Randall Fuller | The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation | Viking| January 2017 | 25 minutes (6,840 words)
The excerpt below is adapted from The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller, which explores the impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species on American intellectual life. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.
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“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Detail from the single illustration that appeared in the first edition of the Origin of Species. Via Wikimedia.
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537 plants!
With the possible exception of Asa Gray, no American read the Origin of Species with as much care and insight as Henry David Thoreau. Throughout the first week of February, he copied extracts from the Origin. Those notes, which until recently had never been published, comprise six notebook pages in a nearly illegible scrawl. They tell the story of someone who must have read with hushed attention, someone attuned to every nuance and involution in the book. In their attention to detail, they suggest someone who assiduously followed the gradual unfolding of Darwin’s ideas, the unspooling of his argument, as though the book of science were an adventure tale or a travel narrative.
He was drawn to Darwin’s compendium of facts, which illustrated the delicate interplay of causes leading to the survival or extinction of species. Darwin wrote, “The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests.” Thoreau copied the sentence into his notebook, probably because he enjoyed the cause-and-effect relationship it implied. He had always been interested in the quirky, arcane detail. “Winged seeds are never found in fruits which do not open,” he read in the Origin, transcribing the sentence into his natural history book. He recorded the strange (if incorrect) statement that “cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf,” something Darwin had gleaned from a work on zoological anomalies by Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who mistakenly assumed that all blue-eyed cats were deaf rather than the majority, as is actually the case.
He also admired Darwin’s genius for experimentation. Thoreau had described his own efforts in Walden to disprove the local myth that the pond was of unusual depth. With a stone tied to the end of a cod line, he “could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me”— a procedure that enabled him to chart the pond’s topography and discover its shallows and depths. He had even provided a map for interested readers. Now he discovered a similar impulse in Darwin. The British naturalist wanted to determine how far birds might transport seeds caught in their muddy feet; this would explain how identical plant species might be found thousands of miles apart. From the silty bottom of a pond near his home he procured some “three table-spoonfuls of mud,” which “when dry weighed only 6¾ ounces.” He kept the mud in his study for six months, “pulling up and counting each plant as it grew; the plants were of many kinds, and were altogether 537 in number; and yet the viscid mud was all contained in a breakfast cup!” The charm of the experiment resided in its simple ingenuity; from common household items Darwin had made a marvelous discovery: 537 plants!
Thoreau was most urgently drawn to Darwin’s ideas. That the struggle among species was an engine of creation struck him with particular force. It undermined transcendentalist assumptions about the essential goodness of nature, but it also corroborated many of Thoreau’s own observations. While living on Walden Pond, he had tried to discover the “unbroken harmony” of the environment, the “celestial dews” and “depth and purity” of the ponds. “Lying between the earth and heavens,” he wrote, Walden “partakes of the color of both.” But sometimes a darker reality intruded upon this picture. “From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth lake but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake.” Something portentous and uneasy lurks about this sentence. The “simple fact” that animals must consume other animals to survive upsets Thoreau; it disturbs the equilibrium of one who wishes to find harmony and beauty in his surroundings. Thoreau tries to laugh it off, calling the dimpled lake the result of “piscine murder.” Yet Darwin provided an explanation for nature’s murderous subtext. Competition and struggle influenced “the whole economy of nature.” It drove species to change and adapt. It created. It was the cost of doing nature’s business. Read more…
"Cancer Alley." Many cases of cancer have occurred in communities on both sides of the river, though the Louisiana Tumor Registry claims the numbers are not higher than the national average. (Photo: Julie Dermansky)
Justin Nobel | Longreads | July 2017 | 16 minutes (4,000 words)
If you’re visiting New Orleans and want to see something truly amazing, take your beer or daiquiri to-go and walk a few blocks past the Superdome—you’ll find a school being constructed on an old waste dump.
“All the toxic chemicals from the landfill are still there,” says toxicologist Wilma Subra. This includes lead, mercury, and arsenic, exposure to which can lead to reproductive damage, and skin and lung cancer. Even more astonishing, Subra says hundreds of schools across Louisiana have been built on waste dumps. Why? Dumps represent cheap land often already owned by a cash-strapped town or city, plus serve as rare high ground in a flood-prone state. And this is just the beginning of Louisiana’s nightmare.
