Book Review: Deafness Gain (Michael Uniacke)Reviewed by T. K. DaltonI read Michael Uniacke's coming-of-age memoir Deafness Gain in electronic format. I mention this seemingly irrelevant fact because the reading experience of the book's latter half, which for me happened via an automated reader for PDF files, productively complemented the life experience reported throughout this sensitive and, at times, nuanced and quite eloquent book. Two idiosyncrasies of my chosen medium became immediately apparent. For one, certain combinations of letters came out as various non-letter characters: 'tt' came out as a hashtag, ‘ff' morphed into double quotations. Even "ft" exited whatever PDF-to-html algorithm the software ran on as a single exclamation point. At first this conversion, and its imposition on myself to mediate, was so bothersome I thought I'd need to go back to scrolling through the text on my aging laptop, taxing its feeble battery. Then I got used to filling in the blanks using what interpreters sometimes call "cloze" skills. After a bit, I grew to even look forward to the next missing letters, and to compiling the words into an offbeat summary or statement of theme: chatting, written, pretty, office, coffee, different, baffled, left, after, drifted, often, crafted, thrifty, softly. Almost poetry, that. The machine's other idiosyncrasy found its root (and while we're on the topic of language, please forgive the lewd Australian double entendre) in the text of Deafness Gain itself. As in his previous book, Deafness Down, Uniacke often represents dialogue taking place in an inaccessible environment by using Greek letters resembling Roman alphabet correspondents to form a sentence half-full of almost-words. (One fairly friendly example, from a line of dialogue at the tax office where Uniacke works: "Hello. My ταξ ρεφυνδ. I pay ταξ. You give me money. Where my money, Sir?") This crafty decision allowed this hearing, English-fluent, sighted reader to usually figure out the meaning–even more clearly than the narrating character could. In the screen reader, however the words represented by Greek almost-letters were simply missing, which created a dramatic effect for the hearing, English-fluent, sighted reader (c.f.: me) of missing it all. After reading Deafness Gain, this dual experience (working it out in one context, missing the train in the next) seems to come closest to what the lived experience described might actually be. Over the course of the book, Uniacke transforms from a shy, reluctant accounting student to a bold, active, professional devoted to advocating for his own beloved deaf community. The dialogue, as I received it, reflects this dramatic arc. Audiologically, the dialog may not be a complete blank; socially, it may as well be. For an individual searching for identity, a community longing for cohesion, and for any movement aiming to foment social progress, emerging from the labyrinth of these contradictions requires both a precise internal compass and the ability to read it. That's clear nowhere more than the book's final section, which takes place at a workshop. Having resoundingly failed to become an accountant, Uniacke has completed school for social work and taken a job with a Deaf organization. His job has paid for him to attend a training, but the only way he can make any sense out of the cross talk is, out of frustration, by telling the group he'll thump the floor when he can't hear them. This may sound funnier than it actually was. The group eagerly goes along with his idea, only to continue speaking inaudibly when they do repeat themselves. Humiliated–feeling, he tells the group, like "a performing seal"–Uniacke stops. The resilient, creative, accomplished professional reduced to thumping on the floor to make himself not even heard but just included echoes the longing middle-schooler whose playground mates become teenagers who do nothing but act older than they are, talking in small, closed circles. "I so wanted to be that free and defiant, conversing and laughing without effort, at one with the glorious preening arrogance that steeled and primed them for the world," writes Uniacke of the sudden exclusion of adolescence. Uniacke enters the world unprimed, landing in the government's tax office while studying accounting. He's unhappy here, and at home, where despite growing up in a household where three of his four siblings are deaf, his parents insist on their assimilation into and accommodation of the hearing world. When Uniacke fails Accounting 2B, his father says to write an appeal to the school, explaining away his failure. "It's because of all your interest in the hard-of-hearing. But don't tell them that." His father compares Uniacke's relationship with his deaf friends, ironically enough, to two radio characters; the comparison of him to these two gossips is apt enough for young Uniacke to see it, and to begin to see the limits of his focus on intense social life. Make no mistake, though: social life has had a profound effect on Uniacke. The VTS Companion Group is comprised entirely of young deaf people educated by visiting teachers. These students, like Uniacke, typically were the only deaf student in their schools. They are not fluent signers, if they sign at all. On the bond connecting the group, Uniacke writes that he realized: "we speak a common language, language not made up of words but of the way we speak. I do not know what is this language, but this I know very clearly: this would not happen if I were the only deaf person in a sea of hearing people. If I were, I would be floundering and flopping, unable to hear." Interactions with the group allow him to see himself in a context he never could have