Deafening and I...

While rummaging through my bookshelves, I came across Deafening (2003) by Frances Itani, who lives in Ottawa. This is the second of her seven published novels, including Remembering the Bones (2007), Requiem (2011) and Tell (2014), all four of which are available at the Lennoxville Library. But Deafening appears to have been the most critically successful, having been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Award, as well as having won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book (Canada and Caribbean Region), and the Drummer General’s Award for Fiction. This last prize is conferred by A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario for meritorious books that the store feels were overlooked by the Governor General Awards and the Giller Prize.

This book was of great personal interest to me for two reasons. The first relates to the content: The principal character is a girl named Grania O’neill who was made deaf by a bout of scarlet fever at the age of five in 1901. My nephew and godson suffered a similar fate when he was struck with meningitis at the age of four in 1973. Both of these children were able to speak by that age, but only with the vocabulary and pronunciation of a small child. Itani details the struggle Grania has to maintain and expand her speech without the sensory reinforcement of being able to hear other people speak, and without the ability to hear herself. The story also illustrates how much work she has to do to learn to pronounce new words, and to control the volume of her voice, using her hands and fingers to feel the muscles in her throat and the shape of her lips and tongue.

The story is set in Deseronto, Ontario (named after a Mohawk chief who led his people to Canada after the American Revolution) on the shore of the Bay of Quinte, where Grania’s family runs a hotel. Everyone in the family helps out in some way, including her grandmother, her sister Tress and her brothers Bernard and eventually the baby Patrick. It is her grandmother who does a lot of the early work in making sure that Grania continues to be a speaking person and does not lapse into the silence of those who are born deaf.

Eventually, at age nine, Grania is sent away to Belleville to what is now the Sir James Whitney School, but was at that time the Ontario School for the Deaf. She stays there until she graduates from high school, coming home only for summer vacation. It is there that she meets other deaf people for the first time and learns the sign language that they use to communicate. (My nephew, who attended the Montreal Oral School for the Deaf, eventually had to spend a summer at Gallaudet University in Washington in order to learn sign language. Because he could read lips and could speak, he could talk to hearing people; but he was unable to communicate with other deaf people.)

This gets us to the other personal reason this book was so interesting to me. I have a cousin who used to live in Belleville around the corner from this school. He and his children used the grounds as their park when I would spend Christmas with them. I suspect that he and his wife are the ones who gave me this book.

By the time Grania graduates, WWI has broken out. Since she had taken a Home Nursing program, she ends up working at a hospital, where she meets Jim Lloyd. He is from Prince Edward Island, but has moved to Ontario to live with an aunt and uncle after his own parents had died. He and Grania fall in love, more because of, rather than in spite of, the barriers that could divide them. They marry shortly after Tress and her childhood sweetheart Kenan wed. But then both men enlist and the terror of the war intervenes.

Itani does a marvelous job of describing the parallel stories between the men who are fighting and the families who are at home. It is the ignorance of what is happening across the ocean that eats away at those who wait. Will the letters be delivered? Will there be any response? And always, there is the fear that the next response will be a telegram from the army.

Itani, in the person of Kenan, provides a heart-breaking portrait of a soldier who survives the war, but is damaged both physically and emotionally. His wife, who has no knowledge of what he has been through, except for the evidence of his scars, has no way of getting through to him. It is her deaf sister, who knows all about silence, who is able to bring him out of his shell.

Even though Jim is in a non-combatant role (stretcher-bearer), Itani makes it clear just how blindly random violence and death are in a war zone. Her description of life on the front reminded me a lot of George Orwell’s portrayal of war in Homage to Catalonia. And in a gruesomely ironic twist, it turns out that Grania may be in greater danger than Jim when she falls victim to the Spanish Influenza epidemic ....