The risk of cancer in Reserve, a community founded by freed slaves, is 800 times the national average, making the community, by one EPA metric, the most carcinogenic census tract in America—the cause is a DuPont/Denka chemical plant adjacent to the town that annually spews 250,000 pounds of the likely carcinogen chloroprene into the air. If you think the situation in Flint is bad, there are approximately 400 public water systems in Louisiana with lead or other hazardous substances leaching into the drinking water. Meanwhile, hundreds of petrochemical plants peppered across the state’s lush swampy interior freely emit carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and neurotoxins into the air and water, as well as inject them deep into the earth.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Louisiana is ranked, according to different surveys, 47th in environmental quality, third in poverty, and 49th in education. Are you still gushing about your latest trip to New Orleans for Jazz Fest Presented by Shell, or French Quarter Festival presented by Chevron? “New Orleans is the best,” one visitor recently wrote to me, “you are so smart to live there!” But how smart is it to allow children to attend school built on toxin-laced waste? How smart is it to allow a community’s cancer rates to shoot off the charts? Louisiana is rich in culture, spirit, and faith, yet what type of state knowingly poisons its own people? What type of country stands by and allows it to happen?
While it is fashionable to critique President Trump for his scientific ignorance, science was misdirected long before Trump laid hands on it. It is time to open our eyes and see what is really going on in this world, to critique our society’s dinosaur methods, then step back and imagine what a new path forward might look like. It is with this aim that I begin a science column for Longreads. In my first story I’ll tour us through a land America should have never allowed to materialize—it’s what I’m calling the Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip. As the Trump administration chucks environmental science out the window, evaporates industry regulations, and cripples agencies charged with protecting the environment, this tale is relevant for all Americans, because the poisoning happening in Louisiana could happen in your state too—in fact, it is probably already happening.
But for now sit back, enjoy a signature New Orleans cocktail from the comfort of your couch or chair, and get ready to keep reminding yourself: Yes, this is occurring in 2017 in the United States of America. Read more…
Ella Alexander | Longreads | July 2017 | 16 minutes (3,919 words)
I wanted danger. My identity as a liberated woman, or at least an adventurous girl, was inextricably linked to placing myself in the way of unnecessary bodily harm and, though I’d never have admitted to it, my blue U.S. passport seemed like a strong enough shield to stop anything truly bad from happening. So, although I was a demographic outlier — a 19-year-old American girl travelling alone —
my presence in Pamplona made sense, at least in my mind. The running of the bulls presented itself to me as the ideal prepackaged brush with death, with the bonus of a possible existential realization. Knowledge of life and death, the value of every breath, etcetera.
Pamplona was just one in a series of strange places I’d found myself after neglecting to map out my trip any more definitively than a plane ticket from Jerusalem, where I had family, to Rome and another one home from Berlin two months later. I had been making strategically bad decisions all summer, using money my grandfather set aside for education to bankroll a solo-backpacking trip through Europe. Before I left, all my friends were gearing up for art gallery internships or ice cream shop jobs, and a flutter of joy ran through me every time somebody heard my summer plans and asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?” or, “Haven’t you seen Taken?”
I’d reply, “I can’t spend my life worrying about things like that,” or sometimes, “If I die then you’ll have a great story for parties. You can say, ‘I knew this girl who got murdered in Europe.’”
This is how I always imagine my grandfather’s departure from Shanghai: him, a lanky boy of 19, wearing khakis and a pressed shirt, standing near the docks with a small brown suitcase in hand. I imagine the shirt to be white with intersecting gray lines, a series of chess-sized squares on his body. Maybe he’s wearing a matching beige jacket too, or a hat of some sort. I assume that going overseas was probably a big deal at the time, an occasion you were supposed to dress up for.