while floating in the ocean of hearing people who saw deafness as a static problem with a reasonable solution. "I knew deafness as ragged and fluid. Deafness laughed at the dinky little assumptions hearing people made," Uniacke writes. "And in spite of that momentary rage, I was beginning to laugh, too." Laughter is an important part of his draw to the VTS crowd. To his friend Myles, he notes that the way jokes function here are different than outside the group, where he and others miss the joke. "But what do these deaf people do? They hold back their laughter. They make sure that everyone has got it. And then we all laugh. That's absolutely incredible, and they are the only people in the world who do that." This insightful scene stands out, as do others, like a discussion about the design of a house for deaf people ("You build houses for people. You don't twist people to try and make them fit into houses.") These scenes stand out in part because the book has some early pacing problems as the worlds of home, work, and social life gradually establish, as plot points come together to make a story. At times in the early parts, not enough distinction separates one party from another, or days at the office, or even members of the VTS group. But such weaving is a necessary part representing how he moves, choppily, between deaf and hearing worlds. As a hard of hearing person, the "dinky little assumptions" about Uniacke and his group – that is, "little-d" deaf people who choose to use speech – weren't only made by hearing people. When the VTS group attends a performance by the touring American Theater of the Deaf, they are deeply disappointed with their inability to understand the performance, which despite including both ASL and spoken English, gave them access in neither avenue. The group resolves to start their own theater group, with which they have modest success, focused not on an aged "hearing-handicapped" Australian Army general (as one hearing worker at a deaf organization suggested), nor on sign, but instead on gesture and mime. The theater experiment shows Uniacke and others negotiating how others, both hearing and deaf, "had consigned each of us to the bottom of the unforgiving gulf between hearing and deaf," adding that thanks to the group, the sting of exclusion "was receding amid the chatter and gossip and the waves of laughter that held us together. And just maybe it was helping us to climb out. I wondered if this was how we coped with being forgotten, in the way that the American Theatre of the Deaf forgot us." The tension Uniacke describes between the cultural model of deafness and the audiological model could have been explored a bit more. Late in the book, after Uniacke becomes a social worker at a deaf organization, Ern Reynolds, an elder from the signing community who had led the organization pays a visit: His knowledge of deafness was all different to mine. He seemed to think that signs were all that counted. If you
didn't sign you weren't really deaf, and if you weren't really deaf you were hearing. He fixed me with a determined,
no-nonsense glare. "Now you, young fellow," he said. "I would say – I would say that ninety per
cent of your friends are hearing." The uncharacteristically meek concession at the end of the scene – a complete untruth, unless my own accounting of his social circles is off – breaks my heart on young Uniacke's behalf. Reading that, I thought back to a two moments in the book. In one, Uniacke describes the dynamics of a big group hug, how difficult it is to know why one is giving the hug to a person, and how the hug is given anyway. The other is a discussion he had with his friend Myles about extended goodbyes, a feature also found in signing, "big-D" Deaf communities: "It was all to do with communication. [Myles] said that we all find it so hard to communicate with hearing people, that when we're with deaf people, we just want to hang on to it. You know. Delay the moment we have to leave them and return to hearing people." The end of the book brings a cascade of insight about deafness and its impact on communication, autonomy, and identity. Elected President of VTS, Uniacke leads a social retreat, in which he is uninterested in organizing events and very interested in the girl he has brought along; he is censured, and another member of the group points out that as the only organization for the deaf not run by hearing people, he needs to hold himself to a higher standard, that any lapse will be a statement about the inability of the community to manage its affairs. This serves as a kind of turning point, and he begins to take his community involvement more seriously. In his position as a social worker, he occasionally functions as an interpreter, and at one point, interprets for a man getting tax advice – from the senior Uniacke. Later, he gives a talk to a conference of visiting teachers, fueling more reflecting on his own schooling: "It never occurred to me that I did not understand chemistry because I did not hear what was being taught." When Uniacke describes to Myles his vision for non-signing deaf theater, he suggests that though theater cannot communicate to them, they can communicate through it the idea of what he calls incommunicado, the liminal status of their own group's relationship to the transfer of ideas from person to person. "We can use the double negative as a positive," he says, and if the theater group never really accomplishes that, and if the book doesn't always get their either, then the conversation has been started, the idea has been planted, and that in itself is a considerable and impressive gain.
Title: Deafness Gain
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