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Mel Gibson: Watch the Hands

On Saturday, August 29, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Mel Gibson walked out from behind a curtain to begin a retrospective Q&A at Fan Expo Canada, the sprawling annual gathering billed as Canada’s largest comics and gaming event and the third-largest pop culture draw in North America. An American Sign Language interpreter stood at the edge of the stage, doing the work that makes such an event available to Deaf attendees, work interpreters were doing at panels across the hall all weekend. As Gibson passed behind the interpreter, his hands went up in a burst of empty flapping, a second or three of imitation nonsense played for the crowd, and then he waved and took his seat to talk about his career. Fans had paid 275 dollars apiece for photographs and autographs. The clip of the flapping traveled across social media before the weekend closed, and by Monday he had issued a statement through the trades, blaming the disorientation of being pushed into a spotlight and apologizing to anyone who took offense.

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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The EleMenTs Series Is Complete: A Young Adult Fantasy Trilogy

Twenty years ago, I began imagining a story about three disabled teenage girls who discover they possess elemental powers. The idea stayed with me, growing and changing as I grew and changed, waiting for the right moment to be told. That moment has arrived. The EleMenTs Series is complete, and all three novels are now available.

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Buy Our Book! American Sign Language Level 5: A Field Guide for Advanced Communication Techniques for People with Other Disabilities

Janna and I are pleased to announce our latest book is now available for purchase from Amazon — American Sign Language Level 5: A Field Guide for Advanced Communication Techniques for People with Other Disabilities written by David Boles, M.F.A. and Janna Sweenie, M.A. — yes, it’s an eyeful of a title, but that sort of specificity is necessary for this sort sort of real life ASL field guide.

BUY NOW!


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The Interpreter Impostor at the Mandela Memorial

Mandela’s memorial yesterday has ignited a firestorm today out of the Soweto rain.  No, not Obama’s failed message, or the non-Michelle approved Presidential selfie with other heads of State, but rather the fraud of an impostor posing as an interpreter for the Deaf during the ceremony.

The alleged sign language interpreter was so awful, in fact, that he had to have been in on the cruel joke that he knew nothing about even creating rudimentary signs.

Unfortunately, this sort of “faking it” is actually pretty common in the Deaf Community.  There are a lot of “professional” interpreters who are not well-trained but who are given jobs because they are cheap — even though they are incapable of proper signing.  The Deaf suffer and the incompetence gets a paycheck.

While not many working interpreters are as fraudulent on the level of what happened in Soweto — the end effect is still the same: The Deaf person has no idea what’s being said and has to guess about what’s really happening.

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As Oscar Pistorius Stumbles Down Murder Row

I am dumbfounded by news today from South Africa that legless Olympian runner Oscar Pistorius has been charged with murdering Reeva Steenkamp, his longtime girlfriend, with four gunshots.  Why would a man like Oscar ever raise a gun in fear or anger?  Hasn’t his life taught him that obstacles are to be overcome and never under-gunned?

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