(Content note: This podcast contains interview extracts recorded at Deaf Connections. A British Sign Language interpreter, interpreting on behalf of five Deaf people, speaks their answers out loud).

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

I wanted to talk about an interview that spoke to me and perhaps has a lot that’s worth talking about in terms of the politics of it in content and as a form actually in the way it was recorded. So it’s an interview, it’s Deaf Connections isn’t it?

Claire: Yeah it was done through Deaf Connections, which is an advocacy group in Glasgow for D/eaf people that also sort of provide deaf services. I went to them, and they put a call out for anybody that might want to have a conversation, be interviewed, and then they hosted a conversation and the interview process for us. I think there was maybe five people in the conversation, four or five people in one room and a translator, and myself and my mentor Tom Roden was there at the time as well.

Jak: And yeah, and the person that you hear on the audio is the interpreter.

Claire: Yeah, so it’s difficult because you only ever hear, from an audio perspective you just hear the same voice representing a lot of different people. Yeah, like anything, in retrospect, in terms of process and research you learn a lot afterwards of going actually, I should also have videoed, it’s a visual language, I should have of course videoed those conversations. So even if it was only for our own archive there should’ve been a visual record of the language to get a more accurate representation.

Jak: Sure, but I think it’s still, there’s still a lot you can take from it and there’s lots I took.

[Harmonium plays]

Jak: It seemed that the, the link between, I think all of them but particularly ones that were from an Islamic faith was that there was just a distinct lack of any kind of access, interpreter, there was no one in the mosque that made them feel welcome, or could use BSL, or translate from the Qur’an and-

Claire: One of the things that was happening particularly here in Glasgow is that a number of the Imams were speaking in the Asian languages, so maybe Pakistani or, and while you could bring in a BSL interpreter, but at that time particularly there was nobody that could translate from the languages the Imams were speaking into BSL. Which is different in some of the cities down south in England that have a much larger sort of ethnic diversity, then there are more interpreters who can translate those languages, but up here, certainly at that time, when I was interviewing them which was 2014 there was nobody that could translate at all into BSL.

[Interview clip]

Interpreter: I grew up with religion you know going on a Friday, with the family and my mother.  My mum and dad didn’t actually teach me anything. We just went to the mosque on the Friday. Is it mosque? Mosque on a Friday. Obviously they were speaking and you know, preaching and I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t understand what’s going on. It was all going over my head. I wasn’t sure. I tried to ask what was going on. I was told to be quiet. I had to be very patient and then my father would tell me later on in a different language, in his own language.

[Violin plays]

Interpreter: So growing up I was pitied. They didn’t force me to do anything; I was very pitied because I was deaf.  I was treated differently from my family and it was because I was deaf.  Then the rules were a lot looser than my brothers and sisters.  They had stricter rules that they had to follow.  And I see my parents, like my family members praying all the time and I wasn’t made to pray.  So I just went on with my life, so obviously learning this later on is because they didn’t force me because [of] my disability.  So me growing up in the Asian community, Imam as well he’s you know higher up you know role model for everyone.  “Automatically you’ll go to heaven.  You don’t worry.  You don’t have to actually learn anything”, to me, that’s what he said.  I don’t have to learn my faith.  I’ll automatically go to heaven, he said.  But then I was told, “you can’t learn because you’re not hearing”.  And I said. “but I can learn I just need to have access”.

Jak: It struck me, it was like there was almost two things, there was the practicality that right now, there’s, that means, that renders the mosques inaccessible to them but there’s also, a lot of them had stories about when they were brought up how they were treated very differently from if they had siblings that were hearing, the expectations of how often they would go to mosque, the way they were being brought into the faith was completely different, and the expectation for them as deaf people was, ‘agh don’t worry about, you don’t really need this, you’re going to go to heaven anyway, it’s all good’. That kind of, yeah that like absolutely baffles me [laughs].

[Interview clip]

Interpreter: I prefer an actual BSL translation.  It would give me the picture in my mind of what it’s meaning and that’s why it’s so much better.

Interpreter: Recently I went to holiday in Pakistan. They knew everything about their religion obviously and the deaf people, the Deaf community in Pakistan, knew everything about their own religion it’s because they actually have signers that come and sign the service.  So then after that they were all talking to us, jaw dropped, in Scotland, there’s nothing like that.

Jak: Yeah, not only are people being deprived of accessing their faith as the Hearing world sees it, but they’re being prevented from actually creating something for themselves. Yeah, which is just, yeah a real real shame, like beyond a shame.

