Deaf Adoption: A Rhetorician's New Family

Marlana Portolano

”I'm just as deaf as I am blind.  The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness.  Deafness is a much worse misfortune for it means the loss of the most vital stimulus--the sound of voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir, and keeps us in the intellectual company of men."   --Helen Keller

     What happens when a scholar of rhetoric – the art of speaking well (at least as Cicero defined it) – suddenly becomes mother to a four-year-old who has neither heard nor spoken a word in her life?  This is the story of my experiences adopting just such a child and a hearing sister from a poor, Eastern European orphanage.  Here and there I have included a few words on what I learned about the choices parents face for a deaf child, choices that ultimately determine the child’s chances of learning to read and write without limits.  It is my hope that other teachers of writing and literature will read my story and consider how mainstream culture’s approach to deafness bars eager, promising young minds from accessing worlds of knowledge through the written word, which most of us are devoted to sharing as broadly as possible.

On to The Choice of Deafness