Woke up with the memory of this poem / video on my mind, this morning...

[capri0mni]

The sound quality isn't that great; the gasps and comments from the audience nearly drown out the performer... And for some reason, the closed captioning isn't working for me (I see the text box background, but not the words ... Is it working for you?).* But it's still powerful.

Here's the comment I left on the video, when I rewatched it, a couple hours ago:

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is the gasps of astonishment from the audience, representing all the history we are never taught, because the points of view are from those we consider "unimportant" (the disabled, those of a linguistic minority, women... all of the above...)

"" (Watch on YouTube)

[ETA: Okay -- Now, it's working. I wonder why it wasn't working on the YouTube page...]

Comments

[spiralsheep]

I can't play the vid but I know the poem so... transcript (ish):

A Letter To Alexander Graham Bell From His Deaf Wife Mabel, by Karly Fesolowich

Standing before a priest;
I still felt as though we were playing dress up,
lace soft like your breath across my skin,
no longer trying to hide the glow I have around you.
Your tie matches the green flecks in your eyes
and I don’t need sound to feel the music.

I turn to see the priest
wrap his lips around the word “husband”
—a question suspended between us—
I know what comes next,
we practiced this for hours in front of a mirror,
my lips dancing to no music
desperately struggling to match their shape —to yours.
But today no one will notice their careful movement
they will be listening for the one thing I cannot control.

Your fingers gently cover mine
but I know this isn’t because
you cannot wait to touch me.
Our audience sighs,
imagining us
two perfect plastic lovers,
created simply to adorn every white cake,
but really
the heat from your fingers
—wrapped around my wrists—
were more like a gag;
a reminder that my hands
have no place in speaking.

This was the first moment
I ever felt the weight of the word —Disability.

Saying the words “I do” without ever hearing them
is like carrying a stranger’s child;
this life was never mine
but you sure taught me how to act in it
fed me all the right lines.

Alec,
Did you ever regret teaching me to read lips?
You waited for the moments when my back was turned to tell our friends
that you believed Deaf people weakened society.
Did you picture me a stray puppy;
something you picked up off the streets
—a charity case—
that painted you a better person
for investing in it.

It’s ironic
that you will later be remembered as the
pioneer of communication
when you banned
the use of my language
from schools
   called it barbaric.
Isolated Deaf children
in hopes that they wouldn’t reproduce
for fear of spreading
this disease.

Once after a fight
you rushed to the bathroom and threw yourself underwater.
Muffled the sounds of a world I never knew,
in hopes that a minute in the bathtub
could honestly compare to a lifetime of
trying to read a different language written only in the curves of your lips.
When I said we couldn’t communicate
I wasn’t talking about the silence.
Our marriage was always this,
underwater,
drowning.

By the time you get this letter
we will both be long gone.
You were meant for great things Alec
I was not one of them.

[capri0mni]

Yup -- those are her words in English... but not what she signs, exactly, in ASL...

[spiralsheep]

Yeah, different medium of communication, different performance. :-)

[capri0mni]

Not just a different medium of communication, a completely different language. Many of her signs fit with her spoken words, but I'd say at least a quarter are chosen for how well they punctuate her spoken English (For example, she makes the sign for REST as she says "can't wait to touch me.")

But it's enough to elicit a few "Oh, Shit!"s by the time she gets to the lines about how AGB banned signing in his schools, because by that point it's clear to the audience that ASL is a language....

Which, I suppose, was her point.

I'd still like to see how a fluent, first-language signer would perform that poem, using the actual language.

[spiralsheep]

Which makes me wonder again about the thought processes of performance poets who also choose to print their poems as text, as Fesolowich seems to have done. Of course, the subtleties of her performance would be lost on me anyway, even if I could see the vid, because we used BSL at school, heh.

[capri0mni]

To be fair, though, I don't think most people in the audience there knew any ASL, either...

[spiralsheep]

They seem to have had a sparky relationship:

A month before they became engaged to be married, Alexander Graham Bell wrote Mabel Hubbard this letter, teasing her about her interest in "Woman's Rights": "I never suspected that you were one of these people who think women have rights. Do you actually suppose their wishes are to be considered with the same respect as those of men?" However, Bell may have actually been sympathetic to the women's movement, and he later admitted to Mabel that he wrote the letter because he was "hoping to rouse your indignation to a reply!"

Transcript of letter.

[capri0mni]

he later admitted to Mabel that he wrote the letter because he was "hoping to rouse your indignation to a reply!"

Ah! Courtship by trolling! Why does this not surprise me?

As you can tell,
I do not like this Mr. Bell!

(I'm not all that fond of the invention attributed to him, either, for that matter).

[spiralsheep]

Also, this conversation has reminded me that you weren't exaggerating about being on British time now, heh.

[capri0mni]

Ha! Exactly!