Introduction to the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Horror Author Interview Series by Christopher Jon Heuer
Christopher Jon Heuer is the author of Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution as well as All Your Parts Intact: Poems. He is the editor of Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. He is a professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington DC.
Is Deaf Horror fiction a genre or a sub-subgenre?
There is no misspelling above. I’m inventing a new term for a weird situation. When we label something a genre, such as Horror Science Fiction, or Fantasy, we are saying “This is what it is. This is its definition.” Horror stories include axe-wielding serial killers who lurch through the night, and enough of us agree upon that, so fine, we’ll publish stories about axe-wielding murderers. And horror is about witches and gargoyles and one-eyed octopus monsters that snatch up young teen virgins, so great, great, and great. There’s a place for them all.
I have a question, though. Let’s step for a moment out of literature and into television and film. Is Lovecraft Country a “Black Horror show,” or is it just… a Horror show? Is Wonder Woman a superhero movie? Or is it a female superhero movie? (Or superheroine?)Whatever your answer, hopefully, you see the problem. You’re not thinking about who wrote the script, or who originally created the character. You’re thinking about what you see up on the screen.
And the same thing goes when you pick up a book… say Tripping the Tale Fantastic, an anthology of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Deaf and hard-of-hearing writers. What have you got in your hands, here? If it’s Deaf Horror fiction, then by definition it’s not “mainstream.” Yet if one of those stories is about a monster and one is about a murderer and one is about a cannibal, do we classify these stories under broader subgenres and place them alongside of Hearing writers, or… no? Because none of this is “really mainstream enough,” and therefore we should put these stories under yet another subcategorization?
And what happens when we do that? Well, that should be simple enough. Name one Native American actor in any of the last twenty films you saw who wasn’t shot off his horse. Name a Black actor who didn’t have to work his way up by first portraying a gang member? Peter Dinklage, as a final example, takes great pride in the fact that, when he was still in the trenches, he turned down “traditional Dwarf roles.” (Of the type where drunken frat boy buffoons of “normal height” would toss them at Little People-sized Velcro dartboards.) Yet his most recent role was the character of Cyrano, a freak. And he’ll likely be remembered best as Tyrion in Game of Thrones.
A freak.
Minority Literature springs up because Mainstream (Majority) Literature is closed. And in a world where Deaf writers exist at all—many Deaf Americans do not use English as a first language, they use American Sign Language, which has a completely different grammatical structure from English, and many deaf people do not acquire English in a timely manner (or at all), not because they are deaf, but because they are neglected by an ongoing, real-life Horror story called the American Education System—we should honor their contributions to our beloved genre as we would the stories of any other writer.
I think this is an excellent introduction to the circumstances that challenge deaf writers and—perhaps, more problematically—diminish their works’ reception. The old majoritarian model of creative genius celebrates (1) individualistic uniqueness and (2) the success of creative works in majoritarian culture. [Very often] Successful authors rise out of what most people think of as a “marketplace of ideas,” governed by a communal “wisdom of crowds,” in which recognition proves a singular individual’s “merit.” Deaf authors often have to prove their excellence as prose writers when, due to their growing up in a culture fluent in ASL, Standard American (Grammatical) English is a second-language. Worse, if a deaf author produces published writing that isn’t promoted as exceptional in itself (at least better or more distinctive than recognized works of hearing writers), then it’s promoted as different only by virtue of the author not-being-like-the-majority. Marginal: a freak.
I admire the realizations put forth in his fiction and essays by Ralph Ellison. Ellison wrote singularly great, “genre”-breaking, fiction. But he insisted you couldn’t separate what made his creative writings fine from the histories and communities he came from: black American, Southern, male . . . . But he also always argued he shouldn’t be seen as a special break-out from a marginalized community. He privileged the fact that the majoritarian culture had refused to accept the presence of black Americans with “color-blindness,” but, he insisted, black American identity and culture were already irrevocably a distinctive course of ideas and identities woven through the white American *majoritarian* culture. More daringly, he contended that advocates of the white majoritarian culture must examine their own personal investments and accept that they had incorporated black origins and innovations into their *ideals* of the implicitly white color-blind society.
Ellison argued that white people would never know what black American authors were capable of meaning because they—the empowered, white-American readers—couldn’t risk acknowledging that contemporary “color-blind” majority identity was already vastly constituted the by the labor, history, art, and and involvement of black Americans. But, similarly, Ellison castigated advocates of an exclusive black identity who refused to acknowledge that black history in the New World was partially realized in segregationist society—almost always, as fighters in oppressors’ “battle royale.” Ellison suggested his Invisible Man was ‘different’ because white people couldn’t imagine what he, as a person, might intend and realize. But, Ellison also argued, contemporaries who espoused a unique and separate black culture and black identity couldn’t see or hear who his Invisible Man was. Nor who they were or might become..
I’m suggesting that, at last, “color-blind” white, masculinist, hetero-normative culture has begun to acknowledge ways in which the unidentifiable majority culture has kept others. Currently, we see the result in an immense white, misogynist, conservative backlash. Unfortunately, novel recognition of people who come from communities that have been marginalized has propagated a prevailing notion that a society always partially defined by interstitial diminutions—injuries and failures to account for unrecognized communities—must, in social practice, be a zero-sum game of contested dominion, in which stakeholders have to ignore all rivals. In which all “interested allies” must be accounted untrustworthy. In which, to admit the truth of some other group’s fundamental claims to real grievances means to authenticity must entail relinquishing a portion of its own unique claim to have been treated unjustly in a nation that boasts universal equality. The temptation is to say others *can’t* know our grievance. Yet in a substantial way, we are all embodied within and through America’s shifting history. We say that the appallingly constrained class of men named as “The People” in the Constitution propagated an [Enlightenment] ideal of individual equality—white Protestant men of property. That’s true. But the majority’s adherence to the terms of its claim forced it to acknowledge marginalized communities of Americans. That’s the 20th-century’s Civil Rights triumphs.
But, following Ellison, you can’t assume that an author who comes from a ‘challengingly’ different community or background will write any particular way. Or, if they identify with their community, we can’t, as readers, assume that their community’s experience is all they can speak to. Follow Ellison, and the author can prove that what’s uncannily familiar to black Americans should be disturbingly recognizable to white audiences (like _Lovecraft Country_). Deaf authors should be able to write of the experiences of people, communities, and families who are deaf—and be able to anticipate their readers will bring familiarity or go learn something about the author’s contexts—yet be able to astonish readers in the majority with fear and recognition. Deaf authors should always be able to say, My work usually invokes horror’s tropes, but I’ll often set up expectations in order to shock you. And when you’ve thought it over, you’ll find the terror I portray is uncomfortably like your own. We come out of the same place. Our families are related.