Hello everyone! John here:

?

For anyone interested, the radio interview I did on CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine show, which aired last Sunday across Canada, is available online.? The occasion for the interview is the release of my latest book, “Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays.”? Enjoy!

?

You can find my book at any bookstore, but here’s the Amazon link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324035366/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

?

Link to the radio interview:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/protactile-communication-is-reinventing-everything-says-deafblind-poet-1.7060008

?

Transcript:

?

Protactile communication is 'reinventing everything,' says deafblind poet

John Lee Clark shares his perspective on the emergence of the touch-based language

CBC Radio

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY:?John Lee Clark is an award-winning American poet, author and teacher. He's also deafblind – meaning he has a combination of sight and hearing loss. Along his journey, John's become an activist for his community. And an advocate for a relatively modern way of communicating. One that he says is more than a language – but also a movement, a philosophy and a new way of life that's, quote, "re-inventing everything." John channels his passion for what's known as Protactile in his new book,?Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays. John Lee Clark, good morning. It's so nice to be able to talk with you today...

JOHN LEE CLARK:?[Tapping sounds]?Likewise, likewise Piya, thanks so much for having me. I have to say, I wish that we were seated side by side and in touch with one another. You know, being at a distance – I'm in Oregon and I know you're up in Toronto. So we're spanning quite the distance this morning. But still nevertheless, we're finding a way to connect, right?

?

PC:?Through the magic of radio!?

JLC: Indeed, indeed.

PC: So, the voice you are hearing, dear listeners, is the voice of Halene Anderson, John's interpreter. She's sharing John's words and his thoughts and ideas. And the two of them are communicating using Protactile or PT, which is this language developed and used primarily by people who are deafblind. So, John, I can hear some sounds coming through your end, some clicking and clacking. Can you describe how Protactile works and how it's different from, say, American Sign Language or ASL, which many people will be familiar with?

JLC:?Oh yes, sure. There is quite a distinction. ASL, or any visual-gestural language, all over the world there are distinct sign languages, and all of those sign languages are used by deaf communities and have emerged in and from deaf communities. They're based, obviously, on vision, and the articulatory system is typically with the face. The grammar is communicated on the face, and then signs are articulated with the two hands in what we call airspace.

PC:?Airspace. That's using the empty space, like typically in front of your face and chest to communicate in ASL, which of course is a visual mode of communication.

JLC:?Mhmm. So that's one modality for language, a visual modality. In Protactile, we use the tactile and proprioceptive modality. So right now I'm seated with Hal, she and I are seated so that we're facing each other, but we're beside each other, so our thighs are adjacent and I have one of her hands on mine. The other one I'm using to make more language, by which she can feel, because I'm actually articulating with what we call contact space on Hal's body. As I would any interlocutor, I'm using her arm, areas of her chest, the top of her thigh onto the back of her neck and head. And so there are different grammatical aspects of Protactile. We don't communicate at a distance like people would in the visual modality, where they're standing or seated at a distance from one another so that they can see and provide visual backchanneling cues to keep the conversation going. Instead, we in Protactile use tactile backchanneling cues, so all of my emotions in terms of how I am receiving a person's message is also communicated as I'm receiving it. So contact space is immense and powerful, and that's part of the articulatory system of Protactile language.?

?

PC: I know it's complex, but if I'm understanding you correctly, John, you and Halene are sitting very close to each other, like facing each other, and you're using these different grammar spaces on the body, to put it simply, like squeezing, stroking, touching her to communicate. Is that a fair kind of rudimentary explanation?

JLC:?There are a lot of what we call movement contacts. So the way that I get in touch with the surface of Hal's body, for example, different degrees of pressure that are used, different traces, different taps. For example, I'm taking Hal's hands now and I am holding it in my left hand while I make movement contact with my right. As an example, I could press with all four fingers on Hal's hand for a longer period of time, maybe with one finger. Maybe with the whole finger versus the fingertip. Maybe take all four fingers and scratch downward. All of those different movements are distinctive and that's the phenology of the language.?

PC:?It sounds absolutely fascinating.?

