The Quiet Ear

An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir

About the Book

A groundbreaking exploration of deafness by a young award-winning poet—a memoir, a cultural history, and a call to action

“Expansive, generous, and massively tender.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is . . . a book that changed how I will move through the world.”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

“A litany to beauty beyond what is spoken. This book is an essential education.”Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon

“A spellbinding account of [Antrobus's] youth as a deaf, mixed-race child in East London . . . an unforgettable account of finding one’s voice. It’s masterful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 New Memoirs and Biographies of the Fall • One of The Washington Post and Vulture’s Most Anticipated Books

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.

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds—bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Antrobus explores the shame of miscommunication, the joy of finding community, and shines a light on deaf education.

Throughout, Antrobus sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures—from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers—the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up. A singular, remarkable work, The Quiet Ear is a much-needed examination of deafness in the world.
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Praise for The Quiet Ear

“His poetic sensibility infuses his moving memoir about living between the worlds of the hearing and the deaf, and brings color to his observations about a life spent noticing and attempting to fill in the gaps.”—The Washington Post

The Quiet Ear is expansive, generous, and massively tender—a beautiful exploration of an interior life grappling with several magnitudes of loss, and what can be found within them.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“A revelatory exploration of deafness.”The Bookseller (UK)

“A spellbinding account of [Antrobus’s] youth as a deaf, mixed-race child in East London. . . . With lyrical prose, bruising candor, and remarkable tenderness toward his wounded younger self, Antrobus provides an unforgettable account of finding one’s voice. It’s masterful.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is. . . The Quiet Ear has given me new ways to think about the vibration of sound, the movement of language, and the complicated contours of shame. It is a book that changed how I will move through the world.”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

“Lyrical, moving and powerful.”—Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy and author of Year of the Tiger

“Poignant, illuminating, and perceptive . . . Rewriting myths of deafness, Antrobus depicts the diversity of sound worlds, reframing the loss of hearing as a gain.”Booklist

“In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus lifts up a defiant mirror to the mainstream world that has long ignored and shamed the d/Deaf communities and masterfully crafts a world we all deserve: one free of shame, one where deaf people are uplifted, empowered, no longer at the margins of society, but in the center, full of joy and thriving.”—Javier Zamora, author of Solito

“A resounding tribute to deaf artistry, to deaf identity, and to the ways that sound and language—and the boundless universe in between—shape a life. Antrobus writes with lyric clarity and the radiant music of a poet, interrogating the complex histories of British and Jamaican selfhood, the legacy of rootlessness across the diaspora, and what to do with the inheritances we are given. This is a litany to beauty beyond what is spoken. This book is an essential education.”Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon

“A marvel.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus’s vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: [and] the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness.”—Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Country of the Blind

The Quiet Ear isn’t simply about hearing; it’s about perception, identity, and the politics of language. Antrobus doesn’t just open our ears—he opens our understanding.”Dame Evelyn Glennie, Grammy Award–winning musician

“Antrobus’s incredible capacity for documenting the interior is on full show here, traversing not just his griefs and losses but his hopes and joys, too. This book left me transformed.”—Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water

“A journey through language, history and family, The Quiet Ear is a moving and expansive book about the long journey of finding a voice, and the joy and power of using it.”—Séan Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven
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Excerpt

The Quiet Ear

1

The Frequencies Are Yours

Let me go back then, to the sounds of my birth.

If I close my eyes, the sounds of my birth come from a million places at once. Wind in the trees by the beeping traffic on the main road, the shrilling bike bells under the canal bridges, the bustling markets, trolleys rolling over grazed pavements, the clanging of the market-stall bars, the “pound a bowl, pound a bowl” yelling, road works drilling, digging, engines whirring, shutters clanging, the shovels coming down on the hot tarmac, the pop and crash of the lifted manhole covers, the radios blaring in the cars and the offices and the open living-room windows, the dogs barking, the rivers running, voices on the train carriages and the buses, bars, galleries, benches by the lake, children on the climbing frame and children who have tucked themselves into the huts and the tunnels on the adventure playgrounds.

They come from the families standing out in the fields clapping as the children’s kites flap in the wind, the coo-coo pigeons, the chirp-chirp sparrows, the man scattering seeds beneath the Trafalgar Square lions. The trees with their branches and leaves stretching past the windows of the hospital wards and corridors as if saying now or live or breathe or hear hear hear.

In 1986 in Homerton Hospital, London, a midwife clicked her fingers next to my newborn ears and gauged my response. It was my first hearing test, and I passed.

There were so many sounds that existed that I would not hear until I was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven. Until then, I existed in my own kind of noise.

For the first seven years of my life, it was assumed I was just slow or perhaps dyslexic. I would miss vital details in teachers’ instructions, which kept getting me into trouble, like being told I could play outside but missing the “come back in five minutes”; then, during the subsequent detention (a harsh punishment but the teachers thought I was deliberately disobedient), being told to write about why “punctuality was important” and composing a wonky-lined misspelled essay on the value of punctuation. I was constantly told that what I was hearing was wrong without understanding why, which meant I couldn’t trust myself or the world around me. How does a child make sense of words or the world when they seem slippery and untrustworthy? What new perspectives and sensibilities might open up during this formative period?

No one knew I was deaf until my mother bought a large, exceptionally loud, cream-colored telephone that sat in her living room like a pet. The phone rang and rang, and my mother looked at me, unresponsive to the shrilling.

This is how I was diagnosed as deaf.

