The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound

(Paperback)

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Description

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of seven. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. His teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some friends didn't believe he was deaf at all.

Moving from London to Jamaica and the US, The Quiet Ear tells the story of Raymond's upbringing to an English mother and Jamaican father, his first experience using hearing aids, his troubled adolescence as he navigated his deaf identity, and the parallel mainstream and deaf education systems. It also explores how masculinity and race complicate the shame of miscommunication, his formative introduction to literature as a way to connect to the world, and how the deaf body is 'performed'.

Throughout, Raymond sets his remarkable story alongside those of D/deaf cultural figures, historic and contemporary, the famous and under-recognised - including the painter and silent film actor Granville Redmond, the poet David Wright, performer Johnnie Ray and Welsh poet Dorothy Miles. The models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up.

In The Quiet Ear Raymond Antrobus uses life writing, criticism, biography, and a poet's sense of images that bind and unbind argument, to create a groundbreaking and daring examination of deafness.

Reviews

A powerful and important book. This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus' vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: his Jamaican heritage and his British one; his blackness and his whiteness; and, again and again, the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness. His voice is at once blunt and lyrical, angry and curious -- Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize-Finalist and author of The Country of the Blind
The Quiet Ear is a marvel, a story of his life as a Deaf man in a society as unjust as ours, which he investigates with clarity, honesty, endless patience and tenderness . . . The book is a confession, an arts poetica, a manifesto. The reader learns what it might mean to live between sound and its lack, what it is to discover and remake one's own culture, between Britain and Jamaica, Deafness and birdsong. Which is to say: you will find here what it is to watch and be watched by our world, what it is to be a good human in a tough time, to be filled with wonder, even in the age of a crumbling empire, what it is to be a young father, an ageing son, a human being with talent for language that is memorable and clarifying. Antrobus is a terrific writer, yes, but what is more, he is an honest one -- Ilya Kaminsky, National Book Award-Finalist and author of Deaf Republic
The Quiet Ear presents a complex portrait of deafness that goes beyond living without sound. Antrobus situates his own personal story of growing up not quite Black or deaf enough within larger contexts of D/deaf culture, race, masculinity, and colonialism. Lyrical, moving and powerful -- Alice Wong, author of Disability Intimacies: Essays on Love, Care and Desire and Year of the Tiger: An Activists Life

Author Bio

Raymond Antrobus is the author of three poetry titles: To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press), The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins) and All The Names Given (Picador), as well as a forthcoming collection to be published by Picador. Raymond's poems have been added to GCSE syllabi, and his work has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He is also the author of a children's book, Can Bears Ski (Walkers Books), which became the first story to be broadcast on the BBC entirely in British Sign Language. Raymond was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021.