ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Author Sara Novic is obsessed with language - its power, how it connects us and also how it can isolate us. Her latest book, a memoir, is called "Mother Tongue." In it, she chronicles losing her hearing at age 12, learning American Sign Language and finding a deaf community.
SARA NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) I feel like I'm always evolving, changing, and I think that's part of life as a deaf person.
NADWORNY: We're talking to Novic through an ASL translator. That's the voice you'll hear throughout our interview. Her story is one about motherhood, deaf history and how being deaf has shaped who she is and how she parents.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) I'm a parent. I'm a writer. I'm a deaf person.
NADWORNY: Novic has short, gelled hair, boxy glasses, and when we talk, she's eight months pregnant.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) We're much more calm.
NADWORNY: At her house in the Philly suburbs, Novic brings us to a room filled with toys and musical instruments. She says it's the best room in the house.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) I mean, anytime people are here, this is the spot. We all sit and we meet around here.
NADWORNY: Across from a wall of guitars is an upright piano. Novic takes a seat and begins to play.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO)
NADWORNY: You could consider music as the fourth language Novic knows, in addition to ASL, English and Croatian, the language of her grandparents.
You just made that up?
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) I mean, yeah. Just something.
NADWORNY: She plays us a chord, and after she plays, she signs it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO)
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) F.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO)
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) C.
NADWORNY: When she lost her hearing in middle school, music became a facade - a way to convince herself and others her deafness wasn't really happening. Now music is mostly about a physical feeling.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) Most things now for me is vibration-related.
(Whispering) I was laughing.
(Through ASL translator) I think there was always something that I felt more than I thought about.
NADWORNY: She's come a long way from that teen in hiding. Her book, "Mother Tongue," follows her navigating her deaf identity to disability rights activist, professor of deaf studies and mother through pregnancy and adoption.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO)
NADWORNY: That's her older son, who she calls K in the book, playing the piano.
K: Yeah.
NADWORNY: He is adopted from Thailand and is deaf. At his orphanage, he was mostly deprived of language. He learned ASL from Novic and her husband at age 4. He now wears hearing aids, and he loves loud noises.
K: (Laughter).
NOVIC: K loves to speak. He loves to yell and shout.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Laughter).
NADWORNY: Her younger son is biological and hearing. She calls him S.
S: Can I hear? Can I hear the dee-dee-dee (ph)?
NADWORNY: He grew up with ASL as his first language.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS SHUFFLING AROUND)
NADWORNY: Both boys now speak and sign. They love to laugh and play together, especially with Legos. Novic loves watching how each of her boys use and relate to language. They are far more comfortable in the in between of ASL and English, of the hearing world and the deaf world, than she ever was.
(Through ASL translator) They really teeter between worlds. They like it there. And that took a long time for me to also like it here
NADWORNY: This teetering inspired a question.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) What is a primary language? And how do you get one? I mean, I think I've always been obsessed with that idea.
(Laughter).
NADWORNY: Which led to the title of the book, "Mother Tongue." But even that raised more questions.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) The sign for mother and the sign for tongue does not make sense as a phrase in ASL. How do you sign, then, that phrase - mother tongue?
NADWORNY: She's landed on two signs, one for language, but the other - the descriptor - has a lot of options - the sign for priority or primary or perhaps natural, first or family. For most deaf people like Novic, ASL is not their first language. Ninety percent of deaf children come from hearing homes. Only 8% of parents ever learn enough ASL to have a conversation with their kids.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) There's a lot of baby things on the floor.
NADWORNY: Novic brings producer Eleana Tworek and I into her office.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) Ta-da.
(LAUGHTER)
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) This is, like, the only place in the house that is mine.
NADWORNY: Here is where she can step into her identity as a writer.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) So this little corner of this little room is very important to me.
NADWORNY: To actually write the book, Novic signed much of her thoughts first, as if talking to herself. Then sat down at her computer and translated it to the written English. Next to her desk, there's a shelf of foreign-language versions of her two previous books.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) I think the Spanish one might be the most bada**, though.
NADWORNY: "Girl At War," about a 10-year-old surviving the war in former Yugoslavia.
Oh, "Chica En Guerra."
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) Yeah. That's it.
NADWORNY: And "True Biz," her bestseller about a deaf boarding school.
You've been a fiction writer, and you're writing not just nonfiction, but memoir. Did it feel like you had to wait to do that?
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) For a while, maybe. I didn't think that I had anything to say about myself until I had the kids. And then I could go kind of back from that place and look back at myself.
NADWORNY: She started by writing letters to each of them. She wanted her boys to understand her life as a deaf person and the landscape of being deaf in America.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) So much of our deaf history is kind of scattered, and it's in different places.
NADWORNY: So Novic thought, what if I put it all in one place? A book. Part of that history can be found at a deaf boarding school a few miles from her house.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) This is what we call old PSD, the old Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.
NADWORNY: We walk with Novic through the sprawling green of the now-closed campus. Most buildings are empty and in disrepair.
This is kind of a place that represents what happened to deaf education in America.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) Definitely. In a lot of places, a lot of different state schools for the deaf are being shut down.
NADWORNY: Safe spaces for deaf people have a dark history. Ableist laws in the 1800s prohibited deaf people from being in public. Today, in addition to school closures, there's controversy around trying to heal deafness with things like cochlear implants. Novic connects this all to her own experiences, like on the assumptions people make when they meet her.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) A lot of people, their first instinct is obviously not like, oh, you're a deaf person. Their first instinct is...
(Growling).
...(Through ASL translator) More like this rage. Like, why are you ignoring me?
NADWORNY: Or on wearing hearing aids.
When do you wear yours?
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) When I'm with hearing people. And then I get home and...
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
NOVIC: ...(Through ASL translator) They're immediately taken off.
Like your bra.
(Through ASL translator) Like your bra, you know, after a long day, you know? After a long day, you take your bra off. It feels like that times 10.
NADWORNY: For her son, K, it's a different story.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) He likes his hearing aids. He's in the bath sometimes and still trying to wear them. I'm always trying to, like, rip them off of him.
NADWORNY: This difference in the deaf experience, in the role of language in shaping her boys' childhood has left Novic with more questions than answers. Just the night before, K had trouble sleeping. He was afraid of the dark, afraid of monsters. This did not square with what the orphanage in Thailand had told them years ago, that K was fearless.
NOVIC: (Through ASL translator) They all said, oh, he's not scared of anything. He'll do whatever he wants. He's brave. He has no fears. And I'm telling you this kid is a giant chicken. I always wonder, was he always scared of those things but he couldn't express it? I don't know. Language is everything.
(Laughter).
NADWORNY: Language is everything. Sara Novic is the author of the new memoir "Mother Tongue." This piece was produced by Eleana Tworek and edited by Jacob Fenston.
(SOUNDBITE OF L'ECLAIR'S "SI O NO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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