A Simple Observation

A friend who studied abroad in Japan once told me about the strange simplicity of his realization that Japan had international relations with every other country in the world. He grew up thinking about almost every issue and conflict in light of America's power, influence, and concerns, and the de-centering of that perspective was obvious and yet still strange.

And in some sense, viewing things from the US's perspective is perhaps the best way to get an overall picture of the world. The United States, after all, is the richest and most powerful nation on the planet. But to move away from that dominant perspective and consider a smaller, de-centered nexus of international issues is often eye-opening. And it's one of the best things that come out of any true traveling experience.

Today, I had another one of those experiences.

I was sitting in a small crowded restaurant, eating off of a plastic table, when a young couple sat down next to me. They were quiet at first, and, since I was reading a book, I didn't pay much attention to them. When I finally did look up, I realized that both were speaking in sign language.

Believe it or not, in all my years of traveling, that was the first time I had ever seen a non-American use sign language. Until today, being deaf or dumb and using sign language to communicate had been an exclusively American issue in my mind. If you were to have asked me if sign language existed outside of the United States, I would have been able to assent that I knew it did exist. But the issue would still have been wrapped solely within the context of the American deaf people that I have known and thus centered around my own subjective experience of the phenomenom.

As I sat there occasionally glancing over to observe the couple, a series of questions crossed my mind: How well would two deaf people from different countries be able to communicate with each other? Would they communicate better than two non-deaf people who didn't share a common tongue? How much does the surrounding culture affect the way deaf people interact? How does "body language" work across cultures in sign language? Do deaf people have an easier time communicating in a very emotive culture like Morocco?

And then another question came to mind: how can I personally communicate with them? I don't speak international sign language and I didn't know how easy it would be for them to lip read my accented Arabic.

I didn't know what I would have tried to say anyway. So I got up, paid, and left the restaurant.