Language Euphoria

How to translate a body

This week I had a killer time visiting Georgetown U. as part of their Lannan Center literary festival. It was a great event, with strong ASL facilitation, a kind and smart hard-of-hearing moderator who asked good questions, and students sharing their own disability-related poems, paintings and stories.

I came away thinking about how our work as marginalized artists and activists must continue to push past the ways in which we are so often siloed by access, language, geography, social and cultural norms, convenience, comfort, etc. Solidarity is essential for liberation, for everybody, and I think most people probably know this already. How to make the change, though, is daunting.

ID: Posing with a group of Georgetown student artists and professors, and a yellow lab service dog in the foreground.

Which is probably why, whenever I’m in DC, I feel the pull of Gallaudet, and inevitably end up there like a homing pigeon. Though I spent a short time there doing a translation exchange project as a student, I never studied at Gallaudet. Still, there is something about being on campus that acts as a hard reset for the spirit.