The Use Of Cochlear Implants In True Biz By Sara Polish

Sara Nović’s novel True Biz is, at its core, a depiction of the struggle between the Deaf community and its hearing counterpart. Much of the book is spent describing how hearing people who fail to understand the Deaf community have mainstreamed their deaf children through the use of ASL deprivation and the use of cochlear implants. Nović feels pride about the Deaf community and wants to teach us about it so that we in the hearing world can better help to prevent its destruction. Unfortunately, in doing this, Nović has painted a one-sided picture regarding the use of cochlear implants by failing to include examples of successful ones, her depiction of Austin's family struggle around the issue, and most importantly, by glorifying the destruction of the bionics lab.

So Yeon Kim, Dr. Min Bum Kim, and Dr. Won-ho Chung, over 18 years (2001-2019), 4.6 percent (43 out of 925) of patients with cochlear implants experienced failure of the devices of some kind. In other words, more than 95 percent of the devices are successful in the long run. This information makes the lack of a main character with a successful implant all the more confusing. Nović has, in failing to include a character like this, created a one-sided depiction of the Deaf community without much of the nuance surrounding this complicated issue. The undue focus on implant failure, the most glaring example of which is when Charlie’s implant fails on stage, causing her to feel like “her mouth was cottony thick, jaw tight” and like "her body was a hummingbirds thrum” (320). While it is, of course, critical to show the harms of cochlear implants and include examples of cases like Charlie’s, experiences like that are the minority, and depicting only experiences like Charlie’s is not accurate