had left the original request for appointment and tenure for Fernandes in her file and had not given them to the administrative assistant. The dean contacted each member of the Promotion and Tenure Advisory Board during spring break to ask them to review a request from the ASL and Deaf Studies Department for appointment and tenure for Dr. Jane Fernandes. Eight members of the nine-member CLAST Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee reviewed Dr. Fernandes' portfolio individually. (One member was on travel during spring break and was unable to review the portfolio.)

7. Based on the request of the ASL and Deaf Studies Department and the recommendations of the CLAST Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee, and the contents of the Fernandes portfolio, the dean recommended Dr. Jane Fernandes for appointment and tenure in the Department of ASL and Deaf Studies.

8. The dean sent all recommendations for promotion, appointment, and tenure to Provost Jane Fernandes' office for her decisions with the exception, of course, of documents related to her appointment and tenure.

9. The recommendation for appointment and tenure for Dr. Jane Fernandes were sent directly to President Jordan's office.

10. In May 2005, recommendations for appointment and tenure were approved by the Board of Trustees including that of Dr. Jane Fernandes.

11. During the summer 2005, Faculty Chair, Mark Weinberg stated that he did not know that Dr. Fernandes had been recommended for appointment and tenure. He questioned the dean, the ASL and Deaf Studies chair, and the chair of Committee A about the process by which Dr. Fernandes was awarded appointment and tenure to the ASL and Deaf Studies Department. The above information was presented to the chair of the Faculty Senate. Weinberg's suspicions were raised when he reviewed the Fernandes documents and did not find a signed A-5 form (Request for Tenure).

12. The dean stated that she must have lost the A-5 form, but that both the A-1 and the A-5 had been signed. The chair of the ASL and Deaf Studies Department concurred. The chair of Committee A did not recall signing the A-5 form. Despite verification by the chair of ASL and Deaf Studies, the dean of CLAST, and proof that the members of the CLAST Promotion and Tenure Advisory Committee reviewed the request, there remained skepticism about the process. The appointment and request for tenure of Jane Fernandes were followed according to the Faculty Guidelines, but the lost document (and the lack of recollection of the Chair of Committee A) raised concerns and suspicion about the process.

13. The dean of CLAST has taken full responsibility for the lost A-5 document.

14. In May 2006, the CLAST dean was cleaning her file cabinet and noticed a plastic file folder lying on the bottom of the file cabinet. The folder was labeled "Request for Appointment and Tenure-Fernandes." The contents of the folder were the original A-1 Appointment form and A-5 Tenure form with the signatures of Dr. MJ Bienvenu, Dr. James Nickerson, and Dr. Karen Kimmel. The dean immediately alerted the President's Office of the finding. She also sent an email to Dr. MJ Bienvenu and Dr. James Nickerson. After Dr. Nickerson confirmed that he had received the dean's email, the dean sent an email to Faculty Chair Weinberg, Vice Chair Lois Bragg, Secretary Tom Baldridge and members of the Faculty Officers Advisory Committee: Dr. Jane Dillehay, Dr. Janet Pray, Dr. Emilia Chukwuma, Dr. Patrick Brice, Dr. William Marshall, Dr. Michael Moore, Dr. Cristina Berdichevsky, and Dr. Tammy Weiner. The dean also copied Dr. Nickerson, Dr. Bienvenu, and Dr. Fernandes on this email. She sent a copy to the president as well. The email sent on May 25, 2006 can be seen in the accompanying PDF.

15. On May 26, 2006, Dr. James Nickerson met with Dean Karen Kimmel. Dr. Nickerson viewed the documents and verified that he signed both forms. He said that he did not remember signing the A-5 form. He apologized through email and in person for the error. He said that any inconsistencies were his responsibility. Dean Kimmel accepts the responsibility for losing the original documents. Dr. Nickerson stated that he would write a letter to the Board of Trustees and the president explaining the situation. The dean asked him to send this information directly to Ms. Patti Kunkle, Executive Assistant to the President and Board of Trustees liaison.

16. On May 26, 2006, copies were made of the original A-1 and A-5 forms, Dr. Fernandes' CV and the summary sheet. The originals were delivered to President I. King Jordan. Copies were sent to Dr. Fernandes, Dr. Nickerson, Dr. Bienvenu, Mr. Weinberg, Dr. Bragg, Mr. Baldridge, and the members of the Officers' Advisory Council.

What a revelation! Is anyone embarrassed? Someone is a hypocrite! Someone must be fired! No one remembered? Someone lost something? No other copies? All copy machines broke down? Who is lying? Who is telling the truth? Is anyone shot?

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain retreats from the possibility of freedom for two protagonists, Jim and Huck. Jim does not fight to free his family; Huck does not break free of civilization; they are bound to society; they must live in it or die. At Gallaudet University, no one fights to free his/her rights; no one breaks free of oppression and suppression; everyone is bound to the June 28th memo regulating scholar and intellectual freedom on campus; everyone must live by it or get "shot!" By a security photographer?

Toni Morrison writes that “silence and evasion” pervade discussions about race: “Ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.” Instead of being ignored, we must find a way to stay and fight scholarly racism. This is going to be very, very dangerous!

Michel Foucault and Gallaudet University

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) committed his writing to what is called today cultural history. It is about the organizing principle of power wherein culture can be studied through technologies of power—not progress, not education, not conflict, not struggle, and not resistance. For Foucault, power is a strategy attributable to functions, neither economy nor politics. Power creates truth, and this truth produces a function of power. As Foucault points out in his writing: “My general theme is not society, it is true/false discourses: let me say it is the correlative formation of domains, of objects, and of discourses verifiable and falsifiable which are assignable to them; it is not simply this formation which interests me but the effects of reality which are linked to it.” It is impossible to imagine Foucault’s method but Foucault’s influence is most often identified with his topics rather than a method.

