This past spring, I participated in a panel discussion at a writing conference in Boston. The panel consisted of me (a blind writer), Darcel Rockett (a black writer), and Rachel Kolb (a deaf writer). We were there to discuss the journalistic principle of objectivity and whether it made sense to try to write without bias as we reported on communities we belonged to. The Trump administration had recently begun attacking those very communities: just a few months earlier, the president fired all the American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who made White House press briefings accessible, part of a larger backlash that dismissed disability rights as just another form of wokeness. When wildfires spread across Los Angeles that same month, the late right-wing influencer and White House adviser Charlie Kirk called the on-screen ASL interpreters during the LA mayor’s emergency broadcasts “distractions.” Trump’s other anti-wokeness czar Christopher Rufo soon piled on, asking why, if captions were available, the “wild human gesticulators” (referring to the interpreters) were necessary at all—as though they were a kind of literal virtue signaling.
This political climate added a sense of urgency to our panel discussion at Boston University, which had, unlike the White House, made no complaints about hiring two ASL interpreters, who were there to provide access to the panel discussion for Kolb. She answered her questions verbally, describing the ways the Americans with Disabilities Act had paved the way for her education and career, in contrast to the right wing’s active dismantling of those rights playing out at that moment in the capital.
Kolb, who is white and grew up in Albuquerque, has said that strangers, upon hearing her speak, often wonder if she’s from Australia or Scandinavia. They don’t recognize her deaf accent, which is common among deaf and hard-of-hearing people who speak verbally. The title of her new memoir, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, alludes (in part) to the condescending appraisal that hearing people in Kolb’s life frequently offer about her verbal abilities (hard-won after a lifetime of speech therapy), an experience that brings to mind the old racist trope of well-meaning white people expressing implicit, delighted surprise at a black speaker’s “articulateness.”
After holding forth for a few rounds of questions, Kolb suddenly turned off her voice—that is, she stopped speaking orally and abruptly began talking in ASL instead. One of her interpreters, who was holding a mic, seamlessly began to voice Kolb’s reflections.
The transition had an electric impact on the room. Kolb’s voice was, in a basic, important sense, unchanged—she was still there, after all, the same poised, alert presence. There was an audible continuity between her speaking voice and the interpreter’s; one could hear her methodical and sharp style of thinking in both. But it also felt radically modulated: her voice had suddenly switched genders, for one, and her deaf accent had given way to a hearing-accented voice. The effect was unmistakably sonic, even musical, like a song that begins with an autotuned vocal and, after a few bars, gives way to a less processed voice.
But which voice in this analogy is the “natural” one, and which one is artificial? Which voice was more authentically Kolb’s? This was, she told the audience, the point of her decision to switch: each mode of communication—and, indeed, each language—had its own affordances, its own advantages and pitfalls of expression. Speaking in ASL, Kolb could articulate herself with unmediated nuance and specificity; it was a language she had unfettered access to—but she had to rely on the extemporaneous ability of the interpreter to capture not just her meaning but the spirit and style of her expression. In English, she wrested control of her words from the interpreter, but also had to exert a tremendous amount of cognitive labor to perform speech she did not hear, with a new set of anxieties about how intelligible her voice really was. Is her “true” voice oral, or manual? To Kolb, this binary is a false one.
Articulate tracks Kolb’s life through an evolving linguistic journey, structured around her education, from preschool to Rhodes scholar to PhD. The book burrows into the interstitial linguistic spaces that she finds herself caught between at every stage of her development, an experience she describes as “floating between split worlds and not knowing how to suture them back together.”
She shares this in-betweenness with a new generation of deaf writers and artists intent on charting that liminal territory. Their work describes a contemporary deaf subject grappling with a range of twenty-first century contradictions. Christine Sun Kim’s blockbuster mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum (now traveling to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) features an entire series of drawings shaded by differing degrees of “Deaf Rage,” per the show’s title, which is induced in Kim by everything from parents who refuse to learn ASL to slow Wi-Fi on planes that make video chat inaccessible. Sara Nović’s 2022 novel True Biz—a fast-paced deaf-teen bildungsroman with raging hormones—functions simultaneously as a primer on contemporary threats to deaf culture and a page-turning proposal for how deaf separatists might find a coalition with the hearing. Since the book’s publication, Trump’s recent attacks have made its fury and fantasy of rebellion only more resonant. “These guys weren’t so bad,” Austin Workman, a deaf teenager, remarks when he meets Slash (née Kyle), a hearing anarchist plotting to bomb a cochlear implant factory. “They kind of made sense, actually. He could get behind some rage right about now.”