Claire: Yeah, there was, I seem to remember there were conversations around the fact that a lot of them had discovered sort of later on in life that there exist things like, there are videos on YouTube etc., where people were signing the Qur’an, or signing tutorials on Islam, but you have to pay for them, you have to sign up and subscribe to a course and I can’t remember how much it cost but it was, you know, it was quite a significant. So yeah, if they wanted to access teachings on the Qur’an and Islam in BSL, there was somebody in England I think who had, you know, started to do it, but yeah they had to pay money to do that. And just the reality of going, well yeah, nobody else has–  Sure, if people choose to want to go and study their own faith to a higher level then they can pay and do courses, but to actually just access your faith at the very beginning [laughs], entry level, to have to pay that. One, obviously off putting and two, some people can’t afford it, is the reality there as well.

[Violin plays]

Jak: I wanted to say, the Deaf Club and their, the way they all had these stories of problems with access, I think most interviews if not all the interviews had some kind of tale of no ramp or something that made them feel excluded whether that was physically, physical exclusion or like a social exclusion or a shame. It was very easy to pull in all the parts that were just talking about access. So I think it’s worth saying that this, this is just like one part of that whole access picture, or in-access.

Claire: Yeah, I mean and that wasn’t, that wasn’t what I was going to research. I was really trying to find out about the relationship I guess or the intersection between people’s experiences with faith and disability, and the whole question of access hadn’t really been on my mind but it became a really present aspect of the conversation. There’s still a lot to be done there.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

Claire: What I tended to meet quite often when I spoke to faith leaders or visited religious institutions or buildings, was, was this, well we’ve never had sign language here because we’ve never had any D/eaf people come. Which is the whole kind of chicken and egg situation, that you know a lot of disabled people as well are familiar to that argument, you know. You know, we’ve never, we’ve never had anyone in a wheelchair come so we don’t need a ramp [laughs] and it’s like yes.

What really struck me I think quite often is it really feels like, religion and religious institutions have got away under the radar, for decades in a way that other elements of society haven’t been allowed to in terms of legislation. You know, so Education and Industry, The Arts itself, you know Sport, have all been kind of required at times to, you know, sometimes requiring government legislation to make them become more accessible to people and to provide services that create more equality.

What I began to feel is that religious institutions had totally been away, got away under the wire, as if nobody had, and nobody had really noticed. And that the only times any buildings or organisations were really dealing with it was the, when they started to acknowledge the spectre of an aging population. Like a lot of these institutions their congregations are aging, therefore they’re becoming hearing impaired or mobility impaired, and sometimes visually impaired, and then they’ll put hearing loop in the church, or then they’ll put a ramp at the mosque because the congregations that they’ve built and need those things. But the idea of providing those things for people who might need them you know from birth, or for people who that’s how they’ve always negotiated, need to negotiate the world, there really felt like a complete lack of regard for that quite often in a way that I felt like I was stepping back in time, that was quite shocking, you know. And that sort of yeah ‘We’ve never had any D/eaf people here”, was like-

Jak: Well why do you think? [laughs]

Claire: Yeah! And it’s like, no and you never will! Because why would they come here? You know everything, if you don’t provide any braille, if you don’t provide any BSL or sign language, if you don’t have accessible space, if you hold your coffee mornings downstairs in the church hall that you know doesn’t have level access, no, then you’re telling those people that they’re not welcome at the end of the day. You know, and nobody’s going to come through your doors if they’ve felt that they were never welcome. They’re not going to pay attention to your newsletter.

The thing about trying to get these institutions to understand that they have to go to where people are, and bring them in-

Jak: -Yeah meet them where they’re at.

Claire: Yeah, you have to go to where disabled and D/eaf people are, and have created safe spaces for themselves, and you have to gain their trust, and you have to deserve their trust before they’re going to come to your institutions and your services because, you know. Yeah, in a lot of these places they have, they have not been welcome you know. And people don’t ever like to think that that’s what they’re saying, but yes, it’s that thing of like going yeah if you’re not providing sign language you’re saying that you don’t want D/eaf people here. And people never like to hear it that way because they don’t think that that’s, that’s not their intention.
A lot of these conversations really at the end of the day, were about being made to feel like they don’t belong and how do you make people belong, and it’s all about trust, and hospitality and welcome.

Jak: It makes me think is the reason why religious institutions have been able to get away with this because, in general, we’re quite scared about critiquing these institutions? Because it’s religion, it’s sacred we don’t want to offend religious people. A great thing about Guide Gods as a work is that it it starts that work of going, ‘no you know what? We can critique these institutions without being deliberately offensive in that way’, and that’s how things are going to change and that’s really needed.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

Claire: For me I think, you know, I have a real interest that the lived experience of disability actually offers a really extraordinary and quite creative perspective on life. I think disability is one of the most creative ways of having to exist in the world, you know, whether you want to or not you know you’re required to be creative. And for me in an arts context it’s then phenomenally frustrating to see that, to feel that disabled people are still relatively on the margins you know, I think there are some of us that are managing to get the opportunity to carve a path into it but this thing of going, actually, the arts could be so much richer for this perspective, because they’re, these are people who are experiencing the world in a much more creative way because you’re required to negotiate differently, and sometimes that’s really difficult but sometimes that’s also, it’s really illuminating you know in terms of what it requires you to have to work out.