Foucault asserts that no one is outside of power; there are no margins, no peripheries, and no centers: “power is coextensive with the social body." There are relations within power that are interwoven with external kinds of relations (family, friendship, and even sexuality) that can be studied through their discourses. Relations of power are interconnected to “delineate general conditions of domination …organizing into a more or less coherent and unitary strategic form.” Foucault made a new discovery in his studies: “a rupture: the introduction of the body/mind dichotomy into the arena of penal justice.” For Foucault, the power of repression in power relations does not originate with the state. Michel Foucault has challenged me to question my assumptions about truths for Gallaudet University’s future.

Truth #1: Gallaudet University happens because Deaf people exist. The University website reads: "Gallaudet University leads the world in undergraduate liberal arts education, career development, and outstanding graduate programs for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing students." Success at Gallaudet University is seldom accidental. Hard work, good planning and for Gallaudet University, a reason to believe is necessary to garner success. As Gallaudet University celebrates its 132nd year anniversary, I can say that this “recipe” for success has worked its’ magic of many more truths.

Truth #2: On the occasion of the Iowa Association of the Deaf 125th Anniversary Celebration, JKF, Gallaudet University’s President Designate, announced: “ASL is my language and that I belong to the deaf community.” She explained that at age 23, she was exposed to ASL for the first time in Iowa. Her statement is a welcome contrary to the concluding statement IKJ told at the 48th Biennial NAD Conference: “Perhaps, most importantly, at Gallaudet I learned how to be deaf.” JKF’s discovery of ASL has truthfully furnished her home today.

Truth #3: On the occasion of the 48th Biennial NAD Conference, IKJ explained: “Even though every one of us here today is a stakeholder in the success of Gallaudet University, and even though some individuals both on and off campus disagree with the Board’s decision, we all must accept their right and responsibility to make the final selection.” Gallaudet University Board needs to become more committed to higher education in support of intellectual freedom, the search for social justice, respect for differences, and a belief in collective responsibility for the welfare of all the Deaf.

Truth #4: The Gallaudet English Department Chair David Pancost wrote in protest against the 28 June memo "Guidelines for Expressive Activities and Assemblies" which limits freedom of speech on campus: “Because our profession as scholars and teachers depends upon the First Amendment rights of our students and all other members of the campus community, we find your memo to be ill-advised and urge you not to pursue the actions delineated therein.” The goal of Professor Pancost’s object is to create a cohesive collaboration that supports communication in the context of Deaf students’ rights to assemble and express on campus.

Truth #5: The Gallaudet University website reads: “The University also enjoys international renown for its research on the history, language, and culture of deaf people.” Gallaudet University needs to start to strive to live by the values it teaches and to reflect them in lives of the Deaf everywhere and in their work as a world community.

In closing my assessment of Gallaudet University today, I would like to quote from Michel Foucault’s concluding lecture on “Discourse & Truth” at the University of California at Berkeley last November 1983: ”My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role.” Gallaudet Professor Jeffrey Lewis told truthfully: “[T]he students have spoken, the faculty has spoken.”

My SidekickII message to my old, old friend Denny Voreck (I did some editing):

Hey Denny,

I love my newly adopted home on Maui! It's far, far away from everything so I have a plenty of quality time to think, write and even relax.

Yes, I've been reading everything about Gallaudet protest. My daughter Vivienne is a sophomore there so she also keeps me posted. Low morale. High distrust. A lot of speculations. Deaf versus deaf. IKJ is a sitting duck, a lame duck no one wants to listen to him. JKF is still in "training" to assume IKJ's helm (or hell) but she also knows no one wants to listen to her. WOW!

I'm now reading Michel Foucault's work on cultural history so I could have a general understanding of what goes awry at Gallaudet. It has to do with power.

Denny, I would like to throw in some of my thoughts and see how they get brewed within you so we could share them. Maybe we will do the interview in my blog. OK? Here are my thoughts: Any organization or institution with a good standing owns a word or phrase. For example, IBM owns the word THINK; McDonald's owns the word KIDS; Nike owns the phrase JUST DO IT!; St. John's College owns GREAT BOOKS; New College of California owns EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE and so forth. What does Gallaudet University own? DEAFNESS? ASL? If it's deafness, then it's pathological, period. Deafness is not about ASL. It is about diversities of hearing loss, something lacking, something missing, something wrong, something defiant, something benevolent, something pitiful. Not deaf enough! Not hearing enough! Hearing needs to be restored so to speak.

If Gallaudet University owns ASL, would we have this hiring procedure that is widely practiced on campus? If Gallaudet University does not own ASL, does it mean that ASL is still homeless? Is ASL marginalized? Does ASL still belong in the schoolyard rather than in the schoolhouse? Is ASL for amusement or for academia? ASL is about not only Deaf people but also their children who can hear (CODA). When we talk about deafness, we usually end up with a university that owns it, that is, Gallaudet University. When we talk about ASL, we usually end up with a schoolyard.

Yes, Gallaudet does offer courses in ASL but they are not in general education requirements for graduation. They are for some amusement rides. ASL is fun!

With ALOHA always, Carl

ASLympics: A Proposal

Aloha.

I would like to share with everyone that I hereby propose a new ASL contest that may be of interest to you--teachers, interpreters, school administrators, friends of the Deaf, parents of the Deaf, Deaf people and ASL students. The contest is called the ASLympics. There exist numerous language related contests around the world.

At the ASLympics, participants of all age categories compete in four areas: (1) storytelling in ASL, (2) solving linguistic puzzles in ASL, (3) translating some well known short stories into ASL, and (4) describe something in ASL. The ASLympics will be a unique activity that combines cultural awareness, analytic reasoning and celebrating Deaf life. Participants will learn about the richness, diversity and grammaticality of ASL while overcoming natural anxiety toward using ASL.

