Heart of Deafness

[Dan Parvaz]

Just some musings, by me. I can't quite match Terri's zen-like eloquence:

> There is no such thing as "pure" ASL

> But there surely is a thing: ASL

But all this has been percolating for a while. One of the things I think we try to do as interpreters, at least when we're at our best, is to see through mere denotation to find the connotation...

[Although sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I'm not convinced that there's a special Deaf version of "transparency." Are the dealings of the NAD Board -- surely a Deaf institution par excellence -- any less opaque than the RID, the Frat (RIP), or AAAD? Now that is a dissertation waiting to happen.]

... and base our interpretation on that, should the Target culture not be able to immediately access it. The same thing applies to our interaction with our non-native culture, which for most of us here is American Deaf culture (itself a complex, multifaceted thing). For clarity's sake, I'll begin a different example. Time and again, I've heard clients express a preference for "English." Sometimes, they really do mean interpreting that hews close to the form of the spoken English original, preserving specific English terminology. Often, though, I've found that "English" means something more like, "I just want to understand, thank you. Please don't make me decode whatever jacked-up pastiche you've decided constitutes 'ASL.'" 

That was for clarity's sake. Honest.

On to "Deaf Heart." I almost never hear this discussion amongst interpreters of other language pairs (whither "French Heart"?). One exception for me is Native American/Alaskan Native/First Nations people, for whom one's stance with respect to the culture is often central to the interaction (again, brevity forces me to be reductive; all I can do is acknowledge the massive complexity I've hidden and beg the reader's understanding). That Deb Russell started her talk with reference to Canadian First Nations as a bridge to acknowledging our field's indebtedness to the Deaf was telling.

Anyway, "Deaf Heart" strikes me as another complex code word like "English." One is an acknowledgment that RID as an organization, an we as a field, have wandered from our roots. There are those -- even on the Diversity Committee! -- who argue that this is a Good Thing, a natural consequence of professionalization (I can hear almost someone saying that surgeons don't cut hair, anymore, either). Another is that we need to include in our field's history, the contributions of the Deaf, as Nancy Bloch argued (although I would be less laudatory than her when it came to discussing the brain trust that gave us GLAD/CAD/NAD interpreter certification). 

Really, however, for me all the discussion of "Deaf Heart" amounts to this: Okay, we Deaf people have left you interpreters alone for nigh on half a century; we've watched you detach yourselves in the name of professionalism; we've seen you run through an impenetrable alphabet soup of "scientific" certification... so why aren't you any better? Why do we not only have the same complaints, we have more of them? 

You say "tomāto", I say "cultural and linguistic competence." If as a field, we delivered on the massive promissory note we wrote to the Deaf community, all this angst would evaporate, either because interpreters would do their jobs and fade into the background (no, we're not invisible, but you don't notice when things are working well, which is the way it should be), or because engaging with the Deaf is how we in fact become competent in the first place. Either way, the answer is "get smart(er)."

At least that's how I see it this afternoon.

Cheers,

-Dan.

[Brace Aaron]

Thanks for this, Dan.  It's always risky to put words in the "mouths" (hands?) of Deaf people (even though that's what we dare to do all the time), but your intuitions of what's behind some of the discussions we've been having are the same as mine.  I'd be particularly interested to hear from Deaf members here if these 2 statements ring true:

On May 2, 2013, at 3:51 PM, Dan Parvaz wrote:

Often, though, I've found that "English" means something more like, "I just want to understand, thank you. Please don't make me decode whatever jacked-up pastiche you've decided constitutes 'ASL.'" 

and

Really, however, for me all the discussion of "Deaf Heart" amounts to this: Okay, we Deaf people have left you interpreters alone for nigh on half a century; we've watched you detach yourselves in the name of professionalism; we've seen you run through an impenetrable alphabet soup of "scientific" certification... so why aren't you any better? Why do we not only have the same complaints, we have more of them? 

Thanks, again.

Cheers,

Aaron

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[Dan Parvaz]

Thank you Aaron. Of course, this is just what both my brain cells came up with after they were done fighting each other, and so feedback from Deaf folk would be very cool.

Another example of what I was talking about: sometimes, when I asked a Deaf consumer for feedback on my work, I'd get something like "make a picture." This sounded to me like my mother's advice on how I'd know when the asparagus was done cooking ("Stick a fork in it." Thanks, Mom). But when you unpack all that, good signing involves the use of depiction, agreement, nonmanuals, etc.... "make a picture" is actually a pretty good summary. I usually had to figure out what then was missing from the picture.

So, if interpreters insist that "ASL" is that jumble our Deaf clients can't make heads or tails of, then some will ask for not-ASL, aka English. Even if it's really ASL. 

If the one thing that has remained constant through all the follies of our field is the exclusion (or at least the subtle discouraging) of our Deaf friends, then reconciliation makes sense. And what is essential about Deafness, as Alan Abarbanell (speaking as his father) put it, is in the heart. 

Oh, the brain cells are still at war. Feedback is more than welcome; it's needed.

Cheers,

-Dan.