For some reason, in this scene, I don’t see the man traveling with my grandfather—a friend of my great-grandparents he might have called Uncle. Instead, I see my great-grandmother, small and slightly bent over, her lined face rearranging its features as she struggles not to cry. I see her gazing up at her tall boy, adjusting his shirt, touching his lapel, fussing the way mothers do. I see her pressing a sack of oranges into his palms, worried he’ll be hungry on the boat. Now he’s brushing her fingers away, annoyed, impatient. He’ll only be gone for a few weeks, he reminds her, three months at the most. She tells him not to do anything rash out there. She tells him to listen to Uncle. I can see him barely registering her words. I can see his eyes lingering on the boat and the ocean and the tiny island of Taiwan he can’t yet make out. I can see that his mind is already gone from his childhood home and she can see it too. She takes a deep breath and smiles. She tries to be happy for him, to be proud of her youngest son. She tries to remember that boys his age are fighting wars in the north, and that she is lucky, so lucky, that all he wants is to explore the world. She tries to be happy that her boy will not only be well-educated, but also well-traveled, but he is her baby boy and she is his mother and he’s never traveled so far from home before.
DeRay Mckesson, who was seeking the Democratic nomination to run for mayor of Baltimore, chats with campaign volunteers in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
It was one o’clock in the morning on August 16th, 2014. In Minneapolis, DeRay Mckesson watched the news on television and scrolled through Twitter. “I saw what was happening on CNN; I saw what was happening on Twitter, and they were telling two different stories. And I said, ‘I just want to go see for myself.’” Exactly one week before, Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson had killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, black teenager. The television narrative highlighted protesters’ supposed unrest and Wilson’s self-defense claim. The narrative on Mckesson’s Twitter timeline was quite different: police brutality and murder.
That morning, Mckesson drove nine hours from Minneapolis to St. Louis to protest in the streets. The Ferguson protests not only propelled to the national stage the Black Lives Matter movement — originally sparked after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, another unarmed, black teenager, in 2012 — it also launched Mckesson’s political activism career — one which he amplifies via social media.
Mckesson makes news in every direction. In March 2015, he quit his job in human resources at Minneapolis Public Schools to devote himself to full-time activism. He helped launch a police-reform initiative called Campaign Zero. He ran for mayor in his hometown of Baltimore. He started a podcast about policy and social justice called Pod Save the People, for which he recently interviewed Edward Snowden and Katy Perry. And he is currently finishing his term as interim chief human capital officer at the Baltimore City Public School System.
He has been tear gassed and arrested during a protest (with charges later dropped). His Twitter following, at around 1,000 in 2014, is now over 800,000 today, and he has become a sought-after guest and speaker. The only constant: Mckesson’s puffy, blue Patagonia vest — his sartorial trademark. But the question on everyone’s mind for the 31-year-old is simple: what’s next?
No matter what 45 says — or, in this case, doesn’t say — June is LGBT Pride month. It’s a month of joy, protest and, this year, mourning. June 12, 2017 marked the one-year anniversary of the attack against queer Latinx and Black folks at Pulse in Orlando, Florida. The day before, thousands of people came together in Washington, D.C. as part of the Equality March for Unity and Pride, protesting the presidential administration and standing against discrimination.
Here’s what I’ve done this month, Pride-wise: I interviewed Kelly Madrone, the author of GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens, and our audience was full of queer teens and their families. I writhed in ecstasy at a Tegan & Sara concert, sporting my “Boyfriend” hat. I stood in silence next to my friends at a local vigil for the victims of the shooting at Pulse. I helped the bookstore choose which queer-centric titles to stock, and I resisted the temptation to drop too much money on rainbow Doc Martens. I spent a hot, happy day strolling by the canal with my friends during Frederick Pride. July looms; I’ll downgrade my gay apparel to a simple rainbow wristband. The work continues, whether it’s leading LGBTQ sensitivity trainings, correcting people who misgender me or continuing to learn about allyship, organization, and liberation.
The protests at different Pride parades around the country have inspired conversations about working within the system versus overthrowing it and about the intersectionality (that should be) inherent in the LGBTQ pursuit of equality.
Meredith Talusan analyzes the dynamics of sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression in the dating lives of two of their friends, activists and non-binary femmes Alok Vaid-Menon and Jacob Tobia.
Outside the queer zone of Orlando Pride, or our misterb&b, in Okeechobee, we’ve tried keeping to the shadows, our own private zone of safety. I realize how much work we all do as queers to enlarge the bubbles we live and move in, make them nice, fill them with friends and allies. But being on the road makes it clear that, fifty years after Stonewall and the active struggle for LGBT civil rights, so much of our lives still exists in isolated safety zones that don’t always keep us safe.