Big D, Little d
The experience of a deaf person is often imagined in binaries, beginning with the seemingly definitional division between people who hear and those who do not. Many deaf people further subdivide themselves into separate groups: there’s a signing community that identifies as culturally deaf, often rendered with a capital D, and there are those for whom being deaf is merely a lowercase-d medical, audiological fact. These two groups can have sharply different attitudes about their relationship with hearing society. Culturally deaf activists and thinkers tend to describe being deaf as distinct from disability; to them, deaf people are a linguistic minority like Arabic or Vietnamese speakers in the United States; the disadvantage is structural rather than intrinsic. This group rejects the notion of hearing loss (many native ASL speakers have been deaf from infancy and thus in a literal sense have lost nothing) and instead speak of deaf gain: a heightened attunement to visual cues and an embrace of the beauty of an embodied, manual language.
ASL had, despite its status as a purely visual language, a phonology of its own.
Some deaf people, on the other hand—particularly those who become deaf after childhood—can feel excluded from the insular world of deaf culture. Adèle Rosenfeld, the author of the recent novel Jellyfish Have No Ears (translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, who is also deaf), shares with her novel’s narrator a condition that causes her to progressively lose her hearing. After a new round of hearing loss, Louise, the novel’s protagonist, attends a beginning class in French Sign Language (LSF) alongside mostly hearing students. But when she tries to express solidarity with her deaf teacher, he rejects the alliance. “You are hearing,” he tells her in simple language so she can understand. “You went to a hearing school. I’m Deaf, I’ve been signing since I was little, we’ll never be the same.” She detects unmistakable contempt in his response:
He made it clear that the two of us belonged to dissimilar worlds: he to the one of capital-D Deaf people who signed, and I to that of lowercase-d deaf—oral—people who talked.
He saw me as a turncoat.
The origins of this division lie in part in the birth of deaf activism itself and attempts by advocates to create separate, autonomous institutions to nurture and educate deaf people. In this history, the emergence of American Sign Language and American deaf culture are inextricable: they developed together at the first free residential school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1817. The school’s cofounder, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, had traveled to Paris to visit the world’s first school for the deaf, where students received instruction in FSL. Gallaudet hired Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher at the Paris school, and in Connecticut, Clerc taught LSF to this first generation of American deaf students. They had come from across New England, where over time LSF combined with their own regional sign languages (like Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, which had been in use since the seventeenth century because of a high incidence of hereditary deafness on the island). Over time, these signed languages evolved into ASL, which, as a result, has more in common with French Sign Language (one observer compared their linguistic coziness to that of Spanish and Italian), than, say, British Sign Language, which developed independently and is mostly inscrutable to a speaker of ASL.
Graduates of the school in Hartford became founders of and teachers at similar schools across the country, and ASL soon became a national deaf language. Arriving at a residential school, deaf people shared traditions, history, jokes, stories—the building blocks of culture. In the late nineteenth century, deaf education turned away from manualism (instruction in ASL) to oralism (drilling deaf children in verbal speech), a brutal chapter in deaf history that saw a widespread suppression of sign language on par with the erasure of Native American culture in boarding schools. As the scholar Rebecca Sanchez has observed, Native Americans and the deaf are “America’s two indigenous non-English speaking populations” whose social vulnerability “enabled the government to remove them from their homes and place them in boarding schools where they could be forcibly restricted from using their languages.”
The contemporary deaf rights movement began to crystallize in the 1960s at Gallaudet, the Washington, D.C., deaf-centric university named after the pioneer of deaf education. In 1960, a hearing professor of English at Gallaudet named William Stokoe published Sign Language Structure, a landmark monograph that proved that ASL was not, as so many hearing educators had assumed, a primitive gestural system of crude pantomime but was instead a full-fledged language, with the ability to express abstract ideas, an arbitrary set of grammatical structures, and a rich, complex syntax on par with any verbal language. Up to that point, linguists conceived of phonology—the differences in articulation that create meaning— only in terms of sound: phonology is what allows English speakers to effortlessly detect, for instance, the difference between a dog and a bog. Stokoe’s revelation was that ASL had, despite its status as a purely visual language, a phonology of its own: rather than sonic pairs like d/b sounds, ASL has distinct markers like hand shape, position, movement, and so on. A fist at the mouth that blooms outward like a rebuke, the ASL word scold becomes send, for instance, when the same configuration begins away from the face—a distinction that’s as phonological (and linguistically sophisticated) as dog/bog. This realization legitimated ASL in deaf education and accelerated the sense of pride in—and the first naming of—“deaf culture.”
