Signs of Revolution
المصدر
November 6, 2011 rwjcollins
Arriving in the city of Tunis on the heels of 8 months of revolutionary activities and at the dawn of a new democratic era, my research with members of the deaf community in the city required that a new set of signs be mastered in view of the new social and political conditions. Early in this process, I learned that the sign for former President Ben Ali had been reformed shifting from an index of his hands peaceably clasped at his heart to a single hand clawing at one's nose indexing the outsized proportions of that of the ousted leader's.
Yet, a more important shift had occurred in the Tunisian Sign community whereby new concepts and terms had been introduced in the course of eight months of an increasingly vibrant communicative environment. While working closely with Fatma Kharrat, an incredibly talented Deaf instructor (and a former member of the Association Voix Du Sourd de Tunisie and a talented actress frequently performing in collaboration with the Théâtre national tunisien), we devised a variety of strategies through which to capture these recent semiotic currents.
One of our most promising methods builds upon graffiti slogans found on the city's walls by creating short video clips of the spray painted messages interpreted in Tunisian Sign Language (LST). Here, our effort was to capture not only the semantic value of each of the slogans, but also the voice and tone of the messages. Complicating our process was the fact that not all of the terms are readily accessible in LST whether as a result of their relatively recent introduction as concepts or the challenges of the bilingual texture of the speech community characterized by rapid and frequent shifts between French and Arabic language source codes.
The principal challenge in creating the clip, aside from preventing passers-by from walking in front of the camera, was capturing the spirit of the letter when some Arabic terms were somewhat unfamiliar. Here, we work to capture the phrase: "Freedom is a daily practice."
In this case, identifying an appropriate sign to illustrate 'practice' in conjunction with an abstraction like 'freedom' initiated an exploratory dialogue where Fatma and I considered a number of alternatives. We both think that this final illustration captures the spirit of the letter best.
Similarly challenging was capturing the more expansive message expressed in the following clip:
Here, the text renders in English: "How beautiful Tunis is without Ben Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves." This is, of course, referring to former President Ben Ali as the leader of the classic Arabian Nights tale of Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves as well as the corrupt practices of Ben Ali's entourage. In our deliberations, the Fusha Arabic "min ghayr" was not immediately resonant, nor was the metaphorical collapsing of President Ben Ali with the fictional character Ali Baba. But in this final version, we agree that the sign version and the graffiti are well matched.
These initial, innovative exercises of using the city as a text to be interpreted in sign language have subsequently provided a technique through which to channel our interest in producing socially relevant tools for exchange, instruction, and awareness. In this case, our technique does even more than this; it also provides an archive of the spirit of revolution. Fortunately, our timing in producing these videos was excellent — two days later the messages had been white washed.
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