The Perseverance Read online

and we would keep losing connection.

  But praise my Dad’s mechanical hands.

  Even though he couldn’t fix my deafness

  I still channel him. My sound system plays

  on Father’s Day in Manor Park Cemetery

  where I find his grave, and for the first time

  see his middle name, OSBERT, derived from Old English

  meaning God and bright. Which may

  have been a way to bleach him, darkest

  of his five brothers, the only one sent away

  from the country to live up-town

  with his light skin aunt. She protected him

  from police, who didn’t believe he belonged

  unless they heard his English,

  which was smooth as some up-town roads.

  His aunt loved him and taught him

  to recite Wordsworth and Coleridge — rhythms

  that wouldn’t save him. He would become

  Rasta and never tell a soul about the name

  that undid his blackness. It is his grave

  that tells me the name his black

  body, even in death, could not move or mute.

  Dear Hearing World

  after Danez Smith

  I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits,

  a solar system where the space between

  a star and a planet isn’t empty. I have left

  a white beard of noise in my place and many

  of you won’t know the difference. We are

  indeed the same volume, all of us eventually fade.

  I have left Earth in search of an audible God.

  I do not trust the sound of yours.

  You wouldn’t recognise my grandmother’s Hallelujah

  if she had to sign it, you would have made her sit

  on her hands and put a ruler in her mouth

  as if measuring her distance from holy.

  Take your God back, though his songs

  are beautiful, they are not loud enough.

  I want the fate of Lazarus for every deaf school

  you’ve closed, every deaf child whose confidence

  has gone to a silent grave, every BSL user

  who has seen the annihilation of their language,

  I want these ghosts to haunt your tongue-tied hands.

  I have left Earth, I am equal parts sick of your

  oh, I’m hard of hearing too, just because

  you’ve been on an airplane or suffered head colds.

  Your voice has always been the loudest sound in a room.

  I call you out for refusing to acknowledge

  sign language in classrooms, for assessing

  deaf students on what they can’t say

  instead of what they can, we did not ask to be a part

  of the hearing world, I can’t hear my joints crack

  but I can feel them. I am sick of sounding out your rules —

  you tell me I breathe too loud and it’s rude to make noise

  when I eat, sent me to speech therapists, said I was speaking

  a language of holes, I was pronouncing what I heard

  but your judgment made my syllables disappear,

  your magic master trick hearing world — drowning out the quiet,

  bursting all speech bubbles in my graphic childhood,

  you are glad to benefit from audio supremacy,

  I tried, hearing people, I tried to love you, but you laughed

  at my deaf grammar, I used commas not full stops

  because everything I said kept running away,

  I mulled over long paragraphs because I didn’t know

  what a natural break sounded like, you erased

  what could have always been poetry

  You erased what could have always been poetry.

  You taught me I was inferior to standard English expression —

  I was a broken speaker, you were never a broken interpreter —

  taught me my speech was dry for someone who should sound

  like they’re underwater. It took years to talk with a straight spine

  and mute red marks on the coursework you assigned.

  Deaf voices go missing like sound in space

  and I have left earth to find them.

  ‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughes

  The deaf children were monkey nimble, fish tremulous

  and sudden.

  Their faces were alert and simple

  Like faces of little animals, small night lemurs caught in

  the flash light.

  They lacked a dimension,

  They lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses

  to sound.

  The whole body was removed

  From the vibration of air, they lived through the eyes,

  The clear simple look, the instant full attention.

  Their selves were not woven into a voice

  Which was woven into a face

  Hearing itself, its own public and audience,

  An apparition in camouflage, an assertion in doubt

  Their selves were hidden, and their faces looked out of

  hiding.

  What they spoke with was a machine,

  A manipulation of fingers, a control-panel of gestures

  Out there in the alien space

  Separated from them.

  Their unused faces were simple lenses of watchfulness

  Simple pools of earnest watchfulness

  Their bodies were like their hands

  Nimbler than bodies, like the hammers of a piano,

  A puppet agility, a simple mechanical action

  A blankness of hieroglyph

  A stylized lettering

  Spelling out approximate signals

  While the self looked through, out of the face of simple

  concealment

  A face not merely deaf, a face in the darkness, a face unaware,

  A face that was simply the front skin of the self concealed and

  Separate

  After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River

  No one wise calls the river unaware or simple pools;

  no one wise says it lacks a dimension; no one wise

  says its body is removed from the vibration of air.

  The river is a quiet breath-taker, gargling mud.

