15 November 2011
BEIRUT: Prayers are recited and hymns are sung, but during Sunday’s Mass at Zkak al-Blat’s Notre-Dame de l’Annonciation, almost no words are spoken aloud. This is because Father Jean-Marie Chami is conducting Mass using sign language. Chami, the only priest in the country to use sign language, tells followers “The Lord be with you,” and with their hands they answer, “and also with you.”
“All the songs’ translation is our work,” Chami says. “We’ve been working on it for 20 years proudly.
He has been a priest for 15 years, but met many of the churchgoers who attend his masses long before that.
“Last May I celebrated 25 years of services to the deaf,” he says. “All those [in my congregation] who are married were married by me.”
The vast majority of those attending the Mass were Chami’s students at the IRAP school for hearing impaired students in Ain Aar, Metn.
“This one,” he says gesturing toward a young man named Elie, “was my student when he was 13.”
In Elie’s class, he says, “We created the signs for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and the ‘Hail Mary’ for the first time,” he says, noting that this was the first time it was done in the country.
Although parts of the Mass are completely quiet, the priest sometimes speaks while a seminarian translates, and pre-recorded songs are played in the church while a follower near the priest translates them in sign language for the audience, with many singing along with their hands.
Chami explains that music is played as some of the followers hear some sound, and others are able to feel the vibrations. It’s also important for children who can hear “to become accustomed to the singing,” he says.
Many of the church-goers bring their children along, such as Antoinette Rizk, 39, who came with her husband Joseph and their three young children.
She says it’s important that her children “learn religion and grow up with Jesus and the Church,” although they’re too young to follow Mass in sign language.
She says her children, who can all hear, use sign language for daily life although they don’t know it perfectly yet. “But that’s normal, they’re still young. It’s like any other language, when they grow up they’ll speak better,” she says.
Rizk, who lives in Harissa, says she can’t come every Sunday because of the distance. When she doesn’t come to Zkak al-Blat she attends a Mass in a church closer to her home.
“I don’t understand much because there is no translation,” she says. “I go just to receive communion.”
Before becoming a priest, Chami, who was a ballet dancer, an atheist and an architect before hearing the call from God, used to translate Mass in other churches.
It wasn’t always easy, he says. “I was often put on the side,” he says, adding that until the end of the 1980s, “there were priests who didn’t allow me stand at the altar … or people in the church looked at me like I was completely stupid.”
“It was a long process … for me to come from the back of the church to the altar, it took me 10 years,” he says. “I used to sit on the floor to translate.”
He says that 25 years ago, he himself “didn’t know deaf people. I didn’t know they existed.”
By chance, he found himself one day in a workshop organized by deaf individuals, and “saw people [using sign language].”
“I asked someone near me about it, and he told me ‘they’re deaf’ … And everything started there. I fell in love.”
Although he’s been learning, teaching and using sign language for many years, he says he will never be finished learning, and is often helped by followers, even during Mass.
“When I was saying Mass, Joseph, Antoinette’s husband, corrected my signs. He told me ‘This way we’ll understand better,’” he says, adding he doesn’t have a problem with that. “If I want to serve them better, I need to accept them as my professors.”
Chami says church-goers don’t all use the same sign language as they come from different parts of the country, and he sees the sign language Mass as a way to bring them together under the same language.
At Saint Joseph University, head of the psychology department Tony Romanos, who has conducted extensive research on sign languages in Lebanon, says that sign languages cannot be universal as they are the creations of deaf communities.
“We can very well understand that communities that are not communicating with each other don’t have the same language,” he says, explaining that there can still be similarities.
He says that some “universal signs,” like those signs representing the body, are normally similar in all sign languages.
“No one will point at his foot saying ‘This is my head,’” he explains, adding, that in general, when there is a direct link between a sign and an action, the sign used is universal.
But when it comes to an abstract concept, he says, giving the example of the word “democracy,” a specific community chooses a sign according to what it believes is democracy. “Every community when it moves toward abstraction chooses one dominant characteristic of the concept to explain it.”
Romanos says there are an estimated 15,000 deaf people in the country. In 2006, he published a glossary of 500 words and the corresponding signs used by six different communities of deaf people.
He says the cleavages between different sign languages in Lebanon were accentuated by the Civil War, as communities became even more isolated from each other. Communities in Tripoli, Zahle, Beirut or Sidon, “had very little contact one with each other” until the end of the war. “They didn’t even know each other,” he says.
He believes that since the end of the war, communities are now able to communicate with each other more easily, which should lead to a unification of sign languages in the country. “It’s a linguistic law for all human languages … we will go toward that.”
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
