200 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
Recalling my own experiences of competence as a scholar in the Gallaudet environ-
ment helped me maintain the stance of equality that I needed to break through
the glass ceiling and to stand strong in a humiliating and limiting process. In this
social and existential struggle that was predominantly invisible and silent, I kept
telling myself, “you have to stand,” calling on myself to practice a ritual that has
been shared among deaf people—historically and collectively—each in his or her
own way.^13
In my struggle, I could feel the people I had worked with standing with me. Their
experiences of dealing with adversity and the wisdom they had derived from these
experiences encouraged and supported me. In a similar way, in the preface to her
1995 book, Engendering Motherhood, Mary McMahon writes, “Before I started the
research I had not realized the ways in which the subjects of my research could
come into my life, talk to me, tell me about myself” (cited in Doucet, 1998, p. 52).
In my mind, I practiced telling and rewriting my life story, as I had done at
Gallaudet. I kept telling myself that I should “keep going” and that I should not
give up. I told myself that I should be confident that doors would open. They had
for other people, and they would for me. As Jiayi Zhou, a deaf artist from China,
explained,When I was a kid, I dreamed of my future and where I would go or what I
would do. In the deaf world, what would I do? I drew that deaf people could
play, that all the deaf people in the world could come together. Cats, animals,
and all those—I drew red to represent good feelings, a good heart, warmth.I learned to be hopeful and to believe again in my dreams. The power of dreams
coming true is illustrated by the drawing described by Jiayi. As a child, she created a
world in which all deaf people could unite, a world of goodness and love. She told
me this story when I visited her in China, and indeed in some way the world had
come together at Gallaudet and even in China. I opened up and connected with
other people, with nature, and with the world. I had learned of the struggles for
survival of many people across the world; of deaf people fighting to be able to go to
school, find a job, and feed their children; and of deaf students surmounting obsta-
cles to reach Gallaudet University. These put my own challenge into perspective and
prompted me to transform my reflective process into one that was outward looking
and compassionate. My “spiritual awakening” and my practicing of this stance of
“concern for everybody” (Armstrong, 2011) necessarily included moving beyond
deaf/signing people to the diverse community of humankind, a movement that also
inspired me epistemologically.
These realizations may be compared to those of paul Stoller (2009), whose an-
thropological memoir, The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Essay, describes
how his apprenticeship in sorcery among the Songhai in Niger helped him cope
when he was diagnosed with cancer. performing the rituals he had learned gave him
peace and a feeling of personal control:- This theme of silence and deaf citizenship is explored further in Chapter 6.