Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice by Rachel Kolb
Summary: Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So she learned to speak through speech therapy and to piece together missing sounds through lipreading and an eventual cochlear implant, all while finding clarity and meaning in American Sign Language (ASL) and written literature. Kolb blends personal narrative with cultural commentary to explore the different layers of deafness, language, and voice. She deconstructs multisensory experiences of language, examining the cultural importance hearing people attach to sound, the inner labyrinths of speech therapy, the murkiness of lipreading, and her lifelong intimacy with written English. And she uses her own experiences to illuminate the complexities of disability access, partnerships with ASL interpreters, Deaf culture and d/Deaf identity, and the perception versus reality of deafness.

Many hearing people, if they think of deaf people at all, tend to make generalizations—either they sign, or they speak and speechread. Either they spend all their time in the Deaf community or they are fully integrated into the hearing world.

But as Rachel Kolb’s thoughtful and compelling new memoir shows, every deaf person contains “Whitmanian multitudes,” learning to navigate the Deaf and hearing worlds in different ways at different times and with different tools, employing signs, speech, writing, reading, gesture, technology, bureaucracy, and millions of other means to communicate and find one’s way. Kolb explores concepts that will be familiar to many in the Deaf community—speech therapy, navigating mainstream schooling, working with interpreters, slogging through the bureaucracy of accommodations requests, deciding which hills to die on when it comes to fighting for the rights granted under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Kolb grounds her essays in her own experience, weaving deft storytelling about growing up deaf in a hearing family who (thankfully, and unusually) chose to learn ASL, as well as her experiences pursuing advanced education at Stanford, Oxford, Emory, and Harvard. From these personal narratives, Kolb teases out thoughtful reflections about the ups and downs of access for deaf and disabled people post-ADA. As an interpreter, I especially appreciated her discussion of working with interpreters and the differences between working with professional interpreters and what she calls “friendterpreting,” when a signing friend provides more basic access in informal situations. A terrific read for hearing, hard of hearing, and deaf readers alike.

ARTICULATE is out now.

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