At a restaurant in Philadelphia I sit across from my mother, watching her as she watches me. What she is doing is nothing new, but I am still amazed to see her manipulate her hands before her into the likeness of her thoughts. How does her brain do that? Before I was born, she had no reason to move her hands this way. Then, her hands must have moved as I see everyone else’s hands move at the tables around us, only to pick up a glass or a fork.
Meanwhile, I move my hands as well. Together, watching each other, we carry on a conversation, as if we were letting the shapes of the phrases fall from our hands as a seasoning over our plates of food.
For most tasks, hands are useful. They grasp a steaming coffee mug, pinch a sheet of paper, pull a cookie sheet out of the oven, or wring a wet washcloth. But for communicating about these tasks, hands leap into another dimension. They enter the realm of thought.
They can say that someone is grabbing coffee in a rush out the door, or taking the one confidential document out of a stack of papers, or praying the cookies will come out just right for the dinner party, or feeling aggravated that the kids left a sticky mess on the kitchen counter. From hands in concert with rising and falling eyebrows, with motions of irises, clenching of teeth, and puckering lips, language is born.
Sign language has lived for thousands of years before this night when I sit with my mother. It came into being before the invention of writing, maybe before spoken words. Between people deaf and hearing, it came to be used as a lingua franca between tribes, as a way for them to share common thought. It has been reinvented countless times where deaf children of hearing parents have lived together in isolation, and where deaf relatives have communicated from generation to generation. It was systematized in eighteenth-century Paris by deaf teachers of deaf children. It has been adapted in the twenty-first-century locker rooms of deaf student-athletes. It has evolved in many places, and traveled across lands and seas. It has grown into various distinct languages around the world, as when the children in the schools for the deaf in Nicaragua developed their own Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) in the 1970s.
Sign language is both long-lasting and ephemeral. It can only be recorded truly through memory and the moving image. In grainy footage from 1913, George Veditz signs, “As long as we have deaf people on earth, we will have signs. And as long as we have our films, we can preserve signs in their old purity. It is my hope that we will all love and guard our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people.”
To use sign languages is to be an architect of space and time. In Amer-ican Sign Language (ASL), to create an airplane runway, you set one hand palm down in front of you, and the other hand, placed on top, moves forward away from the first. The first hand is not a runway until the other hand plays the part of the airplane. Time sits still as the airplane rests on the back of the hand, allowing us to imagine the pilot getting ready and passengers shifting in their seats. The movement of the airplane hand begins with a rumbling taxiing and takeoff, seamlessly transitioning into a five-hour flight in a few seconds, with the puff of the cheeks as the plane travels to eye level heading toward its destination.
Nietzsche said, “Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.” I draw a circle in air above my face. I point from there to my face with fingertips and thumb all touching. And when I spread my hand, those who know American Sign Language know that this is the sign for “sun,” for the source of light on earth. This seems obvious when I tell you, though we may never find an absolute truth in the sign, or in the sun itself. Still, the moment when the gift of sign is shared from person to person, as my mother does across the table when she signs her thoughts, however many times her hands may do this, it will be as wondrous and as life-affirming as the sunlight, every time.
Shira Leitson-Grabelsky is an artist and educator living in Santa Fe.
