Winning Words Lesson Guide (Adults) Winnning Words Lesson Plan Guide | Page 23

Deafness is the degree to which a person experiences auditory mechanism failure.
There are several kinds of deafness. The condition is not always “total” or “complete”.
Reread the entire first verse of Living Chartreuse very slowly, paying careful attention
to the phonemes /s/ and /t/. Can you identify the literary device emerging from the
sound effects of your slow, deliberate re-reading of the first verse?
Phoneme? Whuz dah?
A phoneme is the scientific name linguists give to any speech sound.
Phonemes are stored mentally and are heard whenever we speak. They can
also be represented in written form. In writing, phonemes are represented by
drawing two slanted lines on either side of a letter. There is, therefore, a
significant difference between s and /s/ or t and /t/. Whenever you see a
letter between two slanted lines as shown above, this represent the sound the
letter makes and not the name of the letter. For example, /s/ = sssss and /t/
= tuh
Now dive below the surface of what you read in the first verse and think about how
speech sounds are made. Think about your ability to gather information from the rich
sound effects phonemes make. Next, compare your thoughts to what you have
discovered so far about Benjamin.
Is there another literary device at work below the surface at this stage of the poem?
Try to explain it to your reading partner.
A tragic past
At one point in the Caribbean region, children with disabilities were, to a
large degree, viewed as a disgrace to the family by their own family mem-
bers and others in the community. It was a largely held view that to have a
child with a disability was some sort of visible evidence of divine judgement
on the mother or the entire family. Tragically, as a result of such misinterpre-
tation and misunderstanding, these children were typically hidden (and often
locked) away for much of their lives in their own homes as a strategy to
“conceal” the disgrace of the family. They almost always suffered physical,
emotional and sexual abuse. Think about your immediate neighbourhood
where you live. How accurate is it to say that phenomenon outlined above is
a part of the distant past in your community?