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Thoughts on Train Go Sorry

HarryT's picture

Train Go Sorry is different than most of the other things we have read about disability as it is much more narrative based. Instead of getting some narrative, with a lot of view and analysis on disability and the way disabled people are perceived, it feels much more like we are simply reading a story whose main characters happen to be deaf. 

From this perspective, we see that the theoretical debates about disabled people's lives are often oversimplified, and treat disabled people as if that is their only quality. The narrative format of Train Go Sorry innately humanizes it's main characters because we learn so much about them. We are forced to see what life is actually like for the main characters and see the intersection of their deafness with the rest of their identity. Despite the theoretical debates, "in real life, most deaf people must be agile code-switchers, ready to employ various combinations of all these methods [various languages and communication strategies] at any given time" (176). Is it possible and/or helpful to have all deaf people learn one language or sign-language when they will be communicating in all different forms with all different languages and people?