170 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
from the “objectivity” of the literary critic to do justice to the book, which touched
her own soul:This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness.... She makes “culture”— that slow
and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance—seem as natu-
ral and organic and beautiful as the sunrise.... She makes “black woman-ness”
appear as a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share,
however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and
continents and languages and religions.... Almost—but not quite. Better to
say, when I’m reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to
say things I wouldn’t normally. Things like “She is my sister and I love her.”The soulfulness of Sarah’s scream is in its sisterhood, and in “the many spaces be-
tween voice and silence” where deaf women and deaf citizens may position them-
selves (see Hoegaerts & De Clerck, in press). Sarah’s scream in the film is echoed in
Laborit’s autobiography. In my master’s thesis I wrote: “The story of Sarah could have
been Laborit’s own story, and it illustrates that heroines like Sarah are not unusual
characters, but may be living in every street and every country.” (De Clerck 2001)
The classical mirror of the deaf hero also falls to pieces in Matlin’s biography, I’ll
Scream Later, which was published in 2014. The story is very personal, revealing the
abusive relationship with her co-star and addiction to drugs (including being in
rehab after the Oscars), as well as experiencing sexual abuse as a teenager. While
disclosure has a function, it unfortunately put her efforts toward an acting career
in the shadows, although she emphasizes that she is much more than a deaf actress.
Again, it takes courage to make cracks in the mirror and find a space between dom-
inant forms of representation and available identity constructs, with more fixed cul-
tural identities in the 1980s and more openness for nuances in contemporary times.
Her story is about becoming, rather than being (e.g., becoming an actress, becom-
ing a heroine), and the affirmative stance that comes with it:Perhaps you have to be deaf to feel this particular sting, but there must be a
space in which individual deaf people can write autobiographically and “gain
recognition, acceptance, and affirmation of deafness, without assumptions
about ‘deaf identity’ as the main driving force in their lives (Corker, p. 61)”
(McDonald, 2010, p. 468)We may never know the story of the two deaf girls in the myth of Epée and “no
one could have told her life-story as she herself would have told it” (Arendt, cited
in Caverero, 2000, p. 8). However, the story has lived on, and our desire persists
“for who they are through their story, beyond the form that the story takes” (Cava-
rero, 2000, p. xxv). On the other hand, there are tales of origin that have not been
attended to. In the essay “Old Trails, New Roads,” Marc Jacobs (2012) argues for
dynamically dealing with deaf heritage, to highlight pathways around the world that
have been overshadowed by the dominant LSF/ASL story of origin.
Jacobs calls for further research on an alternative story of origin in the use of
Ixarette, the signed language used in 16th- to 20th-century Istanbul at the Otto-
man court. This requires a paradigm shift and a postcolonial stance (see Chapter 2)
for the recognition of documenting deaf communities and signed languages beyond