Last month, I came across the article Toward a Literature of Sign Language, by Ross Showalter, and I thought "This is exactly what I write about! I have to find some way to use this!"
Sign languages have a body of literature; there are Deaf poets who compose in ASL, Deaf storytellers who perform in ASL, and I am certain the same is true for other sign languages; their literature is merely encoded in video, rather than text. And that's totally valid on its own... but if you want to include Deaf, or otherwise signing, characters in a book for general audiences, relying on video isn't going to cut it! So how do you incorporate sign into English text, when no sign language currently has a widely-accepted standard orthography?
I have written about sign language representation in fiction 5 times before (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)--kind of a shockingly large proportion given that this is only my 30th entry in the Linguistically Interesting Fiction series--but 4 out of those 5 examples are of sign language in movies or TV; only one, in Rosemary Kirstein's The Steerswoman, involves depiction of signing in text. Two.. and a half strategies are used there--mostly, a combination of simple translation into English, narrow translation that attempts to preserve the syntax of the underlying sign, and descriptions of the performance of signs. All three of strategies which Ross acknowledges, although narrow translation comes very close to glossing, a strategy which author and ASL interpreter Kathy MacMillan explicitly rejects. Ross has a slightly more poetic take on the issue:
Therein lies the contradiction of this method: to render ASL in written English with its syntax intact is to create a strange tension. There is the grammar of ASL, preserved and captured only in syntax—but syntax is only part of a language. To try to render ASL in writing is to suspend yourself halfway between ASL and English.
To do justice to ASL, we need to treat it on its own terms.
And yet, simply translating into fluent English isn't a whole lot better! Why? Well, for all the same reasons that you might want to include any examples of secondary language in Anglophone fiction! Because language is identity. To quote Ross again:
If you use sign language, you sublimate yourself within the Deaf community. You step away from English and the mainstream for a space and language outside standard expectations.
To see sign language and English as interchangeable ignores the cultural legacy that comes with sign language. It ignores the storytelling already shared through signing.
If you're going to include French, then include French, like Graham Bradley did in Kill the Beast--if you just let it all be English, you lose the cultural immersion of the language. And if you are going to include ASL (or any other sign language), then include ASL, for goodness' sake! If I may be permitted a smidge of hyperbole: if you just turn it all into English, then what even was the point?
Ross does not offer a complete solution to writing sign into literature, but he does propose a perspective: signs are made with the body, and portrayal of sign must center what the body does. I suspect, therefore, that out of all the portrayals of signs in The Steerswoman, Ross would be most pleased with the brief instances in which the shapes and gestures are directly described. (Slightly more exploration of the physical-description approach to signs is undertaken in The Lost Steersman, a later book in the Steerswoman series, in which this approach is forced by the fact that the viewpoint characters don't actually understand what is being signed, and so it cannot be translated; but, that's about signs made by sometimes-murderous aliens which might only be paralinguistic anyway, so not really the best example of human sign language representation, although perhaps useful for technical reference.)
For my own part, I have written one story (for submission to an anthology; sadly, not accepted, so who knows when it will find another potential home) which involves signing, when two people who speak unrelated sign languages meet underwater, where they cannot speak orally. Having read Ross's point of view, I feel pretty good about how I handled things there; each character's individual point of view is written with their thoughts rendered in English, because something must be made comprehensible to the reader, but what they each sign is described from the other character's point of view in physical terms, as handshapes, poses, and motions.
Now, is that the best way to do it? I have no freakin' idea. I'm not Deaf; I don't even speak ASL. I think sign languages are neat, and I've studied some of them as a linguist, just like I've studied Coptic, Warlpiri, and Ingush, but that doesn't mean I can actually speak any of those! I am not a member of the Deaf community, and I can't give advice on how they would like to be represented in written literature.
But, like Ross, I'd sure as heck like to see more people give it a try.
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