CS 35.5: ASL Poetry as Novelty
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010CLERC SCAR 35.5
28 April 2010
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ASL POETRY AS NOVELTY
John Lee Clark
Words: 2,331
[Essay]
After the publication of my anthology DEAF AMERICAN POETRY, I came into contact with a number of hearing critics and journalists seeking interviews or comments. Almost all of them were interested in ASL poetry, which pleased me. One leading poetry critic and a professor of literature at Harvard, upon learning of the anthology, immediately asked if it included ASL poetry and went on to say how amazed he was by ASL poetry. I was grateful he even knew that ASL poetry existed.
But then this attention on ASL poetry began to bother me. For one thing, it was usually at the expense of the rest of Deaf poetry created in standard English. For another thing, their praise of ASL poetry is meaningless because they do not know ASL and, to date, there is only a handful of translations in English. How could they know that this or that ASL poem is amazing? Aside from the titles of ASL poems, they would have no idea as to the content. So why are they so interested in what they have no access to while dismissing the English poems by Deaf poets open to them?
The case of Paul Laurence Dunbar, I think, helps answer this mystery. He was a hearing black poet born in 1872 who became our nation’s first black professional man of letters, although his career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis in 1906. He is now best known for his poetry. He wrote in two general styles, traditional verse in standard English and poems in black folk dialect. In 1896, the country’s most important literary critic, William Dean Howells, did a review in HARPER’S WEEKLY of Dunbar’s second book of poems. Howells praised his dialect poems by writing, “[He] has been able to bring us nearer to the heart of primitive human nature in his race than any one else has yet done.” Of Dunbar’s work in standard English, Howells said there was nothing “especially notable . . . except for the Negro face of the author.”
Howells’s distasteful treatment notwithstanding, Dunbar was thrilled. The review drew much attention and helped sales. But he soon began to realize how this praise of his dialect work and dismissal of the rest of his efforts limited him. He lamented to a friend in a letter: “One critic says a thing and the rest hasten to say the same things, in many cases using the identical words. I see very clearly that Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he laid down regarding my dialect verse.” Indeed, Howells had set the framework within which Dunbar’s and other black poets’ work would be debated for many years among literary scholars.
But even if Howells had never written that review, I think black poets’ work would still have been discussed in a narrow and superficial way. The prevailing racism would have made sure it was. The dialect poems, being a cute novelty, would have seemed to reinforce white people’s views of black people. Even a blue-blooded Klansman would have smiled benevolently while reading a poem like “Song of Summer,” whose first four lines are:
Dis is gospel weathah sho’–
Hills is sawt o’ hazy.
Medahs level ez a flo’
Callin’ to de lazy . . .
It was not that Dunbar’s dialect poems did not challenge racist sentiments. The charm of the dialect itself made it easier for white readers to deflect Dunbar’s challenge, without knowing that they were denying his message. When the message is expressed in standard English, however, it may have been harder to deny. In fact, some of Dunbar’s poems would have seemed downright unpatriotic and treasonous. Take the first stanza of his early poem “Ode to Ethiopia”:
O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heels,
With thy dear blood all gory.
The black community loved such poems. When Dunbar met Frederick Douglass, who was then U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, the great man asked the young poet to read “Ode to Ethiopia” first of all. But I can just imagine well-meaning white law clerks squirming in some discomfort while listening to the poet read these lines.
Is something similar happening today, with ASL poetry being automatically praised while the standard English poems are largely ignored? Could it be that some hearing critics, in their ignorance or bigotry, are unwilling to listen to the cultural, anti-medical perspective from which many Deaf poets write? Perhaps. I suppose an audist would not like reading a poem like James William Sowell’s “The Oralist” (1913):
All you care to do on earth is to make a show,
Claim the power of miracle to see the people stare;
For you have an audience everywhere you go,
Oralist, whose traffic is a little child’s despair.
Oralist, O oralist, show your silken hose,
Little souls are sacrificed that you may wear such clothes;
Little souls and beautiful, pure from God’s own hand;
Halting feet that lamely walk; wistful eyes that plead,
Hearts but could you only read them, could you understand,
You would throw away your creed and give to them their need.
Oralist, O oralist, work to get your laws
Force the baby lips to lisp, laugh at all their flaws.
Minds they have as sound as yours but for hours you waste;
Spirits as impervious yearning for the light;
See! Their baby hands they lift, pleading that in haste
You may see the wrong you do and will cease to smite.
Oralist, O oralist, turn your head aside,
Know you not the pitying Christ for sins like yours has died?
As neat as the comparison between black poetry and Deaf poetry may be, there is one major difference that makes Deaf poetry’s predicament worse. Unlike white critics, hearing critics don’t even have access to ASL poetry, at least not yet. They do not know what the ASL poets are SAYING. They do not know whether an ASL poet is being ironic, earnest, brilliant, or pedestrian. They cannot begin to consider the art being displayed before their waxen eyes. This means the very idea of ASL poetry, nothing more, is enough. The novelty alone satisfies their notions of deaf people as different, strange, freakish, a special class whose language is “beautiful.”
But the blame cannot rest on hearing people’s shoulders alone. Those who should know better are not helping matters any. The academic literature on ASL poetry is quite large. But even for knowledgeable scholars, ASL poetry remains a linguistic novelty. For them, the very possibility of poetry being created in ASL is enough. In the meantime, there has been very little study made of Deaf poetry–not only the poems that are in English but also the actual cultural contents of ASL poetry.
