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In 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 a white British mother, Antrobus grew up in East London, where, as a child, he was often told he wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t black enough, wasn’t deaf enough.
Only when he was fitted with hearing aids at age 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 previously unknown to him.
The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds and explore how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It’s a story of finding a 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 see how they might understand and misunderstand each other.
Weaving memoir, criticism, and cultural history, and touching on both the spectrum of the deaf experience and how society fails deaf people, Antrobus reclaims his deafness as a power and a joy, and reconciles his relationship to words and the world around him.

The Quiet Ear

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