6. "No Words, Guys. No Words."
In other words: we found that video, with its audiovisual preservation of embodied voice, could indeed help us capture, interpret, and share what we saw to be the infinitely nuanced nature of sponsorship as described by Deborah Brandt (2001). Sponsors—those "who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy" (p. 19)—need not, for example, do so in a direct, one-to-one exchange. Sponsorship, especially when decoupled from direct indicators of alphabetic text, seemed to us to indicate a far more complex operation of influence. Consider how Liberty told us in her very first interview about her older sister, Jovanna, who "doesn't walk or talk" (at around 3:05 into the video). But it wasn't until Liberty—working on her own—took the camera to her home that we started to understand the complexities of Jovanna's surprising role in her sponsorship.
Let's engage a bit of heuristic play for a moment. Knowing that you have seen the scenario that we are about to describe (15:28 to 18:52), let's pretend that you have not, and let's try to imagine how it may be described—keeping in mind, that is, that you actually have seen it. The point of our play will be to determine—knowing the "answer" all along—if you can detect moments in our description that may invite you to question our translation of the scenario.
In this scene, Liberty introduces us to Jovanna even as she announces that her older sister "has no spoken language." Throughout the segment, Liberty clearly speaks to "us," her future audience. The scene is powerful and disturbing. And it is dark—both emotionally and visually. Liberty, then untrained in video recording techniques, video recorded her interview with Jovanna in a poorly lit room. It is often hard to see Jovanna in the shadows; however, we hear Jovanna's breathing and we hear Liberty's narration from behind the camera. The lighting makes the scene all the harder to "watch." And it makes it all the more compelling. Kenneth Burke (1945) described "scene" as "a fit ‘container' for the act, expressing in fixed properties the same quality that the action expresses in terms of development" (p. 3). Everything about this scene seems to qualify the action as intimate: It is a dimly lit, quiet bedroom occupied by two sisters who have a long and intimate familiarity with one another. Liberty apologizes to us for the bad lighting in apparent deference to Jovanna's needs; however, she apparently apologizes to Jovanna as she says, "I hate to do this, but…" just before she lifts Jovanna's shirt to expose the outline of a cylindrical shape (the size of a soda can) under the skin of her abdomen. These are intimate moves. As researchers, we could not have had this interaction. Only Liberty and Jovanna could have had this interaction—one that their mother (as she told us after watching the video of the interaction) was happy Liberty had shared with us. After describing Jovanna's situation and her sister's motivating influence in her life, Liberty playfully asks her sister at the end of the segment, "You don't have no words for the camera?" Then, soberly, Liberty addresses her future viewers: "No words, guys. No words."
Apart from its emotional power, the scene is also powerfully informative in that it opens a glimpse into the complex web of sponsoring in which Jovanna has played a central role in Liberty's life: Jovanna, a young woman with severe cerebral palsy who cannot speak and who requires ongoing care and attention. During our own subsequent visits to Flint, we learn much more about characteristics of the community and are able to posit how Jovanna's needs for attention have sponsored forms of intervention from competing influences in the community. Liberty's life has been qualitatively unlike the lives of most of her peers—her experiences, influenced always by her family's love and care for Jovanna, have marked her as decidedly "different," a word that repeatedly surfaces in interviews with Liberty and her friends and family members.
We will have more to say, presently, about what Jovanna has taught us about the ethics of voice. But, first, let's return to our game. Even in this brief description of our interaction with Liberty, let's take a moment to note just how much we are asking of you—our readers. We make claims about the scene's power and about how the poor lighting both affects the viewer and comments on the action captured (or occluded) by the camera. We characterize the nature of Liberty's interaction with her sister (and her audience) as both playful and sober. We posit who Liberty appears to be addressing and suggest why she may be doing so. We qualify Liberty's footage as compelling, informative, and magnificently amateur. We even tell you how you would feel were you fortunate enough to read/view/audit this footage (and, of course, you had already done so). We are asking you to believe us. If your only access to that scene were through our description of it, you would likely feel yourself lacking sufficient resources to interpret the scene we offer above in any other way, since your only access to the scene is through our description of it. Now, after considering our description of the scene, take another look at the audiovisual version we've just attempted to render in text:
Fig. 2: "Jovanna" by Liberty Bell (captioned, or read the transcript in the appendix.)
Now that you have reviewed the scene a couple of times, you likely feel equipped, and invited, to offer understandings that may be divergent from ours. Upon review of the footage, for example, you may offer a counter-analysis to what we have interpreted as "playfulness." Or possibly you may have noticed other indicators to support identifying alternate audiences that Liberty seems to be addressing. You may wish to interpret some of Jovanna's responses as meaningful within the context. You may even wish to critique our choice to share the clip with you at all, citing our own identification of "intimacy" as something that should have been kept private. Or, you may question the obvious sound of the researcher's voices—absent from the actual scene of action but present in the version offered for your review—that shows up in the form of the blackened screen that we have used to prevent you from seeing the pump that Liberty exposes in Jovanna's abdomen. And while we have prevented you from seeing this intimate/private action, we have left Liberty's unedited voice to talk you through the action. We have done so to respect Liberty's desire to let you know about Jovanna's implant that she tells us "didn't even do anything but cause problems," but also to respect Jovanna's privacy, as she is unable to give us permission to view this part of her person—even though her mother did give us permission to share the footage. Sometimes, it is the conspicuous absence of voice that speaks most loudly—and if you read the transcript, you will see that we have transcribed only Liberty's audible words and what we have interpreted to be Liberty's semantic non-verbal sounds: sighs, exhales, whispers, and what appear to be meaningful fluctuations in volume. We have not transcribed Jovanna's nonverbal sounds. Her voice is conspicuously absent from the visual transcript. In doing so, we do not mean to silence Jovanna's voice, but to help you see the conspicuous absence of her audible voice and offer to you our shared challenge: How do we transcribe what we may be only beginning to hear, let alone understand?
Fortunately, for our hearing audience, you have the unchanging video record to inform and support both your analyses of what Liberty and Jovanna have said and of what we, the researchers and editors, have said. In other words, you can do more than tell us that we are wrong or right—what we may have mischaracterized or missed altogether: You can show us where, specifically. Brandt (2001) claimed,
Literacy instruction needs to develop from a sense of a new role for schools, as a place where the ideological complexities (including the inequities) of literacy sponsorship are sorted through and negotiated. Basic literate ability requires the ability to position and reposition oneself among literacy's sponsoring agents as well as among competing forms of communication. (p. 198)
In keeping with Brandt's characterization of the scenic qualities of literacy instruction and Burke's characterization that scene expresses in fixed properties the same quality that the action expresses in terms of development, we offer the following: The audiovisual video footage allows viewers/auditors to sort through, negotiate, position, and reposition the action in this scene—again and again and again.