  Ted is alert and simple.

  Ted lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound

  and responses to Sound.

  Ted lived through his eyes. But eye the colossal

  currents from the bridge. Eye riverboats

  ghosting a geography of fog.

  Mississippi means Big River, named by French colonisers.

  The natives laughed at their arrogant maps,

  conquering wind and marking mist.

  The mouth of the river laughs. A man in a wetsuit emerges,

  pulls misty goggles over his head. Couldn’t see a thing.

  He breathes heavily. My face was in darkness.

  No one heard him; the river drowned him out.

  For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent

  When three deaf women

  were found murdered,

  their tongues cut out

  for speaking sign language,

  the papers called it

  a savage ritualistic act —

  but I think the world

  should have gone silent,

  should have heard the deaf

  gather at Saint Vincent,

  should have heard the quiet

  march towards Port-au-Prince.

  ‘The British government did not recognise British Sign Language until 2002’

  BSL ZONE (DEAF HISTORY)

  Before, all official languages

  were oral. The Deaf were a colony

  the hearing world ignored

  and now, the irony, that the words noise

  and London are the same sign in BSL.

  It is getting so loud

  au
diologists are preparing

  for the deafest generation

  in heard history.

  In Montego Bay, a sign

  written on the outside walls

  of the Christian deaf school says

  Isiah 29:18 In that day the deaf shall hear

  above a painting of a green hill paradise.

  Harriott, the only Deaf teacher in the school,

  tells me no one speaks sign well enough

  to enter any visions of valleys.

  My Dad never called me deaf,

  even when he saw the audiogram.

  He’d say, you’re limited,

  so you can turn the TV up.

  He didn’t mean to be cruel.

  He was thinking about his friend

  at school in Jamaica who stabbed

  another boy’s eardrums with pencils.

  Dad never saw him in class again.

  Maybe that’s what he was afraid of;

  that the deaf disappear, get carried away

  bleeding from their ears.

  Conversation with the Art Teacher

  (a Translation Attempt)

  Shit and good my education. Hearing teachers not see potential. This my confusion life, 90s hearing teachers not think I can become artist because of deafness but funny thing, Deaf girl does GCSE art in six months and go on to get degree. I have proved many wrongs. I am costume designer, teacher, artist. At school I said, “I want to be a costume designer.” Teacher says, “I can’t.” I can’t? So harsh. My father, hearing, signs. Says I can follow dream and lucky me, I did. Proving people wrong is great but tiring. Was I born deaf? You asking lots of questions! OK, yes, in Somaliland, I was about two, meningitis. Seven other children in my hospital ward, all died. My father worked around Europe and took me with him. English hospital saved me. I still know some Somali sign. Wait, you write down what I say, how? You know BSL has no grammar structure? How you write me when I am visual? Me, into fashion, expression in colour. How will someone reading this see my feeling?

  The Ghost of Laura Bridgeman Warns Helen Keller About Fame

  They’ll forget you, but not

  until men have sat close, touched

  your hands, asked their questions.

  What is divinity? Eternity? Insouciance?

  Your name will be scratched into reports

  naming you proof that those born

  deaf or blind or both are worth

  an incapable God, a fragmented sermon.

  They will want to know if “intelligence”

  has a hand shape. It took one man

  called Dickens to open my story

  to the world and call it how he saw,

  how he heard. Your danger is

  in his language. Don’t let them twist

  your silence –– the ear and eye

  are at the seat of their perception.

  We are centuries away from people

  believing our stories without

  perversion, without pity. Their speech

  will never really find a way into us,

  will always be the sound

  of our separation. Who is testing

  God’s hearing when you ask if my blood

  is dead? If I am dead, where is my thinking?

  Beware of Alexander Graham Bell.

  Decibel is his word.

  He never receives you. O Helen,

  don’t trust what you cannot say yourself.

  The Mechanism of Speech*

  His tongue was too far forward

  His tongue further back

  His tongue too high, too low

  His incorrect instrument

  his difficult power

  to muscle

  meaning

  * Lectures delivered before the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf by Alexander Graham Bell. An erasure.

  Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated

  ‘If a written word can stand for an idea as well as a spoken word can, the same may be said of a signed word’

  HARLAN LANE

  My BSL teacher taught me about affirmation and negation, saying, in sign: if you are crying and someone asks, “are you crying?” you must answer with a smile and nod to affirm, “yes, crying.”