In storytelling competition, ASLympics introduces a short opening story and the participant has to continue and complete it within a time frame. The best story will be judged and announced.

ASL puzzle participants also exercise their analytic and problem-solving skills. ASLympics will develop puzzles that require them to think carefully through different hypotheses and problem-solving strategies. The most successful participants are those who are able to extend themselves beyond their usual thought patterns to discover ways in which users of ASL approach reality. Here’s an example of puzzle to be resolved for the intermediate users of ASL:

Given four signs: SCHOOL, COOK, OPEN, COOKBOOK.

Organize them into a coherent ASL sentence and then translate it into a best English equivalence.

(Answer: OPEN COOK SCHOOL COOKBOOK/Open the Culinary School Cookbook. Special note: In this above ASL sentence you can sign either forward or backward. Moral: ASL can do what English can’t.)

The best ASL translation of a story selected by ASLympics (Noah's Ark, Dr. Seuss' Old Hat, New Hat, Plato's Allegory of Cave, etc.) will be judged for accuracy, clarification and precision.

For the ASL description, ASLympics will select an object, a picture, a building or a tulip for the participants to describe using one or two hand configurations. The best one wins the contest.

While the ASLympics proposal is new and open, I would very much appreciate any and all comments and suggestions from readers of this post on how to better use this contest, how to develop regulations for each competition or who to solicit for sponsorship for the ASLympics events. Volunteers are welcome to help develop ASLympics. If you know any other similar competition, it would help greatly. I hope that ASLympics will materialize in the summer of 2008. Anyone seconds this proposal?

With ALOHA always!

Writing About ASL
Writing about ASL is a technical skill that must be learned if a user of ASL is to spread language and culture of the Deaf further than among a circle of immediate acquaintances. More than that, despite the importance of the oral tradition in ASL, many linguistic and cultural points and positions are so intricate and complex that they can be advanced, followed, and criticized only if they are printed as sidewise arguments for study and contemplation at length and at leisure. In this post I provide two basic rationales for writing about ASL.

1. We the Deaf need Case Studies that examine all ASL variables in order to provide as complete an understanding of an event or situation as possible. If you ask today’s ASL interpreters, for example, to write case studies, they would be unable to do so for two reasons: (1) they are not trained and (2) they are reminded by the Code of Ethics regulation (not law). No graduate schools across the nation have a set of case studies that can be very useful for academic discussion as well as dialogue about best practices and problem-solving strategies for ASL. No Deaf Education teachers have developed case studies that focus on ASL-English bilingualism either.

2. We the Deaf want to be professional in our own language and culture. Writing about ASL is the only way we can enter the dialogue that is the lifeblood of ASL. In discussion notes, articles, books, and case studies we are able to present theses, arguments, and criticisms to our peers, counterparts and colleagues. We need their responses that will help make us better users of ASL.

Writing about ASL is similar to scientific writing in the requirement that it be rhetorically clear. It means that one must say what one means as nearly as possible with univocal words and phrases, in detail, and at sufficient length to avoid misunderstanding. However, clarity does not necessarily rule out ambiguity in ASL, but ambiguities must be clearly evident and not hidden. A case study on ASL must bear on a language problem set out to expostulate, interpret, clarify, analyze, explicate, develop, reduce, derive, dissolve, solve, or give the history of ASL, but in each case study the problem itself is primary to work on. A good case study does not count as much as a book or an article, but it should show that the author know what he or she is doing.

I refuse to be embarrassed about writing this post that should have helped us both to write about ASL and to get sophisticated in our own language and culture. And it would be wrong if we are intimidated by snobbish institutions or organizations that tell us that it would be beneath a scholar’s dignity. That conceit is an affection deriving from a time when it was okay to oppress ASL and the Deaf. No, there is no right or wrong way of writing about ASL, which reminds me of the joke about one of my former Gallaudet University students who asked me how to get to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I fixed her with a steely eye and replied: "Practice! Practice! Practice!" If you want to write about ASL: "Write! Write! Write!"

ASL as Our Form of Speech

Deafness, whether total or only partial, is a biological condition that makes life, language and leisure (my favorite l-words) so human that each Deaf person know which mode of communication is best because of a lifetime struggle that their deafness imposes. For example, Gallaudet University President-designate Jane K. Fernandes’ educational discovery of ASL begs for a greater development that ASL is a linguistic mandate for her speech community.

We the Deaf have yet to integrate ASL community with creation of a just, sacred and sustainable world. By "just" it means that we the Deaf aspire to a world in which all forms of inequality and dehumanization among ourselves can be overcome through both conventional achievements such as the ASL-English bilingualism, as well as through emerging modes of social action that foster empathy, trust and mutual understanding. By "sacred" it means that we the Deaf aspire to affirm the inviolate beauty and interdependence between ASL and English and deepen the sense of awe and grace that accompanies an awareness of ASL-English bilingualism. And by "sustainable" it means we the Deaf aspire to a world in which all linguistic activity is expressive of a sensitivity that assures the extension of a just and sacred world of the ASL-English bilingualism.

Are we developing our Deaf Education programs and curricula, for instance, to create pathways for Deaf children to walk toward this ASL-English bilingualism? Do we teach the need to heal from the traumas of living in less than a just, sacred and sustainable world; to resist the further destruction of the ASL-English hegemony; to create alternatives which inspire us to promote ASL-English bilingualism? Does our ASL speech community combine a pedagogy of both ASL and English which emphasizes the development of a greater understanding of the world literacy? What does the creation of this ASL-English environment require to materialize both the process of learning and the content of what is taught?

In the realm of content, do we seek to transmit to our general society the knowledge of ASL-English bilingualism? Toward a just, sacred and sustainable world, we need to capitalize what Dr. Jane Fernandes has herself discovered: sign language, be it ASL, BSL, LSF or Gebarentaal, is undebatably a form of speech for Deaf people.

