Aegis 2012
112
Book Review >>> Niki Calvaruso
What’s That Pig Outdoors? Henry Kisor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 232 pp.
The literary market is inundated with books about what it’s like to be around deafness. Parents, children, and educators of the deaf have told their stories countless times, but first-hand accounts of life as a deaf person are few and far between. Reporter, Henry Kisor took notice of this glaring lack because he is in a member of this under-represented population. The autobiography What’s That Pig Outdoors? is his attempt at rectifying the lack of deaf voices in literature as well as providing the population with a story that is not one full of tears or vying for readers’ sympathy, but one full of honest reports of living life differently from than the mainstream. Kisor’s story would widely be considered an unusual one. He lost his hearing in 1944 at age 3 after an acute bout of meningitis. His parents refused to subscribe to the common belief that their son needed to merely accept his role as a “deaf man” and not strive to better himself beyond the life of menial labor that society dictated was all he was capable of. They searched out a program that not only helped him learn to lip read, but gave him a high proficiency in the written English language, which lead led to him becoming one of America’s first and most respected deaf journalists. Even today, the average middle schooler is likely to be a more proficient reader than the average deaf adult. You can imagine the educational climate of the ’40s and ’50s. His parents made the decision for him to lip read, in hopes of keeping him active in the hearing world. Lipreading, which Kisor notes as is a misnomer, is more like “speachreading,” utilizing context, facial cues, and familiarity with one’s speech patterns (xii). It is this inaccuracy, which is often times funny, that gave the book its name. Kisor had never been aware that passing gas makes a noise, and once when he did it in front of his son his son replied with “what’s that big loud noise” which looks identical to “what’s that pig outside?”(xiv). Pig is full of stories and anecdotes that embrace the comedies of his Kisor’s life as well as the tragedies. It celebrates the beautiful parts of disability (like how one’s senses work together to compensate for their fallen brother), as well as the nasty parts (like how social institutions have, in many ways, failed the deaf population) (15). Deafness is often painted as a social death sentence: if you cannot properly communicate with the masses you are totally excommunicated and forced to live as a leper of communication. Autobiographies of the deaf are supposed to capture these hardships, and those authors should be rewarded for their hardships. Kisor shows that this is not the case. Though he tells stories of miscommunications and embarrassing instances, he is a successful journalist who is happily married to a hearing woman with two hearing sons, who lives happily in the hearing world and also serves as an advocate for the deaf community.
