Recently, the ABC aired an interview with the CEO of a successful company promoting the cochlear implant, the pride of Australian technical and business achievement which, implanted in a deaf person, can enable that person to hear perfectly.
Perhaps he did not use the word 'perfect', but that was certainly the sense of the interview. The company's website is more circumspect, promising merely that the device is 'designed to provide useful hearing sensations'.
That interview grated on me. There was in it an implied hubris, veiled as sincerity, that technology could make deaf people 'normal'. It wasn't the soppy interviewer or the cheerful, can-do attitude of the man being interviewed — he has shareholders to keep happy, after all — so much as the unwarranted interference in the personal lives of people who may not want his expensive gadgetry.
Those of us who have normal hearing feel good if we think technology can provide a way of helping deaf people to hear, to be the same as us. In contrast, according to Deaf Australia, the national peak organisation for the Deaf* in this country, 'Deaf people generally have little interest in 'cures' for deafness. They value their identity as Deaf people and see no value in becoming a different person.'
Deaf Australia's policy on implants, while acknowledging that the leading product in the area is an Australian invention, gives the impression that as a group, they are not easy about its use, particularly with children.
One sentence in their document is particularly striking. They urge implant specialists to 'ensure that parents considering an implant understand that their child will always be a deaf child even with an implant'.
The group is also uneasy about the cost of implant programs and implies that the expense of inserting and tuning the device and training the recipient to interpret the sounds being heard — a process that may go on for years — takes money from mainstream services for the Deaf.
There is in this country and in others a thriving Deaf pride movement. It may lack the flamboyance of gay pride or the testiness of ethnic pride, but Deaf people do not see themselves or want to be seen as having a disability. Some have learned to lip read and speak, but all of them have an alternative language, Auslan in Australia, with which they communicate.
It is useful to distinguish between language and speech. For the Deaf, speech is