We don’t lose our opportunities for joy and celebration when we make space for our struggles and the struggles of our most vulnerable, and when we elevate and center those in need. More than that, our celebrations as a community come out of our struggles, and our survival of them, and the ways in which we’ve helped each other survive no matter the cost.
Honestly, every month under the Trump administration feels like a year, and one of the awful things that bubbled up during this year-month is the Senate Republicans’ bogus decision to write a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, including massive cuts to Medicaid. Many smart people have written about this better than I ever could, and I found the experiences of these queer and trans disabled folks who rely on the ACA to live equal parts compelling and terrifying. (I’m a fan of 5 Calls, if you’re feeling moved to contact your congresspeople.)
The opening paragraphs of Brandon Taylor’s essay slammed into me like a wave and drove me down to the ocean floor. Take these sentences, for instance:
God suffused everything in our lives the way heat suffuses every particle of air in the summer. There is a time of day in Alabama when the heat reaches its most critical point, when even shade is of little comfort; Sundays gathered all of God’s power to its most frightening pitch and beamed it down on us, testing us, daring us to wither.
Over two years, Barry Yeoman interviewed over 40 gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender Baby Boomers–“the Gayest Generation,” according to professor Jesus Ramirez-Valles. They discussed their struggles (reconciling the trauma of the AIDS epidemic, aging without the guarantee of a support system) and triumphs (fighting for and winning marriage equality and forming treasured friendships with other LGBTQ folks). Their stories brought me to tears and reminded me of the importance of taking care of our LGBTQ elders.
8. “Little Fish.” (Casey Plett, Plenitude Magazine, June 2017)
New writing from Casey Plett is cause for celebration. Plett is the author of the seminal work A Safe Girl to Love, which spotlights the lives of trans women.“Little Fish” is an excerpt from her upcoming novel.
My ESL student had his first dream in English the same night I dreamt about Matias. I dream in ex-boyfriends. So the morning I left Ben’s apartment and jumped on my bike, I was already thrown. I headed down Myrtle Avenue, fast, trying to escape my own skin. I wasn’t wearing a helmet.
My courtship with Ben was filled with long bike rides: sunset trips to Red Hook, routes that wrapped around rivers and crossed boroughs. When our bikes were stolen, locked together outside a café in plain daylight, Ben gave me his mom’s sturdy Dutch road cruiser that she didn’t use anymore. It was an upgrade, with a bell and a basket and newly tightened brakes.
I had sobbed into Ben’s arms the night before about my impending breakup. I’d been having an affair with Ben on and off for months. My boyfriend, Matias, lived in Mexico City. We had loosely discussed seeing other people on the heels of a fight that ended with him screaming, “If you feel like I am wasting your time, then you should go out and meet someone who won’t!” Still, we’d never had an explicit talk about actually going through with it.
Holly Maniatty is moving faster than anyone in the Wu-Tang Clan. She bounces up and down, her whole body undulates, her hands fly as she signs, her eyes flare precisely, her mouth articulates the lyrics. She is in the front row at the Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, where she’s interpreting the concert for Deaf fans. The other American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter at the show looks at her in awe. Maniatty doesn’t pause.
Maniatty, who grew up in rural Vermont and holds degrees in interpreting and ASL linguistics, is a sensation in the Deaf community and among hip-hop fans. When she interpreted a Killer Mike concert, also at Bonnaroo, the rapper was so impressed with her rapid movements and visible passion that he jumped off the stage and began dancing with her. With a smile, he rapped a series of nasty words and phrases. Maniatty kept up; the crowd went wild.
Maniatty is an in-demand ASL concert interpreter and has grown in fame, appearing on late night shows from Jimmy Kimmel to Jimmy Fallon. Her skill is hard-won; for a single concert, she often prepares for up to 40 hours, to understand every aspect of the musical group she’ll sign for. She wants to provide near-perfect information to her Deaf patrons, so she learns everything: the group’s entire backlist, where they grew up, what charities they give to. By knowing the group she’s interpreting, she can more precisely — and more quickly — interpret their performance.
Maniatty wants to use her profile to bring greater equality to Deaf people. “There’s this whole population of culture in America that sometimes is easily overlooked and not served,” she tells me. Likewise, she wants attention turned not toward her but toward the Deaf performers who are breaking stereotypes of what it means to be a performing artist and what it means to be Deaf. She mentions her great respect for Deaf performers like Sean Forbes, Dack Virnig, and Peter Cook.
