I've long been impressed by The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, by Josh Swiller, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia in the 1990s. The book featured in my piece on the Peace Corps in Africa published two years ago in African Identities, and I recently re-read the book as part of my work in writing what I hope will some day be a book on American views of Africa since 1945.
Swiller found what he was looking for in Africa, "that place past deafness," as he put it in a 2007 interview with Peace Corps Writers. The Zambian villagers didn't think much about his deafness, and Swiller soon felt integrated into village life in a way that he never had been back "home."
But, like most PCVs, he also found a lot that he hadn't bargained for. He gradually became alienated from most of the village, and the project that he had become most devoted to, building a new clinic, turned to ashes.
Zambia, then, radically reworked Swiller's self identity. It not only showed him that being deaf was less central to that identity than he had supposed, but also that his assumptions about individual agency and power were something of a mirage, that he had much less control over his life--and certainly over the lives of others--than he had imagined.
2007 Interview with Swiller
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