JLC:?Sure. And the syntax of the language, there are different locations, also, it's not just the palm of your interlocutor's hand that can be used. What you can do is create what we call a proprioceptive construction, where I would ask for Helene to assume a certain hand shape, like let's say the shape of your hand if it were holding a cup. And I would then take that cup and proceed to bring it to my mouth to drink from it. And those are very vivid constructions, as you can imagine. And by vivid I mean tactilely vivid. So I could chop the plane of Halene's hand, which would be as if I was chopping something on a horizontal surface. But if I were to have her arm raised up vertically and then I chopped below her elbow, it would be more like I was chopping down a tree or something pillar-like. And so these are very vivid, tactilely descript productions, as you can imagine. And so it puts us in a real vital space where language is in emergence and just very generative.?

PC:?It's very vivid to me as well, John. I'm closing my eyes as I'm listening to you explain it and like I can visualize it. So thank you for that. Some of our listeners are going to be familiar with you, but others this will be an introduction to them, of you. So I just want to give them a sense of who you are and how you got here. You were born deaf to an all deaf family that used American Sign Language, ASL. And then around 12, John, you started to lose your vision due to a genetic disorder called Usher syndrome. How did that affect your ability to communicate with the language you'd grown up with?

JLC:?Hmm. Yeah, that's an entailed question. So my father, he also is deafblind, as is my brother. My mother and my sister are deaf. And when I was a baby, I don't know how much vision I was born with. Perhaps never completely sighted, right? I could never see at night or in the darkness. So I always was deafblind, essentially, but the degree to which I used my vision during the day when I was a youngster was a lot more. It was when I was seven, my mom and dad knew that I had Usher syndrome by that point, and so I started to learn braille at the age of seven. But I wasn't an avid reader at that point. As my vision changed, I was 13 approximately when I started to engage in a more tactile way with the world. So I would, when I was signing with someone, I would go ahead and want their hand on mine or and put my hand on theirs to receive the language that they were using. It wasn't Protactile language because that hadn't been conceived of, but it was still signing people, signing American Sign Language but I was putting my hands on it to try to feel what I couldn't see. So that's a makeshift system. And most deafblind people, as their vision changes, they actually grip more tightly onto the vision that they have and onto the visual modality. But I actually took a different course. When I knew that my vision was going, I went ahead and ushered in changes in touch, right? I got into touch more with people and with my world, knowing that this is my world, right? So it didn't have the same sort of stigma, I think, for me as it does for many and it allowed me a great number of connections with others, where I was able to relationally jump into some of the historic and social relationships that were very rich in my life with others. And I wasn't clamped down on vision, you know, I was able to let go of that and develop other means and modes of being in touch and being with others in the world through touch. So thinking about just how we know what we know and thinking about when the Protactile movement started, which had its inception in Seattle. And in 2013, when I met AJ Granda and Jelica Nuccio, I had known them previously, but when I met them to discuss and learn about Protactile, these ideas, I would say the formative impulse that gave rise to Protactile was already in order. You know, I mean it was, it's intuitive to many of us to be in touch in these ways, but it was just us getting together in a way that was able to develop that which is the Protactile movement. So even though Protactile is not my first language – Protactile is my third language – it is my native language. It's the language that I live in, that I breathe through. So it's an interesting journey to acquire a native language as a third language and thinking about what that means, what nativity means in terms of the languages we speak and the socialities that we invite.?

?

PC: The people you reference there, AJ Granda and Jelica Nuccio are leaders within the Protactile movement. You attended your first PT training with them back in 2013, you're in your 30s then. You write about how things changed for you and your wife and kids at home as you started attending these Protactile training sessions. Can you tell me how??

JLC: Sure. So I was always in touch with my wife and my boys, even though we were using still a lot of words from ASL, but also the way that we would just function as a family, you know, in our home environment still had a lot of traces of what I'll call distantism. Right, where we are working and living and engaging in spaces that are distinct from one another, not being beside each other as we're doing certain things. So someone would come up, my child or my wife would come up to me to touch me and tell me something, but then they would go back to the space that they were in, at their desk or on the sofa or whatever. So there is a spatial component to Protactile where, not only are we coming to touch one another when we want to tell someone something, but we're also sitting, maybe nearby, or happen to be convening in shared tactile spaces.

