Immersed in a Sort of Silence

Sure, I’d been told that graduate study would take me places I never imagined I’d go, but I had no idea that this would be happening in my first quarter.

In Nagy’s Oral Tradition course, we’ve been exploring the relationships between oral traditions (and by extension folklore) and literatures in print. Never content to pursue a conventional line, I tried to imagine "orality" from a New Media standpoint – and realized that the one literature I hadn’t seen enough of, and that could easily take advantage of New Media, would be sign language literature. Deaf literature. Deaf with a capital D, for the distinct cultural group that defines itself not by a loss of hearing, but by adopting sign language as its primary idiom. Here, "orality" is often associated with the pressures brought upon Deaf people to conform to the demands of hearing people, often through forced reliance on speechreading to the exclusion of sign. (Hence "orality" in quotes.)

Precisely because of the progress of the World Wide Web and broadband access, sign communication, both synchronous and archived, ought to easily move to this stage. So a generic web search for "Deaf folklore" ought to be fruitful, hm?

Not necessarily. I found a few assorted articles explaining Deaf culture (again). On YouTube - ostensibly the one place I should see lots of ASL vlogging - I found only one video that would definitely count as a performance of Deaf folklore, the majority otherwise appearing to be vlogs of newbie signers showing off their new vocabulary. (I remember those days. What a snot-nosed audist I was.)

This was a wake-up call. If the Web seems such an appropriate medium for sign language performance, as well as for collection and analysis of Deaf folklore, why isn’t it there? I brought this idea to Nagy, carefully arguing the case for Deaf culture and hence folklore, and he OK’d it with a few suggestions for sources. Great!, I thought to myself. If these sources pan out, they might lead me to the golden Deafie web site carefully hidden from the all-seeing eye of Google-bot; at the very least, they could help explain why I wasn’t finding anything.

One, two, six books later, I still got nothing. But sometimes, footnotes are a grad student’s best friend. Footnotes shoot like tendrils back toward their original referents, and each cord leads to a book, an article, a database, a person. I used these to slowly build a list of follow-up sources.

And then I remembered CSUN.

Cal State Northridge is home of the National Center on Deafness (NCOD), a place of legend that I had developed a deep anxiety about visiting. But they had sources that I could find nowhere else and could not get via Inter-Library Loan in time. I had a car, I had gas in the tank, and I had a day off to visit. Hence, I had no excuse.

The Resource Center at NCOD – their library, basically – is quiet, like you would expect any library to be, but not really in the same way. From my observations, I think I was the only hearing person to visit that day. The silence I experienced was not a complete absence of sound – with Deaf people, there's the occasional vocalization, or the slap of an emphatic sign – but what struck me was that this silence was, how do I say it?, completely comfortable with itself. I could not sense any need on anyone’s part to "fill" this silence with sound; it was a fulfilled silence. And however rusty my own signing was (not practicing for ten or so years can do that), not once did I feel the desire to tear into this singular comfort with spoken words. (If only my computer had been as cooperative.)

The two librarians who covered the desk that day were great; in spite of my lack of any grammatical sense of ASL, and a deepening fear that my fingers were turning into bratwursts, they lead me in a beeline to the folklore-related items. And, after hours of watching Deaf videos and taking notes from Rutherford’s seminal work on Deaf folklore, they finally led me to the answer I needed (even if it wasn’t what I wanted): Deaf folklore is not big on the Internet because there isn’t as yet a critical mass of folkloristic research in print.

I had found an answer to the question, but a good scholar finds the question to the answer; that new question what I’m working on next. Knowing what I know of Deaf culture, the Internet, and cyberculture, I think I can look at the data anew and reconsider - in a contemplative quiet that, with a little effort, just might approximate the peace of that library. The work deserves no less.