This same breakthrough helped inspire outrage at what the poet Curtis Robbins, an undergraduate at Gallaudet in the 1960s, described as “all the misanthropic wisdom the hearing world had about deaf people.” In the wake of Stokoe’s findings, deaf literature and arts turned more forcefully toward an articulation not only of deaf pride but also toward an understanding and documentation of the prejudice of a mainstream culture that equated being deaf with being of low intelligence and success with the ability to speak.
In Robbins’s poem “Solo Dining While Growing Up,” he describes an archetypal scene in the life of many deaf children of hearing parents, a daily ritual of exclusion from one’s own family called dinner-table syndrome. “There was always conversation / between napkins,” Robbins writes,
There were always
empty plates and empty bowls
But the knife that laid between them all –
from mouth to ear –
from mouth to eye –
cut me off.
By the time the Deaf President Now (DPN) protests exploded on the campus of Gallaudet in 1988, Robbins was a professor there, and he joined the protests when students shut down the campus for a week after the university’s board of directors, seemingly on the precipice of appointing its first deaf president, instead chose Elisabeth Zinser, the single hearing (and non-signing) candidate from among the three finalists.
“Imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain.”
The DPN demonstrations—which are the subject of a new documentary film, Deaf President Now!, codirected by the deaf reality star Nyle DiMarco—gained momentum after the chair of the Gallaudet board of trustees told an interviewer that the board chose the hearing candidate because “deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.” Soon TV screens and newspaper front pages filled with images of deaf people barricading gates, banging cans, burning effigies, and chanting in ASL, generating national sympathy and interest in deaf culture. A few days into the demonstrations, Nightline’s Ted Koppel moderated a panel discussion with Zinser, along with Greg Hlibok, one of the student leaders of the DPN movement, and a twenty-two-year-old Marlee Matlin, who’d just become the first deaf person to receive an Academy Award the previous year for her role in Children of a Lesser God, a film where she plays a signing deaf woman who refuses to acquiesce to William Hurt’s bullying, hypererotic campaign to get her to speak. (This year Kino Lorber released a new documentary bio, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, that features this same Nightline interview.) “I do believe that deaf individuals have great capacities,” Zinser says, in an attempt to cover over her board president’s earlier comment about deaf people’s unsuitability for hearing society. “There has been tremendous growth in the positions that deaf people hold—”
“Then prove it!” Hlibok interrupts in ASL, his interpreter verbally cutting in over Zinser’s empty assurances. Five days later, Zinser resigned, and I. King Jordan was appointed as the university’s first deaf president.
The 1988 protests flung the deaf rights movement into the mainstream, and two years later, George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. Building on earlier legislation, the ADA promised to enshrine language access for deaf people across American life, from employment to education, hospital rooms to restaurants. Hearing children learned ASL in mainstream schools, and ASL joined Danish and Bengali on the course catalogs of American universities. (Today, ASL is the third-most-frequently taught language in U.S. colleges.) For the first time, deaf students could attend mainstream public schools with state-funded interpreters tagging along to all their classes and activities.
Sixty Percent Was Still a D
Rachel Kolb was born the same summer that the ADA was signed into law. The idea that, when she grew up, she’d get a job, go to college, live independently, and “participate in broader public life” didn’t strike her as outlandish, as it might have to earlier generations. “As a kid,” she writes, “I never questioned that such things were ahead of me, even if I did not always know how I was going to achieve them.”
When Kolb was a few months old, her family’s smoke detector went off. Her mother, already suspicious that something was different about her child, saw that Rachel didn’t seem to notice the piercing alarm. Once they had a diagnosis, it didn’t take Kolb’s parents long to decide to learn to sign. “Your father and I knew you couldn’t learn to hear,” Kolb’s mother tells her later. “But we could learn to sign.”
Today, there is conclusive evidence that knowing one language (ASL) only strengthens one’s ability to learn a second (English)—indeed, deaf children of deaf parents are more likely to develop fluent written English than deaf children of hearing parents. “Imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain,” says February Waters, one of the many voices who narrate Sara Nović’s True Biz.
