Innocents of Oppression: Deaf Students in the UK Need A Better Education @nicksturley

I had some background in deaf issues before I read Innocents of Oppression by Nick Sturley.  My most recent related read was Inside Deaf Culture which I reviewed last year on Shomeret: The Masked Reviewer here.  What interested me about Sturley’s novel is that I’ve never read anything about the deaf in the UK.   Apparently the predominance of exclusive oralism in deaf education has continued in the UK.   This doesn’t just mean that lip reading and speaking are encouraged.  It means that signing is prohibited in the classroom.  I wanted to understand why this situation continues unchanged.

                                                         

                                                 

Innocents of Oppression dramatizes the impact of exclusive oralism on a group of UK deaf students at a boarding school for deaf boys.  Those that were not totally deaf tended be more successful with the oral method.  All the students were required to wear hearing aids even if they were completely deaf.  Instructors had microphones and thought that they could somehow reach students with no residual hearing by increasing their volume.  Teachers who rely solely on oral communication could shout into their microphones all day and still wouldn’t be heard by the students who had no hearing.    This is common sense.  I can’t imagine what the teachers, or the school administration were thinking.  It’s as if they didn’t know that it’s possible for someone to be completely unable to hear.  It’s like assuming that the blind are just near sighted, and requiring them to wear prescription glasses.  If they were that uninformed, they obviously shouldn’t have been allowed to teach deaf children.

Oralism wasn’t the only barrier to a good education in the lives of these students.  Bullying is a major theme in this novel.   This is why I don’t agree with Sturley’s title.  Students who engage in bullying or who react to bullying with equally violent behavior can’t be considered “innocents”.  While it was certainly true that their backgrounds often motivated their conduct, they were still guilty of harming their fellow students.  Breaking the cycle of abuse isn’t easy, but victimizers shouldn’t be given a free pass because they were once victims. 

Although I was moved by the resolution of the book, there was a long info dump that preceded it dealing with what had happened in the lives of the characters in the thirty years since they’d been together in boarding school.  While it’s very likely that in real life a conversation between two old friends from boarding school would consist of catching up on everyone they knew, fiction should be more entertaining.  I would have preferred selected flashbacks. 

I believe that an earlier info dump on deaf history shouldn’t have been included in the novel in any form.  The narrative purpose was bringing the protagonist up to speed, but the probable purpose of the author was educating readers.   He should have included a bibliography with recommended resources on deaf history, or placed that entire info dump on a web page and given readers the URL.

Nevertheless, I was interested to learn about the first deaf Member of Parliament, Francis Humberston MacKenzie (1754-1815).  The mention of Auslan led me to discover that Australian Aborigine peoples have ancient traditional sign languages that were developed for situations when speech was taboo.  I already knew about Native American sign languages that were used for communication between individuals who didn’t share a spoken language.   I consider all forms of communication intriguing. 

I do wish that Sturley hadn’t mentioned recreational swimming with dolphins.  The capture of dolphins for this purpose traumatizes them.  See this article from World Animal Protection and this article from Right Tourism. My concern for the rights of intelligent beings extends to non-human species. 

There was some good characterization and character interaction in this book and I learned a great deal about deaf education in the UK.  British families who can’t afford to send their deaf children to the U.S. for a better education need more advocacy.  I’m sure that this is Sturley’s central purpose and I applaud him for that.

Website with Video (subtitled) http://innocentsofoppression.com/
Article about the author in Limping Chicken: http://limpingchicken.com/2013/09/12/nick-sturley-how-having-usher-syndrome-changed-my-life-part-1-my-first-diagnosis/

                                                 

Freaks-- A Steampunk Adventure Written For Children With Unusual Protagonists

There came a point in my life when I stopped worrying about the age of the intended audience for a book.  After all, when it comes to books written for adults my biggest concern is the content.  So if a book contains content that interests me there could be a strong possibility that I would like it even though it was written for young adults or children.   It turned out that I was correct.  Some of my favorite books in previous years were YA novels.  I hadn't found any children's novels that I considered potential favorites until this year.

I am a fan of circus fiction. I recently read and loved Wild Boy by Rob Lloyd Jones, a children's novel about a Victorian circus freak with amazing deductive abilities that allow him to solve mysteries with the help of a girl who is a tightrope walker.   Goodreads told me that people who were interested in Wild Boy also had viewed the page for this  novel,  Freaks by Kieran Larwood, a children's Victorian steampunk science fantasy with a girl protagonist.

                                                   


The main viewpoint character of this novel is Sheba, the Wolf Girl.  She was sold to a succession of freak shows because she's very hairy, but she also has an unusually keen sense of smell that makes her a superb tracker. As Freaks opens, Sheba doesn't remember a life before freak shows.   She is terribly lonely, and is delighted to join a larger freak show where she has friends her own age.  These are Sister Moon and Monkey Boy.  Sister Moon is Japanese, dresses like a boy and has ninja skills.  My feeling is that the narrow prejudices of Victorian England would have consigned Sister Moon to the fate of a freak to be put on display simply because she's Asian, but her departures from conventional sex roles would have sealed the deal.  Monkey Boy has a tail and is an excellent climber. 

It may occur to readers of this review that these three unusual children would make an impressive team.   Those who are fans of comic books will be delighted to learn that they do. When children from London's poor begin disappearing,  the police aren't interested.  The general public scoffs at the talk of monsters emerging from the muck, and seizing the unwary.  So the members of this freak show become vigilantes whose goals are to discover what happened to the lost children and to rescue them. The group includes adults and animals who make significant contributions.  I particularly liked Mama Rat with her troupe of smart performing rodents.

Anyone who was ever called a "freak" in school is aware of the negative and hurtful connotation of this word.  Some choose to reclaim the word and give it a positive connotation.  Kieran Larwood's decision, despite the title, is to refer to the protagonists as "peculiars".  This seems consistent with the Victorian milieu, and with the English propensity for understatement.  I am comfortable with this choice, though I would also be happy with the main characters discovering that they are proud to identify as "freaks".  I believe that people should be able to call themselves whatever empowers them.

Some of my reviews deal with discussion of genre.  This book definitely belongs to the steampunk sub-genre.  Steampunk fiction takes place in an alternate universe dominated by steam technology.  They usually contain inventions that run on steam and often take place during the Victorian period.  For the overwhelming majority of this book I was convinced that this book was also science fiction, but toward the end of the novel an event occurs that can't be explained by science.  It changed my categorization of Freaks to science fantasy.  This fantasy element also altered my view of Sheba, the protagonist.

I ended up liking the author's set of character drawings with entertaining captions that appears after the text of the novel. I'd imagine that Freaks could be very successful as a graphic novel.

I appreciated the Author's Note dealing with the historical aspect of this book which was illustrated with photographs. The author makes certain that his readers know that a device which was important to the plot of Freaks was entirely fictional even though Larwood credited it to the historical scientist, Michael Faraday within his novel.  As a circus fan, I was particularly interested in the poster of  the "Chinese Goliath", a man who was nearly eight feet tall exhibited by P. T. Barnum.  I wanted to know something about this tall man's life, and found an article from 1893 called The Gentle Giant .
 
I had to overcome my prejudice against silly names in children's literature in order to enjoy this novel.  Readers will probably infer that I am not a fan of Harry Potter, and you would be quite right in that assumption.  I normally shudder when I encounter characters with names such as Grunchgirdle  and Plumpscuttle, close the book and never read another word between those two covers.   Yet I had become invested enough in Sheba that I needed to know what happened to her.  So I continued reading, and my persistence was rewarded with an engaging and original tale.