Interview with Michael Uniacke

WG: Michael, your previous work on historical fiction about the Deaf community, The Incontestable Superiority and The Quest for Edith Ackers has been well-received, with the former being reprinted in John Lee Clark's Deaf Lit Extravagnaza. What prompted you to shift gears to memoir writing in your two latest books, Deafness Down and Deafness Gain?

MU: I didn't really shift gears into memoir writing for the simple reason I started the memoir more than 30 years ago. Effectively the engine had been idling for quite a while, and I concentrated on other writing ventures, of which historical fiction was one.

The memoirs underwent numerous changes over the years, the major change being from a documentary, expository style into a memoir and narrative style in which I fictionalised passages to show what happened rather than just explain what happened – the classical "show, don't tell" canon of good writing. It's something I have to guard against when writing on deafness: an inclination to explain everything.

At the time I started writing the memoirs I was working for deafness organisations when qualified deaf people first began working professionally with them. It coincided with the UN's International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981, and there was a demand to hear directly from people with the lived experience of disability. So in deafness I was something of a novelty and spent a lot of time talking – and explaining about deafness.

Although I scored a publishing contract in the mid 1980s, the publishing firm was taken over by a larger firm which did not want to publish. I negotiated a settlement with them, which arguably might have been more than what I might have earned had the book been published.

I didn't do much on the manuscript for a while, but during this hiatus I commenced an Arts degree at Deakin University. I majored in literary studies and took a couple of history subjects in which we analysed historical sources. I realised that analysis and interpretation of sources depended very much on who was doing it, and especially that different people at the time of an historical event would have very different points of view. Traditionally, these points-of-view were those of the winners, the educated, the wealthy, the elite.

So it wasn't much of a jump from there to realise that almost no-one had told the stories of history from the deaf point-of-view. Researchers like Harlan Lane, and in Australia, Breda Carty, gave me enough resource material to develop stories, starting with the seminal event in deaf history, the Congress of Milan. Historical fiction gives me the freedom of imagination buttressed by a reliability of factual events established by researchers mindful and respectful of the deaf perspective.

So I'd say I'd shifted gears from memoir writing to historical fiction. Memoir writing is partly about historical writing writ small.

WG: The need to revisit historical events that impact Deaf culture and to incorporate the view points of those who have been most affected by those events as you do in The Incontestable Superiority is fairly clear, but the function of memoir might be a bit less so. What were you hoping to accomplish in your two most recent books?

MU: Initially a first motivation was to tell a rollicking good story. It needed a hook, and that hook was deafness, plus the unusual situation of there being four deaf children out of five born to hearing parents.

Furthermore deafness seemed such an unusual and ready-made topic. I remember being impressed, but not altogether surprised, by the fact that very, very few books on deafness anywhere in the world were written by deaf people themselves. And I knew I could write with absolute authenticity.

I was also very tired of the emphasis found in many books on deafness which started with the assumption that it was a problem, and that it needed to be overcome, conquered or cured. I read a couple of these books and found them superficial, tedious and predictable. My sense of deafness was layered, nuanced and paradoxical, and it seemed no-one had tried to convey that.

A final motivation, and perhaps bundling together the above three, was to convey that deafness could be something very different from this popular perception, that it could be something beyond disability and instead, could be simply a variation on the human condition. It's about exploration and reaching one's own accommodation with deafness.

In the popular mind, there is nothing new about deafness; it's something that has always been around, ever since biblical times when Jesus was said to have cured the deaf-and-dumb man with the Aramaic imperative, "Ephpheta!" ("Be opened!") Thus my perception of the common attitude to deafness is one that tends to be frozen to the simple black-and-white of silence-and-hearing, or to paraphrase Animal Farm, hearing good, deafness bad. The new kids on the disability block, especially the autism spectrum disorders for example, don't have this problem. The novelty of ASD means popular attitudes are still being formed and are open and malleable.

Hence the title of the second memoir Deafness Gain deliberately reverses the very common phrase, "hearing loss". I didn't lose something I never really had in the first place. (I certainly acknowledge that for most, a gradual loss of hearing is precisely their interpretation.) But I did gain a powerful sense of deafness as an integral part of who I am.

So it is these I hope to accomplish in the memoirs: genuinely authentic writing that presents an unusual slant on a well-known but superficially understood part of the human condition. And while doing so, to tell a great story.

WG: I'm struck by your comment "the title of the second memoir Deafness Gain deliberately reverses the very common phrase, 'hearing loss'. I didn't lose something I never really had in the first place." It parallels something that I was just reading, written quite a few years ago by Stuart Sanderson, a writer with cerebral palsy. He says, "My handicap is a physical one. I can't change and don't want to. I am ugly, scary, a monster and retarded to some of the public but, to me, I don't feel handicapped; it's second nature. I don't know any other way to live positively." What strikes me in both cases is that at the core it is a question of identity. People who suddenly finds themselves deaf or in a wheelchair are thrust into the position of redefining themselves and it is probably from that point of view – from the point of view of loss –that the general public views deafness. So my question is, how in Deafness Gain do you work to reverse that perception?

MU: Thank you – the question is not long-winded but touches upon something that's quite important.

It would be unusual for a person suddenly deprived of a sense to see it in terms of anything other than a loss. Hearing-impaired people, who were born hearing, feel a sense of loss for something that once they had, and they do seek to regain it. That's natural and understandable. They define success by how well they can pass as hearing.

I didn't set out deliberately to prove I had "gained" deafness. I was telling a story based on what I remembered, and I sought to understand why I remembered what I remembered. What I found was a trajectory of a kind that made me see how it began to fit together.

Deafness had a profound effect on everyday living, but as Deafness Down reveals, much of this was suppressed. One of the earliest indications for me that deafness could be something other than a loss or a deficiency was my discovery that not having on a hearing aid was not the frightening, alien state of being it was supposed to be, for example, when playing tennis. In another example from that book, the French dictation test showed deafness as something quite positive.

Self identity has a lot of meanings; the ones I like are about working it all out for yourself, or if you like, getting your shit together. It's about finding your place in the world. It's a slow process, and it can come in fits and starts. The two memoirs taken together reveal much of this. In particular, Deafness Gain shows the further exploration of deafness the protagonist needed to do. It was critical that the protagonist explored deafness with other people who like him were deaf.

In Deafness Gain, it's the climax at the end of the book that puts the sealer on this process. The words spoken to the protagonist suddenly crystallised for him everything that had been going on, and it needed an outsider to see that and to say what she did. So in this way the memoir shows there isn't a sense of loss of deafness, but as I writer I didn't deliberately proselytize – it's not a Deaf Power primer!

WG: Michael, before we close I'd like to mention for any readers who may be new to Wordgathering, that they can find a review of Deafness Down in the June 2015 issue, and ask when is Deafness Gain scheduled to come out and how would readers be able to acquire one or the other of these books?

MU: TUQ Publications publishes the memoirs Deafness Down, Deafness Gain and the novella The Quest for Edith Ackers. The novella The Quest for Edith Ackers is available in print from most online book retailers anywhere in the world. The eBook version is available from the website www.tuq.pub. The memoir Deafness Down will become available in print from online retailers during December 2015. The eBook version likewise will be available from www.tuq.pub. The follow-up memoir Deafness Gain is anticipated for release during February 2016, in both print and eBook versions. For details of all books, including extracts for reading, visit www.tuq.pub.

WG: Thanks for taking your time to tell us about your work. It is an important contribution to Deaf literature and I hope your books will find a wide audience.