The deaf and the telephone – three short scenes:

A group of little girls sit cross-legged on the floor. They’re playing “Broken Telephone.” The first girl whispers a sentence into the ear of a girl beside her, and the message moves around the circle. One little girl, the one who can’t hear, waits anxiously for the whisper to reach her. When it does, she quickly makes something up and whispers this into the ear of the next girl. The last girl says the message out loud. They’re all astonished! delighted! by how much the original message has changed. All except the deaf girl.

But at least this is one game she can bluff her way through.

A man devotes much of his life to teaching the deaf to speak. He marries a deaf woman, Mabel Hubbard. He is an inventor whose greatest invention was inspired by his work with the deaf. Late in his life he gets letters from unhappy deaf men and women taking issue with his oralist agenda and his position that the deaf shouldn’t intermarry for fear they’ll have deaf children. “Furthermore, these letters accuse me of inventing the one device that, more than any other, separates the deaf from the hearing world. Blasphemy!”
– from Yellow Pages by Nicole Marcoti´c

His name is Alexander Graham Bell.

A woman speaks to her adult son on the phone for the first time. He’s flabbergasted that his mother can understand what he is saying. His mother, who is deaf, recalls, “It was one of the most liberating experiences I have ever had, to be free to call up anyone in the world and speak to them.”

Beverly Biderman was that little girl and is that grown-up woman. In her forthcoming book, Wired For Sound, the Toronto computer analyst chronicles growing up deaf and learning to “hear” again after her 1993 cochlear implant surgery.

Even though Biderman was born into a family with a history of deafness (her father, his mother, and his siblings all were deaf), her hearing impairment wasn’t noticed until she was four and she never had a complete hearing test until she was 10. Her hearing loss was progressive and by her early teens she was profoundly deaf. She would see a dog’s mouth open and close, but not hear his bark. Hearing aids sometimes bloodied her ears, she became adept at lipreading (or, more accurately, speechreading), and she spent half a lifetime trying to “pass,” to hide her deafness. Her father’s deafness “repelled” her and they never discussed their mutual hearing loss. She knows no sign language, and, until recently, had no friends who were deaf.

Yet, Biderman is lucky – because she could hear well enough during her first few years to pick up language. Prelingually deaf children, those born deaf or seriously deafened before learning language, run the risk of retardation if the child doesn’t acquire some form of language in the critical early stages of life. “[It is] the relation of language to thought,” writes neurologist Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices, “that forms the deepest, the ultimate issue when we consider what faces or may face those who are born, or very early become, deaf.”

A heated and sometimes vicious debate has raged for 200 years over what language a deaf child should be taught. On one side are the oralists (with Graham Bell as their spiritual father), and medical and education professionals dedicated to teaching the deaf to speak. On the other are members of the capital ‘D’ Deaf community (those deaf and hard of hearing who identify themselves, not as people with a disability, but as a linguistic and cultural minority), and their allies, who are equally dedicated to seeing American Sign Language (ASL) used as the primary language of instruction. And, in between, there are a variety of compromise positions. In her book Dancing Without Music: Deafness in America, Beryl Lieff Benderley calls the debate over deaf education “A holy war.”

Then there’s the issue of the cochlear implant, the device that’s allowed Biderman to talk on the telephone, enjoy music, and enter a world of wider social interaction that she felt islolated from for so long. Unlike a hearing aid, which merely picks up sound and sends an amplified signal through to the hearing organ, a cochlear implant consists of a receiver implanted in the bone behind the ear that turns sound waves into electrical impulses. A 22-channel bundle of electrodes surgically inserted into the inner ear carries the signals to remaining nerve fibres. The external components consist of a microphone, a transmitter, and a speech processor that selects and codes sounds. The result is not a miracle of “hearing.” Intensive auditory training is needed to teach recipients to interpret signals.

Multi-channel implants have only been in use for about two decades and were approved for children in Canada in 1988. As Biderman points out, her own implant “is still something of a novelty: there are only about 20,000 people in the world who have one.” She acknowledges that the issue of cochlear implants, especially in children, has become a rallying point for Deaf culture.

“The controversy over implanting children still has all the ingredients of a play by Beckett with the characters not connecting and the tension never being resolved,” writes Biderman. “Playing out their parts are the Deaf who see deafness as nothing to be fixed, the deaf who have cochlear implants and see deafness as a terrible and hated burden, [and] the medical professionals who see deafness as a deficit they can reduce. In the middle are caught the parents who need to make a choice and the children themselves who need to live with that choice.”

Deaf activists have gone so far as to call the implants cultural genocide. U.S. psychologist Harlan Lane, a hearing advocate of Deaf culture and leading proponent of deaf-centred education, titled the chapter dealing with cochlear implants in his fascinating 1992 polemic, The Mask of Benevolence, “Oralism’s Ultimate Recourse.” (Echoes of The Final Solution?)

While Wired for Sound is not a polemic but the detailing of a personal journey, Biderman, who is an editor of CONTACT, a journal dealing with cochlear implants, comes down firmly, but compassionately, on the side of deafness as an affliction. She writes that she has benefitted from the Deaf pride movement, but hates her deafness. It speaks to the complexities of all the issues surrounding deafness that Oliver Sacks, who championed ASL in Seeing Voices, sees fit to positively blurb books by both Biderman and Lane.

Wired for Sound is not an elegant literary memoir of a medical calamity in the vein of Jean-Claude Bauby’s The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly. Biderman’s prose is intelligent yet proletarian. There are no turns of phrase to make you catch your breath, but it’s a quietly competent book that could prove a valuable addition to the growing library of books about deafness, deaf education, and the difficult choices parents of deaf children face. The last 40 pages or so consist of a resource guide (selective, by the author’s own admission) of newsletters, journals, support groups, associations, medical institutes, and books that deal with deafness and, particularly, cochlear implants.

Biderman has this valuable advice for parents: “That they acknowledge and accept their child’s deafness, and help their child to do the same. No deaf child should be encouraged to ‘pass’ as hearing, nor feel ashamed of being deaf.” Biderman and her hearing husband decided to adopt, as a 50% chance of having a deaf child runs in her family. Later she asked herself: “In not having a child of my own because he or she might be deaf, was I making a statement that a life like mine, lived without hearing, was not worth living?”

In her intensely beautiful 1995 novel Yellow Pages: A Catalogue of Intentions (Red Deer College Press), Calgary writer Nicole Marcoti´c gives voice to Alexander Graham Bell as well as his deaf pupil, and later wife, Mabel.

“I want to trap the human throat inside a box,” the novelist imagines the inventor musing. “I want to speak to Watson without tolerating his body in the same room. I want Mabel Hubbard to implant my device inside her ear.

“The future, I have discovered, is no longer what it used to be.”