Grab the Lapels

Emerging Wings by Melissa Lewis

Emerging Wings: Becoming Myself is a very short book (50 pages) by Melissa Lewis. If you want a brief introduction to what life is like for one person who is not Hearing, this is the book for you. Some authors chose to capitalize Deaf and Hearing, which means they are referring to cultures. We don’t typically think of being able to hear as part of a culture, but it is in contrast to Deaf culture. Deaf people rely on visual cues, are a collectivist culture, are proud when they are part of a Deaf family (generations of Deafness), share a language, use direct communication (instead of hedging or euphemisms), do not value the ability to speak (some D/deaf people can!) and more. In contrast, Hearing culture, if you will, relies more on sound, are an individualistic culture (in America), think deafness is a handicap, share a language and value speech, and tend to soften their point so as not to offend someone.

Melissa Lewis was born in 1976, and she opens her book explaining how doctors suggested her parents should send her away and forget about her because she was deaf. She notes that she did not know what her doctor advised until the night of her graduation party, where she celebrated being valedictorian. Her point shines through; the doctor was wrong about Lewis’s abilities because his medical view of deafness informed him that she would be incapable of thriving. Due to how she was raised and support services she received in school, Lewis views herself as a person with “hearing loss” rather than as deaf. In Deaf culture, community members do not view themselves as having “lost” anything, because if you are born without the ability to hear, what did you ever lose? Lewis’s story provides a contrast, a different way of being deaf, to demonstrate the range of experience.

A hotly debated conversation in Deaf communities is whether a person can be part of Deaf culture and have a cochlear implant (CI). Is the recipient of a CI embarrassed about their deafness? Do they want to please hearing people and eschew the Deaf community? Lewis describes her desire to be a “fully practicing attorney in the courtroom without having to request accommodations.” She did hesitate, as the surgery to get a CI means all the ear nerves are severed, so while she used a hearing aid in the past, an unsuccessful CI would mean hearing absolutely nothing. Lewis is direct about her reasoning and experience with a CI, and in her case, she felt she was more herself than a person with “a hearing loss” afterward.

I am not suggesting Lewis turned away from the Deaf community, or, as she puts it, the Hearing world versus the Deaf world. Part of the reason she wanted to be a lawyer was because she was “part of a class action against the health organization in [her] home state that led to statewide interpreting policy changes for people with hearing loss requesting accommodations for medical appointments.” So, while some in the Deaf community may feel apprehensive about Lewis and her CI that helps her be more like a hearing person, her efforts to legalize equal access for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people is ongoing. Lewis emphasizes, “I do not affiliate myself entirely with one community. It can be lonely in this aspect as there are not many people like myself to be classified in this group. Some days, I wonder what my life would be like if I was completely immersed in the deaf community.” Interestingly, Lewis reveals that she wishes she could just use sign language and relate to people who understand her, but notes that her “education is more in par with conversing with the hearing community.” Oof. Here, the author reveals she has some internalized audism, implying that D/deaf people are not as educated as hearing people. I also noticed she does not capitalize the D in Deaf, suggesting she doesn’t believe it’s a culture, more just a group.

In general, Lewis demonstrates how she is a woman who identifies as deaf (the medical condition, not the culture) and labels herself with hearing loss (not Deaf gain) and engages in two worlds. While she may not be accepted in the Hearing or Deaf worlds, her experience is something we should take note of as cochlear implant surgeries increase each year. Historically, medical science continues to try and fix deafness, even when the Deaf community says there’s nothing to fix.

Published by Grab the Lapels

I'm a graduate of the MFA fiction writing program at the University of Notre Dame, which inspired me to follow along with trends in teaching, publishing, and reviewing. I also have an MA and BS from Central Michigan University. I used to teach composition, creative writing, and literature in higher education, then did a brief stint at a civic theater, followed by two years at a references desk at a public library. I'm now working toward my ASL Interpreter license.

23 comments

  1. Sounds interesting. Do deaf children with hearing parents tend to be taught/encouraged/pushed to fit into the hearing world? It seems like many of the stories you write about that is the case. Does it maybe also depend on when they were born? Like Lewis in the 70s? And children born maybe in the 80s/90s or later to hearing parents are better supported and more likely to find a place in the Deaf community?

    On a side note, I was at a library conference yesterday and there was a woman there who could have been your doppelganger. It was so weird.

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    • A few things I’ve learned: most hearing people have never met a deaf person in their lives. Typically, the first deaf person parents meet is their deaf child. Because hearing parents have not met a deaf adult, many in the past have assumed that being deaf is a disease that causes death. Otherwise, wouldn’t they have met a deaf person before? Thus, some parents assume their child will only live to young adulthood. Hearing people who know nothing about Deaf Culture believe deafness is a huge handicap, so they turn to medical interventions, such as cochlear implants, speech therapy, and hearing aids. In the past, deaf children at some schools were required to wear hearing aids even if the hearing aids did nothing for them (such as a profoundly deaf person). Now, some people are looking into gene therapy. From my perspective, and that of the capital-D Deaf community, this is a lot of surgery and experimentation on children, and it is unethical.

      Some Deaf people I know serve as mentors to hearing parents with babies under age two. They show the parents sign language and get them enrolled in classes, they teach them about the Deaf community and Deaf culture. It also depends on where the hearing parents live. If they are anywhere near a big city, there is a Deaf community. However, if they are in rural Kansas, their deaf child may be the only one around.

      That’s funny that you saw my other me. Twilight Zone moment, for sure!

