Insights: Out, Proud and L-L-Loud!

What is it like to grow up as a stutterer in a world which forcefully demands fluency?

For my most recent job interview, I had made it a point to disclose my stutter to the interviewer. No more fumbling around trying to pass as a fluent person when all it ever does is make me insecure and gives the impression that I don’t know what I’m talking about. This particular interview was for a teaching position at a school that had made lofty claims about their openness to difference, so I was cautiously optimistic.  

While introducing myself, I slipped in a line about my stutter, emphasising that I hoped it wouldn’t be a deal breaker. My interviewer, who was a senior educator at the institute, gave me a toothy smile and nodded as I made the disclosure.“Don’t worry about stuttering,” he said. “I don’t know anyone who does not fumble.”  But fumbling isn’t the same as stuttering, Mr. Educator! is what I wanted to say, but I merely pursed my lips in response.

While he did listen patiently as I navigated my speech blocks during our conversation, towards the end of the interview he concluded: “Excellent! You have done very well despite the shortcoming that you call stuttering. You have it in you to be a good teacher. But I am a little apprehensive as to how you would explain your speech to young children — ”

Wait, he is right. How would I? Surely, amongst the odd ten thousand students, not a single one would be a stutterer! Nor would there be kids with other kinds of mental and physical disabilities. Everyone would think me a broken tape and enjoy a great comic interlude.

As he was finishing his comments, I was already building a comeback in my head. Never had I felt so flared up to speak for my stutter.

“But Sir,” I began, “Why do you think it would be difficult to explain stuttering to children? Isn’t that the reason why they have enrolled in your school? To learn?”

CDD20 (2019)

“Well.” He seemed to have been caught off guard. “Yes, of course.”

"You talked about the importance of inclusivity, diversity and a healthy learning environment. I personally believe that exposure to difference is the best way to learn about inclusivity. Surely you’re not insinuating that a speech impediment is best hidden from young children?”

It suddenly dawned on me that my tone was veering towards what corporate higher ups deem ‘disrespectful’. So I cleared my throat and quickly added, “I would rather like to show kids that there is no one correct way of speaking, Sir. That’s all.”

Silence for a good two minutes: an eternity during which I don’t think I moved or breathed one bit. Contrary to my fears of him ending the interview right there, a gradual smile spread across his face. “You are right. I am glad we are having this conversation.”

***

Being a badass isn’t always easy. Although I had countered the interviewer’s ableism, my sense of triumph at having done so came with an equally heavy feeling of hopelessness, which grew by the second and almost threatened to subsume the fact that for the first time ever, I had stood up for myself. Several questions ran through my head: Was it a mistake to disclose my stutter? Did I just dig my own grave?

Stutterers occupy a very curious position in society. In medical terms, we are an anomaly. At the same time, stuttering isn't widely accepted as a disability. Half of our lives are spent convincing others that our stutter is a real thing, but people rarely listen. In a capitalist world that doesn’t have time to lend an ear to its most eloquent soldiers, how can I, a stutterer, hope to be heard? 

The stutterer is shut up, silenced, spoken over, given funny looks and called names. When she tries to educate people and tell them that it is okay to take a few extra seconds to get across what she wants to say, she is slapped with the legends of stuttering celebrities who have overcome dysfluency and are now some of the most heard voices in the industry. Somehow it becomes a moral flaw that she cannot ‘fix’ herself like James Earl Jones did. Growing up as a stutterer, I have always been made to believe that it is my fault that I can’t speak like others do, that words get stuck in my throat halfway, that, like threads, they become entangled with my tongue and all I can make is a funny noise. That it is me alone who is stopping myself.

The onus sits heavy upon the psyche of the stutterer. As we internalise the stigma, all we are left to do is blame ourselves. For me, the experience of being a stutterer has been an isolated one, since I never knew anyone else who stuttered like I did. In school, whenever they weren’t speaking over me, most of my friends would either suppress a laugh or sit in an uncomfortable silence when I stuttered. The Bengali word for a stutterer, totla, floated freely whenever I got stuck while speaking.

Naturally, passing as fluent was something I tried to do, and my friends liked it better too. For me, passing consisted of switching words that I anticipated I’d stutter on with words that I found easier to utter, modulating my voice in a certain way, and acting like I forgot what I was about to say to buy myself some time to push my words out. But passing has always been tricky, because with the pressure to not reveal that I stutter comes a constant sense of impending doom, the apprehension of a looming prolonged block or repetition that others might perceive as funny.

