10.01.07
Deaf in Africa
Yes, I recently wrote that as a blogger I was uninterested in reviewing books, having made my living at it for 33 long years, but there always will be exceptions — and the latest is The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, by Josh Swiller (Holt paperback original, $14).
Of course my interest first was whetted because I’m a deaf writer, too, and naturally want to read the work of every new colleague of our kind. But the subject of deafness is not the reason to read this first-class memoir of two years with the Peace Corps in Zambia, a place with unsettling echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Before I get into that, let me get something off my chest: The Unheard is billed by its publisher as “literary nonfiction,” which, at least to an old journalistic nonfiction hand like me, raises a small warning flag: in this genre (also called “creative nonfiction”), events are not necessarily depicted the way they happened. They often are stretched and massaged for the sake of a better story. Dialogue is also sharpened and sometimes fabricated. Publishers like to call this “reaching for a higher artistic truth.” (James Frey is this genre’s most notorious poster child.)
All the same, although Swiller warns us up front that “some events were reordered for narrative clarity,” he also adds that “most of the details come from the extensive journals and photographic records I kept while in Africa.” Perhaps if he’s challenged on anything, he can prove it.
I did begin reading with one hand on my wallet — but everything about deafness in The Unheard rang true, and that led me to kick back and lose myself in the rest of the tale. It was hard not to, for Swiller is a superb storyteller.
In the mid-1990s the Peace Corps assigned Swiller to Mununga, Zambia, to teach rural villagers to dig wells, but he wound up instead as an unofficial aide in a local clinic whose amiable director, a chess fanatic and talented banana winemaker, befriended him. Together, with a few aspirin, they tried to mitigate the suffering of people with AIDs, malaria, malnutrition and a host of horrible diseases endemic to impoverished Africa.
This is not an unending litany of misery. Swiller hoped to find a place where deafness made no difference, and to a great extent he found it in Africa. Many Zambians had never before seen a white man, let alone a deaf one, and they treated the eccentricities of not-hearing as just another novelty of being Caucasian and American.
There are also hilarious stories about the collision of cultures and expectations — Swiller can have you rolling on the floor with laughter, especially his tales of his own naivete. In one, a nubile young Zambian woman and her father blackmail him into paying a costly penalty for — they said — deflowering her.
He can also scare the bejesus out of you. Rural Zambia is a violent place where angry locals, stupefied by drink, think nothing of killing and dismembering those who offend them. Several times Swiller witnesses bloody events, and more than once he himself escapes death by a hairsbreadth.
Scattered throughout the narrative are flashbacks to home and growing up deaf. Swiller was born with a moderate hearing loss and did not acquire aids until age 4. They did not restore his hearing but helped his lipreading, and his speech was almost normal. He graduated from Yale and spent a little time at Gallaudet, the university for the deaf, but as do so many deaf and hard of hearing people who are mainstreamed, he felt caught between two stools.
Readers who demand the quotidian details of coping with deafness may be disappointed, for Swiller tells us only what we need to know about the subject — how, for instance, impaired hearing affects his sense of self — and nothing more. He is far more concerned with the events in Africa, and this is what lifts his compelling book out of the boring self-absorption of most memoirs of disabilities.
What, in the end, did he learn? That horror has an opposite, the grace of survival. Deafness is a trivial thing compared to just being alive. One cannot run away from deafness, but equanimity comes with a sense of humor.
All this Swiller relates in a muscular and colorful prose, full of knees and elbows, that occasionally skids on a flat note but never gets in the way of the story he is telling — unlike the often self-conscious literary confection of those who have studied much but experienced little.
Swiller, whose hearing was largely revived with a cochlear implant two years ago, recently worked in an AIDS hospice in Brooklyn, N.Y. You can find out more about him and his missions on his Web site. He is a young idealist worth knowing.