Maniatty and I discussed the boundaries of language, the complexities of interpreting, and raising awareness for the Deaf community. Throughout it all, she was upbeat and energetic, stressing how grateful she is to get to do what she does. Deaf or hearing, it’s hard not to look forward to her next concert.
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How did you become interested in ASL?
I had ideas about going to art school and I really felt like I wanted to be an interpreter and I went for it wholeheartedly. I was very fortunate to be accepted to RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). The National Technical Institute for the Deaf is there so they have a large population of Deaf students. I lived in a dorm with Deaf people and interacted with Deaf people, and most of my friends were Deaf, so I was really lucky to have that immersive experience, and because of that, I gained the language quickly. Since then, it’s really been one of the fulfilling things I could ever think of in life, really.
I worked for a short time as a staff interpreter at RIT and as a freelance interpreter, and just randomly was asked to do a concert. They were having a hard time finding an interpreter for it. I jumped in and found that I really loved the work because of the preparatory process: going through the music and analyzing the lyrics, and doing what an interpreter would call “text analysis” of the intent of the speaker and, hopefully, the received message of the person you’re interpreting for. I fell in love with that process.
That was in between my two degrees, and I went back to school to get a degree in ASL Linguistics because I felt like there was so much more that I needed to know about the language before I could really do this at the highest level. The University of Rochester has a fabulous program that includes linguistics classes, brain, and science classes, but also a lot of Deaf history, and Deaf folklore, and Deaf poetry. I was able to take those classes, and it really helped build my skill. From there, I just started doing shows and patrons liked the interpreting that I was able to offer, and they requested me to do shows.
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After I moved to Portland, ME, I got involved in Bonnaroo and interpreted there, and, again, that was patron-driven: someone that I had interpreted for before asked if I was able to go to Bonnaroo, and I contacted the accessibility department there.
Starting at Bonnaroo was a big step for me because it wasn’t just one show a night. Over the course of a weekend, an interpreter at a festival can do fifteen to twenty shows in just three to four days. That was a big step for me and brought me to another level of being able to do a variety of music throughout one day. You could go from something that was more lyrical and folk all the way to something that someone would refer to as a hardcore rap show. It definitely stretched my skills, and I think built me up to be a better interpreter every single year that I did it. I just really enjoyed that.
There’s a fabulous team of interpreters that come from all over the country to do Bonnaroo so it was a great opportunity to learn from other professionals, and we had this great, little brain trust going on — learning from each other and working together and supporting each other through that process. It was one of the pivotal interpreting opportunities I had.
Where does your particular skill set lie?
That’s such an astute question. No one has ever asked me that. I think the things that most prepares me for this work is my ability to look at communication as a whole entity — almost this global package. I try to use as many different possible ways to communicate a message as possible. Obviously the sign language, but then there’s the poetic aspect of music that you’re always trying to relay and put that experience out there for a person that’s at a show.
I always go back to what I would term as “the old Deaf masters,” like Clayton Valli and Patrick Graybill and The National Theater for the Deaf and all those old things we watched on VHS tapes when I was in college — that’s how old I am. Going back to them and seeing how they creatively used their language and then incorporated that into the way you communicate as a human being. So accessing people’s visual representations of things — like if they’re talking about a political movement, what was the picture that went along with that political movement? Or what was the striking Pulitzer image that goes along with that, and trying to access that through the interpretation. I research how the performer moves, and I think that speaks a lot to how they feel about one particular song or album. You see the way they shift their body posture and even the way they’re projecting their voice can be different based on the album, which goes back to a time in their life.
The more you look at communication as a global thing — a global delivery as opposed to just looking at the language itself — you’re able to communicate things a lot more efficiently and a lot more effectively than if you were just kind of thinking, How can I translate this instrument to sign language? Music is about so many more things than that, and if you’re going from very rich and lush movement to ASL, which is also a very rich and lush medium, you want to take advantage of everything you have.
…the most important thing is that they’re experiencing the same thing as somebody else is. They’re dropping with the beat at the same time; they’re having that emotional moment. I’ve interpreted shows before and almost everyone in the crowd is tearing up, and you want that for the patron that you’re interpreting for.