And many ASL poets themselves, in their own way, handle their work as if it is very special. It is natural for a poet to hold dear her own creations, but that’s not what I mean. One way in which they keep ASL poetry sealed in its novelty status is by refusing to allow their work to be translated into English. Almost all of the people I know who have created ASL poems say they cannot be translated. What they may not realize is that refusing translation means refusing literature itself. As Edith Grossman explains in her book WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS:
“Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. . . . And their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live.”
Yes, translating ASL poetry would mean mangling it. But it will be a confirmation of the original, and translation would help us understand ASL poetry in ways we cannot understand it when it stands alone. Perhaps because many ASL poets encountered doubts in others as to whether ASL is a language, not to mention skepticism as to whether their work is really poetry, they feel defensive, protecting it by exalting it up to the skies. I sympathize, but it is well past time we understand that ASL is a mere language, one of many lowly, earth-bound languages in the world, made of magic, certainly, but also made of dirt.
Do hearing critics and audiences want translations of ASL poetry? Not really. Remember, the very idea of ASL poetry is enough, and they are happy. They do not want more because they have no idea what they may be or may not be missing. But if there are more ASL poems available with full, rich translations, their very availability will attract, intrigue, and compel deeper responses.
We in the signing community are also to blame for ASL poetry being trapped in limbo. There are two things we are doing wrong. First, we praise ASL poetry too readily. I shall never forget one lecture on Deaf poetry I was presenting at St. Catherine University. I performed, on purpose, a lousy ABC poem about baseball. It was just the various motions of a baseball game. I may have executed it with some grace, and it may have been a good exercise, but it had no message or any other redeeming artistic qualities. Yet my predominantly Deaf audience cheered. Most of ASL poetry being produced are mere exercises in this way—-dazzling eye candy, but no meat.
We need to become more discriminating, praise what is good, smile politely at what is mediocre, and blast what is bad. We need to watch more ASL poetry and develop refined tastes, thus creating higher expectations and challenging poets to compete. Put simply, we need to WANT better ASL poetry. Then better ASL poetry WILL be created.
The second way in which we do ASL poetry harm is by thinking that we cannot create it ourselves. After the pioneering generation of ASL poets–Ella Mae Lentz, Clayton Valli, Peter Cook, and Debbie Rennie–there was . . nobody. No one has come forward to create a body of work remotely approaching the quality or breadth of any of those poets. We seem to be in too much awe of ASL poetry that we have decided it is beyond our abilities. I confess I thought I could not possibly create an ASL poem, but I have since learned that ASL poetry is just one way to express myself in ASL, just as writing poetry is one way to play with the English language. One doesn’t have to be a Shakespeare to enjoy writing poetry; one doesn’t have to be a Valli to sign some things differently for the sheer joy of it.
I think we can learn a lesson from the sixteenth century. Most of the poetry was written in Latin by educated clergymen and aristocrats. Then two French deaf poets, Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, along with three other poets, helped to break down the ivory wall around poetry. What they did was use common French vernacular to write poems that anyone in France could read or listen to. This led to poetry emerging from people in all walks of life. Today kindergarteners dabble in poetry at school everywhere. Of course, very little poetry wins wide recognition, but poetry serves many other private functions than attaining fame.
Now, the elegance and dynamite with which the pioneering ASL poets performed their work still impresses me and overwhelms me. But I believe ordinary ASL diction can make for ASL poetry that is just as great. Much of the best contemporary poetry in English are written in language that is stubbornly plain, free of flourishes. Perhaps my poem “Rebuilding” would be a good example, not of what is best but of plain language being used in a poem:
Half of the time, my mother didn’t know why
he spanked her. He didn’t have the signs
to tell his deaf daughter. After she gave birth
to three deaf children, he wanted to say something
to us. His hands creaked to life. Buildings
were all he could tell us about. The sod hut
he was born in. The red barn on the farm.
The basement he put his family in while building
a house above their heads. The Ramsey Hospital
where he was foreman and where I and my sons were born.
The Ramsey County Jail we always pointed out
on our way to visit Grandma and Grandpa.
The bird houses in his green garden.
It didn’t matter what kind of building
it was, as long as it was with his hands.
This poem is so plain it is almost not a poem. But, somehow, a subtle pattern, a bit of compression, one or two small choices, makes it a poem. What I am trying to say is that poetry is not far from what we sign every day. A few small steps can turn a casual account into a powerful poem. It is not hard, and I would love it for there to be more ASL poems that use colloquial, even chatty signing. We can still have fancy signing, but there should be more than that.
How wonderful it is that language yields itself so easily to poetry. Poetry is already in our hands, if only we would believe that it is there and that we can and should bring it out into the open. Yes, much of it would be unworthy of wide attention. Yes, audism will dictate the dialogue about our community’s poetry for a while yet. Yes, it will take a long time for translations to be widely available. Yes, the next generation will be slow in coming. But, at this very moment, what we can do is get our hands a little dirty playing in the mud of poetry, making it less of a novelty and more natural to us.
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John Lee Clark is the author of the chapbook SUDDENLY SLOW and he edited the anthology DEAF AMERICAN POETRY, both available for purchase here.
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Copyright 2010 by Clerc Scar. All rights reserved.Visit our archives or bookstore at http://www.clercscar.com
Copyright 2010 by Clerc Scar. All rights reserved.