I believe it’s different for different people, but for me, I find it easier to hide my stutter on days when I feel particularly confident or when I am among people I feel secure with. Nevertheless, it rarely works all the time, and in the end, as a teenager I just played into a stereotype of the ‘quiet introvert kid’ who always dresses in black, as if mourning their own silence (I was, in fact, into metal music and adopted a gothcore aesthetic). In the absence of any confidante, I could give no vent to my emotions, which kept building until I lost my voice altogether. It fuelled my inferiority complex and told me that my voice wasn’t worthy of being heard. In situations where I was forced to speak, I would be overwhelmed with terror.

Fear is a massive part of the stutterer’s experience — fear coupled with shame and guilt. To this day, these emotions are so deeply ingrained in my mind that no matter how assertive I try to be, they still plague me. The crippling anxiety that comes with being dysfluent is paralysing because the other’s reaction to one’s stutter is instant and harsh, especially in a situation that calls on you to be fast. If you are late to utter a word, you are deemed to be wasting everyone's time. 

For instance, I once boarded an auto-rickshaw and stuttered on the name of the lane I wanted to be dropped at. The instant reaction of the pilot was to rudely say, “Quick! Don’t even know where you want to get off?” These may be little things, but for us stutterers, they are massive blows to our self-esteem, to the point that we shut ourselves off and refuse to speak anymore.

In hindsight, I see how all our school life, we are trained precisely to talk straight, yet the idea of straight-talk is a dubious one. To talk straight is to talk ‘fluently’; to talk straight is to talk super-fast without hesitation; to talk straight is to cut others short. Moreover, to talk straight is also to perform. It is most often the culmination of years of training in rhetoric and delivery. It is an endeavour to erase the ellipses and the uh/ums. It is an exercise in upholding an ideal, non-stop, linear flow of speech — the kind you would find in AI text-to-speech. 

To perform is also to fabricate. Sometimes, the act of stuttering is viewed with suspicion, as a marker that you are hiding something. A very common way of showcasing a lie on television shows is to have a character fumble around in search of words. While the interlocutor doesn’t catch it, it is a clear sign to the audience that a lie is being fabricated. To me, such instances have always felt as if they are lessons in catching liars by the tone of their speech. But what about the flamboyant political and corporate straight-talkers at podiums? The ones who tell obvious lies for publicity, politics and profit? Let’s face it: exercises in being a potent speaker have always been about becoming convincing enough to sell a thing or an idea that otherwise sports little value. Straight-talking keeps hierarchies in place by fighting off opposition with the shiny snitch that is known as charisma, and to expel difference by branding it unnatural or untrained.

A curriculum that fosters fluent speech through corrective reading lessons, recitation and elocution training, is designed with only extroverted able speakers in mind. In this approach to education, the dysfluent has to bend herself to fit in, if at all.

All my student life, I have been susceptible to those bending forces, but I also believe that my silence — my unwillingness to speak and participate in class — has been a sort of resistance, an opting-out of the fluency games. I am not necessarily proud of my silent school years, but I also could not have become who I am today if I had not traversed that territory. News flash: I got the job that I was interviewing for. But I chose not to accept the offer letter, having found a better fit for myself at another educational initiative. 

Now, as I once again set out to enter a classroom, I seek to be the kind of teacher that I had looked for all my life. (Ambitious, I know!) I am yet to discover what I can offer to young minds, but one thing I will certainly carry into the classroom is the skill to stop and listen. I also seek to learn what the children themselves have to say about speech and effective communication. What would listening to a stutterer mean to them? We’ll see. Either way, I don’t want to be a teacher who is only concerned with communicating ‘her side’. I want all types of voices to fill the room. I want to remedy the belief that children are poor communicators.

Harold Fisk, Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (1944)

In his spoken word poem "Dysfluent Waters", JJJJJerome Ellis invokes the crooked Mississippi River that was artificially straightened out by white colonial settlers in America to build plantations. But despite their efforts, every so often the river would periodically reclaim its crookedness by flooding the banks. The crooked Mississippi will always find a way back to herself. And so will we!

The system wages psychological warfare in order to tame the rippling flow of the stutterer’s speech. It laughs, grimaces and rolls its eyes at us. Yet, we persist. Stray trickles of water flowing away from the linearity imposed upon speech. The very existence of a stutterer is a reminder to the system that it is flawed in its claim that straight-talk is the only kind of talk. It is perhaps through the stutterer’s bouncing, prolonged speech that the fast-paced capitalist world of rapid fluency may see the importance of taking the time to breathe.