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      • Thank you for all this information! Clearly the hearing world has done (and continues to do) wrong by deaf children and people, which is heartbreaking. I don’t think I have ever mentioned that when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade I was obsessed with Helen Keller. I read everything about her and Annie Sullivan and I decided I wanted to be a teacher for the death and blind like Annie. I taught myself finger spelling and the braille alphabet. But having no connection to anyone in the Deaf or Blind community, this dream slowly disappeared. However, I eventually did meet some Deaf people at my university, California State University Northridge, which had a large Deaf community and ASL program. I even took a semester of ASL and loved it, but then couldn’t continue because the university didn’t count it as part of graduation language requirements and I couldn’t fit it into my schedule. Many years later I had a deaf coworker who was lovely and she taught me some signs (which I have now forgotten because that was 15+ years ago), but we mostly communicated in writing. Sometimes I miss that old dream and wonder what if? But life has taken me in a different direction, all that so explain why I love hearing your stories 🙂

        And yeah, the other you was super weird!

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        • Interestingly, sign language wasn’t considered a real language until 1965 when a linguist proved that it has all the features of a language. Therefore, many colleges did not accept ASL as a language until this proof. I assume that some colleges took their time in coming around, which may explain your experiences. I was at the University of Notre Dame in 2008, they did not count Spanish as a language that you could take to fulfill graduation requirements. I have no clue what that is about, but they did offer Spanish, so what the hell? If you keep reading more into the history of Helen Keller, you’ll find that she comes from a long line of people with disabilities who taught each other. So if you go back from Anne Sullivan, there are more deaf-blind people in the mix. Mix. It’s pretty cool. I do think some of this stuff is hard to talk about because people still take the medical view that in order to have a good life, or an easy life, you need to not have any kind of what people would call disability. I like how you learned about Helen Keller and did your own research, and didn’t see the deaf or blind community as disabled, but a group of people with whom you could work.

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          • I keep meaning to dip back into Helen Keller’s life. She was such an activist and wrote some really great things. But you know all about bookish distractions and “mean to get to thats” 🙂

            So weird Notre Dame didn’t allow Spanish to count as a language requirement! What the heck?

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  2. Oh my, I just wrote a long response and it disappeared. So, I’ll just say thanks for this post because I found the insights you share about Deaf culture and deafness interesting and helpful, but mystifying in some of the details such as the potential rejection of someone because they choose CI?

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    • My understanding about CIs, and this may be wrong, is that some Deaf people feel threatened or insulted by CIs. If the person with a CI is living a “great life,” then maybe the Deaf person will feel doubt, like they should get one, too. This I understand because I feel the same way about gastric surgery for fat people. What I’ve noticed is people get the surgery, it seems awful, then they lose a ton of weight and look pretty good and feel super happy, but then on the flip side, I’ve never met someone who did not gain all the weight back AND have continuing health issues. As for offended, some Deaf people believe that if you get a CI, you think hearing people are better than Deaf people. The term for this is audism. Where I live, I’ve never seen people give a person with a CI a hard time; however, they may say when they see a baby with one, or even two, CIs, that they feel sad for the baby, who had major surgery and could not give consent.

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      • Thanks Melanie. I understand this but it makes me a bit sad too.

        I would say if I were a parent I would seriously consider going the CI route not because I think hearing people are better but because I would think their life would be easier.

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  3. I can’t believe that as late as 1975 a doctor would suggest sending a child away like this! This book sounds like a different perspective than some of the others you’ve shared and having learned more about d/Deaf culture from you, I can better understand how some of her choices would be controversial.

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    • I’m glad you’ve gathered information to see how/why these stories are different! Seriously, that makes my heart happy. If you’re familiar with author Sara Novic, she is BIG on CAPITAL-D Deaf culture and has lately been calling out “cures” for deafness that people tout without discussing the ethical and medical issues involved (such as people with cochlear implants still basically being deaf).

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  4. Wow, this is so fascinating. These posts are so so fascinating to read about, especially the fact that people who have hearing loss, or born deafness are so caught in between these cultures. Like Karissa said above it’s also shocking that a doctor would say this as late as 1975. My god! Imagine a doctor telling a woman to just forget about her child, it’s just horrific.

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    • I was talking to my mom this morning about how Gen Z appears to get caught in thinking everyone is “sweet.” For example, a person who is well known for having autism made a sexual comment to me last year, and I have been cautious ever since, especially after that person asked me to meet them “alone, with no one else around” at one point. However, other students were saying, “But X is really sweet!” Erm. My point is that today people are diagnosed with autism and other disabilities much younger, so people know what it is. When I was a kid, we (the average person) did not know what autism was and made fun of the “weird” kids. When my mom was growing up, there were no “weird” kids at school, which tells me that they were likely kept home/hidden from society. We’re not that far off from the “send you child away” times.

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      • that’s quite scary Melanie, I’m sorry that happened to you. But you’re so right about that, if we had good interactions with someone, we automatically think they are a good person. And yet I think we’ve both read enough true crime to know that criminals always have people in their life that love them, and think the world of them, no matter their actions.

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    • It was normal in those days to send away children with any kind of disability, or to keep them within the home and out of sight as much as possible. Judy Heumann was born in 1947 and told she couldn’t go to school because her wheelchair made her a fire hazard. In the documentary Crip Camp, she describes attending special education in a basement because she was too handicapped (literally a wheelchair) to be with the general population. When I worked in group homes, many of those people were given to the state once their parents found out they had a disability. It was a social stigma back then, as if you did something bad to make a “bad” baby.

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