Communicating without talking

The link between deaf people and the hearing world can be tricky to straddle. THEO PANAYIDES meets an interpreter who does so with joy and energy

Konstantina Papageorgiou has a certain energy. It’s not what she says, necessarily, but her body language and the spark in her eyes: an urge to connect, an openness of spirit, an avid good humour. Maybe it’s because of the circumstances, given that we meet in the noisy foyer of Satiriko Theatre in Nicosia where she’s being interviewed (for the first time ever, she says) a day or so before giving a talk at TEDx Nicosia – an annual event “powered by Cytamobile-Vodafone” to quote the official phrasing, this year’s theme being ‘Traces’. Maybe, too, it’s because she’s a visitor, here for a few days from her native Thessaloniki, brimming with a traveller’s curiosity about everyone and everything.

Then again, maybe that’s just her energy – a non-verbal energy, which actually fits very nicely because that’s what we talk about, the magic and method of communicating without talking. When you meet a 30-year-old woman who’s been practising Greek sign language since her teens, you naturally assume she had some personal reason for learning to sign – a deaf friend or family member with whom she had to communicate – but in fact it’s nothing of the sort. Young Konstantina simply happened to watch the news on TV, and was instantly smitten by the sign-language interpreter translating the day’s headlines in a corner of the screen – a window, so it seemed, into a new exotic world where the rules were different, words were superfluous and emotions, crucially, were out in the open.

What exactly did she find so magical about sign language? “I guess the facial expressions,” she replies in flawed but fluent English (the third of her four languages, after Greek and sign language but before Spanish). “That, without seeing the hands or knowing the words they were using, I could get the feeling of what they were saying”. Also, she adds wryly, “I really love quiet and silence, and, to my child’s mind, it was really cool that you could talk in silence – but really talk, really have a discussion.”

In what way does she like silence?

“I like silence,” she says simply. “I like being alone. I like not-very-loud music, I like music being in the background… I prefer everything being soothing and quiet and halara,” she adds, using the Greek word meaning roughly ‘laid-back’. “Calm. I like being calm.”

There’s a bit more to say on this subject. “Maybe it’s because lots of times when I interpret,” explains Konstantina, “the deaf and the hearing are fighting each other – so I have to yell, I have to be mad… And this is not who I am, so sometimes I get out of myself. So, when I go back home, I want to be peaceful, because I did things I wouldn’t do normally.

“For example, I was interpreting one time, and there was a [deaf] daughter with her father who were fighting. And the daughter was like ‘I hate you!’, ‘Go die!’, ‘Go to hell!’ – I will never say that to anyone, but I was interpreting, so I was shouting, because I was representing the woman that hired me.”

Her job as a freelance sign-language interpreter often puts her in the midst of other people’s dramas – and she has to take part in those dramas, by definition. It wouldn’t have been enough, in the case of that father-daughter fight (they were in court, arguing over some family property), for Konstantina to have simply told the father ‘She hates you’. She had to convey the emotion as well, had to supply the furious volume which the deaf woman was unable to access: the father “should understand her anger,” she explains.

It’s something that hadn’t occurred to me, that interpreters are forced into such an intimate relationship with the people for whom they interpret. “Think of the deaf as a linguistic minority,” says Konstantina. “They’re not actually disabled, because they can go anywhere and do anything by themselves, but whenever it comes to language they need an interpreter. It’s as if they were Chinese, or something”. If a Chinese person in Greece had to go to a doctor or lawyer for a serious matter, they wouldn’t go alone – and a stranger, paradoxically, makes more sense than a family member, when it comes to the deaf, because family members often hide the truth in a misguided attempt to protect them. There was even a doctor once, recalls Konstantina, who refused to tell a deaf patient that he had cancer, forcing the interpreter into an uncomfortable situation. “He’s got cancer,” whispered the doctor in Konstantina’s ear while the patient was dressing. “Don’t tell me, tell him!” she replied – but the doctor wouldn’t, not wishing to burden a disabled man with such terrible news (he did suggest a course of treatment, so it wasn’t completely unethical). “And we left the doctor’s office, and I asked him to go for a coffee with me so I could tell him – why me? – that he had cancer!”.

Needless to say, such misplaced over-sensitivity is almost as bad as insensitivity (in its way, it’s a form of dehumanisation) – especially when it comes to deaf people, who are more than able to take care of themselves. “I have lots of deaf friends,” reports Konstantina. “I have a deaf godchild, I’ve even had a relationship with a deaf person”. She knows the community well – and if anything, she says, the deaf are tougher than the hearing, less weighed down by fear, for the simple reason that they’re not susceptible to outside information that might confuse or constrain them. A deaf driver won’t be put off by the squeal of brakes, or annoyed by the honking horns of less patient drivers.