The Art of Listening to ASL

ASL has been called the language of concepts deeply embedded in Deaf Culture. This is a not unreasonable metaphor; for ASL, like any other language, aims to communicate conceptual meanings. But ASL is a different kind of language. Concepts are concrete; signs are fluid and intangible. A concept taken by itself has a fixed meaning; a sign assumes meaning only from its association with other signs. Concepts convey specific ideas; ASL suggests elusive states of mind.

Because of this elusiveness ASL has been subject to a constant attempt to translate its message into another language, often, English. Yet this is hardly possible. Suppose we do storytelling that uses the manual alphabet. Will this convey the remotest conception of ASL to one who never saw it? We are able to explain but we are not able to explain the meaning of an ASL "melody." It means--itself. Beyond that it will mean something lost through interpretation and translation.

Even if we reject the possibility of translating the meaning of ASL into English, there still remains much for us to talk about. It will heighten our perception if we know something about the parts of signs, and the way that native signers go about organizing signs into patterns and forms. We may inquire into the meanings that have shaped the language of the Deaf at various periods, the movements within ASL and their relationship to the social-cultural environment.

Like poets, the native users of ASL are apt to distrust talk about ASL. This, they complain, is generally so complicated that it stands in the way of ASL itself. Such mistrust is based on a valid intuition that there is only one way to learn to listen to ASL and that is--to listen, continually and intensively. It will help to focus our listening if we read and talk about ASL; but this is no more than a preliminary. The true meaning, the ultimate wisdom, is to be found in one art only: the art of listening to ASL.

As a matter of fact, we vary greatly in our way of responding to ASL. During signing, let’s say, The Star Spangled Banner, for example, one listener will summon up a vision of the composer in the ship watching Fort McHenry. Another floats off in a way that each word is signed equally far removed from the reality. A third is filled with a strange sense of power at the meaning of the individual signs reflecting each word in the anthem.

To listen to ASL perceptively requires that we fasten our whole attention upon the signs as they come floating through the air; that we observe the signing parts they form, and respond to the thought and feeling out of which those parts have emerged. Responding to ASL is the most natural thing in the Deaf Culture, judging from the multitudes who sign. But to listen perceptively to good ASL--that is, really to understand it--is an art itself: an art that may come more easily to some than to others, but that can be acquired through practice and application.

My Hawai'ian Aunty: Then and Now

January 1, 2005

September 11, 2006

I Wrote....

During the spring 2006 protest at Gallaudet University I wrote a letter to Dr. Brenda Jo Brueggemann:

War came. Bodies lined the roadside.--"Lamentation for the Destruction of Ur," Third Millennium B.C.

I'm writing this letter for two reasons. First, I remember you visiting my English class twice in 1992. You wrote me a very nice memorandum about it. Second, I want to share my thoughts about a recent development at Gallaudet University. This letter also embodies my philosophy of making new meanings.

I take it for granted that you have asked yourself in these trying times during the student protest at Gallaudet University what it all means. What does it all mean? And why don't philosophers tell us? I asked myself these two questions, too. I want to know. So why not writing to you?

You and I are not alone in our imagination. The leaders of the Deaf would like to know what it all means. The students at Gallaudet University--they would like to know, too. Why don't philosophers tell us what it all means? I think the answer is simple. They don't know. And we don't know much more than the others, but it just happens that I do know a numbers of things that, as Descartes said, it would be shameful of me to withhold. So I wrote you a letter.

Before you read this letter, you doubtless want to know what my philosophy is. And in two sentences. Very well, let me say that I find these to be peculiar times. Some of us live the most extraordinarily satisfying lives in a period that has witnessed the 1988 Deaf President Now demonstration; a world in which Deaf people have been "heard," and in which hundreds of millions of deaf people around the world live in conditions of oppression and hopelessness. Sooner or later, there will be another big "culture war," and whoever declares it will have enough power and prestige to lead us through it. My children Justin and Vivienne, before the collapse of the Soviet regime, thought someone will push the war button, and they asked what I would do about it. I don't know. Probably nothing.

But you want to know my philosophy. It has to do with reading and writing. This philosophy is derived primarily from my parents who are deaf. When I was young, my mother (a loyal Ole Jim volunteer) used to sit beside me to make me write well and nicely. My father (an avid, critical reader) also had a saying. When I sought sympathy after stubbling over something, he would say, "Get up and get on." Two sentences.

President-selected Jane Fernandes. I presume we must work with her. Then quit battling so much. No one in this vast universe ever wants to have a "no confidence" vote. Do a few other things, but don't distract the students from higher learning, and we will prevail.

Ah, but it's not so easy. Else why would there be such a market for higher education? The reason is secret I intend to tell.

There are a lot of good things about the Fernandes "no confidence" vote. For one thing, it demands change, especially in academia. More important, we could become new meaning-makers. We are working all the time. Gallaudet University is about our deafness. Deafness--it is energy that challenges us all. Deafness is a superb condition because our deaf ancestors evolved through times of oppression and opportunity. When you read in Plato's Cratylus, for example, you find that Socrates questions whether words can be replaced by signs. He recognizes the intellectual life of Deaf people of his day. And it is always good to have both Socrates and Plato in case we need it. That's why we lived through both the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest and the 2006 Better President Now (BPN) demonstration: we trust tomorrow. As for today, there is always a room for making new meanings.

Let's start like a philosopher, with some meaningful questions. Are many Deaf people as oppressed as they think they are? Consider renewing a hiring formula for the future University President. Philosopher's motto: Mutatis mutandis (If you are a human, make the necessary changes in the example). How? Without mincing words: Make new meanings. But that alone is not enough, for we also have to learn how to mean differently from what we are meaning now. How exciting!

