Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Local hearing farmers do not have an enormous vocabulary, and neither does this sign language, in which about a thousand signs have been identified by scholars, though deaf people clearly know more signs than that and can combine them to achieve additional meanings. For Western members of the educated classes, intimacy usually resides in mutual knowledge, and that knowledge is advanced when language unlocks the secrets of the other mind. But some people are less given to articulation: people for whom the self is expressed in the preparation of food and in the ministrations of erotic passion and in shared labor in the field. For such people the meaning embedded in words is secondary, an adjunct to love rather than its method. We had come into a society in which language was not the necessary precondition of familiarity for the hearing or the deaf, nor the primary medium through which to understand and negotiate the world.

When we finished lunch, fourteen men put on sarongs, and two women donned fancy, lacy nylon blouses. Like most deaf people, they could feel the vibrations of the drum, and their dance included movements that seemed to flow from their mimetic language—you could tell when they were dancing about being on a boat, and when they were smoking, and when they were running away. Each woman individually would invite one of the men to dance. One invited me, and I went for it; she hung flowers around my neck as we danced. Then the women remarked that they were all getting hot and tired, as it was incredibly humid, so they stopped. The men offered to show us the martial arts they use as the village security agents. I was interested in the way they mixed signing and the deployment of their hands and feet as weapons. One young man, Suarayasa, resisted joining in the theatrics until he was shamed into it by his mother, and the whole time he was demonstrating his abilities, he was also signing repeatedly, “Look at me!” It was fierce but playful.

The women gave everyone a Sprite, then the men proposed a dip in the river, so we walked down through the elephant grass and hot peppers and went skinny-dipping. The rock wall rose steep above us, and long vines hung down, and the deaf men swung on them. I did somersaults in the water, others did headstands, and we set bait to fish for eels. Some would swim underwater until they were right beside me and then shoot up out of the current. They continued to sign to me, and the communication was exuberant, even joyful. It seemed possible, in that sunset light, to contemplate this as an idyll for the fluent communication it entailed, despite the poverty and disability of the people whom we were visiting.

The next day, Kanta translated from Kata Kolok into Balinese, occasionally addressing me in his limited English; Gede translated Kanta’s Balinese into English, occasionally signing in his limited Kata Kolok; and the deaf Bengkala villagers addressed me directly in animated sign. Communication in this linguistic jumble was established through sheer force of collective will. It was hard to ascertain even the numbers of deaf and hearing people in individual families because everyone had different ideas about what was meant by family: All the male relatives? All the adults? All the people sharing a kitchen? What one could ask was limited because many grammatical structures couldn’t be translated. For example, Kata Kolok has no conditional tense nor any sign for why; the language has no categorical words (such as animals or the abstract notion of name), only specific ones (such as cow or someone’s actual name).

We first talked to the family of Pinda, who currently had two wives and had divorced two others. He was father to two living children, a daughter by Ni Md Resmini and a son by another wife; three children from his previous marriages had died. His wives and children were all deaf. Pinda said, “I don’t like the hearing people here. If I ask them for money, they always refuse.” Pinda was vain and wanted to have his picture taken incessantly, but warm, too, and he laughed readily. He said he loved Resmini because she cut grass all day for the cows and never talked. “Hearing people talk too much,” he explained. Resmini said, “I always knew I wanted to marry a deaf man, but I never cared whether my children could hear or not. With a hearing husband, my deaf daughter will probably be richer, and with a deaf husband she will end up fighting like I do. Having too much of a common language with your husband is not an advantage. It makes everyone too emotional.” Pinda seemed to take an obscure pride in this prognosis. “The deaf, if there is something wrong with the wife, he is kicking her out straightaway,” he said. “If she’s been too friendly with another man, she’s kicked out without questions. I would never marry a hearing woman. And I want my son to marry someone deaf as well.” It became clear that it would be harder for him to dominate the family with a hearing woman.