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Clerc Scar 8.519 August 2009
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The Cry of the Gull Emmanuelle Laborit Gallaudet University Press, $13.95 Available at http://www.clercscar.com/books/gull.html The Cry of the Gull is the autobiography of Emmanuelle Laborit, a Deaf French actress. Laborit, while little known in America, won a French acting award in 1993 for her theatre work in Les Enfants du Silence (the French adaption of "Children of a Lesser God"), and today is the director of International Visual Theatre, a prestigious Deaf theatre company. It would be a huge mistake to think of Laborit as France's answer to Marlee Matlin. Unlike Matlin's recently published I'll Scream Later, you won't find Hollywood tales of rehab or affairs with famous actors. What you will find is a coming-of-age story that guides us along her the first steps in her journey into Deafhood and Womanhood. As a child, Laborit was nicknamed Mouette, which means "gull" in French--apparently a name that refers to both the sound of her deaf speech and a play on the similar word, meuette, meaning mute. By the end of the book, she is Emmanuelle, name sign "Sun-Coming-From-the-Heart" in the Langue des Signes FranÁaise (LSF). Mouette becomes the Deaf inner-child that Emmanuelle learns to nurture as she grows up and into Deaf culture. Like many hearing parents in America, Laborit's parents were misguided by medical professionals and trapped in a "tunnel of erroneous information and false hopes." Because of this, and the fact that sign language was banned at that time in France, she did not learn to sign until she was seven years old. Like other Deaf people I've known who describe their time before learning sign in later childhood, Laborit's early flashes of memories and feelings are fragmented and dream-like. She describes the way she communicated with her mother as "instinctive, animal-like. What I call 'umbilical' . . . we had signs of our very own, completely made up." A number of experiences that Laborit describes are common to many deaf children growing up in hearing families: Having your mother as your only link to the world, fearing the night, communication via drawing, getting hysterical when stuck behind locked bathroom doors, and thinking you will never grow up or are destined to die young because you have never seen a Deaf adult. Laborit describes how the International Visual Theatre (ITV) became the place where she was first introduced not only to her language and culture, but also to theatre, which became her art and her career. Shortly after meeting her first Deaf adults there, Laborit and her parents journeyed to Gallaudet University. Here's Laborit description of the "flash of lightning" that came while she was at Gallaudet: "In Washington, they told me 'You're like us, you are deaf.' And they showed me the sign for deaf. No one had ever SAID that to me. That was a revelation . . . bursting into my parents' room all excited . . . (I told them) 'I'm deaf.' 'I'm deaf' didn't mean 'I couldn't hear.' It meant 'I realize I am deaf!' . . . I had become a human being endowed with language." When she returns to France and the beginning of another new school year in her oral program, she is reprimanded for handing out Xeroxed copies of the manual alphabet. Laborit's adolescence rebellion started early: She had a 'bad boy' Deaf lover when she was just barely a teen, she hung out at the 'Deaf youth ghetto' metro stop, stayed out all hours, and cut school. Fortunately, she eventually channels her rebellious determination into school and into acting. This book was written by Laborit primarily in French, with some help from an interpreter, and later translated into English. Given this, the reading is pretty smooth going with short chapters that have a stream of consciousness feel. There are times when the writing veers into sentimentality, but hey, she wrote this book when she was only 22 years old, and that may also be the result of the interpretation/translation or how us Americans stereotypically view the (overly-emotional? romantic-to-the-extreme?) French. Well aware of the implications that choosing to use written language, she addresses this head on at both the beginning and end of the book, where she asserts she is "using my second language, the language of hearing people, to proclaim with absolute certainty that sign language is the native language of deaf people . . ." My all-Deaf-folks book club raved about this book, and gave it ten waving hands. Like most in the signing community, we value the stories Deaf people tell about their lives. They validate our shared experiences and enlighten us about how Deaf people have faced unique life experiences. In The Cry of the Gull, free-flying Mouette and Sun-Coming-From-the-Heart give us the opportunity to recognize the Deaf experience that transcends national boundaries--and those that are uniquely French-flavored.
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