  I thought about Charles Dickens. About everyone laughing and crying in 1843 while he performed Doctor Marigold. The story is of a Cheap Jack trader pushing his cart through east London, who adopts a deaf girl called Sophy after losing his own daughter, because grief never leaves, it just changes shape. Dickens visited deaf schools, interviewed the students before shaping his story.

  So let’s love that Sophy and Doctor Marigold invent their own home signs. Let’s love that Sophy goes to a deaf school, learns to read. Let’s laugh when two deaf people fall in love. Let’s laugh when Sophy writes a letter to Doctor Marigold hoping the child is not born deaf. Let’s laugh at the people who hope their child is born with a pretty voice. Let’s speak in the BSL word order — sign you speak? — while celebrating and rolling our eyes at the signature sentimental ending. It’s said that as Dickens read in Whitechapel, hearing people cried in the street when Sophy spoke (an unexplained miracle).

  I want my BSL teacher to sign to everyone in 1843, are you crying? I want everyone to smile and nod, yes, crying.

  The Shame of Mable Gardiner Hubbards

  ‘Where in literature are the deaf seen truly, with deafness just one condition of their lives, acting in concert, with deaf and hearing people, not living as isolates?’

  LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY (poet & teacher, 1814)

  I shrink at any reference to my disability,

  leave dinner halls with table edge marks in my chest

  from hours leaning in. I lock myself in ladies’ rooms

  to rest, away from noise, to not be the girl going gah gah.

  To pass as normal I rehearse my listening in mirrors.

  My lips move and I wait for the right time to nod. A nod

  restores my civility. I burned to absorb every decibel.

  Look, ladies with perfect responses. A child drops

  a spoon and their ears know where it landed.

  Breed out our deafness, sterilise the shame of our species.

  I love the man who forgets I cannot hear,

  who plays piano and recites Shakespeare.

  Everything he does shakes the floor; his name is Bell.

  Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris

  When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car

  the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.

  I use the past tense though this is irrelevant

  in Daniel’s language, which is sign.

  Sign has no future or past; it is a present language.

  You are never more present than when a gun

  is pointed at you. What language says this

  if not sign? But the police officer saw hands

  waving in the air, fired and Daniel dropped

  his hands, his chest bleeding out onto concrete

  metres from his home. I am in Breukelen Coffee House

  in New York, reading this news on my phone,

  when a black policewoman walks in, two guns

  on her hips, my friend next to me reading

  the comments section: Black Lives Matter.

  Now what could we sign or say out loud

  when the last word I learned in ASL was alive?

  Alive — both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal,

  index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky.

  To Sweeten Bitter

  My father had four children

  and three sugars in his coffee

  and every birthday he bought me

  a dictionary which got thicker

  and thicker and because his word

  is not dead I carry it like sugar

  on a silver spoon

  up the Mobay hills in Jamaica

  past the flaked white walls

  of plantation houses<
br />
  past canefields and coconut trees

  past the new crystal sugar factories.

  I ask dictionary why we came here —

  it said nourish so I sat with my aunt

  on her balcony at the top

  of Barnet Heights

  and ate salt fish

  and sweet potato

  and watched women

  leading their children

  home from school.

  As I ate I asked dictionary

  what is difficult about love?

  It opened on the word grasp

  and I looked at my hand

  holding this ivory knife

  and thought about how hard it was

  to accept my father

  for who he was

  and where he came from

  how easy it is now to spill

  sugar on the table before

  it is poured into my cup.

  I Want the Confidence of

  Salvador Dali in a 1950s McDonald’s advert,

  of red gold and green ties

  on shanty town dapper dandies, of Cuba Gooding Jr.

  in a strip club shouting SHOW ME THE MONEY,

  of the woman on her phone in the quiet coach,

  of knowing you’ll be seen and served,

  that no one will cross the road when they see you,

  the sun shining through the gaps in the buildings,

  a glass ceiling in a restaurant

  where knives and spoons wink,

  a polite pint and a cheeky cigarette, tattoos

  on the arms, trains that blur the whole city without delay.

  I want the confidence of a coffee bean in the body,

  a surface that doesn’t need scratching;

  I want to be fluent in confidence so large it speaks from its own sky.

  At the airport I want my confidence to board

  without investigations, to sit in foreign cafés

  without a silver spoon in a teacup clinking

  into sunken places, of someone named after a saint,

  of Matthew the deaf footballer who couldn’t hear

  to pass the ball, but still ran the pitch,

  of leather jackets and the teeth