Raymond Antrobus' first prose work for adults is a revelatory exploration of deafness

Antrobus tells me that one of the most common and most annoying questions asked of deaf people is: why isn’t sign language universal? “Asking this question shows a misunderstanding of what language is. Language comes from the context of a culture and place, so how can any language, including sign language, be universal? I’m an English-language poet but I also exist in the deaf world, which has its own space and its own rules. I’m also of Caribbean heritage and I lived in America for a long time. So I see how different audiences, different readers, different listeners have their own takes on my work.” When he does readings, Antrobus loves working with British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters who “understand the fluidity of poetry” and recognise that their signing is not merely a direct translation of his words but a visual, artistic interpretation of them.

In the case of Antrobus’ own poetic sensibility, being hard of hearing certainly led to his “hyper-fixation on words”. But his deafness has never been the sole formative influence on his poetry. There is his lineage as the grandson of a Congregational church minister JK Antrobus, for example. “My grandad was a preacher and a poet who died just before I was born. My grandma gave me all his sermons and it’s such an affirmation having that written heritage – I think it’s as significant to me as my deafness.” Antrobus’ parents both loved poetry, too. The work of William Blake and Adrian Mitchell, in particular, resonated with his mother, while his DJ father would interweave poetry between his sets. “Then there were all the poets who were incorporated into my speech-therapy sessions, when I had to try and recite lines from rhymes and tongue twisters. It all tuned me in.”

Music also had a significant part to play in Antrobus’ growing agility with words and tone and meter. In a memorable section of The Quiet Ear, he describes recording DIY radio shows onto cassette tapes as a teenager, in the voices of two alter egos, DJ Check and DJ Check Mate, with Busta Rhymes as his main imaginary guest. And then one day he heard Leonard Cohen’s One of Us Cannot Be Wrong on the cassette player in his mother’s bedroom and Cohen’s “soft, sincere sound” resonated deeply. “Hearing Leonard Cohen changed my life – it was like he was speaking to me first,” he recalls.

The Quiet Ear is beautifully balanced between Antrobus’s experience of deafness – with all the challenges it entails in a world largely geared to those who hear well – and the idea of ‘deaf gain’: the notion that deafness is, in itself, a particular sensibility rather than an impairment. It is a book that therefore asks the reader to accord the languages of deafness “the reverence they deserve”.

And, as an assertion of the deaf part of his identity, The Quiet Ear’s publication also marks a personal watershed for a gifted writer who, as a ‘differently-abled’ Black boy, was desperate not to stand out and who later became concerned that his deafness would lead to being pigeon-holed as a “deaf poet”. When Antrobus returned to visit the north-London deaf school he attended, he met his former English teacher Miss Willis. “I hadn’t seen her for years, but she remembered me straight away. ‘Ah Raymond,’ she said. ‘Have you accepted that you’re deaf yet?’ And I started crying because she knew about the masking I used to do. She really understood what embracing my deaf identity would mean.”