#protactile

"In my community, we are in the midst of a revolution. We have our first truly tactile language, called Protactile. We insist on doing everything our way, fumbling around, groping along, touching everything and everyone. We are messing with traditional spaces, rearranging them to suit us better, rather than the other way around. The Protactile movement is obsessed with direct experience. As Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect, put it in a recent conversation, the question we begin with is not “How do we make it more accessible?” Instead, we start by asking, “What feels beautiful?” When hearing and sighted people join us, they pick up Protactile and learn how to work and socialize with us in our space. They often find themselves closing their eyes, either literally or by dimming their visual processing, because sight isn’t necessary. Bodies in contact become as normal to them as they are to us."

What I’m going to say about Protactile isn’t the tip of an iceberg. It’s only one-eighth of a snowflake riding that tip of the iceberg. I wrote a whole book of essays about Protactile, and that’s maybe worth three snowflakes. Protactile is such an epochal event. We are in the year 15 A.P. I was born in 28 B.P. Most people reading our interview cannot understand what a wild time it is for us, but the good news is that you can pretend you know all about it. And in pretending and saying, “Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean,” you will begin to understand.

Take the card game UNO, one of the games widely available in a Braille version. The standard cards have dots at the corner that say things like “Y5” for a yellow card with the number five. In practice, playing the game with the Brailled cards is painfully slow. If Protactile hadn’t given us permission to rip sighted norms into shreds, I would still be fingering those dots like a fool. The way to go is with textured shapes, as in our homemade version of UNO, called Textures and Shapes. In this Protactile version you feel the player ahead of you hesitate and make a joking gesture before depositing a velvet star. Now the attention shifts to you, with some hands feeling yours as you deliberate, while a couple of knees tauntingly jostle your knees. Should you unload your velvet square or your rayon star? But the transformation doesn’t end there. Ideally, there are up to four players, who can feel everything at all times if they want to follow the action, or can chatter in three-way Protactile while the fourth attends to their turn.

#4 DeafBlind Awareness Month