Moving Hands

When I think about what my cochlear implant means to me, all I keep coming back to is: it is a gadget. Nothing more than that. My hearing is an artificially generated sense. Without computers, I would have no hearing. Likewise, without computers, we would have no Internet and no cell phones. Computers are an essential part of modern life in many ways, but if all computers suddenly ceased to work tomorrow, I think that, after a period of crisis, humans would be able to figure out how to survive in nature once more. So, in my perspective, computers in general are integral right now – but in the long run, they may not necessarily be so important. My cochlear implant is no exception.

Heck, even hearing is not integral to my lived experience. I was trying to think of an analogy for my relationship with my cochlear implant, and this is what I came up with: Imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning in an alternate reality where every human has always had wings. They have structured society around the fact that humans possess wings: for example, to meet someone for lunch, you fly to the top floor of a skyscraper. This is every bit as normal as taking the subway. You are the only person who remembers that humans once had no wings; everybody else lives in a reality where human beings have always had wings. For them, this is the natural order of things and they cannot imagine how one could function without wings. They expect you to graft on wings because there obviously is no way that anybody could function in society without wings. I ask: how would you feel?

Personally, if I were in this situation and I chose to graft on wings, I’d appreciate my wings for two reasons: one, because flying is inherently cool and, two, because everybody else has trouble thinking of a society structured around bipedal people. Perhaps over time, I would even neglect to walk because flying was so much more convenient. But in the end, having wings wouldn’t be part of my normal self-conception – I had, after all, experienced a childhood without wings – and I wouldn’t think that wings are inherently necessary to function in all human societies. After all, I would still remember the fact that human beings in my reality were able to structure a society just fine with two legs and two hands.

This is how I feel about hearing. While hearing is not nearly as cool as having wings, I appreciate the ability to listen to music and get along with hearing people more easily. But at the end of the day, I know from experience that humans can function without hearing. Growing up, it was difficult for me to grasp why people thought otherwise, especially because there are real-life examples of functioning Deaf communities. I have come to the conclusion that most people, unless they are anthropology students or something, simply don’t think about what is not on their radar – if their social structure is working just fine, why think about what it would be like to live in a society with alternate rules?

In the end, though, I don’t begrudge hearing people for being ignorant. (Unless, of course, they meet me or other deaf people and continue to be closed-minded after prolonged exposure to deafness.) I think that most people in this culture are ignorant. Now, I think it’s important to say that I don’t believe that ignorance and bigotry are essential traits of human nature; rather, I think that it is simply part of the dominant culture. But, because many people are steeped within the dominant culture, they are inclined to simultaneously emphasize differences rather than similarities and to generalize so much that they try to apply their own experiences to everyone else’s. It sounds contradictory, but in the end, it comes down to this: we are encouraged to be self-centered. If it works for me, why wouldn’t it work for everyone else?

With that being said, I would like to remind everyone that I was talking about my experiences with cochlear implants. Everyone has a different relationship to cochlear implants. Hell, my sister has a radically different conception of her cochlear implant and her relationship to hearing culture than I do. And we came from the same womb – imagine how different it would be for yet another deaf person.

Many (90%) of deaf children have Hearing parents. A good portion of these parents have had no exposure to deafness and Deaf culture, so their first thought is to make their child like themselves rather than working with what the child has. A lot of audiologists, cochlear implant corporations, speech pathologists, oralists, and other persons in similar professions promise that, with a lot of training and practice, deaf children will be able to integrate in mainstream Hearing society.

These professionals have noble sentiments, but I feel that a lot of them neglect to mention a very important factor: motivation. This is very simple. As many teachers know, it is nearly impossible to teach a reluctant learner. The same thing goes for teaching deaf children how to speak, how to listen, how to use a cochlear implant, and so forth.

The thing is, for a lot of people who were born deaf, hearing is unnatural on some level. Myself included – I now appreciate hearing as a tool that helps me integrate into society. But, as a child, I simply did not understand why hearing people put so much emphasis on hearing – in my perspective, if everybody in the world signed, there would be no problem with deafness at all. I still believe that, but I have learned that Hearing people stubbornly cling to their notion that hearing is one of the more important senses, so I have learned how to play along with them.¹ At the end of the day, though, hearing is an artificial sense that I can turn off or on. When I was younger, this sense of artificiality made it harder to grasp why it was so important to learn how to do things like listen and speak.

When I was a kid, I had the most amazing speech therapist in the entire world. She was extremely kind, patient, and tolerant.² To give her credit, I did learn how to produce basic sounds, like h, k, e, and so forth. However, once I had learned the basics of speaking, I plateaued. I didn’t see the importance of making my speech more clearly understood. Now my parents and peers at my small private school could understand me; why bother working on my speech even more?

It was only when I entered a large public school that I regained motivation to work on my speech. I discovered that most new people could not understand me, so I had a reason to make my speech more clearly understood. Later on, when I entered an academic competition that included a public speaking category, I had even more motivation to make myself understood to hearing people.³

I do have mixed feelings – if society were truly equal, d/Deaf people wouldn’t need to learn how to make their speech understandable, or even how to speak. Like many Deaf people, I sometimes daydream of a utopia in which everyone can sign. But, at the end of the day, it is a Hearing person’s world. Unfortunately, a lot of us have to make compromises in order to get along in society, whether that means learning how to speak and read lips or using cochlear implants. Another alternative is to live in the Deaf community, which I personally think can be a very fulfilling life.

That being said, if a Hearing parent really wants their child to live in the Hearing world, cochlear implants are not a magic cure for Deaf children. Motivation is much more important. If a Hearing parent truly wants their kid to learn how to speak and listen, I would suggest being more sensitive to the Deaf kid’s perspective. Remember that Deaf children may not necessarily see the importance of hearing. It is up to Hearing people to explain that Hearing people believe that hearing is an important sense.

Another thing that Hearing parents overlook is that there are many answers. Like I said, cochlear implants aren’t a magical cure: if a child decides that a cochlear implant is not something that fits in with his or her self-image, a properly motivated child can learn how to lipread and speak. I personally decided that I can be Deaf and have a cochlear implant, so I got a cochlear implant, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. One key of encouraging motivation within a child is to look at his or her natural inclinations, then work with them. Like I said, hearing is an unnatural sense for many of us, but some methods of integrating in the Hearing world feel less unnatural than others. What methods those are depend on the individual and how willing he or she is to compromise with Hearing people in order to live a fulfilling life.

I have more to say about the concept of fitting in with the Hearing world, but that’s for another post. I hope that I have made the importance of motivation somewhat clear in this post.

1. I honestly do not think that Hearing people can explain exactly why they believe that Hearing is so important using logical arguments. [↩]
2. In fact, when I came out to her this summer, she took it in stride – more on that later. [↩]
3. Incidentally, I scored something like 950/1000 in the public speaking section at the national competition. [↩]