The archetype of Gallaudet University President, at first glance, would mean little in which any deaf individual could identify. In the popular imagination, the notion of presidency of this particular institution of higher learning exclusively for the Deaf connotes a certain romantic grandiosity, an aura of academic freedom, and an atmosphere of "Deaf Culture" splendor--in the other words, qualities that few deaf people could ever even hope to experience. Moreover, as democratic people who happen to be deaf, we find the idea of Gallaudet University Presidency mildly repugnant, even while we are simultaneously fascinated by a continuing civil rights attraction from the historical 1988 DPN protest. Yet regardless this attitude, anyone who finds himself or herself in a position of Gallaudet University President needs to develop such an archetype successfully if he or she means to lead the University well. We know that it is not just a political position, but a meaningful vocation; not just a role of academic freedom, but a service of responsibility.

I approved of student protest because it is meaningful and necessary. Their battle harmed no one. Take notice. Be aware. Appreciate the students. We know how hard it is, especially when deaf cards were played: deaf squabblers and deaf absolutists. However, this type of campus protest generated new meaning-makers, and now we have big, huge, enormous responsibilities to keep them alive and well. Gallaudet University belongs to the future of all the Deaf. As the Junior National Association of the Deaf motto reads: Promoting Tomorrow of All the Deaf; By Working with the Deaf Youth of Today.

I just love to laugh, of course; that's a good enough reason in itself. There is a story told in Nigeria about the trickster god Edshu. Edshu has a hat colored red on one side and blue on the other. When he walks down the road he provokes an uproar when farmers on either side of the road get into an argument over whether the god they had seen had on a red or blue hat. In the midst of the quarrel, Edshu reappears and says, "It's my fault, I did it, and I meant to do it. Spreading strife is my greatest joy." Methaphorically, Dr. Fernandes of Gallaudet University performed a very important service: confounding those of us who think we know exactly how to squabble what it means to be deaf. Is she deaf enough or not? I love this new trickster who means that "being not deaf enough" is never too important, never too great!

With aloha from this beautiful, rural island of Maui where I'm still thinking and laughing. Somewhere down the roadside outside Gallaudet University, I'm very excited about all the new meaning-makers yet to come.

ASL and My Favorite Short Hawai'ian Myth: Bowl of Light

ASL is a well known language for which Deaf people are so famous. However, it also refers to a powerful way to make meanings. It needs myth, a story concerning how the origin of sign language in general comes to be. I found a beautiful Hawai'ian myth Bowl of Light that I could easily liken ASL to a perfect Light in Hawai'i.



Each child born has at birth a Bowl of perfect Light. If he tends his Light it will grow in strength and he can do all things-swim with the shark, fly with the birds, know and understand all things. If, however, he becomes envious or jealous he drops a stone into his Bowl of Light and some of the Light goes out. Light and the stone cannot hold the same space. If he continues to put stones in the Bowl of Light, the light will go out and he will become a stone. A stone does not grow, not does it move. If at any time he tires of being a stone, all he needs to do is turn the bowl upside down and the stones will fall away and the Light will grow once more.

Analogically speaking, each Deaf child has a Bowl of ASL. ASL is growing, and it enables the child to do anything...but hear. In our present educational system, this child takes note of the considerable difference that exists between ASL and its spoken and written counterpart, English. The child soon discovers that many signs commonly used in the English word order are often praised and favored. Unbeknown to this child, the Bowl of ASL receives many stones. ASL becomes weak. Anyone using ASL just as it is in the English word order runs the risk of "speaking like a book." On the other hand, many signs commonly used in the everyday ASL conversation are too informal to be translated into formal English. Of course, we do know such formal and informal words and expressions in English, but the cleft between ASL and English is 3,412 miles apart. (The ongoing assertion that there is a language continuum between ASL and English is a huge hoax--a huge stone in the Bowl of ASL--to bamboozle anybody into thinking there exists a miraculous string between ASL and English.)

Now is a good time to turn the mythical Bowl of ASL upside down so that the stones would fall away. For Deaf children, ASL needs to thrive.

Gentle Breeze Blows Aloha Always for Gallaudet University

According to Dr. Serge Kahili King, the Executive Director of Aloha International, aloha is in Hawai’ian meaning much more than just “hello” or “good bye” or “love.” It has deeper implications including “the joyful (oha) sharing (alo) of life energy (ha) in the present (alo).” I would like to share this aloha energy with you because I have a need to react to David King, a Gallaudet University student who recently resigned from FSSA and wrote: “Having said so, Dr. Jane Fernandes is a victim of many years old system, victim of the flawed process as I believe.” A job well done!

I could vividly remember Dr. I. King Jordan who was then Dean for Academic Affairs faced the similar consequence before he became a historical University President. I was a faculty member of the English Department at Gallaudet University at that time and I recalled his desire to change something I really liked. He was attempting to propose a new grading system in which students are encouraged not to work for grades but for the intrinsic satisfaction of higher learning. In the other words, within the university, grading is not of central importance. Dean Jordan’s ideas included that the semester grade is based principally on both the quality of the student’s participation in class activities and the student’s final paper. Because Dean Jordan’s ideas would be essential to the way in which courses are conducted at Gallaudet University, communication between students and their professors must be clear and direct. I attended several meetings and discussions about student self-assessment instead of grading, and I thought they were innovative and well-intended. However, Dean Jordan was meted out with high hostility and harsh criticism by the University Faculty Senate. I believe rather firmly that Dean Jordan was always at odds with Faculty Senate. Dean Jordan’s priorities were suddenly forced to change when he was appointed as the University President. Subsequently his no-grading ambition was shelved and then forgotten.