It feels like that’s that thing of, in terms of faith communities and religions to kind of acknowledge that actually instead of viewing disabled people as people to be helped or supported it’s like actually, how about acknowledging that these people might have an extraordinary sort of insight into the very core ideas that you’re trying to grapple with in faith, you know, what does it mean to be human? That disabled people actually because of what they’re encountering in their life, actually yeah the wisdom of some of these voices is extraordinary, you know, and that that actually is just a loss to these faiths to not be sort of, not actually be really mining the knowledge of disabled people and, and yeah rather going ‘okay, well let’s include you’ saying actually ‘yeah what can I learn from you?’-

Jak: -‘What are we missing?’

Claire: Yeah, ‘what can we learn from you?’ ‘How about you lead us a little bit and show us what you know and what you experience?’
But there’s also another journey of how do you empower disabled people to be in a place of feeling confident and that they have that knowledge and have a right to lead, and have an insight that is worthy of sharing, and that’s always a big journey for people to, whether you can support disabled people to be empowered to that place. And not everybody’s offered the support and understanding, and the right community around them to get to that place.

Jak: Yeah, yeah and I guess in terms of the people you spoke to through Deaf Connections, in terms of relationship to their faith, they’re not even being given that opportunity to get in the door/, to get in the room, to even start to understand the ways they can contribute to the faith.

Claire: /No.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

(Content note: This podcast contains interview extracts recorded at Deaf Connections. A British Sign Language interpreter, interpreting on behalf of five Deaf people, speaks their answers out loud).

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

[Interview clip]

Interpreter: So I’d like to go back to your question and your perspective; should we be the ones going to them or should…? You know like in history they’re so used to saying deaf people don’t need to come.  They don’t need to come.  They won’t be able to learn.  They won’t be able to understand.
We have to roll up our sleeve and we have to fight for our own faith.  Because if we don’t, then they won’t do anything for us.  Because they think it’s okay.  They don’t, they think ‘if we have to pay for interpreters, that’s going to cost so much money’, so they just avoid it altogether.  So we actually have to be the ones fighting for our own access.  That’s, that’s what it come down to.

Claire: I mean I think that is, sometimes, in the arts I guess is my direct experience of it, you know if I think with making Guide Gods I made the decision from the start to try as much as possible to make it as accessible as possible.
Yeah, everybody hears the audio description, there’s a captioning going on for hard of hearing people but actually it’s just, it’s also there for all the hearing people as well because these voices are quite hard to understand at times. In the space there’s a lot of choices as well, you can choose to listen more, you can choose to read, you can choose to watch what I’m doing, you can choose where you want to sit without being told to sit somewhere.
What I was coming back to was this idea that at the moment still the responsibility for creating accessible performance still falls predominantly on the shoulders of disabled and D/eaf artists, we are still the people that are making predominantly the most accessible work. And in the same way that you know a lot of theatres maybe in the UK have started to provide BSL shows, and they start to provide audio description, quite often it’s like oh the Thursday morning matinee of our West End show will be, will have a BSL interpreter, and it’s like, as if D/eaf people don’t have a job, you know. And from talking to the Deaf Club about religion as well they have the same issue.

[Violin plays]

[Interview clip]

Interpreter: You know there’s a Saint Mary Church on a Sunday night, at six o’clock but obviously I’m not really that confident [and comfortable] to go so I’m still waiting for a right place to go to, a good place to go to but I’ve not found it yet.  I’d rather have a Sunday morning but, with everyone else but because it’s a deaf service it’s at night.

[Interpreter to person: Is it a deaf only service at night or anyone?]

Hearing do come but they have interpreters especially at that time, but the numbers do dwindle because you know people pull out because it is so late.

Claire: So there’s no Sunday morning services?

Interpreter: Yeah, just night time for us.

Claire: Wow.

Interpreter:  Usually, in the morning eight o’clock or nine o’clock, people often do go to church and deaf people have to go at night, and well my friends all go to the pub, getting drunk and I have to go to the church.  You know that’s not a…

Claire: [Laughs] It’s a choice.

Interpreter: [Laughs] I know but that’s what I’m left with.

Claire: These very strange sort of, accommo-, you know when the accommodation is made, sometimes it’s made in this very surreal and begrudging manner, you know that-

Jak: -Or patronising.