They’re also, it seems, a good laugh. “Whenever I’m sad, or I have anxiety or any problem, I go out with them, because they’re really good fun. And whenever I go out with my deaf friends I have a really, really great time”. The deaf don’t have any taboos about partying or getting drunk – and they’re also “a little bit more open-minded than we are, because growing up they had a lot of discrimination” which has made them more tolerant. They go to clubs, sitting close to the speakers so they can feel the music through the vibrations; “They do dance excellently”. They also make sign-language jokes just like the hearing make puns, Konstantina’s own party-piece – the story she’ll never live down – being a boo-boo she made in her teens, while she was learning the lingo. She was at a restaurant with deaf friends, asking if they’d like some carrot salad. The sign for ‘carrot’ is a cupped hand coming to the mouth from the side, like Bugs Bunny taking a nibble – but instead she brought the hand to her mouth from the front (and forgot to chatter her teeth) so it looked like she was cupping, or offering, something else altogether.

It does seem rather tricky, as a language. Facial expressions matter (you use the mouth to suggest volume, as for instance to sign ‘the door slammed’ as opposed to ‘the door closed’), and it also makes a difference where on the body a “hand-shape” is placed. Some signs make sense – ‘pride’ is indicated by tugging at an invisible necktie, to suggest a person preening – others seem more random. ‘Hate’ is a thumb flicked out from the chest. ‘Interpreter’ is a finger tapping back and forth on the opposite palm, as if turning the pages of a tiny book.

The most pressing problem, however, isn’t learning how to sign but making a living out of it. A freelance sign-language interpreter can no longer make ends meet in Thessaloniki (Athens is slightly better), because it’s a service provided to the deaf by the state, and the state no longer has money to provide that service. At 30, Konstantina – who now has a second job training interpreters at the college where she herself trained – is very much a part of the ‘lost generation’ that’s borne the brunt of Greece’s collapse. What will they be like in their 40s, I wonder, assuming things eventually improve? What will they believe in?

“I think, nothing,” she replies.

So they’re all becoming cynical?

“Yes. Cynical and nihilistic. And it’s really bad – I think we are a destroyed generation.” It’s impossible to settle down or start a family with no job, or a job paying €500. She and her peers are seething with rage, she reports, “because we’re at the age that we can give 100 per cent of ourselves to a job, to family, to anything. And we can’t”. A young person needs that sense of intense commitment, but you can’t give 100 per cent to a job with a humiliating salary – and the missed potential gnaws at your insides, like a prisoner trapped in a small room slowly going stir-crazy. Maybe all these unfulfilled youngsters will “get wild” in their 40s, she muses half-jokingly, as if to make up for being cheated of their 20s – “and this will be bad, I think. But most of us are just emigrating. I really love Greece, I really do; but if I cannot live there, if I cannot be decent, if I cannot have a house or a car, why should I stay?”.

Her adventures have included the desert Bedouins

I suspect the sense of being trapped may be especially sharp for Konstantina – because she’s always been the type to look beyond, her most salient trait being a thirst for experience and connection with new, exciting worlds: “I am,” as she puts it, “very, very curious as a person”. On her Facebook page are photos from a recent trip to the Sahara, three days’ camping with Bedouins and camels which she calls “one of those huge experiences of life”; they sat around the campfire every night, swapping stories with the Bedouins despite having no language in common. (So how did they tell the stories? “Eh… The human spirit!”) She loves to travel, though not in the sense of sightseeing – more in the sense of immersing herself in a new community, taking the pulse of a different world.

The Sahara was one such experience. A 10-day camping holiday on Gavdos – the southernmost Aegean island – was another, a “trip that changed my whole perspective of the world”. It wasn’t just the island, she explains, but the people she met there, a mini-commune of environmentally-aware visitors who fished for food, shared what they caught, burned all their garbage and left the beach as pristine as they found it. (“It was pure,” she explains fervently.) And of course the sign-language world of the deaf was, and is, another such experience – an exotic sub-culture that first bewitched her years ago and which she now knows as well as, or better than, the half-collapsed ‘real’ world around her.

What attracts her in people? “Energy,” she replies; “I like positive energy” – but not ‘positive’ as in viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses, more like her own brand of candid, welcoming energy. She’s essentially a down-to-earth person, balking when I ask if she’s spiritual: “This is very heavy…” she replies uncertainly. “I don’t know. I try to be. I don’t know, I really don’t. I mean, I’ve met some spiritual people – and when you meet them, you know that they are. I don’t think I am”. I assume she’s far too sensible to discern deeper meanings in the silence and calmness she appreciates so much; she just loves it anyway, the way she loves the music of Alkinoos Ioannides or the pleasures of sipping tsipouro in small tavernas in Thessaloniki – but spiritual? “I believe in Love,” she shrugs. “I believe in Nature.”

And what of TEDx itself? I’m afraid I didn’t catch Konstantina’s talk two days later (it’ll surely appear on the tedxnicosia.com site sooner or later) but she did offer a preview, the point of the speech being the ‘traces’ she bears of the two worlds between which she shuttles, those of the deaf and the hearing – and the point being also to offer some advice, from her vantage point as an intermediary.

“Dealing with the deaf,” she says breathlessly, “or any other human being who’s a little bit different from us – it’s fun! It’s nice to do it”. We often shrink away from that kind of contact, and there’s really no reason to. “Lots of people, when they see a deaf person, they feel embarrassed,” she admits, “or they don’t know how to treat them. Just – just treat them! Somehow! If they are offended, they will tell you”. There’s that certain energy again: the open spirit, the urge to connect.