[ Golden Gater Online - October 14, 1997 ]
Natasha Chanetskaia
Staff writer
Holly Stewart and Douglas Barber planned their wedding ceremony just like many other couples- everything from the beautifully-decorated church to bride's perfect-fit dress - but the guests will not hear the music when the bride walks down the isle. It makes sense - the bride and the groom are deaf.
Their decision not to have music even though they were hearing people at the wedding, was based on culture - the Deaf culture.
Stewart and Barber are the main characters of "Deaf Family Diary," a play that premiered at SF State campus last weekend. Although the play's characters are fictional, the play explores important issues for the deaf community. The contrasting experience of the bride's deaf family and the groom's hearing parents is a setting for a conflict that ends in a fist fight in the middle of the wedding ceremony.
The sold-out performance gathered deaf, hard of hearing and hearing audience.
The conflict between two families that ended in a fist fight in the middle of their children's wedding reflects the important concerns of deaf people. The main question of the play is whether deafness is a culture or a disability. Barber's hearing family believes deafness is a disability mainly because they cannot communicate with their own son.
Going to school is a challenge for deaf people like Barber. "For a long time the emphasis was on making deaf children use their voice, so instead of learning math and science, deaf children spent their time in speech therapy," said Jeff Bettger, who teaches the Deaf Community Culture class at SF State for the first time this semester. "As a result of this approach, deaf students did not do very well in school."
Bettger said the focus is now shifting toward teaching deaf children American Sign Language (ASL) as the primary language and then helping them learn English as a second language. To help deaf students communicate in class, most schools, including SF State, provide interpreting services. The American Disability Act mandates that the federal government pays for such services, therefore, treating deafness as a disability.
"We have about 30 deaf people at SF State campus who use our services on a regular basis," said Tony Moy, an ASL interpreter at the Disability Resource Center. "We help them communicate in class using real time captions or sign language."
Communication and the willingness to find common ground is the main challenge for two families in the "Deaf Family Diary." While the play's characters were trying to communicate between each other on stage, several ASL interpreters helped the communication between the actors and the audience.
Most of the play's characters argued that deafness is not a disadvantage. Many of the specialists in the deafness field would agree. "Deafness is a culture and not a disability," said Karen Courtney at New Mexico Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. "It's a culture based on ASL, which is just another language, like Spanish or Chinese." She said many universities give foreign language credit to hearing students who take sign language classes.
According to Bettger, a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding surround the issue of deafness because most hearing people don't know enough about the Deaf culture. But the Deaf Community Culture class can change that. "You don't need to know sign language to take it and there are no prerequisites," Bettger said. "It's a great class for anyone who's interested in learning about another culture."
The communication between the deaf and the hearing cultures is what helped the two families in "Deaf Family Diary" become aware of their own prejudices toward each other. The result is a beautiful wedding- a symbolic marriage between two cultures that require trust and acceptance.
[ Golden Gater - October 14, 1997 ]