The quiet world of Raymond Antrobus

Antrobus was born in 1986 and passed his first hearing test when the midwife clicked her fingers. Thereafter, he existed in his “own kind of noise”. His deafness went undetected by those around him for seven years until his mother, Rosemary, observed her son “unresponsive to the shrilling” as a “loud, cream-coloured telephone” she had bought rang continuously. Tests showed that, without hearing aids, he was unable to register high-pitched sounds such as doorbells, kettles whistling or birdsong.

The hearing deficit was a huge challenge, but Antrobus has enough writerly awareness to avoid the memoirist’s trap of casting himself as a hero. There are, though, countless heroes in the book: his protective teacher, Penny, who recognised it was especially “hard for deaf black boys” already subjected to prejudice. Too often black people “are spoken of and written about [as] objects of history, not subjects within it,” Toni Morrison once asserted. In The Quiet Ear, Antrobus avoids being relegated to an object of pity by portraying himself as both endearing, in wondering how to honour Penny, and enraging, in defiantly keeping his hearing aid in his pocket during his anger management therapy sessions after punching walls and smashing windows.

The young Antrobus was tormented, self-conscious and desperate to fit in at mainstream schools, where he recalls his embarrassment at regularly feeling like a machine “that had to be taken out of the main factory space for specialised maintenance”.

Antrobus rejects the notion that deafness is offset by some sort of superpower or comes with compensatory sensorial advantages. He is nonetheless sympathetic to deaf people who challenge the negativity of “hearing loss” and assert instead their “deaf gain”. He asks, now that he’s a parent, whether there’s anything his hearing son “might be losing out on ... by meeting all those expected timelines and milestones”.

In Antrobus’s investigation of “missing sound” and of what he might have missed out on because of his disability, he takes issue with the assumption that his life has been “limited”, as Seymour, his Rastafarian father, once put it. Seymour struggled to accept his son’s diagnosis. “But the boy hears me!” he’d protest. Antrobus describes a fraught relationship with his volatile father. When Seymour was violently drunk, which was often, Raymond and his sister, Corrina, felt compelled to put an end to any escalating acrimony by arming themselves with bricks.

Tense, with a child’s clenched fists, is how Antrobus comes across early on in the book – battle-ready for the hostile environment of the hearing world. He reflects on Britain’s pervasive cultural insensitivity towards deafness, citing Ted Hughes’s poem, Deaf School, which includes descriptions of deaf children as “small night lemurs caught in the flashlight”. Appalled that the revered poet clumsily uses “his poetic gift to frame deaf children as animalistic simpletons”, Antrobus responds combatively, first by publishing a redacted version of the offensive poem, and then by parodying Hughes in his poem After Reading “Deaf School” by the Mississippi River: “Ted is alert and simple. / Ted lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound / and responses to Sound.”

Antrobus is in dialogue with numerous pioneering deaf poets such as Dorothy Miles, as well as artists like the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who reminds him that “most deaf people do not live in a world of silence”. Some of the memoir’s most rewarding passages come from his finely honed reflections on what steered him towards spoken and written poetry. The poet admits he came reluctantly to sign language in secondary school, confiding: “It looked like a hyperactive drama performance and I didn’t want to participate.” Later, though, it was performance poetry – via a self-schooled apprenticeship in the virtuosity of Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur and Leonard Cohen – that captivated him. But Cohen’s influence was more of a challenge to discuss with black friends, because of the febrile race politics alive in London’s youth culture, where “Cohen’s soft, sincere sound … would be understood as ‘white’.” Poetry slams were the gateway for the “stifled angst finding its way out of my head”, Antrobus recalls.

Close to the book’s end, Antrobus, by this point an established poet, is visiting a deaf school when a student asks him: “What’s good about being deaf?” In the introduction to his memoir, Antrobus offers an answer: “Like poetry, [deafness] has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through.” The memoir is a journey from the kind of shame that led to Antrobus masking his deafness in adolescence (growing his hair long and wearing hoods to hide his hearing aids) then finding the confidence that allowed him to compose revealing autobiographical poems.

The Quiet Ear is dark and often heart-rending. But it is a testament to Antrobus’s creativity and mirrors his poetry, which he acknowledges “held and honoured many of my own burdens and truths”.

The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound by Raymond Antrobus is published by W&N (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Suki Dhanda