Nović’s novel is set at River Valley School for the Deaf, a residential school in a fictional Ohio corner of the Rust Belt, and the novel begins with three epigraphs, among them one taken from a real 2014 NBC news story about Advanced Bionics, one of the largest manufacturers of cochlear implants (CIs) in the world, which was discovered to have “sold defective implants to young children and adults for years—even after learning that a significant number of the devices had failed.”
CIs are perhaps the most potent symbol of the d/Deaf binary—so much so that, when the technology first emerged, the National Association of the Deaf decried CIs as unethical experimentation on children, writing in a 1991 position paper, “We should not seek the scientific tools nor use them, if available, to change a child biologically so he or she will belong to the majority rather than the minority.”
CIs have made significant technological advances since then, but so has their perceived threat to deaf culture. As Andrew Solomon argued in a 2021 essay in The New York Times Book Review, the success of modern CI technology renders activists’ efforts to preserve deaf culture part of a “battle, valiant but probably unwinnable, against cultural erasure and standardization.”
In True Biz, Nović acknowledges the reality that CIs have become more effective—and safer—than in the past, even as she dramatizes their dangers, placing them at the symbolic center of her story. True Biz’s protagonist, the teenage Charlie, has (unbeknownst to her and, for much of the book, the reader) one of these faulty units in her skull. Her CI is an almost literal bad idea that she can’t shake. “There was something buzzing, horsefly-like in her head,” Nović writes, “more a feeling than a sound, and she didn’t know if it was her implant or an unkind thought.”
The narrators of True Biz comprise many of the main characters of contemporary deaf culture: there’s Austin, the old-school legacy deaf elite kid from a multigenerational deaf family; February, the hearing CODA—as in, a child of deaf adults—who grew up speaking ASL and is more culturally deaf than many of her students; Eliot, traumatized by parents (and a church) who see his deafness as a curse to be repented of; Kayla, attuned to the ways that Black American Sign Language (BASL) is as subjugated to ASL as black English is to standard English; and Charlie Serrano, with a foot in the deaf and the hearing worlds, not quite fitting into either.
Similar to Kolb’s real-life experience, Charlie was (in the parlance of deaf education) mainstreamed, meaning she attended a public school where she was the only deaf student. This became the case for most deaf children in the United States after 1975, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ended segregation of disabled students—a landmark that was made possible by the racial desegregation of the 1950s, followed by the expansion of public-school funding during LBJ’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. Kolb, after attending a deaf preschool program, was the only deaf student in her school and, at six years old, was made aware for the first time of her difference, with her adult interpreter following her from the classroom onto the playground to facilitate communication during recess. (She also wore, at her mother’s behest, a notepad around her neck.)
The disaster of racial segregation in schools and its persistence long after Brown v. Board of Education makes the problems of post-ADA mainstreaming read a little counterintuitively. The availability of sign-language interpreters and other accommodations for deaf students in public schools led to a massive shift toward mainstreaming and a concomitant collapse among the residential deaf schools: in the early twentieth century, about 80 percent of deaf students attended a residential school for the deaf; today, that statistic has more than flipped, with only about a tenth of deaf or hard-of-hearing students in full-time deaf programs. The logic of desegregation would suggest that this is only a good thing. But while it’s true that deaf students benefit from socializing with hearing students and vice versa, attending a school with a single interpreter as one’s only experience of ASL is meager linguistic sustenance. And for students like Charlie, with her non-signing parents and faulty CI, access to education is hardly guaranteed, even after the ADA. “Really,” Nović’s protagonist thinks, “the fact that she could work out about sixty percent of what was going on with the robo-ear, maybe more with some good lipreading, was impressive. But in school, sixty percent was still a D.” Kolb experiences alienation and frustration like Charlie’s, but she achieves significantly more success in school. The ability of a deaf student to lip-read and speak intelligibly depends on a number of factors, and Kolb is explicit about how her race and economic privilege paved the way for her proficiency in verbal English. In a word, it came down to decades of rigorous speech therapy—tens of thousands of dollars’ worth—which she undertook with the round-the-clock discipline and avidity of a child tennis prodigy.