Claire: Yeah patronising or just this thing of we don’t want to disturb the show for the normative people. We don’t want to sign our Saturday night show. We don’t want to sign our Sunday morning service that we norm-, that we always host, we’ll sign our less attended one, that’ll be less disruptive. And it’s like, what, I just find for me I’m sometimes more surprised that that would happen in a faith setting than anywhere else ‘cause to me it’s like surely most of these faiths are really saying that everybody is equal, the core beliefs of most of them are the same; that everybody is valuable in the eyes of their God. Yet the practices and the systems that have been set up are so damaged by human beings [laughs] that they don’t always embody those beliefs at times it feels when you start to look at people who require different things you know.

The responsibility falls back on the disabled and D/eaf people to have to fight for it. And that, I guess the thing of, sometimes I guess what is frustrating is just, I think it’s not always understood when you’re able to live a more normative journey through life is how exhausting it is to fight these little battles all the time, and eventually yeah some people just give up.

[Interview clip]

And I’m getting fed up. It’s wasting my time because what’s the point in practicing your faith if you don’t understand it?

Claire: They’re like well yeah, why would I follow, why would I bother going to try and learn about my religion if they’re not going to actually provide any material. They don’t want me to read the bible, they don’t want me to read the Qur’an so why would I bother?

Jak: As people that are excluded from certain spaces sometimes you have to like muscle your way in, and like how do we do that and also, to a certain extent why do we do that? When something persistently excludes you and tells you you’re not welcome, what keeps us going to want to be included in that thing?

Claire: Yeah, yeah, why would D/eaf and disabled people want to be included in these faiths that are making sometimes little or no effort to welcome you, yeah. Um.

Jak: And with the art world? [laughs]

Claire: Yeah, and with lots of, with every aspect of society still. Yeah.

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

(Content note: This podcast contains interview extracts recorded at Deaf Connections. A British Sign Language interpreter, interpreting on behalf of five Deaf people, speaks their answers out loud).

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

Claire: Something that I was going to just say in relation to the Deaf Club as well was, the fact that actually they also talked about their relationship to the concept of healing. A lot of the interviews that I did were people talking about healing from a Christian perspective and faith healers that were very much coming from a sort of Catholic or Evangelical sort of perspective on healing. But actually talking to the Deaf Club, you were talking to people that were coming from an Islamic tradition and were being taken to faith healers as well.

[Violin plays]

[Interview clip]

Interpreter: So my mum and dad took me to this old man’s house.  I was sitting down and the man came over to me and started speaking to me, in my ear.  Something about praying and I was like, you know just like I’m doing, and then somebody else spoke into my other ear and this kind of happened regularly, people come over and start speaking to me.  And then it turned out they were doing some sort of magical ceremony to try and get me to hear.  And they were paying; my mum and dad were paying these people to do this.  And it wasn’t working, I told her, “what are you making me go here for”?  You know my mum kept asking me, “Can you hear yet?  Can you hear yet?”  So now when my mum now understands that I actually can do everything that anyone else can.  It’s not 100% but I can still do it.  And she’s more satisfied and she’s more relieved but back then um, she thought God has made me deaf and she thought that she could heal that.

[Violin plays]

Interpreter: And I said to my mother-in-law, “If my babies are Deaf, I don’t care.  I’m happy whether they’re hearing or Deaf.  I don’t care because as a Deaf person I’ll still communicate with my children.”  My mother-in-law was taken aback by my straightforwardness.  So as a Deaf person, I don’t care.  I’m happy with myself.

Claire: There’s quite a common problematic narrative and issue around Deaf people becoming parents because society, a lot of Hearing society presumes that they won’t want Deaf children or that there shouldn’t be Deaf children, and, or if Deaf people have married into families who have Hearing, families, and the tension within families of whether a child will be hearing or deaf, and whether that’s a good or a bad thing, and it was really interesting to hear their experiences of having to negotiate with their families around those issues of like no I’m absolutely happy, of course I want a Deaf child, and yeah, and hearing them having to sort of, how they had had to sort of fight against their closest relatives against that horrendous narrative that surely they wouldn’t want Deaf children, that their children should be Hearing, or they would want their children to be Hearing.

I guess this, this tied to me into this problematic thing around particularly the healing of this presumption that the way one person leads their life is how they presume somebody else should want to lead their life. And that that’s really where all life’s problems arise is in the presumption that the way that you lead your life is the right way. And that surely all Deaf must want to hear. And surely all physically impaired people want to be non-disabled, and surely all visually impaired people must want to see, and it was interesting to hear, yeah, that a lot of the issues I think within faith traditions really press on that button, of still a very ableist perspective that disability and deafness should be eradicated or, maybe not the idea that it is eradicated, but the idea that you would not want to be that way.

That’s actually where all the homophobia and racism and all the ableism, all these things are really actually rooted in these hierarchies that are so subliminally conditioned into us that- The things that you think make life worth living must be the same for the next person. And it’s like actually no; running up a mountain isn’t the thing that makes everyone’s life worth living. Having two legs and walking is not actually what makes everyone’s lives worth living. But there are so many sort of overriding narratives of things like that.



[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.