168 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
educator who was introduced in an earlier section. She enthusiastically read the
book # Believe: [Why Everybody Says But Nobody Really Believes That Young People Are
the Future], in which Sihame El Kaouakibi, a Flemish woman with Moroccan roots,
narrates the story of her motivation to establish a sociocultural youth organization.
This prompted Ayfer to tell her own story some months later, through a process of
complementary writing and signing, using the multiple languages she grew up with
(i.e., Flemish Sign Language, Dutch, and Turkish). She recalled the vacations that
she spent with her family in the vibrant city of Istanbul and with her grandparents in
a remote village in rural Turkey. The love of her grandmother, as well as the warmth
of her family that she experienced during these summer vacations, have been a
source of strength in her life.
Another resource that made a difference was her mother’s belief in her capacities
and continuous support to her education. It represented a little sunlight in the anxi-
ety-ridden rise of nationalism and the extreme right in 1990s Flanders. Encouraging
the women of the Turkish community to check on their children’s homework, her
mother stood up for her choice to leave the deaf school for an uncertain secondary
mainstreamed trajectory in pursuit of a degree in advanced education—although
this was against the advice of the educators.
As she described it metaphorically: It was time to leave the shadows of Plato’s cave,
which were cast on the wall by the fire, for the real world. She wanted to discover,
even though this meant going through the pain of lost security, learning the hard
way, and acquiring the tools to navigate in the hearing world. Her youth in Flan-
ders was “a multifaceted circuit” of “becoming nomadic,” challenging boundaries
to open up space for multiple belonging.
Deaf heroes, heroines, and autobiographies have been important resources for
transitions in my own identity process; there were few resources available in Flan-
ders during my youth in the 1990s. I remember watching Children of a Lesser God
when I was at university, and reading books such as the one by Emmanuelle Laborit.
Both resources fascinated me and I welcomed the opportunity to write a paper on
deaf literature and autobiography for a comparative literature class during my mas-
ter’s studies. I had watched the film Children of a Lesser God on a warm summer night
at the end of the 1990s after my mother had recommended it. Medoff’s play had
been performed for the first time in 1980, with his friend Phyllis Frelich, for whom
he had written it, in the leading role. It was staged again on Broadway in 2015. The
main character, as mentioned above, is Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman who
works as a custodian at the deaf school where she used to be a student. A new and
dedicated speech teacher has just arrived, James Leeds (played by William Hurt
in the film), who wants to integrate the students into society through speech and
lipreading. He is convinced that this is also the way for Sarah, and they start a rela-
tionship, a theme that is more central and romanticized in the film than in the play.
The film was oriented toward a 1980s hearing audience, in a United States with
an emerging awareness of ASL, deaf culture, emancipation, and the rights of
minorities. Sound and silence are repeating themes in the film, as well as the pos-
sibility or impossibility of building bridges between two worlds. The film is about
identity, finding a “voice,” being in control of your life, and the journey this takes.