The Double Edged Sword of Speech
When my mother was very young, the doctor told my grandmother that her daughter would never speak, because of the severity of her cleft palate. But my grandmother refused to believe it. She bought and borrowed speech pathology books (this is in the late 1930’s to early 1940’s in Yorkshire) and taught my mum how to speak herself. Pretty impressive for a woman who wasn’t allowed to go to school after grade 6!
I now have some of those books.
It was such an act of love from my grandmother, countless hours dedicated to giving her daughter the gift of speech. Yet the exercises my mum was forced to do repeatedly, as well as the palate surgery as a child, would have been gruelling for her. Particularly as my mother lived undiagnosed with autism. (incidentally, I was just reading the other day that there is a high instance of autism in people with cleft palates).
This all happened during world war 2. My mum remembered catching a train to Manchester to go to the hospital for one of her surgeries, and seeing a train station bombed! So times in general were very tough.
My grandmother was very strict. She told my mother not to play imaginary games and made her focus on her speech and her study. My mother’s cousin told me once that he remembered playing with my mother as children. My mum suggested ‘Let’s pretend we are King and Queen’. My grandmother heard and immediately interjected ‘No. Do not pretend,’ shutting the game down.
I can sort of understand. My grandmother was not allowed to go to high school because she was a girl, and then when she was married she was not allowed to have anything to do with her husband’s bakery business because she was a woman, even though she was interested and had a strong aptitude for business. And in the end the bakery, (and the marriage), failed. My grandmother was very frustrated with the inequity she experienced due to her gender. And she believed the only way a woman could get ahead was to go into business. So my autistic mother with a speech impediment, who loved painting and making things, was forced to study business. She did pretty well with shorthand and typing and had secretarial jobs for short periods of time over the years, but it never lasted long. There were always issues with co-workers and she often felt bullied or targeted. I remember this as a child. It must have been exhausting for her, negotiating the dynamics of a workplace with her unacknowledged and unsupported disabilities.
Learning how to speak was a pivotal thing for my mother for sure. My grandmother did an amazing job. But being forced to shut down her imagination and pretend to be someone she wasn’t had a devastating effect on my mother. My grandmother told me once that my mother was ‘always difficult’, ‘lazy’ and ‘always throwing tantrums’ as a child. With no understanding of autism back then, my mum was perceived as being badly behaved, which in itself is traumatising for a child. As a result of this and her speech impediment, she struggled her whole life with low self-worth, depression, and was violent and neglectful towards her family. She acted as if everything was normal, and masked, which created it’s own problems. Speech actually became a burden. So often she was exhausted and depressed by her attempts to fit in via speech. Did the gift of speech actually help her, I wonder, if she was unable to speak the truth of her experience? To me it is a great irony that on one hand she was taught to speak, but on the other hand, not allowed to express herself.
Ironically, my grandmother used to praise me for my ‘good speech’ as a child. ‘Well you speak well,’ she would say ‘and that is very important.’ My grandmother used to talk about how awful the broad Yorkshire accent was. She cringed on hearing it, and considered it vulgar and uncouth. To her it represented the ignorance of the culture she grew up in, which suppressed women, was cruel to animals, enabled alcoholism, and remained in a stuck mentality and poverty mind set. Once my grandmother told me that ‘the best thing that ever happened to England was the BBC, because then people started to speak ‘proper English’.
I can understand it. I felt that about the working class culture I grew up in, in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Especially the limiting attitudes towards women and to LGBTQI people, the racism, and the bullying made me want to reject where I came from, and the broad suburban Ozzy accent represented that to me.
Indeed, we base a lot of our judgements of others on speech, particularly on what speech represents in terms of class. Often, in judging people because of the way they speak we are judging them because of their perceived class, or, as I believe was often the case with my mother, judging their intellect by their speech.
Speech pathology is a huge industry now days, especially with disability insurance schemes all around the world, and thankfully support is widely available for kids at school who struggle with communication. What a life line a speech pathologist can be for a young person struggling to navigate communication in the world. I can imagine, for my mother, making the right phonetic sounds when speaking, would have been pivotal life skills for her. Learning how to navigate communication as an autistic person also would have been pivotal, even undiagnosed. I have also supported people with autism and other perceived disabilities through my work to express themselves through poetry and performance. I love this work. And seeing how affective creativity can be in opening up expression in its most nuanced form is powerful. But there is also often a lot of pressure for those people to learn to be ‘normal’ coming from the outside world, families, and program managers, rather than learning to express their own uniqueness and creativity.
I think of my mother, forced to learn by rote how to speak, while pushing her true creative nature down. I think of Deaf kids, forced to learn to lip read and speak English, rather than being given the opportunity to learn their rich sign language with it’s spatial grammer. Speech is wonderful, but creativity is way way more important in my view, in whatever way that expresses itself, whether through speech or otherwise. And so in learning to communicate with speech, children should know it is not the only avenue for them to express themselves, and also that they don’t need to express themselves with speech in the ‘typical’ ways expected. They can be creative.
So much of this world focusses on learning to take our place on the ladder of normality. Some do well right up the top, while others struggle with their so called disabilities and barriers right at the bottom of it, trying desperately to not fall off the rungs, still a part of system, just not flourishing in it. Not contributing to it. Or contributing in low paid uninspiring work. When really they have gifts beyond measure to contribute, just by virtue of their unique experience.
So I have a mixed relationship with speech. I love it. I am a playwright and I love the spoken word so much. I love the power that speech gives us. I totally support anyone to have that power. I respect the speech therapists who work so hard to support kids to speak.
And let’s acknowledge it, if you are articulate, you have a lot of power. Whatever your background, class or wealth, if you can express yourself well with speech you have privilege in our society. There is so much focus on it; debates are central to our political systems, marketing is all about convincing the customer, as is academia and religion and science. So much of speech is about CONVINCING others. If you lack that capacity in this system, you fall behind.
But what in the case of someone who doesn’t have that power? Who never fully is able to navigate the world of speech, both phonetically and with their own capacity for engagement with other humans, even with the best of speech therapy support? We should never bypass a persons magnificence just because they don’t ‘speak well’.
Speech is only part of the equation when it comes to communication.
The arts show us that.
Mystical experiences show us that.
Music.
Dancing.
Silence.
Nature.
gardening, cooking, crafting, painting, forging
Poetry.
The internet now offers a myriad of ways to create and make a self directed living without speech.
We can become very powerful without speech.
Arguably, more powerful, more connected, more deep.
My mum in her later years embraced painting, and she loved that. If only she had of been encouraged younger, how things may have been different for her.
Do not think that speech is required to be successful in life. It isn’t. It’s a wonderful thing, it is a great power to be harnessed. But it’s not the only way. And as long as we believe this, then anything is possible.
I would love to know your thoughts
If you want to support my work, and if you like my funky Speech T-shirt design with phonetic alphabet above you can click on the photo, or check out my shop.
xx s
Clay says:
Great post!