The Island of the Colorblind

Ordinary colorblindness, arising from a defect in the retinal cells, is almost always partial, and some forms are very common: red-green colorblindness occurs to some degree in one in twenty men (it is much rarer in women). But total congenital colorblindness, or achromatopsia, is surpassingly rare, affecting perhaps only one person in thirty or forty thousand. What, I wondered, would the visual world be like for those born totally colorblind? Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a world in some ways more intense than our own, a world of heightened reality – one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white photographers? Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence? I could only guess, as I had never met anyone born completely colorblind.

Many of H.G. Wells’ short stories, it seems to me, fantastical as they are, can be seen as metaphors for certain neurological and psychological realities. One of my favorites is ‘The Country of the Blind,’ in which a lost traveller, stumbling into an isolated valley in South America, is struck by the strange ‘parti-coloured’ houses that he sees. The men who built these, he thinks, must have been as blind as bats – and soon he discovers that this is the case, and indeed that he has come across an entire blind society. He finds that their blindness is due to a disease contracted three hundred years before, and that over the course of time, the very concept of seeing has vanished:

For fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed…Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips.

Wells’ traveller is at first contemptuous of the blind, seeing them as pitiful, disabled – but soon the tables are reversed, and he finds that they see him as demented, subject to hallucinations produced by the irritable, mobile organs in his face (which the blind, with their atrophied eyes, can conceive only as a source of delusion). When he falls in love with a girl in the valley and wants to stay there and marry her, the elders, after much thought, agree to this, provided he consent to the removal of those irritable organs, his eyes.

Forty years after I first read this story, I read another book, by Nora Ellen Groce, about deafness on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A sea captain and his brother from Kent, it seems, had settled there in the 1690s; both had normal hearing, but both brought with them a recessive gene for deafness. In time, with the isolation of the Vineyard, and the intermarriage of its close community, this gene was carried by the majority of their descendants; by the mid-nineteenth century, in some of the up-island villages, a quarter or more of the inhabitants were born totally deaf.

Hearing people were not so much discriminated against here as assimilated – in this visual culture, everyone in the community, deaf and hearing alike, had come to use sign language. They would chat in Sign (it was much better than spoken language in many ways: for communicating across a distance, for instance, from one fishing boat to another, or for gossiping in church), debate in Sign, teach in Sign, think and dream in Sign. Martha’s Vineyard was an island where everyone spoke sign language, a veritable country of the deaf. Alexander Graham Bell, visiting in the 1870s, wondered indeed whether it might not come to harbor an entire ‘deaf variety of the human race,’ which might then spread throughout the world.

And knowing that congenital achromatopsia, like this form of deafness, is also hereditary, I could not help wondering whether there might also be, somewhere on the planet, an island, a village, a valley of the colorblind.