It is now my fervent hope that Dr. Jane K. Fernandes’ leadership would be like a new broom that sweeps Gallaudet University clean. Along with a new Provost in the near future, I would like to see that with 100% support from the Board of Trustees all department chairs submit their resignation so that the Provost could review and revise all departmental procedures to benefit all future students. That’s all there is to my hope. May gentle breeze blow aloha always for Gallaudet University.

Deaf Philosophy, ASL Trinity, and Deaf Children

Is the word deafness necessary in order to acknowledge the existence of ASL? Yes and no! Although the question does not exactly call for a clear answer, it does propose whether there is a philosophy of deafness that enhances ASL and aggrandizes Deaf children.

Being Deaf since birth, I'm led to believe I have life credentials to come up with some presuppositions I'd like to present to my readers, be they friends, parents, teachers, administrators, social workers, students and advocates of ASL, and even Deaf people themselves. First, I wish to presuppose a question whether it is fine to be Deaf. How is that be possible the by lacking the sense of hearing, the remaining senses become so highly acute? Do they become interdependent and integrated modes of information, knowledge and communication?

ASL Trinity

My secondary presupposition is that does a newborn quickly acquire information from his or her environment first in order to attain knowledge, and he or she gradually begins to communication for his need and want for both information and knowledge? Is there a trinity in ASL Trinity? What is ASL Trinity? Information, Knowledge and Communication. What do we get out of information and an inbuilt capacity for knowledge and communication? Is there another hidden potential within this ASL Trinity waiting to manifest? What I am suggesting here is that information, knowledge and communication become "locked" together, like baking a cake. We start off with flour, sugar, eggs, water and so on, but what comes out of the oven is not what went in. Information, knowledge and communication interact to produce something which is neither knowledge nor communication, but something quite distinct from either, something which I will call "information" although that is something of an oversimplification. By information I mean the stuff of the real world.

Something resembling this ASL Trinity can be found in physics. Physicists talk about "energy," and use the concept of energy: Every form of matter has its equivalent in energy (this is the basis for E = mc2), but what distinguishes different kinds of matter are the laws which determine its behavior. Exactly, here is a duality between "knowledge," the raw unformed stuff from which everything is composed, and "communication," the natural laws which determine how knowledge is "developed" in the same rule that distinguishes a proton from an electron. Easy does it? Well, maybe not. What I am suggesting here is that information and knowledge are the same stuff, but they differ only in the degree of how they are communicated by individual experience.

A good philosophy needs a good, traditional syllogism with two principal premises for a sound conclusion. A well known syllogism reads:

PREMISE A: No man is mortal.
PREMISE B: Socrates is a man.
CONCLUSION: Socrates is mortal.

I would now apply the syllogism formula to deafness. When I use the word God I'm borrowing it from Joseph Campbell's understanding of it.

PREMISE A: God's creation is absolute.
PREMISE B: Deafness is God's creation.
CONCLUSION: Deafness is absolute.

Deafness, whether total or only partial, is a biological condition that makes life, language, and leisure human, exceptional, and, absolutely, extraordinary. We the Deaf are not sound-oriented in the broadest sense that we do not rely on the world of sound to attain information and knowledge to communicate our meanings in life.

ASL Storytelling is our most natural form. Issuing from within the language, it is projected by means of the most personal of all experiences, the language of ASL. We have in folklores a treasure of experiences. Some are centuries old, others are of recent origin. One has but to listen to ASL to realize how compellingly storytelling may capture the accent of tenderness and longing. In ASL storytelling imitating springs from deaf individual's joy in his body, his love of expressive gesture, his release of tension through role-shifting. It heightens the pleasure of being, and at the same time mirrors the life of core Deaf community.

ASL is a language dealing with the organization of signs into linguistic patterns. It is one of the great skills of our civilization, along with literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and theatre. Wherever deaf people have got together, sign language has sprung up among them as a language charged with meaning and significance. The desire to create such a meaning appears to be universal. It shows itself in primitive societies as in our own. It has become a part of our need to impose our will upon the universe; to bring order out of chaos; to endow our moments of highest awareness and desire with enduring form and substance in ASL.

ASL is easier to experience than to define. Whereas it would not be easy to find two philosophers who agree on a definition nor two linguists agree on the same claim in ASL. We may say that ASL concerns itself with the communication of ideas by means of a sensuous medium--parts of signs. This medium is fashioned into meanings marked by linguistic coherence of signs. They appeal to our mind, arouse our emotions, kindle our imagination, enchant our senses, and clarify our lack of the sense of hearing.

Deaf Children



My third presupposition questions whether Deaf children are innovative. Is the world for them a thing of wonder. Do they invent signs to tell stories and poems; do they paint themselves? But as they lack education in ASL they know the best, their creativity is often dulled. In the other words, they lose the magic touch. In fact, ASL embodies their view of life, and it brings them their own interpretation of human destiny, the essence of their experience both as signer and individual. In order to comprehend ASL they must enter the secret world out of which it sprang. The greater their understanding, the better they capture the joy, the illumination that went into its making. In so doing they are carried to heights of awareness, to intensities of experience of which they have hardly thought themselves in today's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) movement.

The function of Deaf Education, under the banner of NCLB mandatory, is to reveal to Deaf children their great defeat because ASL suffers the hegemony of English. Although ASL begins by opening to these Deaf children the landscape of their inner life, Deaf Education stops them by revealing their defiance in tests written in high level of English. ASL is an art that deals with the organization of signs that reflect Deaf children's understanding of the world around them. That is their experience best expressed in ASL but inevitably lost in English. Deaf children are victims of a subtle language racism.

We need to promote Deaf philosophy, ASL trinity, and, above all, Deaf children.

Kabbalah

I got a tattoo for my birthday which is December 26th a few years ago from a close friend of mine, Stan Juchno. As seen in the picture, it is a symbol of Tree of Life. Many people have different interpretations of it so I will give you my own account.