PC: Yeah, you can't yell across the room. You have to be in close proximity to the person you're communicating with.

JLC: True. And not just when explicitly communicating, but also just living spaces. So imagine an adjacency where what you're doing is happening in a space that's beside what I'm doing.

PC: Okay.

JLC: We're rushing by each other. So imagine if you're in the kitchen with your loved one and you're creating a meal together. Or maybe you're creating two separate dishes. They want to eat peanut butter and jelly and you're getting cereal. Are you moving in your own sort of separate currents, or are you brushing by each other right as you move from the refrigerator to the stove to the sink? Right? Are you brushing your hand across your loved ones back, or are you tracing your hand down their leg as you open up the cabinet to get a pan? How are you living and coexisting in a tactile ground?

?

PC: If you're just joining us on this Sunday morning, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, and I'm speaking with poet, author and deafblind activist John Lee Clark through John's interpreter, Halene Anderson. John has a new book out. It is called?Touch the Future, A Manifesto in Essays. John, in one of these essays, you reflect on the idea you describe as distantism. What is that and why is that a problem?

JLC: Mhmm. Distantism impacts everyone on the planet, I would say. If you take an individual, they are sort of encased in a bubble, a spatial bubble, and depending on the culture they're in, they are sort of indoctrinated into beliefs, values, a cultural system that keeps others at some distance. When hearing and sighted people stay at a distance, they do use their distance senses of hearing and vision to maintain a connection across those distances. As you and I are communicating across the vast distance that we are today, Piya. Members of the deafblind community know that the distance senses of sight and hearing keeps the whole world at a distance. And there are norms in place, social norms, that keep the status quo. And so then people end up eking out a meager existence, trying to piece together as much as they can while still abiding by these social norms. It's almost like a puzzle, right? Trying to put together a puzzle with few and many missing pieces. And then if you look at structures that have been in place, like support service providers who have been trained to work with deafblind people as an intermediary, mediating what would otherwise be a direct, tactile experience with the world... distances structures put us in a position to stand back and wait, wait for someone else, like a support service provider or another person to intervene between us and the world. And while we're waiting for someone to intervene, you know, or to mediate our experience with the world, we are to just sit back and be passive. So really, distantism relegates us to a role of passivity. And instead what Protactile has encouraged us to do is to not stand back and wait and wait for others to give us, you know, the tidbits that they may want to share with us or that they think are important and instead to forge ahead and to reach out and be in touch with the world. Now, the reason why deafblind people oftentimes are reticent to do so is because, like I said, distantism is in our culture and there is a strong taboo against touch. I mean, imagine you reaching out to touch a stranger on the arm in a grocery store line. People are taken aback, as you can imagine. And so people have been trained, really indoctrinated, to not touch. Look, don't touch. People reach out to touch, they get their hands slapped. And those lessons are learned early for many of us and they run quite deep, so we are working against those cultural impulses that keep us at a distance from one another and we're working to overthrow that mentality in a way and to reach out and get in touch because the world is right here, right here, just waiting for us.

PC: In one of the final essays in this collection, you reference a Hindu fable. As the original telling goes, generally, six blind men encounter an elephant, they touch it, and then they say what they think it is. One says it's a wall, another says a spear, a tree branch, and so on. No one can agree on what it is. And the story, the fable is usually used to kind of illustrate how humans interpret things differently but tend to jump to conclusions based on limited knowledge. And then they fight about who is right. You rewrite this story, John. Tell me about the rewriting, how you're reframing it and what you're trying to say.?

