Sign language is not merely a communication system but a true language—complete with its own syntax, grammar, and capacity to carry meaning. It can be startling to learn that different countries have different sign languages. But that is what happens with all living languages: they shift and adapt to the places where people live. Yet sign language has had a troubled history. It is the essential, instinctive tool of deaf people, and yet it has often been opposed by those who, notably, are not deaf themselves. Sometimes out of fear of being excluded; sometimes, conversely, out of a claim that it does not foster inclusion adequately. But to renounce it—or worse, to actively obstruct it for this reason—meant denying deaf people for decades access to a form of expression they needed. It left them without the natural means to speak.
Bertrand Leclair's novel Malintesi (2020, published by Quodlibet) offers a precious and original window onto the turbulent history of sign language—a history that has literally shaped the deaf world. "It is the story of a rebellious son, but it is also the story of a family devastated by deafness and, more precisely, by a father's stubborn refusal to accept an unthinkable error of genetic chance: an absurdity, certainly an absurdity." Through the singular drama of a prosperous family in rural France during the 1960s, Leclair narrates the multiple, terrible, and all-too-real limitations faced by deaf people and their struggles to assert their dignity through sign language.
That Leclair himself lived through the seismic upheaval triggered by his daughter's deafness emerges powerfully from the prologue itself. His story as a father anchors the novel: the characters' lives gain authentic credibility through his lived experience, and readers encounter the raw emotions and thoughts that surface in the jolting moment when a parent first learns that their child is disabled. And when that parent is hearing, new dilemmas arise: what is the right way to communicate with a deaf child? It seems natural to assume that the most inclusive option would be to teach the child to understand and speak with hearing people without an interpreter.
Contrary to what one might think—and we have discovered this from listening to deaf young people and watching the short film The Silent Child (see OL no. 142)—lip-reading is exhausting and often not feasible. A deaf person's speech, especially someone deaf from birth, is frequently difficult for others to understand. And among other deaf people, sign language becomes indispensable.
So it is with Julien Laporte, a figure who embodies an entire generation of people born deaf. His life upends the comfortable certainties of his father. Yves Laporte, Julien's father, is a successful businessman and a partisan resistance fighter from World War II—a man distinguished by courage and luck. He is authoritarian and proud. Yet Yves confronts his son's deafness with a terrible stubbornness, treating it as an "absurd" error he must repair. Locked in this determination to fix what he sees as his son's defect, Yves embraces the conventional wisdom of the era: he devotes all his educational efforts to oralism—the exclusive teaching of lip-reading and speech therapy to develop verbal expression. Sign language is banned, treated as a kind of barbarism. His wife, Marie-Claude, follows suit. Though she was the first in the family to notice Julien's deafness and sought medical confirmation, she becomes trapped by a misplaced guilt over her son's disability. She yields entirely to her husband's will, complying with his obsessive demands for Julien's education, which Yves believes will heal him. Their other children's lives are marked by this struggle in various ways.
Julien's liberating revolt, then, becomes understandable. It begins when, as a solitary boy struggling to be understood and often unable to understand, he watches two deaf people communicate with their hands. Suddenly he glimpses a different way of communicating—more effective, more free for his invisible condition. He sets out alone to find answers to his unheard questions. He discovers them in an unlikely place: his father's library, hidden in encyclopedic volumes that Yves himself had studied to confront the challenge of his son's disability. Yves had been fascinated by and identified with Alexander Graham Bell, the brilliant inventor.
Bell deserves a word of his own. The son of a deaf mother and husband of a deaf woman, Bell devoted much of his life to researching deafness. The telephone—for which he obtained a patent—lay at the center of his work to develop tools that would help deaf people hear. (There is a paradox here: the telephone, the very device meant to help, became for most of the twentieth century an instrument that deepened deaf isolation, until the invention of text messaging and the internet.) Bell poured the proceeds from his prizes and patents into this research. Yet he was also the first to propose a ban on marriage between deaf people, launching the eugenics policies that led to the sterilization of deaf people in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.
The difficult family drama in Malintesi becomes, then, an occasion to learn more about deaf history. Consider the Milan conference of September 1880. There, 164 delegates from countries around the world—only one of them deaf—gathered on behalf of specialized educational institutions to decide the future of their teaching methods. For nearly a century beforehand, the primary reference had been the method developed by Abbé de l'Épée. This French abbot had systematized the meaning of signs in several texts, demonstrating that abstract concepts, not merely concrete ones, could be conveyed through sign language. Despite promising results, the Milan conference endorsed the primacy of "pure speech" and gave exclusive priority to oralism. The damage was severe and long-lasting; many still live with the consequences today. It was not until the movements of the 1980s that sign language reclaimed its dignity and began to be used in French public schools.
Leclair captures the social and cultural fractures, the emotional and psychological wounds, with profound depth and power, drawing on his own lived experience. He conveys the complexity of Yves's distress while acknowledging his heavy responsibility—and the responsibility of the specialized educational establishment as well. The novel is gripping and intricate, moving across different time periods and colored by the author's authentic personal reflections woven into the narrative. It becomes a valuable occasion, too, for reflection on our contemporary understandings of deafness in the age of cochlear implants, which many deaf people regard with skepticism. There lingers the shadow of a temptation to "fix" someone who does not feel broken at all.
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