Song for a Whale

The handshape poem is ASL’s counterpart to the rhyme of verbal language. Rather than rhyming sounds, the handshape poem features the repetition of hands being in the same shape for the duration of the poem. It can be a collaborative effort, with both parties taking turns adding to it, as they keep the handshape consistent. This recurring motif connects Iris to her grandparents, who are Deaf and are the adults with whom she can best communicate. While Iris’s grandparents encourage her creativity, Iris’s narrow-minded hearing teacher doesn’t recognize the handshape poem’s rhyme, which indicates that Iris is in an educational environment where she won’t flourish. She takes Ms. Conn’s attack on the handshape poem as an attack not only on herself but also on Deaf culture, which Ms. Conn sees as inferior to the mainstream hearing culture.

Additionally, the handshape poem becomes a barometer of Grandma’s happiness and attitude toward life. While she’s in the listless throes of bereavement, Grandma dismisses Iris’s attempt to start a poem, saying that it’s more Grandpa’s thing. This causes Iris to feel a rift with her grandmother. In contrast, when they’re together on the Alaskan cruise, Grandma eagerly participates in a poem about the glaciers she longed to see with Grandpa. Grandma’s return to poetic creativity signifies her return to herself and her willingness to give life another chance after her husband’s death.

The most important handshape poem in the novel is the one that Iris performs for the whale when she meets him. The poem comes to Iris spontaneously following her sighting of the whale. As her fingers make “a good shape for ocean waves and music” (267), she answers the physical sighting of the whale in a figure that replicates his form. Although her song is soundless, the following chapter from the whale’s perspective shows how it has encouraged him to sing his. Here, Kelly adds magical elements to her realist narrative as she shows the mysterious communion between a silent handshape poem—which the hearing community misunderstands because it doesn’t have the same rhyming components as verbal poetry—and the whale’s unusual song. One misunderstood song meets another, and they communicate perfectly, dispelling the illusion that Iris and the whale are alone in the world.