Is there something we can learn about translation from how you interpret ASL?
I do think that there are implications with any language — cultural implications. In Taiwan, February 14th is not Valentine’s Day; it was their February 14 Massacre so you couldn’t go from English to Taiwanese or whatever dialect you were using there and not understand the implication when somebody mentions February 14th. I think that in any language, you have to understand the cultural implications, and ASL is so deeply tied with American cultural experience.
I’ve learned, obviously, from my Deaf professors that you have to understand that cultural implication. I grew up near Canada in Northern Vermont, and on Quebec license plates, it says, “I will remember.” I never really understood that, and then I had a professor who was from France who explained to me the whole cultural implication of “I will remember,” as in Quebec will always remember their relationship as being kind of separate from Canada. So it’s interesting. If you delve into the culture of the language, you’ll have a more complete translation and one that moves people in the appropriate way.
What’s the most important part of interpreting music for Deaf patrons?
I think the most important thing is that they’re experiencing the same thing as somebody else is. They’re dropping with the beat at the same time; they’re having that emotional moment. I’ve interpreted shows before and almost everyone in the crowd is tearing up, and you want that for the patron that you’re interpreting for. Ultimately the goal is that they’re feeling the exact same thing as everybody else. When you hit that interpreting sweet spot, there’s nothing else like it. You’re just like, “Yes! Mission accomplished!”
Tell us about the connection you make with Deaf patrons.
I did a Beastie Boys concert, and the patrons were really excited about it, and I worked really hard to make sure the cultural references in Beastie Boys songs and the funny puns were tangible. There are moments when everyone’s like, “Oh no. He just didn’t say that” all at the same time, including the Deaf patrons. That’s what you go for. Those are the moments when the twenty to forty hours of preparation for the ninety-minute show are absolutely worth it.
I don’t know about you, but I definitely had experiences where I’m at a concert and I think a song means one thing, and then I’m in a crowd of people and we’re all kind of feeling the same thing, and then I see the performer and I’m like, “Oh, that’s what they meant?” I think people have those a-ha moments, and you want to provide an opportunity for someone to have that a-ha moment. They will never forget the moment they really understood what that song meant, or what it meant to the person that wrote it. That’s really the challenge. You’re just setting an opportunity before somebody, and they grasp it just like everybody else.
I think people have those a-ha moments, and you want to provide an opportunity for someone to have that a-ha moment. They will never forget the moment they really understood what that song meant, or what it meant to the person that wrote it.
Why hip-hop?
It just became my thing over the last ten years of interpreting. The Beastie Boys concert was a huge education for me because I was like, “Yeah, I can do that.” And then I was like, “Wait a minute. What is this song about? Wait, who and what are they referencing?” I didn’t grow up in metro New York City so I didn’t know about the Pelham train so I had to look that up and I read all of that. And I mean that whole song has like seventeen different historical references about Manhattan in it and for someone who didn’t grow up there, that’s huge.
I ended up falling in love with the simplicity of hip-hop. It’s this really lush and diverse use of language. Everyone’s really excited about Hamilton because it’s telling a story in a more modern way, but hip-hop’s been doing that for a long time. They broke barriers. They broke social barriers, racial barriers standing for a long time. I think the masterful way that people use language in hip-hop songs is just amazing. It just fascinates me. I read everything I can about hip-hop culture. Every single time, in the same way that I feel like I learned something new about American Sign Language on a weekly basis, I’m learning something new about hip-hop on a weekly basis.
Holly shakes hands with Method Man from the Wu-Tang Clan while interpreting their concert at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.
Hip-hop is often the place where the vernacular of American English is first stretched. Are you likewise trying to expand the possibilities of ASL?
I’m a second-language learner, so I will never use ASL to one hundred percent of its potential like a native user. I understand and respect that. ASL is so complex and has so many beautiful nuances. It really is a perfect medium to translate any kind of hip-hop, just the way in which you can communicate so many concepts very, very quickly. Many of the aspects of ASL are spatial. We use first-person perspective and storytelling mode. It’s literally the perfect medium to make this accessible in a different language.
To what extent is the body a vital interpreting tool?