When Kolb’s parents send her to a deaf camp in Colorado in the summer before fourth grade, she discovers for the first time the existence of deaf culture and meets campers who grew up in big multigenerational deaf families, for whom ASL is an effortless, living legacy. (Nović has compared the privilege of this “deaf elite” to a kind of generational wealth—a linguistic and cultural superiority that within the deaf context gives them much greater comfort and linguistic fluency.) At camp, Kolb is embarrassed to discover that her ASL has a “hearing accent,” just as hearing people tell her that her speaking voice has a “deaf accent.” Kolb learned ASL in preschool, but at home, her parents use Signed Exact English, or SEE, which transposes English grammar into sign. Unlike ASL, SEE isn’t a language—it’s more of a code, awkwardly bolting English syntactical units like -ing onto verbs that natural ASL has no use for. When Kolb uses her voice to order an ice cream on a field trip, a deaf classmate is even more offended by it than by Kolb’s accented signing. “What are you, hearing?” he asks.
Nović’s fictional River Valley School is typical of U.S. residential schools for the deaf that are, today, a dying breed: a state-funded public school retrofitted into a magisterial nineteenth-century campus, where all school business—from the classroom to the sports fields—is conducted in ASL. The school presents a revelation for Charlie that echoes Kolb’s: at first she is a pariah, unable to follow the lightning-fast ASL and unused to the trappings of deaf culture (she mistakes the videophones in the dorm rooms for televisions and is less culturally deaf than the hearing headmistress, who is a CODA). But soon a life where she doesn’t have to work so hard to communicate brings a flood of relief. She falls ill (it’s the crap CI) and has to visit the school nurse. Accustomed to a lifetime of doctors talking over her head to her parents, she realizes with astonishment that it’s the first time she’s ever actually understood what a medical professional is saying to her. This comes as an epiphany, an unfamiliar sense of agency over own body, her own fate.
War in My Head
Kolb, on the other hand, seems to be making a journey in the opposite direction, one in which a nagging sense of alienation and unease grows in tandem with her success in the mainstream hearing world she’s worked so hard to be a part of. When she starts her freshman year at Stanford, she describes it as a kind of Vatican of orality’s high priesthood. The accessibility office offers plenty of accommodations: they hire experienced interpreters and her RAs learn some ASL to welcome her. But soon Kolb finds the chaotic social life of a college campus overwhelming—dinner-table syndrome on an institutional-cafeteria scale. In all her years in California, she met only a handful of deaf people through social media and only after she’d “figured out how to escape the campus bubble.” Interpreters are only available during class time, and the relentless extracurricular chatter that is at the core of university life—along with the persistent benevolent ableism of her peers—begins to grind her down. This culminates not with a transfer to a “Deaf-World” like Gallaudet but instead a hard push in the other direction: she makes the rare decision for a congenitally deaf signing adult to receive a cochlear implant.
Her cochlear implant is an almost literal bad idea that she can’t shake.
The implants offer an ambivalent new relationship with sound and speech. Before her surgery, Kolb worries that she’s a traitor to her identity and feels “an intermittent flash of self-betrayal.” After the surgery (and the months of adjustment and training it requires), she marvels at sounds she’s never heard—“plastic crinkling! Leaves rustling! Banana peels unzipping!”—but realizes that, while it’s eased some of the labor of communicating verbally, it hasn’t erased her sense of herself as deaf. An old interpreter friend asks during a post-implantation coffee if they should still use ASL together. “Yeah, of course I do,” Kolb replies. “The sounds from my cochlear implant still jumbled into wild shapes that would take me years to disentangle, if I ever did. Sign still filled my chest with assurance.”
If for Kolb the sudden intrusion of sound into her life is a mixed blessing, for Nović the tech is a Trojan horse. Charlie’s faulty CI nearly kills her (and destroys her residual hearing). Then Charlie’s love interest, Austin, who’s one of the school’s deaf elite, has a baby sister who, to the family’s dismay, is born hearing. When after a few months she loses her hearing, Austin’s father (the only non-deaf member of the large family) becomes an advocate for a CI—a decision as bioethically fraught in this cultural context as an abortion might be elsewhere. “Why don’t you love her the way she is?” Austin asks his father. “Why do you have to drill a fucking hole in her head?”
True Biz concludes with an explosive act of revolt. Sitting a little awkwardly amid its rotating cast of deaf characters is Slash, Charlie’s hearing ex. He lives in a squat and plays in an anarchist punk band, the Robespierres, an apparent nod to the history of the intersection of deaf and punk cultures, including deaf-run venues like the legendary Deaf Club in San Francisco, which rented out its space to punk bands (a subject that is lovingly re-created in Alison O’Daniel’s transcendent deafcentric experimental 2023 film, The Tuba Thieves).