Scientists inform us that human beings have been around for many centuries before the writing culture merged. They lived in the world of symbolic art. Our Jewish ancestors were first to write about the Creator. Golda Meir commented, "As for Jews being a chosen people, I never quite accepted that. It seemed, and still seems to me, more reasonable to believe, not that God chose the Jews, but that the Jews were the first people that chose God, the first people in history to have done something truly revolutionary, and it was that choice that made them unique." What Golda Meir meant to say is, so as I am completely convinced, that God is a pure human invention. To me, God is immaterialistic and therefore non-existent.

Kabbalah generates Judaism which in turn generates Christianity in that Jesus, if historians claim his existence, was a successful Kabbalist. I am an amateur Kabbalist, a mere guy whose philosophy is inspired by the Essene brotherhood. I am also very much intrigued by Winston Churchill's statement, "I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." I've told my pal Stan that it would be a battle of wills in the heaven if and only if it exists.

Meriam and I

Of all people throughout my life, Meriam knows I love storytelling. When we were little, she used to climb in my bed every morning so we could take turns telling stories about our neighbors, friends and families. We developed some rules for our storytelling sessions. When we completed our story we must blow a kiss in the same way we saw a woman who blew her kiss prematurely in some sport activities around the block but her game was not done yet, which was very funny to us. We were very creative in telling our stories and criticizing each other. We would laugh so hard because we knew Mom or Dad could not hear us. We always had fun.

Meriam and Kathy came to visit me here this past summer, and we went to the best kept secret waterfalls on the island. We had to go down the cliff and then climb through a lava tube to reach the waterhole where the waterfalls is. We swam across the hole and climbed up some rocks for such a photo opportunity. (See photo!)

When Meriam was a young adult, she attended CSUN and became involved with Sign Writing. She persuaded me to pursue this exciting project but I was extremely reluctant. She was good at it, but I didn't, and still don't, think ASL or any other sign language has a written counterpart. Notation of signs using symbols developed by this Sign Writing group may be very useful for research purposes. However, I am very much mindful of what Plato has Socrates say about Thamus arguing against Thoth's discovery of writing. Writing is a technology, and the technical part is the creation of a symbol or a code or an alphabet to represent a concept. Once it is written, it becomes frozen. Therefore writing is very controlling. Walter Ong writes: "Once reduced to space, words are frozen and in a sense dead."

I am pretty sure Meriam understands that I am defending an oral tradition in ASL. Leslie Marmon Silk writes, "Storytelling always includes the audience, the listeners. In fact a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener; the storyteller’s role is to draw the story out of the listeners.” In using ASL, I often find myself reading and reacting to my audience. It was how Meriam and I developed our own storytelling talent. I must now admit that Meriam is more structured than I am. In storytelling, she's factual and I am fictional.

My Turn

I started this blog by making it clear that I was very much intrigued by a famous saying in Taoism: The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao. Speaking itself is always in flux so the Tao, when spoken, could be imposed by any everchanging language. Therefore, I'm compelled to paraphrase to say that ASL cannot ultimately be ASL if it includes voicing. ASL is sight-oriented, not sound-oriented, and it can get lost in translation. ASL is unique in that it has its own entity.

More than almost anything I've ever written about, the subject has been on my mind for the past 40 years, since I first came to live in the United States from The Netherlands. Because it has been a part of me for so long, I thought I should begin by giving a personal account of why this blog has been, and still is, very important to me.

"My Turn" is about language change and profound difference between Dutch and American cultures in which Gebarentaal (sign language of my birth) and ASL (sign language of my new life in America) thrive. Before explaining how and why they have made a difference to me emotionally and intellectually, to my understanding of myself, the world I live in, my views of both Gebarentaal and ASL, I should give some personal background concisely.

I was born Deaf. I was also born Dutch. Both my parents are also Deaf and Dutch. We used Gebarentaal that is inescapably and undebatably influenced by the Dutch language and culture. Before my parents made a new home in the United States in 1963, we were culturally Deaf and Dutch in every single sense.

When I was young I enrolled in Effatha, a residential school for the Deaf where my parents met years before. The school subscribed to a very strange notion of pedagogy for the Deaf. We were to learn how to talk Dutch so that our society would consider us civilized and worthwhile. This approach is often called Oral Method.

Photo: I'm second from right.

Although I believe I had a good start in my early education at home, my schooling was miserable. It created a learning environment that was what I would call anti-Deaf. For example, we were taught to depend on our hearing relatives, hearing friends or neighbors because they heard information firsthand and that we always got it secondhand. Another example was a little rough in that my teacher had me stand before my classmates and listen to their statement that they were sorry my parents are deaf. Yes, in my days in Holland, Deaf people were generally embarrassed to use sign language in public because they thought they were animals if they did.

This was all changed almost quickly after my parents received a letter from President John F. Kennedy who had issued a directive to the American Embassy in Holland to coordinate the emigration for my family to the United States within six months in 1963. My parents told my sister and me to make such an annoucement at Effatha, which we did the next day. Our teachers made us repeat our announcement several times before they called in the principal and social worker to listen to our announcement that we were to move to America. They got upset, and I began to realize that we the Deaf did have information firsthand.

Almost immediately after we arrived in Maryland, we met and became friends with Robert Lakenau who was then the National Association of the Deaf President. Lakenau was a close friend of our American sponsor Jack Allen who was also Deaf. They told me it was great that I have Deaf parents. Lakenau was very proud to meet my family, and I was impressed half to death. He was also so smart and very articulating I thought even at my young age I found my equal, which was very exciting.

My sister and I enrolled in Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick. The school superintendent Lloyd Ambrosen and my first American teacher Sarah Quinn were what is today called CODA's (Children of Deaf Adults), and they made lasting impressions on me. Through their skills in what is called ASL today it did not take me a very long time to acquire and then master my adopted languages, ASL and English.

