The Quiet Ear

A groundbreaking exploration of deafness - the debut work of non-fiction by the multi-award-winning poet Raymond Antrobus

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I live with the aid of deafness. Like poetry, it has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through. This book charts that art in the hopes of offering a map, a mirror, a small part of a larger story. This book is not a polemic, not an argument for sign language, nor is it against speech therapy or cochlea implants. It is an investigation: an attempt to capture an honest account of how my experience of deafness and betweenness has formed me, from boyhood to parenthood, and how it's impacted my own relationship to language - spoken, written and signed.

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 Hackney and Camden market to Jamaica and Oklahoma, 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 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 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.