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The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780593732106)
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Raymond Antrobus
Product type:
Books
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Description
xIn this groundbreaking memoir, an acclaimed young poet explores what it means to live in the "in-betweenness" of the deaf and hearing worlds. 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.
At the hospital where Raymond Antrobus was born, a midwife snapped her fingers by his ears and gauged his response. It was his first hearing test, and he passed. For years, Antrobus lived as a deaf person in the hearing world, before he was diagnosed at the age of six.
This "in-betweenness" was a space he would occupy in other areas of his life too. The son of a Jamaican father and white British mother, growing up in East London, it was easy for him to fall through the cracks. Growing up, he was told that he wasn't smart enough, wasn't black enough, wasn't deaf enough. It was only when he was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven, that he began to discover his missing sounds: the high pitches of whistles, birds, alarms, the "sh, ch, ba, th" sounds in speech--all of it missing. The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds in Antrobus' own life, and how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It's a story of a journey of finding your path when there are no signs to show the way, and a testament to the people--his parents and teachers, artists, writers, and musicians--who helped form his language: spoken, written, and signed. It's also about becoming a father to a hearing son, and trying to know the ways in which they might understand and misunderstand one another. Weaving together memoir, criticism, and cultural history, and touching on both the spectrum of the deaf experience and how society fails deaf people, Antrobus finds his own way to reclaim his deafness as a power and a joy, and to reconcile his relationship to words and the world around him.
Author: Raymond Antrobus
ISBN-10: 0593732103
ISBN-13: 9780593732106
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Language: English
Published: 08/19/2025
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
At the hospital where Raymond Antrobus was born, a midwife snapped her fingers by his ears and gauged his response. It was his first hearing test, and he passed. For years, Antrobus lived as a deaf person in the hearing world, before he was diagnosed at the age of six.
This "in-betweenness" was a space he would occupy in other areas of his life too. The son of a Jamaican father and white British mother, growing up in East London, it was easy for him to fall through the cracks. Growing up, he was told that he wasn't smart enough, wasn't black enough, wasn't deaf enough. It was only when he was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven, that he began to discover his missing sounds: the high pitches of whistles, birds, alarms, the "sh, ch, ba, th" sounds in speech--all of it missing. The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds in Antrobus' own life, and how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It's a story of a journey of finding your path when there are no signs to show the way, and a testament to the people--his parents and teachers, artists, writers, and musicians--who helped form his language: spoken, written, and signed. It's also about becoming a father to a hearing son, and trying to know the ways in which they might understand and misunderstand one another. Weaving together memoir, criticism, and cultural history, and touching on both the spectrum of the deaf experience and how society fails deaf people, Antrobus finds his own way to reclaim his deafness as a power and a joy, and to reconcile his relationship to words and the world around him.
Author: Raymond Antrobus
ISBN-10: 0593732103
ISBN-13: 9780593732106
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Language: English
Published: 08/19/2025
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
By Raymond Antrobus
xRaymond Antrobus is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Signs/Music (Tin House), of which the title poem was published in The New Yorker. His work has won numerous prizes in the UK, where his poems have been added to school examination syllabi. He is also the author of a children's book, Can Bears Ski?, which became the first story broadcast on the BBC entirely in British Sign Language. Raymond was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and appointed an MBE.
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