Calling Alexander Graham Bell

In "Interlude II" in "Lend Me your Ear" Brenda Brueggemann places a poetic phone call to Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. The poem is full of ironies. Bell isn't home, his d/Deaf wife and d/Deaf mother can't hear the phone, the d/Deaf narrator can't hear the beep, so she leaves a message when it's not recording. So the poem shifts to all the other mediums the narrator can use to get the message across: lip-reading, signing, the TTY, relay service, video, fax. All the communication technologies that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate with Bell.

But the message can't get through. Why? Bell isn't listening, and he's not tuning into any of the other frequencies and registers that would allow a d/Deaf person to communicate. No, he's off making the argument that d/Deaf people should not marry d/Deaf people and create more d/Deaf persons. His argument would find sympathy with the woman who "calls" Brueggemann to ask her to mentor her daughter at Gallaudet into marrying a h/Hearing man.

The Medium is the message.

The narrator in the poem imagines signing a message to Bell only to have it burn his retina, turn him into a pillar of salt (the fate of Lot's wife).

Let's talk...no, let's listen, no let's look, no let's communicate on all channels, frequencies, screens, spaces.

In Interlude Three (which we didn't read for the class week, but I did anyway), Brueggemann writes about her challenges with phones at home and with her husband, noting that "[t]he phone is a sticking point, for better or worse in our marriage" (251). Brueggeman's h/Hearing husband hates using the phone, a fact that endeared him to her when she first knew him. They wrote notes and letters. But Brueggemann needs to use the phone to get things done, and she struggles to h/Hear and get things done. So its' interesting to see how she connects the Bell poem, her life with her husband, and the phone call she has with a Gallaudet student's parent who wants her to marry a h/Hearing man. There is a poetic and narrative connective thread throughout this book that creates a deep structure for analysis of the "in-betweenness" that Brueggemann experiences between d/Deaf an h/Hearing culture. The interludes are about the "Stuck between" (260). The spaces in-between.

I love that Brueggemann can do so much in this book, in part, because she is doing so much methodologically--mixing and combining qualitative research, rhetorical research, cultural analysis and critique, personal narrative, poetry. The experiences, knowledges and theories she works through require all of these methodologies. An adherence to one would mean the project would not have its multi-dimensional look and feel--a look and feel that create a prism through which we can view the many qualities of d/Deaf culture.