Eventhough I had undergone some language changes, from Gebarentaal to ASL and from Dutch to English, I continue to be surprised to find a lighter, brighter world of language change on this beautiful, rural island of Maui where trees talk to me in the rainforest, where the sun greets me in the morning, where the birds announce when I ascend Haleakala. On Hawai'i, Mark Twain writes: For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summerseas flashing in the sun, other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers perished more than twenty years ago.

SNORKELING

Snorkeling in Hawai'i is marvelous. Here's the scoop on Volcanic Hawai'i: It is composed of over 130 islands, islets, and atolls, with 120,000 miles or 84 million acres of ocean and reef. Hawai'i is the most isolated land mass in the world and boasts the largest protected marine sanctuary in the United States and second in the world behind Australia's Great Barrier Reef. There are over 7,000 species with half living nowhere else in the world.

Snorkeling is my new form of recreation. I like to enter into the ocean and search for corals attached on rock areas. They fascinate me because they are alive yet brittle. Their denizens--fish, starfish, eels, octopuses, and occasional sea turtles--are vibrantly colorful. I've seen some hiding spots and nurseries for baby fish and other marine life, and I always make sure that I won't harm them in any possible way.

How I Got My Hawai'ian Name Kalalau?



In January 2004, I traveled to Maui for vacation and stayed with a friend in Hana, a beautiful small town on east Maui. I met a very nice Hawai'ian native Aunty Ana, and we became fast friends. She gave me my Hawai'ian name Kalalau, and she explained that Kalalau is in Hawai'ian meaning wanderer. There is a beautiful valley named Kalalau on Kaua'i, and it is said to be very spiritual. Kalalau is a lush valley, filled wuth fruit trees. If you approach Kalalau, everything changes. You would feel much lighter because in Hawai'ian kala means "to forgive" and lau means "to be numerous." To enjoy this place, one needs to have learned to forgive, for kala is, to borrow from Laura Yardley in her book on Huna, "the technique for mental and emotional cleansing of negative emotions, sins, and guilts in order to maintain one's life path clearly."

I have since then learned to live with my newly acquired Hawai'an identity, and I have also come to understand that nature is very much part of our highest form of life, and without honoring and taking care of it, we innately know our future could perish.

ASL Dragon

ASL Dragon

Ladies and gentlemen, yes, there exists a dragon in ASL.

Once in a heavily foggy morning my childhood chum and I went out hiking and soon we got lost in the middle of deep forest with many deadends and false turns. When we stopped to rest, this dragon appeared. For a moment our breath did stop, and then we remembered ourselves. I quickly found my camera and took a picture of it. Only one.



Well, I could never and I don't think my friend could ever tell how funny, frolic and far-out the creature was. The way it defined itself made us laugh so hysterically we could not stop crying. In short, it identified itself with every known literature piece ranging from Eve's serpent to Saint George's dragon, all of which is a pure human invention. After many funnies, giggles and laughters, we finally got around to ask for the directions back home.

Beware! Nothing would be the same at home, the dragon warned us. We didn't really understand it but once we got to tell people about our encounter with ASL Dragon, we simply lost our believability and got accused for fabrication. Even when we made an impassioned defense of ASL Dragon, we were merely ridiculed. Nothing worked.

I am determined to continue to press for the existence of ASL Dragon. My friend, on the other hand, gave up and went silent.

Aloha from Hawai'i!

Those of us who live on this beautiful, rural island of Maui know we live in an extraordinary place, Paradise on Earth.

So as every blogger has a story, this is mine.

When I was young, I was asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I used to answer that I wanted to be like my father, but I've changed my plans ever since. I'm now a college professor, and I believe heart and soul that it is a calling to be a great professor. Unfortunately, greatness is rarely achieved, and thus examples are rarely talked about in my community, namely Deaf Community. For example, Deaf children don't hear inspiring stories of Deaf professors often enough to want to be one.

Early on I was taught that good professors make good lectures. While building up my professoriate in the heyday of the 1988 Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., I learned how to learn. And teach.

Said another way, I have come to realize that, yes, good professors do teach well, however the great professors are the ones who concentrate on how they teach their students. And boy oh boy, high tide, low tide, students are filled to the brim with variation. In every class, like in every landing in Homer's Odyssey, there is always something new to learn and teach. No two classes are alike! Yes, fun! And understand this: The fact that the world is ever-changing requires an open mind. This intuitive knowledge is the juice that jump-starts truly great professors who seek to make a difference with the students they teach. To execute my teaching job well, I need students, and that's what I need to be for them.

The language known to us as American Sign Language (ASL) belongs, along with Gebarentaal (my mother tongue...Dutch system of signing), British Sign Language (BSL), langue des signes française (LSF) and other sign languages around the world, to the so-called visual-gestural group of languages. It is unique in the broadest sense that it is acquired through a different channel, sight. In the other words, ASL is to be seen, not heard. The great variety of signs in ASL can by their very nature not be satisfactorily described on paper; the parts of signs being learned must be examined at as early a stage as possible. The beginner must be aware especially of the misleading cases in which a hand configuration represents a different concept from the one it represents in manual alphabet. For example, the handshape A with an abducted (open) thumb is different from the manual A with an adducted (closed) thumb. ASL is an amazing and exciting tool to learn and master. In the July/August issue of Teaching Exceptional Children (Vol. 38 No. 6), the authors have ASL praised: "Using sign language in a child's home and classroom can be an excellent way to teach vocabulary, particularly since the signs offer a novel and shared language code."

Every day, somewhere across the nation, ASL comes to life. For example, Frank Gallimore's statement that "The history makes the deaf a community of storytellers, telling tales the hearing world will never know" begs for greater development. As ASL lives and breathes, it continues to define us the Deaf.

With ALOHA always, Kalalau