Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother\u2019s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds \u2013 lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a\u00a0crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he\u2019s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as \u201cmissing sound\u201d in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, \u201csuspicious\u201d as \u201cspacious\u201d \u2013 words with problematically different meanings.<\/p>\n
If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to\u00a0hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of \u201caudism\u201d can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for\u00a0what his ears do not pick up.<\/p>\n
Hearing loss is not the only context in which he is expected to adapt to others\u2019 version of the world. Visiting the Cheshire village of Antrobus \u2013 its name derived from the Norman-French \u201centre-bois\u201d, or \u201cbetween woods\u201d\u2013 he meets a farmer who assumes, because of the colour of his skin, that he is\u00a0descended from a slave-owning baronet, although it is his mother\u2019s family who bears the name rather than\u00a0his Jamaican-born father\u2019s. The encounter ends with him standing in a country churchyard with thoughts of the English working-classes and the enslaved plantation workers \u201cturning, churning, burning, all of it inside the blood pumping in my ears\u201d. It joins a long line of moments in which his identity as a mixed Black British person with a disability that is not always easy to define is subject to projection and appropriation.<\/p>\n
Antrobus interlaces episodes from his own life with accounts of pioneering teachers of the deaf, and of artists such as poet David Wright, who lost his hearing as a child and who, Antrobus believes, internalised his parents\u2019 anxieties and consequently lived his life with a degree of shame he finds it easy to recognise. As a child, Antrobus often wished away his deafness and kept capital-D Deaf culture at arm\u2019s length, leaving off his hearing aids and throwing himself into activities such as competitive swimming, in which his hearing peers would also find themselves in a world of distorted sound.<\/p>\n
In the Deaf community, he discovered, he could feel not deaf enough; in the hearing world, he could just about pass if he didn\u2019t use the sign language that he caught other students mocking as his deaf schoolmates walked to class. At anger-management classes, he listened to his mother\u2019s stories about his episodes of frustrated lashing out and heard them \u201cless like someone trying to have an open conversation and more like an attack, an accusation, and the fury that was erupting in my teenage brain felt wrong, a source of my own shame\u201d. As\u00a0his mother attempted to help, his\u00a0father, Seymour, bought him a\u00a0punchbag; Antrobus hit it so hard, he\u00a0sprained his wrist.<\/p>\n
Antrobus is understandably wary of\u00a0salvation narratives, and his introduction to the world of poetry is\u00a0also presented as difficult. At spoken-word nights, he would have to position himself carefully so as not be overwhelmed by creaking staircases or applause, and, as an audience member, was once agonisingly singled out by\u00a0a\u00a0poet for vocalising his own appreciation too loudly. Nonetheless, he began to realise that poetry \u201cheld and honoured many of my own burdens and truths\u201d and, perhaps most significantly, gave him a\u00a0way\u00a0to\u00a0integrate his experiences and\u00a0identities with one another. What emerges most consistently from this moving book is his need to be met on his own terms, in a territory that he is given the freedom to map for himself.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n