A swirl of historically plausible (if implausibly coincident) factors nudges the deaf kids over the course of the novel to gradually become radicalized. There are lessons in deaf history (including the direct action of the Deaf President Now protests); Charlie’s faulty CI (and her parents’ insistence on reimplanting her even after her old unit electrocutes her); Austin’s hearing father’s audist desire to implant his infant daughter; and the imminent closure of the school by the district robbing them of any kind of fallback or respite from these threats. When the deaf world collides with the world of the Robespierres at a concert, bomb-making instructions from The Anarchist Cookbook appear alongside the other documentary materials Nović has threaded like sidebars throughout the book, in what feels like an impulse to materialize her story’s radical climax: once it includes bomb recipes, the novel becomes a literal handbook for insurrection. The hearing anarchists, planning a series of anti-capitalist direct actions, decide to bomb the prosthetics factory that’s responsible for Charlie’s faulty CI. Two teachers apprehend the deaf students (more out of a sense of protection than any real desire to thwart their action), and the hearing anarchists follow through, blowing up the CI company’s offices (at night, when no one is hurt).
The solidarity that Kolb reaches for by the end of her book, meanwhile, seems only distantly connected to the violent revolutionary act that ends Nović’s, but it likewise ends with a dialectical gesture, connecting the hearing and deaf worlds in a reach toward a transcendent synthesis. “I saw how much I identified with that little indeterminate slash in the middle,” Kolb writes, “the line that ostensibly split d/Deaf people from each other.” She’s become conscious of her estrangement from a broader disability coalition and feels alienated from both the mainstream hearing world she’s a part of as well as the deaf culture she was immersed in as a child in places like her summer camp. When she attends a disability rights meetup in college, she writes of the feeling of not belonging that echoes her childhood arrival at deaf camp, among the deaf elite. “I shifted on my heels and looked around,” she writes, “wondering how to communicate with people who were blind, people who didn’t use their hands like I did, people whose language seemed vastly different from mine.”
“My audible speech was a trap.”
By the time she moves to Oxford to study as a Rhodes scholar—the first signing deaf student to receive the distinction—Kolb begins to see the pernicious effects of her lifelong insistence on dazzling hearing people with her verbal abilities. “My audible speech was a trap,” she concludes. While she’s used ASL interpreters her entire life, beyond a few summers at the deaf camp, she hasn’t spent much time in deaf spaces where sign language is the primary form of communication, and when she attends an ASL meetup in London, she comes to an epiphany: the ease and joy she finds in the signing deaf space suddenly cracks open the toll that her lifetime of relentless orality has taken on her. “When I hung out with my hearing friends,” she realizes, “I’d learned to allot myself two or three hours of conversation time, unless they signed reasonably well, because my energy always ran out. . . . But that day in London, the time stretched.”
By the time she enrolls in a PhD program at the disability studies–focused English department at Emory University, in Atlanta, she’s frequently turning her voice off, relying on ASL interpreters to mediate her conversations with professors and colleagues. But just as she’s frank about the affordances of her orality, Kolb avoids bromides about the liberation of the voice-off deaf life, and even as she centers ASL, there are abundant stretches of time when she keeps her CI— and her voice—turned on.
To say that you’re turning off your voice in ASL, in Kolb’s description, requires you to make a “key” with your thumb and index finger, flipping a switch beside your throat. But this binary image—the ignition either fired or dead—feels, by the end of the memoir, like the wrong metaphor. Rather, that key at her throat begins to resemble a dial she might turn higher or lower, depending on her environment or her mood. This blending finds its way into her prose itself, as she turns up the ASL dial in her lines of English: “I tried to hold multiple ideas in my hands at once,” she writes, “sometimes prioritizing one above the others, often seeking some bridge between them.” Writing a book is just about the deepest immersion one can make into English, and for Kolb, the process of writing and thinking ultimately takes place in two languages—and two modalities—at once: “I find that I am fingerspelling certain words into my thigh, or in the air before me,” she writes. “I know them more solidly in my hands than anywhere else.” Sometimes, she writes, she can’t find the right words in English “and its linear grammar, but I can still feel them in space, leaping across the visual and three-dimensional plane that sign gives to me. I sit and I sign to myself, envisioning the concept of the thing that I want to say. The sign is right there.”