Personal: Jodee Mundy’s solo show on deaf culture and her life as a CODA

“Then I finally saw my mum signing from a distance, ‘Where have you been? I was worried about you.’

“I signed back, ‘But the lady made an announcement on the microphone,’ and my mum just walked over, looked at me really lovingly, and said, ‘I’m deaf.’”

Mundy had learnt Auslan (Australian Sign Language) before she spoke English. Of course, she knew her mother was deaf. But what that actually meant hadn’t quite sunk in.

“My parents had always told me they were deaf in sign language,” she says, on a video call from her home in Melbourne. “But I didn’t realise that in English, it means you don’t hear.

“From that moment, I realised I had my feet in two camps that didn’t really understand each other. The world was not designed for my family, but it was designed for me.”

It would be another decade before she discovered there was a name – an identity – for kids like her. CODA: Child of Deaf Adults.

Mundy, who has two older brothers, grew up as the only hearing person in her family. Several of her nephews and nieces are deaf, too.

The stories of how that’s shaped their lives, for better and for worse, are woven through her solo show Personal, which she’s bringing to the Auckland Arts Festival next month.

The multimedia piece combines old family photos and Super 8 footage with animation and pre-recorded video interviews as Mundy shifts from speaker to translator, a dual role she’s played all her life.

Described by one reviewer as “searching, poignant and gently comic”, Personal first toured Australia in 2018. After a five-year hiatus, there’s new material she didn’t feel “emotionally ready” to reveal before now.

This time, she’s given herself permission to be angry – but not at her family for the perceived burden their deafness placed on her childhood, nor the genetic mischance that caused their disability (a loaded word itself).

“In the first version, I took out some things around my anger at people who hear,” she says.

At school, Mundy was an object of curiosity. At home, she shouldered responsibilities well beyond her years as a conduit between her parents and the hearing world.

By the age of 8 or 9, she was handling phone calls for her father’s carpentry business and accompanying her mother to the bank.

At night, she’d stand by the TV set and sign the news, which didn’t have Teletext captions, although soaps like Neighbours did. In 1989, that’s how she heard about the Berlin Wall coming down.

“As a kid, I was always managing a person’s reaction when they realised my mum was deaf. And because she was deaf, they might also assume she was stupid,” she says.

“Part of my job was having to advocate for them, reminding people that my parents work, my parents drive, my dad runs a business, they have a mortgage and three kids, and they’re doing very well, thank you.”

Mundy’s parents, Peter and Gillian, had met at a deaf church camp. Apparently, Gillian sneaked in and painted Peter’s toenails while he was asleep.

Back then, deaf children weren’t allowed to progress beyond Year 10 and were expected to find work in a factory.

Mundy’s oldest brother, Shane, became the first deaf person in New South Wales to get his high school certificate after their parents fought for him to have access to interpreters. He went on to complete a university degree and has worked as a consultant on Personal.

Sign language interpreters have increasingly become part of the landscape here, especially since Covid, where they were visible on a daily basis at the Government’s 1pm press conference.

The 2021 film CODA, which was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, featured deaf actors using sign language to communicate. That level of mainstream acceptance hasn’t always been the case, though.

“Growing up in the 80s, there was a lot of stigma around sign language and a lot of ableism,” says Mundy, who’s now in her late 40s.

“There was no social media talking about identity or intersectionality or identity politics.

“Disability was something people were ashamed of, and that internalised shame needs healing and understanding and awareness to turn it into pride.”

In Auslan, the way to sign “deaf” is by putting your index and middle finger to your ear and then to your mouth.

To sign “CODA”, you put your fingers to your ear and then to your heart. So introducing yourself as CODA, says Mundy, means “I have a Deaf heart.”

That capital letter signifies the deaf community’s sense of cultural identity, rejecting the medical model of disability where there’s a health condition in need of being fixed or cured.

Instead, deafness is viewed as a social disability, framed by the challenges deaf people face in a world that’s not designed (or particularly willing) to accommodate their needs.

In some circles, fiercely identifying with deaf pride has become so politicised that even choosing to have cochlear implants has become controversial, as a form of minority oppression that threatens deaf culture.

Mundy takes a more holistic view, supporting a bilingual and bi-modal approach. One of her nieces, who has two cochlear implants, both signs and speaks.

“How brilliant to give a child two languages: a visual and an aural one.”

As the only hearing person in her family, has she ever suffered from a kind of survivor’s guilt? There’s a cautious pause before she replies.

“There can be elements of lateral violence from some parts of the deaf community where you can feel microaggression for being able to hear, and for having privilege. That does happen,” she says.

“In the US, there are a lot of CODAs who keep quiet, because if they speak up about things, they’ll be shamed for being able to hear. They should just be there to interpret for others. So it can be a bit of a minefield.

“As a CODA, if I was making a show and I did it more about me rather than my family, or if someone was exploiting the language for their own gain in a way that wasn’t culturally respectful or in allyship, that would get slammed. So, it’s a delicate path and yeah, there’s protocol.”

A few years ago, when Mundy and her then-partner were thinking about having children, they talked it through with her parents. The whole family agreed to be tested and a genetic cause was identified.

For Mundy, this was important information to be able to pass on, but it didn’t influence her decision.

“I told my parents it wasn’t in any way because I was ashamed,” she says. “Whether our child was deaf or not didn’t matter.

“I knew I had the skills to be able to raise that child, so I felt really equipped. For my partner, it was more of a journey. But we decided we could do this together and took the plunge.”

Their daughter was born with full hearing and has learnt to sign. However, Mundy knows other CODAs who have decided against taking the risk, although not for the reasons you might think.

“They didn’t want to spend their adult life advocating for their child,” she says, “because they’d already done that growing up for their parents”.

Some might question the ethics of choosing to bring a child into the world knowing the genetic odds are against them. Mundy immediately bristles at the idea.

“That’s just ignorant and stupid,” she says. “Being deaf is not a death sentence. Deaf people can do everything but hear.

“I know that for many people who have no experience of deaf culture, it’s an earth-shattering thing to have a deaf child.

“Of course, if they don’t have the skills or the language or the connection of communities, I have full respect for that experience. But it’s not the end of the world.

“Humans are very adaptable and disability doesn’t mean the end. It just means different, and that’s okay.”

Mundy, too, is living with a disability. Five years ago, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. “And I’m still going. I’m on cancer treatment every day.”

In 2020, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (Australia’s highest honour) for her service to the performing arts.

Through her career, she’s collaborated with many diverse communities, including First Nations and LGBTIQA+ artists. Her work Imagined Touch, a 10-year project created with deafblind performers, culminated in a live show, an installation and an award-winning film documentary.

She’s currently developing a children’s book – her original concept for Personal, which she’s taking on tour to the UK in October.

She also works part-time for the National Relay Services, an interpreting video service for Deaf people that’s newly available here. In 2013, she was an Auslan interpreter for a public event with the Dalai Lama when he came to Melbourne.

Mundy considers it both a privilege and an advantage to have been raised bilingual.

“Deaf people have taught me how to be inclusive and accessible,” she says. “I can travel the world and know how to communicate with my body and gesture in a way that most hearing people don’t know.

“I actually feel sorry for people who hear and don’t know how to sign. I feel like they’re missing out on some really critical skills around what it is to be a human being.”

Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.