Uzi Buzgalo

Recently I read a blog where two people argued whether deaf culture really existed. One person made the statement that the deaf don’t have their own form of art. The other person listed off some deaf artists and mentioned deaf view/image art called De‘VIA, which can be found at Deaf Art.

I’ve been looking at this site for awhile and I love it. If there’s one argument FOR deaf culture it is art. Deaf artists view and express themselves in space through vivid imagery. An emphasis on hands, eyes, lips and color in addition to common themes of repression pop up over and over, both validating and defining deaf culture. When artists create, they project their experiences and feelings into whatever they’re forming. I know this on a personal level because my mother is an artist.

I often tell the story how as a child I came home to my mom painting at an easel day after day. I used to love watching her drawings come to life on the canvas as she mixed and blended colors, them brushed them ever so lightly or scraped across the canvas to create just a certain texture. It was magical. Like most kids I‘d have a snack and talk to my mom after school before running off to play. Not until I became an adult did I realize she used me as a model in so many of her works. The children in her paintings all had my face.

This week I decided to write about a deaf artist. There are so many. I found a great book called, Deaf Artists in America: Colonial to Contemporary by Deborah M. Sonnenstrahl. Not all of the artists in this book adhere to De’VIA‘s manifesto, but there have been many, many talented deaf artists in America and all over the world.

I‘ve chosen to write about Uzi Buzgalo because I just really LOVE his work. His colors are whimsical, and his message is fun, and his art makes me smile. (This one to the left looks like a telephone with hands popping out of it. In the background is a television set with flower hands or some such thing. It's hard to tell. I wish this picture were bigger. If one of you out there knows, please explain this!)

He was born in Israel in 1956. Deaf from birth, he went to the Jerusalem School for the Deaf where he learned Israeli Sign Language. He showed an interest and talent in art from an early age and began studying art seriously from about age eleven. Additionally, he loved to dance. As a young adult he joined a professional dance company made up of deaf and hearing dancers, Kol Demama meaning “Sound-Silence,” and he enjoyed traveling all over the world with them. His experiences with professional dance influenced his art style, which has been described as color waves and dots. His agent explains the impression of the dots as “deaf eyes that see in constant motion.” Like many other deaf artists, hands figure prominently in his work.

One of Buzgalo's paintings in the book that caught my eye was called Only Lives In Water. I couldn’t find this on-line. (Too bad!) I’ll describe it. The top portion had a huge fish. The lower third was obviously water. So the fish was OUT of the water. Under the water were so many, many people with arms and hands flailing about. Buzgalo explained this painting. I’ll quote directly from "Deaf Artists In America." When he was a small boy, “he watched his grandmother lay a fish on the kitchen table and the fish’s mouth was still moving. He asked his grandmother whether the fish was speaking. His grandmother told him that it does not say anything and ’it has no voice’ like him.”

Eventually Buzgalo's travels took him to the United States, and he became a US citizen in 1995.

Great Deaf Talent-- Regina Olson Hughes

So today I’m reading my book called Great Deaf Americans and once again I’m inspired by what so many were able to achieve. Their intelligence, creativity, bravery, and diligence were awesome. It’s so hard to pick just one person to highlight each week.

One point that struck me while reading other deaf blogs this past week however was the negativity surrounding oralism. Deaf people who use “hearing behaviors” or who speak occasionally instead of always communicating in ASL may be accused of not acting deaf by their peers—and this is NOT a compliment.. Read this blog. As someone who is late-deafened I almost always use my voice, though I’m learning ASL. I feel far removed from this oralism debate and can’t comment to the deaf perspective.

But as someone who is neither fully hearing or culturally deaf I will say this-- I do not believe all deaf people can learn to speak or lipread. It is wrong for the hearing to force such high expectations on the deaf. Over the years, the ability to speak among the deaf has wrongly been associated with intelligence level in some cases, which has hurt many highly intelligent deaf people. I want to be clear that the ability to speak and lipread is only related to one’s hearing ability and nothing more. Simply stated, some deaf people hear more than other deaf people. Some are born deaf, while others become deaf during childhood or later, after learning to speak. All of these factors taken into consideration can lead to greater advantages when learning to lipread and speak and also reading and writing abilities.

For example it is a known fact young children benefit from playing language games and being read to long before they begin reading themselves. Early language skills are the foundational building blocks of reading and writing skills. Children who are born deaf are not exposed to English language as young children. If a person becomes deaf after age five, naturally he or she will be at a greater advantage for learning to read, even though he or she did not learn to read before deafness because the language building blocks were put in place.

