Seeing Voices
Seeing Voices: A journey into the world of the deaf
By Oliver Sacks
Picador. 181 pp. $13.00
Reviewed by Dave Riley
This book is not as esoteric as the subject may seem, nor is it a voyeuristic peak at the disabled. The congenitally deaf constitute only about 0.1% of the population, but as Oliver Sacks is keen to point out, deafness of this nature raises issues of the widest and deepest importance. This is why Sack's intense and thoughtful account is such compelling reading.
"The study of the deaf shows us that much of what is distinctly human in us", he writes, "our capacity for language, for thought, for communication, and culture — do not develop automatically in us, are not biological functions, but are, equally, social and historical in origin; that they are a gift — the most wonderful of gifts — from one generation to another. We see that Culture is as crucial as Nature."
Doctor Sacks is a neurologist and writer with a passionate interest in human nature. Seeing Voices is both a history of the deaf — a story of their struggle for acknowledgment and recognition in a hearing world — and an account of the development of their extraordinary and expressive language.
Accompanying Sacks on his journey is to share the discovery of the cultural richness of this oppressed minority and to comprehend its identity. In coming to an understanding of how the deaf attain their human potential, we hearers can learn much about ourselves.
The sign language of the deaf is as expressive as any tongue. Its visual nuances capture the essential feature that makes us human — fusing our thinking with our ability to communicate. Indeed without that attainment we all would be "dumb" and there would be no culture or human society. We would not be human.
The book concludes with a discussion of the burgeoning
movement for deaf rights. In March 1988 the whole student body at Gallaudet University in the United States went on strike, demanding a greater say in the running of their campus, the only university for the deaf in the world. The struggle galvanised the deaf community nationwide. Sacks' first-hand account of the strike describes the explosion of deaf pride as the students asserted the uniqueness of their culture and language.
Sacks has a huge international readership, especially after one of his earlier studies was turned into the movie feature, Awakenings. His pedantic bent means that a parallel text runs through the book in footnotes (there are 167 of them), but for all its inconvenience this allows him to broaden the relevance of the material that runs above. Most of all, in text and in note, he manages to turn his science into irresistible romance.