SARA NOVIĆ is the author of the novel Girl at War (Random House, 2015) and the best-seller True Biz, published by Random House in April. She lives in Philadelphia.
FOR deaf people the voice can be a slippery thing. For some, hearing and producing speech remain elusive even amid the spate of increasingly sophisticated assistive technologies. For others, memories of speech therapy or oral education layer the practices of speaking, listening, and lipreading with trauma.
My experience of voice falls somewhere in the wide gray middle of the continuum that is the deaf relationship to sound and speech. As someone who began losing my hearing after I'd learned to speak, my voice is clear to most, though some people tell me I have an accent from a place they can't quite pin down. The skill of speaking affords me certain privileges as I move through the hearing world, especially in an audio-centric society that upholds a false correlation between the clarity of a person's speaking voice and their intelligence. At the same time, using my voice can also invite trouble; producing intelligible speech is one thing, but when the hearing person responds, I'm still deaf.
Even more frustrating than how others perceive me, though, is the self-consciousness that comes with how I perceive myself or more accurately, how I don't. No matter how much others assure me that my voice is fine, I still can't be sure. An auditory vampire, I have no capacity for reflection and am left only with fear.
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Literary MagNet
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