The Quiet Ear, by Raymond Antrobus review: 'a book about "betweenness"'
In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus offers a nuanced exploration of deafness and creativity, writes Stuart Kelly
Subtitled “An Investigation of Missing Sound”, poet Raymond Antrobus’s first work of non-fiction prose, about deafness and creativity, signals its originality with an absence. It would be a cliché to pay homage to Beethoven as the Great Deaf Genius, and it is a stereotype Antrobus wisely forgoes; not just in that it makes Beethoven’s specific form of hearing loss (noticeable reduction in his late twenties, complete deafness by 45) a metonym for all deafness, but it makes the Tortured Maestro the icon for all artists. Antrobus is markedly different: vulnerable, patiently understanding, curiously seeking out other elective ancestors.
The book is really about “betweenness”. Antrobus had a white English mother and a black Jamaican father, and his early life is one of being variously categorised. He experiences the kind of racism you might expect, but is also vilified as a “white devil” by his father. In terms of hearing, coping strategies can be mistaken as not being “truly” deaf. Even within D/deaf communities there are gradations: he is not, for example fluent in American Sign Language. He writes eloquently about “internal deaf dilemma”, using the image of a broken shop sign that (now) read “THE I NG OF FALAFEL”, finding the aporia as a metaphor that “externalised the language of that internal space”.
Antrobus writes movingly of a feeling of betrayal on coming across the poem “Deaf School” by Ted Hughes, and his own erasure as reclamation of it in his own collection “The Perseverance”. Likewise, he provides a good introduction to David Wright and his ambiguities, especially how even parental voices become “projections of habit and memory”.
But Antrobus find himself in the problematic position of both acknowledging and chafing against the perpetual “deaf” adjective (in the way black and woman and gay are deployed almost as qualifiers: never just “poet”.) As a reader I both respect the decision and wish he had written more about the specific aesthetic decisions and solutions. The idea of signing a poet as a form of parallel choreography to the uttered, or the phonic effects of mishearing, mumbling and whispering are fascinating.
In addition to the poets, Antrobus has small sections on the deaf painter Seymour Redmond and the singer Johnnie Ray (intriguing about the “performative” nature of deafness, and Ray’s strange “outsider” whiteness), as well as personal memoir. The path to poetry owed as much to Busta Rhymes as William Wordsworth, seeking the answer to a question posed by a therapist (not a speech therapist): “Have you found a new language for yourself?”
Antrobus poises himself with precision between his younger self who confides “being deaf doesn’t suit me” to the mature adult wrestling with the privative “hearing loss” versus “deaf gain”. One mild regret: given the musical background, I wonder what on earth he makes of Morrissey and the infamous hearing aid as victim chic?
The Quiet Ear, by Raymond Antrobus, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99. Raymond Antrobus is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 24 August
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