Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Bengkala is also known as Desa Kolok, or Deaf Village. When I went in 2008, forty-six of the village’s two thousand residents were deaf. I met hearing parents with deaf children, deaf parents with hearing children, deaf families with deaf parents and children, deaf or hearing parents with a mix of deaf and hearing children. It’s a poor village, and the general education level is low, but it has been even lower among the deaf. The only education for deaf people supplied by the government was in a signed version of Indonesian, and the only school for the deaf in Bali was in the capital, Denpasar. Signed Indonesian uses an aural grammar to dictate a sequence of signs; people whose grammar is primarily visual find it difficult to learn. Kanta, a hearing teacher in the village, introduced a program in 2007 to educate the deaf of Bengkala in their own sign language, Kata Kolok; the first deaf class had pupils from ages seven to fourteen because none had had any previous formal education. They were learning fingerspelling for Balinese words and were also working on numeracy.

The life of villages in northern Bali is based on a clan system. The deaf can both participate in and transcend their clans; for birthdays, for example, they invite their own clan as well as the deaf alliance in the village, while hearing people would not invite anyone outside their clan. The deaf have certain traditional jobs. They bury the dead and serve as the police, though there is almost no crime; they repair pipes in the often-troubled water system. Most are also farmers, planting cassava, taro, and elephant grass, which is used to feed cows. Bengkala has a traditional chief who presides over religious ceremonies; an administrative chief chosen by the central Balinese government to oversee government functions; and a deaf chief, traditionally the oldest deaf person.

I arrived in Bengkala with the Balinese linguist I Gede Marsaja, born in a neighboring village, who has studied Kata Kolok in depth. We climbed into a canyon where a river rushed under a two-hundred-foot rock wall. Several deaf villagers were waiting for us by the water, where they farm rambutans. Over the next half hour, the rest of Bengkala’s deaf arrived. I sat on a red blanket at one end of a large tarp, and the deaf arranged themselves around the tarp’s edge. People were signing to me, confident that I could understand. Gede translated and Kanta provided further assistance. I quickly picked up a few signs, and when I used them, the entire group broke out in smiles. They seemed to have multiple levels and kinds of signing, because when they were signing to me, they were like a bunch of mimes and I could follow their narratives clearly, but when they were signing to one another, I couldn’t figure out what they were saying at all, and when they were signing to Gede, they were somewhere in between. Some of the hearing people in the village sign better than others, and while Kata Kolok has an exact grammar, purely iconic signs can be strung along without grammatical overlay for people who are not fluent.

The Kata Kolok sign for sad is the index and middle fingers placed at the inside corners of the eyes, then drawn down like tears. The sign for father is an index finger laid across the upper lip to suggest a mustache; the sign for mother is an upward-facing open hand at chest level supporting an imaginary breast. The sign for deaf is the index finger inserted into the ear and rotated; the sign for hearing is the whole hand held closed beside the ear and then opened while it is moved away from the head, sort of like an explosion coming out of the skull. In Kata Kolok, positive words usually involve pointing upward, while negative ones involve pointing downward; one villager who had traveled told the others that the raised third finger is a bad word in the West, so they flipped the sign and now use a third finger pointing down to indicate horrendous. The vocabulary is constantly evolving, while the grammar is fairly static. This language probably took on rules, as many signed languages do, over decades; second-generation language is always more sophisticated and ordered than first-generation.