Guest Post: Khalil Barnett On being a Deaf Writer

Hi everyone!

Today I have something a little different for you all. It’s a guest post by author Khalil Barnett on being a deaf writer. Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to check out his book below!
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On being a Deaf Writer:

My obsession with the Samurai, traditions and history, began at an early age. I read Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure for the first time in middle school, and it struck me as being pf grave importance when he said, as if speaking directly to me, “It is good to face challenges in your youth. He who has never suffered will not sufficiently temper his character.” He also said that, of the Way of the Samurai, “No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down.”

Quotes like these, the intellectual romanticism of this Way of Life that prioritizes brutal perseverance in the face of all forms of adversity, spoke very intimately to my experience in the world as a deaf person. It spoke to the tenacity requisite, especially in the absense of exposure to deaf culture growing up, to preserving a sense of self-worth in passing through a hearing world in isolation from the full experience of it. There is no exaggeration, I think, in describing the deaf experience as a viewing of the world through cage bars. You are faced with the question, Do I, like Samuel Johnson suggested, in anger and frustration make a beast of myself to get rid of the pain of being a man? Or do I seek something akin to the Eightfold Path of the Samurai and power through this unique, deeply personal adversity in hopes of forging the best version of myself, a version that can be useful in the world, that will have something of value to say, and things of value to do?

This becomes the existential question that drives me. Everyone is driven by an existential question. We’re all living out Plato’s allegory of cave in the sense that human life is made distinct by the burden of sentience, the burden of awareness, this realization that we are born in a cavity of the earth with our backs to the light. But the way that this plays out for me, as a deaf person, is at once I realize I am in the metaphorical cave, I realize that I am also submerged in a metaphorical body of water. The audiosphere is irreconcilably compromised. And the way out of the cave, the path for experiencing the world and arriving at purpose, requires the building up of a ladder of words, a tower of babel made entirely of books that won’t bring me necessarily up to the gates of heaven, but rather up to the surface on which hearing folk take for granted the many benefits of unfettered communication.

So why write? Well, Walter Mosley said that he took up writing to “escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.” I would say that I took it up to bring value to the crucible of deafness, and to prove the following thesis; that all trials have their purpose, and from all trials can come beauty.

A friend of mine told me in college, we were walking and I was complaining about how difficult note taking in those echoing auditorium classrooms was, he said, “you know, Khalil, you asked God to turn you into a sword. Well, all the stuff you go through, that’s just God answering the prayer. Because how is a sword made? A piece of steal has to go through the fire.” This has always stuck with me. In fact, it is one of the foundational influences that underpin the creation of my Kojiro mythology. At the center of it all is sword called Hatsukoi, which means ‘first love’. This even is the name I gave to the sword on the cover of KOJIRO.

Love is stronger than any force. It is stronger than all of my anger, of which there is much, over being deaf. If a warrior is going into the battle of life armed with any weapon, let that weapon be Love. Which brings me back to Tsunetomo, who said in Hagakure of life that “it is a matter of being determined, and having the spirit to cut right through to the other side.”

Kojiro by Khalil Barnett

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