At a children’s audiology clinic in Hackney called the Donald Winnicott Center, I sat in a small room with my mother and a serious-looking woman in a white, thickly knitted sweater. I was seven years old. I didn’t know who or what Donald Winnicott was but I thought he must be old because that’s how the clinic felt: brown and gray carpets in sterilized waiting rooms. My mother sat in the corner of that small, soundproofed room with padded walls. The serious-looking woman sat behind a big cream-colored machine with yellow and green buttons.

“Raymond,” my mum said slowly. She spoke to me differently when we were inside this building. Her voice slower, louder. I heard her as she looked at me, her face serious as she handed me a gray remote with one black button on it. “The doctor wants you to press this button when you hear a sound.”

I faced the serious doctor; her eyes were on the lights on her machine. Every now and then I heard a creepy sound, like a ghost whistling faintly, so I pressed the black button and the sound disappeared.

After the doctor turned off the machine she only had one expression: a look of concentration, with raised eyebrows and tight forehead, which held permanent suspense. It gave Mum a hard listening face when she looked at her, but it softened every time she turned away to look at me.

Mum and I sat, parked outside the clinic in her red Mini Metro. I knew she had something important to say because she put on both our seatbelts and didn’t start the engine. “Raymond, I heard every one of those sounds in that room and I didn’t see you press the button.” She looked scared, whereas I remember feeling deeply impressed that she could hear things that weren’t there. She didn’t explain what this meant, but the test had revealed the hidden nuance of my hearing.

Shortly after, I was fitted with my first hearing aids. In a school photo taken at the time, you’ll see I’m not wearing hearing aids. I would whip them out whenever my photo was being taken, mainly out of shame. In my childhood journals, I wrote that “hearing aids don’t suit me” because they highlighted my vulnerability and made me feel ugly, incapable, and “disabled.”

It was around this time that I began discovering my missing sounds: anything high-pitched—whistles, birds, kettles, alarms; “sh, ch, ba, th” sounds in speech—the slow vibrating wavelengths that were meant to be picked up by small hair cells in my inner ear; all of it missing.

My parents had to navigate this world of deafness for me. They were both hearing, as were all the medical professionals I met, and everyone emphasized my deafness as a “loss,” something that would require effort to manage in the hearing world. I would sit in audiology clinics or at the front of classrooms or even around tables in special educational needs (SEN) units and I would only be assessed and understood as someone struggling to hear.

Once, while I was being dropped off at school, a mother of one of my school friends told me my mother was overreacting by giving me hearing aids because I didn’t seem deaf enough. But my parents knew. They saw how loud I had to turn up the television, how often there were gaps in my understanding, and how I didn’t answer the door or the phone.



In 2021, within an hour of my son’s birth he was given a hearing test. His mother and I watched the doctors set up the machine as he lay wrapped in blankets, our eyes wide and unblinking as wires were attached to his ears. The machine whirred and beeped; his head wobbled. The doctor peered at the graph, muttered “Good,” and rushed away, the machine disappearing down the corridor.

I was anxious the doctors might have got it wrong. No one showed me my son’s audiogram; I had to take the doctor’s “good” word for it. But “good” so often fails to pick up nuances. “Good” failed me in this context. “Good.” That vague but affirming word, the word God used when looking over “all He had made.”

I began to wonder how my hearing son’s experience would differ from mine, and how we might understand or misunderstand each other. For over ten years I’d worked as a freelance poetry teacher, mainly in secondary schools. As a teacher I appreciated the need to scaffold ideas and model behavior; I wondered how I would do this for my son, and I wondered how I ever did it for myself.

Since my son’s birth, the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” keeps running through my mind. I take stock of my community, parents, deaf people, writers, artists—and I turn to Granville Redmond.

Born in the second half of the nineteenth century, Redmond was a Deaf painter, actor, and mime artist. Art critics at the time had different things to say about Redmond’s deafness and how elements of his identity were expressed in his paintings. They described his scenes as “muted” and “silent.” Some thought the loud color of his paintings was a result of his deafness, while others thought the quieter nocturnal paintings and tonalist paintings represented what Redmond called his “solitude and silence.” Much depended on who was writing about Redmond and what they projected onto him. Redmond, however, didn’t resist this kind of categorizing. He suggested that he had developed his style of landscape painting because he had experienced “the loss of other senses.”

Redmond’s full name was Granville Richard Seymour Redmond, known to his family simply as Seymour, the same name as my father.

On a virtual tour of Redmond’s 2020 exhibition (The Eloquent Palette), a painting appears of the exact scene I had seen in many of my dreams since becoming a father. It’s called Sunset Over Lake and is part of a series of nocturnal paintings Redmond created in the early 1900s.

Redmond’s paintings became known for their quiet scenes that cry out in almost psychedelic color, and yet there’s always something gentle about his touch despite the dramatic tones, particularly in his coastal landscapes of California. Violet, orange, yellow flowers are scattered in the foreground of many of his paintings; rocks and patches of earth between all the wild grass and plant life hinting at paths grown over. You can spend so much time taking in the vibrancy of the flowers alone (especially the golden poppies) that it takes a while to notice how often there is water, a shore, distant hills, and a bright sky keeping the same company, even taking up more of the canvas. On a Redmond canvas, beauty is as much the rock in the grit as the torn pieces of clouds in the sky. Every object in his landscape is rendered with his radiant spirit.

About the Author

Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Signs/Music, of which the title poem was published in The New Yorker. His work has won numerous prizes in the UK, where his poems are frequently taught in schools. He is also the author of two children’s books, including Can Bears Ski?, which became the first story broadcast on the BBC entirely in British Sign Language. Antrobus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and appointed an MBE. He lives in London. More by Raymond Antrobus
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