Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Getar married once only. His wife bore him five children, then died from eating too much jackfruit. His children were all deaf; four of the five survived infancy. His primary responsibility as chief was to order jobs for members of the deaf alliance. “There are pipes to be fixed. There is a security job,” he explained. “The big boss comes to me, and I decide who will do the jobs. If there’s a death, the family will come to me, and I will decide who will dig the grave. For each job, the person who does it gets most of the money, but some money is also kept to go into the collective deaf-alliance fund, and every six months we slaughter a pig—or some pigs if we can afford it—and the meat is divided equally among the deaf people.” Getar told me that choosing who gets which job is political, since everyone wants the jobs that pay well. “I keep a record of who has done each job so I can show that the decisions are fair,” he said. “If someone is hungry and needs the work, then I’ll give it to him. If someone hasn’t had a job for a long time, I give them a chance.” When the other deaf people sign to Getar, they use more polite, formal signs; he, in turn, uses those forms of address with hearing people. Getar had not been the object of prejudice, but he spoke with longing about the freedoms of younger deaf people. There were more of them, he thought, and their lives were easier. Now they were even going to school.

After our long days of interviews, Cening Sukesti invited us to come out to their farm. It was raining, but Santia shimmied up a tree and brought us fresh coconuts, and we had mealy corn and heavy cassava. There were a lot of jokes with innuendo; Cening Sukesti chuckled as she explained that she had refused sexual favors to Santia until he had finished building their new hut. The deaf alliance had an attractive ease to it, a ready and embracing intimacy. When I asked about prejudice against the deaf, they all agreed that there was none in the village. They all had hearing and deaf friends and could mingle at will.

In Bengkala, people talked about deafness and hearing much as people in more familiar societies might talk about height or race—as personal characteristics with advantages and disadvantages. They did not discount the significance of deafness nor underplay its role in their lives; they did not forget whether they were deaf or hearing and did not expect others to forget it, either. But they considered it within the realm of ordinary variations rather than an aberrance and a severe disability. The deaf alliance in Bengkala is extremely free in every sense except geography; their freedom is predicated on a linguistic fluency shared only in their village. I had gone there to investigate the social constructionist model of disability and found that where deafness does not impair communication, it is not much of a handicap.

Kata Kolok appears to be unique among sign languages for the deaf in that it is used by more hearing people than deaf people. But it is threatened as deaf teenagers from Bengkala are increasingly sent to boarding school, where they learn Indonesian Sign Language (ISL). Many marry deaf people from other parts of Bali and use ISL instead of Kata Kolok; in recent years, eight deaf individuals from Bengkala have moved to other parts of Bali or Australia. Even if non-Bengkala spouses are deaf, the marriages are unlikely to produce deaf children, since individuals from outside Bengkala do not possess the recessive gene that causes deafness there. Since 2005, no deaf children have been born to parents who use Kata Kolok, so no new transmission of the language from deaf parents to deaf children has occurred. As the number of deaf people in Bengkala dwindles, so, too, will the communicative utility of Kata Kolok.

BRAZIL

Rio, City of Hope

Travel + Leisure, October 2011

I went to Rio de Janeiro in 2010 for Travel + Leisure to report on how the city was changing in the lead-up to the World Cup and the Olympics. The central question was the shifting dynamic between the privileged and the impoverished. I addressed the subject in the published article, but conducted a deeper investigation that finds voice in this expanded version.

At a time when much of the world is in some form of decline, Rio de Janeiro is the view looking forward; it can feel like the capital of hope. The wave of change owes something to the booming Brazilian economy, something to the discovery of offshore oil, something to the energy brought to the city when it was chosen for the 2014 World Cup finals and the 2016 Olympics, and most of all to the dramatic reduction in crime. All of these changes are elaborately intertwined. Rio has not achieved the placidity of Zürich or Reykjavík, but just as every small joy feels like rapture after a depression, the improvement in Rio has an aura of fiesta that those tranquil towns will never know.