JLC: Yes, yes, that last essay. So I don't necessarily have a goal or I'm not trying to say anything necessarily, per se. What I'm doing is thinking through that fable. The fable of the blind men and the elephant, one encountering a tusk and saying, "Oh it's a spear," another encountering, like you said, different parts of the elephant. If you look at the Hindu traditional story, what you have is blind men arguing about what they perceive. And you have a sighted person, a wise man, hearing them out in a very patronizing, sort of paternalistic way of saying, "Oh yes, but you don't see the whole picture. Oh yes, but you aren't getting the whole vantage point." That's what we have with the traditional fable. And in that traditional fable, you have a sighted person standing at a distance from the elephant, presuming to know the totality of the elephant, what its essence is, and the blind men not having that experience. And I wanted to challenge, obviously, that frame because we do have ways of knowing. And seeing isn't acquainted with knowing. It is equated with one way of getting information. Also, one blind character knew that there was an elephant and then said, "I don't know how I know," because there are so many different ways of knowing. And then there's also layers of social oppression that are built into the story. The social fabric that we have. And Piya, we have a way that we've been talking about these ideas in PT and I want you to go ahead and get a sense of how we're talking about them in Protactile human listeners. So go ahead and with one hand hold it out, just a flat hand.

PC: Okay.

JLC: And then your other hand, put your index finger through the space between your middle and index finger.

?

PC: Okay.

JLC: So what you have is a social fabric with the open hand and you have an individual, a deafblind person, emerging or stepping into a place, a position within that social fabric and so you have that finger that's between the other two fingers. It's limited in how it can move, the way that it can explore that space.

PC: Yes.

JLC: If those two fingers, if your index and middle finger, are brought more close together, if you take your… and this might be hard to do with only two hands, Piya. We're sorry for you…

PC:?[Laughter]

JLC: …because you don't have four hands at your disposal. Were you to be in conversation with another person and you had four arms, your finger would be in between my hand, Piya, my index and middle finger.

?

PC: Okay, yeah.

JLC: And I would be gripping the tips of my fingers so that that space between my fingers would be kind of enclosing upon your index finger.

PC: Sure, yeah.

JLC: So you would feel a pressure. Now you can also feel that pressure by the interlocutor, me, if we were seated together, could put my hands on your shoulders and bring my hands together around your neck in a… hmmm, you know, a suffocating kind of way.

PC: Yeah.

JLC: And that's the same connotation that can be signified by this Protactile word. English doesn't afford us these same sorts of gradations along this line of what spaces we're asked to occupy or invited to occupy, socially, and how we can engage in those spaces and how those spaces, what they do to us. Do they afford us room to move or do they constrain our movement and do they suffocate us? So what we have with these deafblind men, they're asked to step into certain roles as blind people in society, and they don't maybe want to step into these roles, but others of them do want to step into the roles in certain ways to play with the expectations of sighted society. So that very last fable was a way for me to trouble and problematize the roles that we step into and how we can explore or how we cannot explore. And I was hoping to kind of convey that the way that we step into the social fabric oftentimes deadens us. Even when we're engaging in movements of resistance, or we feel like we are, when we're engaged in a frontal sort of head to head, the movement that we're experiencing, the movement is an oppositional movement. It only allows us to move in particular ways. Whereas if we change the framework, hopefully we can move in new ways. You know, other ways that aren't pre-prescribed either by the social fabric or counter to the social fabric, right? And it's oftentimes a minor gesture or a break that allows for us to really germinate our own ways of learning and being. Because any way we step into a role in the mainstream and dominant culture, we're constrained, right? We're limited in certain ways. And so that's what Protactile has allowed. It's really allowed us to feel our way in our own marginal space, which is alive, which is bustling, which is robust. And we can, from that marginal space, we can step across or step into some of these roles when we feel like it may be beneficial but we certainly aren't limited by being only circumscribed to them.?

?

PC: I appreciate so much having the chance to communicate with you today. Thank you so much, John. And Halene, thank you to you as well.

JLC:?[Clapping sounds]?Thank you, Piya. Thank you.

PC: I know what's happening there, I can do that one! I can do that one! Thank you, everyone.

JLC: Yes! Yes! Yes!

PC: John Lee Clark is a poet, author and teacher. His new book is called?Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays. We spoke today along with John's interpreter, Halene Anderson. And you can find the audio of our conversation... along with a written transcript... at cbc.ca/Sunday.

?

?

?