I think it’s super important. In preparation for a show, you have to think about the lyrical story and the story of the person who wrote it, but you have to think about the musical story too. Jay Z, in 99 Problems, uses this really awesome technique where there’s this weird static noise behind the lyrics where he’s “becoming” the cop that pulls him over. The way in which people are mixing and DJs are mixing their songs with these acoustic effects is really relayed in your body and the way you’re positioning your body in interpreting, and I think that — as much as the words — is important. The context is important, and the beat is just as important. There are some songs you know in just the first three seconds, like It’s Tricky from Run DMC. And that’s really important. If you can make your body movements equally as iconic as the music that’s written, it just enhances the access to the concert and to the musician.
What’s the most creative you’ve ever had to be when signing a lyric?
I think one challenge was when we were doing a back-to-back concert with Eminem and Jay Z. They’re very different performers, with very different approaches to the way they deliver the same genre of music. You have to be able to show that. Eminem had done a lot of sampling of other R&B like Rihanna, so that was a big challenge — to be really visceral like him and then kind of emotional like her in the same song and just kind of switch back and forth between that based on the lyrics and the hook.
I think, too, ideally as an interpreter, you’re making yourself vulnerable to whatever emotion the music is about. So there are some songs that are emotional and you have to go there, and it’s a risk. You really go the whole way and try to make the interpretation as accessible as possible even if it’s emotionally risky for you and other people there.
What do you see as your contribution to the Deaf community at large?
I hope my contribution to the Deaf community is bringing a greater spotlight to their need for access to interpreting. Not just concert interpreting — any kind of interpreting. The Americans with Disabilities Act just had its birthday; it’s twenty years old and people still struggle on a daily basis to get interpreting services for basic things like doctor’s appointments and surgeries.
I hope that somebody hears about this crazy person doing whatever concert and then looks at my page and sees maybe something about a Deaf performer like Sean Forbes or Dack Virnig and then they check out Deaf performers and then they go to their page and say, “Oh wow, this Deaf person is posting that the EDHI law is up for renewal in the United States House and that’s for early detection of hearing loss in children so that there can be ASL services and early intervention services.” There’s this whole population in America that sometimes is easily overlooked and not served.
Interpreters have an inside look on people’s lives. It’s a huge privilege being in a partnership with the Deaf community and Deaf culture. I will continue interpreting. and I will continue trying to be an advocate for access for Deaf people.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cody Delistraty is a writer based in Paris. Follow him on Twitter: @delistraty.
June 26th, 2015 starts out as a regular Friday. At my summer internship at a financial fraud firm in Midtown East, Manhattan, I try to finish my work early so I can leave by 3 p.m., as I’ve done for five of the past six Fridays, but all I can manage is to listen to the fluorescent lights hum. I’m hungover. With a heavy sigh and a hand on my forehead, I go to open my project for the day. Just then, a friend texts me: “We won.” It takes a minute to register. I’d had a feeling the decision might come today, but I shrug, stand up, and walk to the office kitchen to make tea. My head hurts.
I walk back to my desk, a small cubicle, and sit down inside the wall with my name (misspelled) on a temporary laminated sign. I stare at the icon under my cursor, “Anti-Money Laundering,” and decide to check the news instead. I scroll past the soaring rhetoric and indignant vitriol — nothing I haven’t read before. The other summer intern walks past my desk. “We won,” I say without inflection. “It was five to four.” She smiles and sits down at her computer. Then, I see Nic, an analyst, and the news starts to feel more urgent. “You and I can finally get married,” I yell to him from across the room. He shifts in place, his eyes darting between the rows of people seated between us. “Yeah, let’s go right now,” he says with a forced laugh. No one looks up from their screens, and I sit back down at my desk. The fluorescent lights hum.
Still a little groggy, I check Facebook on my phone and watch a video of the spectators waiting to hear the decision outside the Supreme Court. “I’m so scared,” a voice says off camera, “I’m shaking.” Then the crowd erupts around two women, who start hugging. The one facing the camera has her eyes shut tight behind rectangular glasses, her left hand pressing her partner’s head against her own, the other holding a sign: Be Proud. A demonstrator with a rainbow bandana around her neck smiles and speaks into a microphone: “We weren’t sure. We weren’t at all sure, but how could you not be here for this?”
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