In Piedmont, painter to discuss memoir, life with hearing impairment
By Lou Fancher
For most of her 73 years, Oakland’s Claudia Marseille has lived in energetic response to a comment made by a high school English teacher and often by people who learn of her profound hearing disability. “But you look so normal,” they say, causing Marseille to wonder what a person with severe hearing loss looks like, what “normal” looks like and if that’s what she must be to find her place in the hearing world. The comment titles her new memoir, “But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found in a Hearing World,” which Marseille will read from and discuss in a book launch party June 1 at the Piedmont Center for the Arts and on June 26 at the Rockridge Library in North Oakland (claudiamarseilleauthor.com/media-events). Marseille grew up largely In Berkeley after moving at age 5 with her German parents from San Francisco to a home near Hillside Elementary School. Her father was a psychoanalyst who struggled with severe mental health issues; her mother was Jewish and had survived the Holocaust. Together, they had immigrated after World War II, bringing with them Marseille’s grandmother, Omama, at one time a successful actress. Marseille’s childhood home was shrouded by secret-keeping and shadowed with hidden realities, among them the family’s complete history in Germany, the trauma caused by her father’s illness and Marseille’s inability to hear. The force of trying to appear “normal” had her mother and father in denial or at best unaware that their daughter’s lack of language was due to severely limited hearing. Diagnosed with hearing loss at age 4, her “invisible disability” was masked even more so by her and her family’s efforts to hide any signs of being “not normal.” Marseille in a recent interview described being outfitted with primitive hearing aids — the only option available at a time when today’s advanced digital hearing aids and assistive listening devices with Bluetooth and infrared wireless technology didn’t exist. Her parents mainstreamed her, which meant she never learned American Sign Language and relied on lip-reading and the distorted sounds coming in through her hearing aids. Like many people with hearing loss, she became adept at “reading” faces and body language to derive intentions and “fill in the blank spaces” in conversations. “I knew my mother wanted me to be normal, to be accepted. There was so much I couldn’t share with her. I didn’t want to add to her burdens,” Marseille says, adding that she hid her hearing aids behind her hair. “People literally didn’t see them unless the wind blew. It was shame and the stigma about hearing loss that doesn’t exist today. “I didn’t now anyone else who was deaf or had divorced parents, although with 4,000 students at Berkeley High, there must have been someone. I didn’t have modeling or experience advocating for myself.” In terms of contending with hearing loss, the state’s public schools since that time have improved significantly with passage of the federal 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and California’s 1994 Assembly Bill 1836, “The Deaf Children’s Bill of Rights.” Accommodations include better seating, closed-caption videos, sign language interpreters, FM devices that transmit teachers’ voices to students’ hearing aids and classroom projectors to cast enlarged images on whiteboards. Even so, a 2017 study from Coqual, a nonprofit think tank that, among other issues, researches workplace disability and equity, found that 30% of American workers qualify as disabled but less than 39% of those worker disclose their disabilities to employers. “I didn’t meet a deaf or hard-of-hearing person until I was in my 30s. Because I didn’t sign, I wasn’t a part of deaf culture. Because hearing was nearly impossible and the human voice especially so, I wasn’t part of hearing culture. In college, people told me they thought I was stoned because I seemed one beat behind and out of it.” Fortunately, stress proved motivational. Marseille earned a bachelor of arts degree in anthropology and archaeology at UC Berkeley and a master’s degree at London’s Institute of Archaeology. Later, with a master’s in public policy from UC Berkeley, she worked for PG&E until a longtime passion for art took over. Though she has perfect pitch and continues to play piano, she decided long ago that a once-dreamed-of career as a professional musician was impossible. That didn’t prevent her from finding an art form less reliant on hearing: photography. Marseille ran a successful portrait photography studio for 15 years before completing a master of fine arts degree in painting at Orinda’s JFK University and turning to full-time painting (visit claudiamarseille.com online to view her work). She said her memoir came about when friends whose normal age-related hearing loss had them saying, “Now I know how what it was like for you” and that she found writing about her family allowed broader perspective. “My parents had their own stresses; going through a divorce battle, being German immigrants. When they came here, my mother was going to school, my father was trying unsuccessfully to find clients. I have deep appreciation for my mother teaching me the life of the mind, the beauty of literature, music, art. “Both my parents had high values around learning. It was taken for granted I’d do these things. It’s been a lifelong search to find something compatible with my hearing loss like abstract encaustic painting. What I do now comes from discipline, sheer hard work, enthusiasm, love for the art form.” Releasing her life story out into the world leaves her vulnerable, Marseille said. “It’s about my struggles, my loneliness. My friends see me now, articulate, social, well-connected, which for so many years wasn’t the case. But almost everyone can relate because there’s a loneliness in this country that goes beyond people with hearing loss or other disabilities to reach teenagers, elders, everyone.” Motivated during a lifetime to “make a mark and establish a legacy through my art,” Marseille said she hopes like many people to live on in something someone will want to have and keep: a photo, painting, book or memory. “It’s generative, and hopefully my work will have meaning not just for the hearing-impaired or deaf community but for everyone.” |