Sara Novic, Penguin Random House, 2022 pp ISBN 9780593241509
Through a blend of fiction and creative non-fiction Sara Novic has crafted an urgent and compelling lament of the demise of culturally important Deaf education In America. The fiction takes readers into the pleasures and pains of Deaf communities and outliers, whilst the non-fiction unwraps some mysteries of American sign language (ASL). The title refers to an ASL sign meaning real talk, or truth telling, and this is what Novic gives the reader.
Full disclosure here: I am deaf, and this hearing loss complicates everything I do. I wish, I wish, I had learnt sign language as a child, as a young adult even, instead of now, in middle age. My hearing parents made their decision for both their deaf children, that we would be ‘normal’ no matter what.
As Andrew Solomon explores in Far from the Tree (2012), apples (deaf children of hearing parents) are difficult fruit. I am one and got fitted with hearing aids and speech therapied into exhaustion. Teenaged Charlie, one of three central characters, is another difficult fruit and was cochlear implanted as a young child. Her parents, like mine, were guided by medical professionals in the genuinely held but fallacious belief that oralism is the one true way to live, love and learn. Novic, a Deaf woman, relates how the cochlear implant enthusiasm in America meant that families who could afford the devices, the therapy and educational support had many children who did well; but families who couldn’t afford these had failed implantees who were ‘not cured’ as the implant sales reps had promised. Those kids often wound up at Deaf schools, only now with vast cognitive ‘defects’ from childhoods with negligible language and minimal learning.
Charlie is isolated and friendless in mainstream school with a dodgy dubious implant and no support. She is on the precipice of a fall into risky people, behaviours, drugs and crime. Thanks to a judge’s ruling in her parents’ divorce, Charlie is sent to River Valley School for the Deaf.
True biz as well as being a sign, is also a policy at this school where the headmistress February “had instated the True Biz policy as a way to get the students to talk to her when they were up to no good” (Novic. 2022, p. 115) and she would “soften their consequences” (Novic, 2022, p. 116.) February noted so many of her students were failed by implants, hearing aids and therapies as children. Now, as these students navigated the complex language and fraught emotions of risk laden teenage years, it’s as if they were, in effect, “a second wave of the terrible twos” (Novic, 2022, p. 115.)
After entering the endangered spaces of the residential River Valley School for Deaf and Deafblind children, Charlie begins to flourish. As her sign language blossoms, so too does her learning and social engagement with peers, parents and potential romantic partners. Charlie, with her newfound ASL skills, “saw English, rigid and brittle, crack before her eyes-concepts that took up whole spoken phrases encapsulated in a single sign” (Novic, 2022, p. 169).
Charlie learns that Deaf gossip is fast and virulent. She is befriended by Austin, a native signing teen and third main protagonist. He relates: “if hearing people ever studied the power and speed of the Deaf rumour mill, they might think twice about classifying deafness as a ‘communication disorder’” (Novic, 2022, p. 165).
Interspersed in a text that canvases multiple points of view, tricky ethical dilemmas and hazardous teenage behaviours, is a curriculum of sorts. These non-fiction diversions are interleaved with the fictional text and are centred around the history of American Sign Language, evolution of Deaf culture, and activism. The headmistress, February, herself a CODA (child of deaf adults) is teaching Charlie and the class about their place in the world, community and home.
There are two noxious undercurrents. Firstly, that society at large is audist, believing that hearing people are superior to people with hearing loss. In a hearing world, communication and care of Deaf people is parlous. Secondly, while the once floundering Charlie is blooming, the school itself is under threat of closure. February, notes sadly: “the more vulnerable her student body was, the less politicians cared, or even pretended to care, about their fate” (Novic, 2022, p. 160). The school is seeing the failed attempts at mainstreaming d/Deaf kids for they end up at specialist Deaf schools, but with “vast cognitive defects” (Novic, 2022, p. 160). Like a roll call for the fallen, True Biz lists at the end, closures of (real) American schools for the Deaf in the past decades. One cannot help but wonder, where did all the Deaf kids go? And what happened when no one cared if and how they communicated, lived and learned.
Dr Annmaree Watharow
Lived Experience Research Fellow
University of Sydney