Then again, the deaf develop other language building blocks related to ASL. No one has ever studied this to my knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that IQ testing is skewed for the deaf simply because they think and process information differently. My guess is they are all much smarter than we know. Psychologists already understand IQ testing is not as much of a science as it is an art. We’re continually discovering new information about the brain—new ways of measuring intelligence and new types of intelligences. I suspect ASL expands intelligence in ways we have not measured yet. The deaf see our world differently and we would be wise to make the most of their gifts.

Instead we have tried to force them to be oral like square pegs into round holes. This has led to backlash among the deaf —a sort of reverse discrimination where everything “hearing” may be perceived as against deaf culture.

There was a simpler time long ago when deaf people could be oral or non-oral, and there was no rift in the deaf community. It didn’t matter. You simply did what you had to do to get ahead.

Regina Olson Hughes was one such person. She was born in 1895 and died in 1993. Always interested in drawing from the time she was a young child her parents had her tutored privately in art. At age ten she became sick with Scarlet Fever and began losing her hearing. (Another source said a doctor poured oil into her ears when she was a child.) It’s hard to know what caused her progressive hearing loss to start. She was deaf by the time she turned fourteen.

Then she went to Gallaudet for her Bachelor’s and a Masters in art. (Later, because of all her accomplishments she was given and honorary doctorate degree.) Incredibly she was able to speak four languages by lipreading: French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Most the time she lipread if it wasn’t too important to understand, but if she needed to be sure of details she had people write the words out on paper.

Eventually she took on a job for the State Department as a translator. Then later she worked for the Department of Agriculture as a scientific illustrator. She also took on another job with the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany painting plants. Today her work can be found in plant manuals, on pesticide labels, and in dictionaries, as well as museums and cards.

Poetry-You Have To Be Deaf To Understand

Today's post is about deaf art and audism. The picture above, painted by Susan Dupor, is titled "Family Dog". The girl on the ground represents how she feels like the family dog when her family fails to consider her communication needs. I love the way her face looks so dog like. A large social gathering is a nightmare for most deaf people, with several conversations going on at once and people excitedly talking above one another, no one using ASL. The blur of faces depicts the difficulties in following along. Even if she could lip read, watching so many faces at once would be impossible. Everyone seems to be ignoring her. Communicating with her is too much work, so they don't bother. I have felt just like this many times. I'm there, but not interacting with anyone. Jokes are told, stories shared, and I'm not hearing any of it. I've been trying to convince my family to take ASL, but its' hard to get them to face the facts about my hearing loss, since they knew me way back when, and my speech is still good. Also I happen to be pretty good at lipreading one on one.

"But you do so well with your lip-reading," they say.

"Do I?" (or is it that you don't want to be bothered with ASL?) My last audiogram indicated I was hearing less than 12% of what was being said with amplification on random word testing. When I go for the cochlear implant evaluation, we'll see how well I do with contextual clues.

Below is a poem called "You Have To Be Deaf To Understand" I only had mild hearing loss as a child. Some of this rings true for me now. I love this poem.


What is it like to "hear" a hand?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to be a small child,
In a school, in a room void of sound-
With a teacher who talks and talks and talks;
And then when she does come around to you,
She expects you to know what she's said?
You have to be deaf to understand.

Or the teacher thinks that to make you smart,
You must first learn how to talk with your voice;
So mumbo-jumbo with hands on your face
For hours and hours without patience or end,
Until out comes a faint resembling sound?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to be curious,
To thirst for knowledge you can call your own,
With an inner desire that's set on fire-
And you ask a brother, sister, or friend
Who looks in answer and says, "Never mind"?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What it is like in a corner to stand,
Though there's nothing you've done really wrong,
Other than try to make use of your hands
To a silent peer to communicate
A thought that comes to your mind all at once?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to be shouted at
When one thinks that will help you to hear;
Or misunderstand the words of a friend
Who is trying to make a joke clear,
And you don't get the point because he's failed?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to be laughed in the face
When you try to repeat what is said;
Just to make sure that you've understood,
And you find that the words were misread-
And you want to cry out, "Please help me, friend"?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to have to depend
Upon one who can hear to phone a friend;
Or place a call to a business firm
And be forced to share what's personal, and,
Then find that your message wasn't made clear?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to be deaf and alone
In the company of those who can hear-
And you only guess as you go along,
For no one's there with a helping hand,
As you try to keep up with words and song?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like on the road of life
To meet with a stranger who opens his mouth-
And speaks out a line at a rapid pace;
And you can't understand the look in his face
Because it is new and you're lost in the race?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to comprehend
Some nimble fingers that paint the scene,
And make you smile and feel serene
With the "spoken word" of the moving hand
that makes you part of the world at large?
You have to be deaf to understand.

What is it like to "hear" a hand?
Yes, you have to be deaf to understand.

"You Have to be Deaf to Understand" was written by Willard J. Madsen, associate professor at Gallaudet College and a graduate of the Kansas School for the Deaf.