Page 26 - WTP Vol. IX #8

Her lips were sealed. When I asked her her name, she spelled it nimbly with the fingers of her right hand, her mouth a flat horizon line, her eyes smiling. It went right by me—whoosh!—like a gust of wind, and I had to ask her to fingerspell it again. Got it the second time, though: Marina. There was zero mouth movement when she signed, not even the ghost of an English word on her lips. Just her flashing hands and the subtle grammar of her face. Pure, unadulterated ASL, with no corrupting oral influence whatsoever.
It took me a few minutes to find my footing because ASL with no mouth movement can feel a little like your interlocutor has zapped your training wheels and pushed you down a steep hill while sitting on the handlebars, signing to you.
Nary a round O on her mouth when she told me she was from Holyoke. We were sitting in the wait-
ing room of her dentist’s office and this was my first interpreting assignment of the day—I had another one at two o’clock on the other side of Boston. “Holyoke, really?” I said, more than a little surprised, because Holyoke is out in western Mas- sachusetts where the Deaf community is famously a hotbed of oralism, thanks in large part to the per- nicious influence of the Clark School for the Deaf, where Deaf kids were punished for signing. Such is the evil legacy of the educational crusader Horace Mann (1796–1859), who railed against sign lan- guage and to this day stands haughtily philosophiz- ing on the front lawn of the Massachusetts State House—an idealized statue of him in bronze— wearing, anachronistically, a toga.
“I went to the Clark School for the Deaf,” she said, smiling her tight-lipped smile. Clark School grads tended to be oral, meaning they didn’t sign, or if
they did sign they tended to move their mouths
an awful lot while signing. And here she was, not moving her mouth at all, signing CLARK SCHOOL quick as a batted eyelash, and not with the tongue- flapping sign for Clark that some Deaf people use to poke fun at oral Deaf people, but with the initialized “CS” sign like a quickly closing fist. I was intrigued. But before I could ask her about the disconnect between her sealed lips and her Clark School af- filiation, the hygienist called out her name in the waiting room, and that was my cue to fingerspell it back to her: “Marina. They’re calling your name.” She gave me a thin, closed smile as she rose from her seat, and I followed her following the hygienist down the hall to the last room on the left.
~
Sign language puts the food on my table, pays the mortgage, the utility bills, the car loan. It pays quite well. In fact. I probably make more than most of the Deaf people I interpret for. Which sometimes feels a little like extortion. Like they gave it to me and now I’m getting paid to give it back to them. Because sign language belongs to Deaf people. They’re the ones who taught it to me in the first place, gave it
to me as a beautiful, precious, durable, airborne
gift held out in their hands, saying: We learn to love the things we love from others who loved them before us; ASL has been ours for as long as we can remember, and it can be yours, too, if you’re willing to learn it, if you’re worthy of it, if you’ll take care of it and always remember where it comes from and to whom it belongs.
Yes, sign language belongs to Deaf people and we interpreters get paid to give it back to them. But they’re always so generous. YOU SIGN LIKE DEAF, they often say to me. YOU GOOD INTERPRETER, they say. Sometimes, though, I have a hard time under- standing them. And that’s when my job is to inter- rupt. I hate interrupting Deaf people, but if I don’t interrupt when I’m not understanding, then I’m not doing my job. Interrupting is your job, as an inter- preter, if you’re not understanding. Because you can’t interpret what you don’t understand. They taught us that back in Interpreting 101. Of course, Deaf people don’t like being interrupted (Nobody does!) but I suspect they would like it even less if I didn’t inter-
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Light Bulb
Paul hostovsky