INTERVIEW: John Paskievich speaks on his latest documentary, "Unspeakable" (10/01/06)

INTERVIEW: John Paskievich speaks on his latest documentary, "Unspeakable"

by Fran Ponomarenko
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

John Paskievich, award-winning filmmaker and photographer, was in Montreal on August 29-30 at the National Film Board of Canada for the premier screening of his film "Unspeakable," a documentary on stuttering.

Stuttering is as old as human speech, yet it remains a medical enigma. Famous stammerers include: Marilyn Monroe (who developed her breathy speech as a means of avoiding speech blocks), Winston Churchill and Demosthenes (who stuttered but became a great orator).

Mr. Paskievich's film examines the nature, history, and treatment of a speech impediment that affects 1 percent of the world's population. People with this condition often feel diminished because of their stutter, feel they do not fit in. And speech, which normally connects humans to one another with this population often, brings isolation and stigma, as well as shame and inferiority.

Director Paskievich is himself a person who stutters. He both narrates this film and participates in it. His story and the stories of the other people are touching and courageous. Also compelling are the testimonies of children - watching them struggle to utter the simplest words cannot help but elicit compassion in the viewer. The humor and courage of all the interviewees provides an eloquent testimony to what it means to be trapped in "the tower of stutter," as W.H. Auden put it.

Fran Ponomarenko, who teaches in the English department of Vanier College in Montreal spoke to Mr. Paskievich just before the viewing of his film.

Q: What motivated you to do this kind of film?

A: I went on a tour across Canada in 2002 with my films, including "My Mother's Village," and I had to do many interviews. What should have been a simple pleasure turned into an ordeal because I sometimes spooked radio and TV interviewers as they did not know what to do with a guy that stutters.

So on my lonely walks in the rain I wondered: Where have I ever seen on TV a person that stutters? I never did. So where are they? I concluded they are not allowed to appear on the air, just as when I was young, African Americans and Aboriginals did not appear on TV. So, I decided to bring myself out of the closet and bring stuttering out too.

Q: How did you go about finding people for the film?

A: I went on the Internet and found many interesting sites. When I learned that there was a yearly conference in the U.S., I went. There were 600 people. It was amazing!

Q: Why?

A: When you stutter, you always feel you are alone; you tend to keep a low profile. I never saw anybody in a restaurant, for instance, ordering a meal and stuttering. So, to be surrounded by 600 people who stuttered, from mild stuttering to severe stuttering, well, "ya khotiv plakaty." (I wanted to cry). There were young children, senior citizens, boys and girls.

I never in my whole life made more friends than I did there in four days. If I am ever in Wales, I have a place to stay; if I am ever in Tahiti or Australia, I have a place to stay.

Q: It's an instant bond, I guess.

A: Yes, it's like one DP [displaced person] meeting another one, one Ukrainian meeting another one. They know they have gone through something similar. There's no small talk. You immediately cut to the chase. Just as a Ukrainian might have difficulty talking to an Anglo about the Ukrainian experience, so a stammerer has difficulty talking to a fluent person.

I found some of my subjects here and I also contacted speech therapists. I interviewed about 100 people. The only regret I have is that I couldn't put everyone in the film.

Q: What is your aim with this film?

A: I want to make a contribution, to make the world a more stutter-friendly place.

Q: What are the prospects for children who stammer?

A: If a young child gets good therapy before they enter school the chances are quiet good that they will become totally fluent. But often, when they enter school, the negative reactions of their school mates and teachers just reinforces avoidance behavior, which only serves to make the stutter more severe. At this stage the therapy becomes more difficult because of the overlay of emotions.

If a stutterer is stuttering by the time he or she is an adult, they will always have a stammer; they can learn to manage it but it will always be there.

Q: Did you investigate stammering problems in Ukraine?

A: I actually did. And like so much of that part of the world, it's a wasteland as far as speech therapy, as we know it, goes. There is basically folk medicine and quack medicine. So, if 1 percent of the population across cultures stutters, and if there are 46 million Ukrainians, this means that half a million stutter.

You're on your own over there. I tried to find organizations and there aren't any that I could find. But I did find organizations in Poland and the Czech Republic and in Croatia. And they are in touch with Western organizations and Western therapies. They translate books and periodicals. But in Ukraine I could see nothing like that.

Q: Did you interview any Ukrainian stutterers?

A: No, I never met a Ukrainian stutterer in North America. I met Chinese, Jews, East Indians, but never a Ukrainian.

Q: Speech is what distinguishes us from animals, and self-consciousness too, so I imagine that having a stammer affects every aspect of life.

A: Yes, because every aspect involves communication.

When I finished university, I wanted to do graduate work in anthropology. I didn't go because I couldn't see myself in seminars or teaching later on. Now I would be able to do this, as I stutter less. I am an old guy and I know myself better. I learned through hard knocks that this condition is only one aspect of me, but when I was young it seemed like the whole aspect of my being. I wanted to meet girls, and boys, and I wanted to be able to talk in class.

Q: Why do you stutter less now?

A: As a rule, people tend to stutter less as they get older. They have also done their best at whatever it is in life they have wanted to do.

Q: So is there a nervousness factor?

A: You tend to stutter more if you think that you might be rejected, in romance, at work, in school, or in Plast.

Q: Then there is a psychological component.

A: If you try to stutter less you will stutter more. This is not a psychological condition, but speech is psychological. We speak differently to different people. But psychology or nervousness does not cause stammering. But your stuttering will affect your psychology. Then you get nervous. There is no known medical cause and no known psychological cause. There is no evidence that trauma causes stuttering. For some reason certain people are just prone to this.

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