The Unheard:

A Memoir of Deafness and Africa

by Josh Swiller
288 pp. Holt Paperbacks, 2007 $14

Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

Growing up with near-total hearing loss, Josh Swiller experienced life on the periphery of conversation, where spoken words dissolved into fuzzy syllables. In The Unheard, Swiller’s first book, he describes his dream of wanting to live in a place where no one takes pity on him for his lack of hearing, where he doesn’t have to pretend that he can understand every word that’s said. He applies to the Peace Corps, hoping he can “find a place past deafness.”

The Peace Corps assigns him to Mununga, a small town in Zambia, where he is charged with persuading villagers to build wells. In Mununga, he meets Augustine Jere, who runs the dilapidated local health clinic, and they become fast friends, whiling away long evenings with a chess set and a jug of banana wine.

In chapters that read like journal entries, Swiller describes his growing awareness that pressing for change – even change as simple as digging a well to provide clean water – is not as easy as it seemed during Peace Corps training. The villagers have no money and little hope that their leaders will help them. When they bring their emaciated children to Jere’s clinic to be weighed, Swiller notices villagers with sores erupting from their skin – a telltale sign of AIDS. Facing these challenges maddens him on a daily basis, but he feels at home for the first time in his life.

Swiller’s narrative builds upon his confrontations with a fearsome village elder named Boniface, whom he unwittingly offends on his first day in Mununga. The memoir keeps the reader guessing how the rising conflict between the two headstrong men will play out. Although the storyline is compelling, Swiller makes an odd decision to record most of his interactions with other characters as dialogue, an inordinate amount of which seems to be Swiller asking, “What?” followed by characters repeating their previous lines.

Swiller emphasizes that he has “…come to develop and trust an intuition based on physical observation. Body language – posture, motion, expression – reveals so much.” But his focus on dialogue instead of his observations ends up stifling the emotional connection that he claims to have with Jere and the villagers. Though Swiller’s descriptions could be more polished, his skill for maintaining tension makes The Unheard a fascinating book about a country, and a continent, that is so often overlooked.