Głusza

In her book debut, journalist and editor Anna Goc demonstrates, with a peculiar example, how true and how terrifying Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous saying can be:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” As she penetrates, subtly and by degrees, the Polish community of people deaf, deaf and speechless, and hard of hearing (the reporter learned sign language over the course of writing her book), Goc comes to understand what life can seem like for people who are completely separated from others. A life in which one’s native language is a foreign tongue, since one is unable to employ it, although, according to our physical constitution, we should be able to. But this in turn means that, practically speaking, one is a citizen of no state, becoming instead an inhabitant of the titular “deaf backwoods” – a planet which is extraordinarily silent, lonely and indeed unbearable to live in. In this sense, Goc’s book is no run-of-the-mill interventionist reportage, but a manifesto from places that are completely isolated; mysterious enclaves, where one communicates in a different

way and perceives people and reality in a different way, too. It is composed of worlds that can terrify us, especially when we read of children who have experienced various forms of violence, but are unable to communicate it to anyone, in any language. Or of a woman who must communicate a stillbirth to her other child – an elementary school pupil. Goc’s reportage opens a completely new perspective on human life to us

“heards” of people (as the protagonists of her work describe those who are not deaf ).

As the author herself writes, this, for the reader, is “a journey not dissimilar to a trip to a foreign country.” Written in a raw, but balanced tongue, The Deaf Backwoods operates on two levels, appealing to our sensitivity and to our imagination. It shows us what it really means to understand someone in a language more complex than a national tongue: that of splendid literature.