MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
When writer Raymond Antrobus was a child, he had a hard time making sense of the world around him. He struggled to hold conversations. He missed instructions from his teachers. He would get sent off to detention. Everyone assumed he had a cognitive disability. Until, one day, his mother bought a telephone - a loud phone. When it rang, it was piercing. Everyone in his house seemed to notice but him. That is how Raymond Antrobus learned at 6 years old that he was deaf. Well, he's out with a new memoir called "The Quiet Ear: An Investigation Of Missing Sound." Raymond, welcome.
RAYMOND ANTROBUS: Oh, thanks for having me.
KELLY: So to explain to people listening now, you wear hearing aids.
ANTROBUS: Yes.
KELLY: You're also able to hear my questions in part because you have closed captioning going across a screen that's capturing...
ANTROBUS: Yes.
KELLY: ...What I'm saying.
ANTROBUS: Yes.
KELLY: You describe this feeling of living in a world of in-betweenness, to use your word - like, halfway in the deaf world, halfway in the hearing world, feeling displaced from both. How do you navigate that? How did you learn to navigate it as a kid?
ANTROBUS: I didn't have any map. I didn't have anything to kind of compare it to because there was no friends or family or network that had a kind of cultural idea of deafness. So it wasn't...
KELLY: Yeah.
ANTROBUS: ...Actually until much, much later when I kind of connected with a creative deaf community in London and met, you know, deaf actors and dancers and poets and performers that I kind of really found something to, you know, tap into and understand for myself. But there are so many different factors that - you know, that go into developing an identity, race and class, even the way you sign. So, you know, I learned to sign BSL at 11 years old.
KELLY: British Sign Language.
ANTROBUS: British Sign Language, that's right.
KELLY: Which is quite different from American.
ANTROBUS: It is. It has a different root. So American Sign Language is built on French Sign Language because the first deaf families to go over to America from Europe were - came from France. Whereas British Sign Language is an indigenous language. It's more than 500 years old, which is as old as Shakespeare.
KELLY: I never knew that. I never knew the origins.
ANTROBUS: Yeah.
KELLY: You also write so beautifully about the - you just nodded to race, to class, the in-betweenness you experienced growing up...
ANTROBUS: Yeah.
KELLY: ...In London...
ANTROBUS: Yeah.
KELLY: ...Son of a Jamaican father, a British mother - a Black father, a white mother - trying to figure out, what world is mine?
ANTROBUS: Yeah. So my dad was a - kind of an amateur DJ. So - and when I was a kid and I wasn't yet able to speak fluently, he would play me poems by dub poets who often themselves were Jamaican and British. And he would ask me to recite these poems, and they were in patois. So I could barely speak English, and my dad is there trying to get me to recite patois, and then he would just be laughing at all of my attempts. And then he would record me trying to say these words, and then he would incorporate some of the poems and some of my attempts at speech into his DJ set.
You know, it was a way to make - I don't know - fun and lightness of what was a disability, something that everywhere else in my life was looked at as something that I was struggling with, as something that I was incapable of. But there was something particularly Jamaican about remixing or creating your own style or your own sound. That's kind of what Jamaica as a culture is very good at.
KELLY: Yeah. So I do want to ask about - I want to ask about the language that you use to describe your hearing. People always use the term hearing loss. I tell people I have hearing loss - severe to profound hearing loss. You flip it around and write about deaf gain - about living...
ANTROBUS: Yeah.
KELLY: ...With the aid of deafness. Do you feel that?
ANTROBUS: I do. I do. So I think about this idea of having a natural deaf disposition. You know, after reading David Wright, a deaf poet from the 1950s and '60s, he - in his memoir he talks a lot about the hindrance and the struggle, but he does - there are moments where he kind of touches on this idea that he wouldn't be a poet without his deafness. Like, he does credit his deafness for making him a poet. And he even talks about a term from William Wordsworth, where he says, eye music, as in E-Y-E. And David Wright resonated with this idea of the eye - the eye, the music of the eye, the sound of the eye, what you're relying on with the eye. So yeah, you know, there's so much play with that.
KELLY: Well, and you've used poetry to explain to the rest of the world how you see the world, how deafness has influenced you. Would you give us a little taste of that? I wonder if you'd read us the first stanza of your poem "Dear Hearing World."
ANTROBUS: Sure. This is "Dear Hearing World," and it's after a poem by Danez Smith.
KELLY: OK.
ANTROBUS: (Reading) I have left Earth in search of sounder orbits, a solar system where the space between a star and a planet isn't empty. I have left a white beard of noise in my place, and many of you won't know the difference. We are indeed the same volume. All of us eventually fade.
KELLY: Skip ahead, if you would - just give me the last two lines.
ANTROBUS: The last two lines are, (reading) deaf voices go missing like sound in space, and I have left Earth to find them.
KELLY: I keep turning this over in my head. There's anger in this poem - the idea that you had to leave Earth to find something you need. Speak to that.
ANTROBUS: I wrote that poem when I revisited the deaf school I went to in North London - Muswell Hill. It was a deaf school that was also part of a hearing school. And those two worlds still felt like they were a true representation of what it was like leaving school and being out in the big world, where I had to function as a hearing person 'cause I've got this clear speech and my hearing aids are quite small. So I can make people forget that I'm a deaf person. I lip read. I'm very sensitive to acoustics of spaces, so I've learnt how to navigate sound in this particular way. And it's - you know, a lot of that is a kind of invisible labor in the hearing world. But when you find yourself in deaf spaces where that sensibility is understood, there's, like, a relaxation...
KELLY: Such a relief.
ANTROBUS: ...That can happen.
KELLY: Yeah.
ANTROBUS: Right. Exactly.
KELLY: Yeah. I know.
ANTROBUS: And just to say that - when you asked about that anger, like, you're right because I went back to Blanche Nevile's, you know, about 14 years after leaving it, and I saw more struggle. I saw smaller classrooms. I realized that had I been growing up at that point, I wouldn't have even got into that school. I wouldn't have been deaf enough to get into that school. There's more deaf schools being closed. There's more deaf people being mainstreamed. And so I had to, you know, speak to that, and a lot of anger is sourced in that.
KELLY: Raymond Antrobus, he is a poet and author of the new memoir "The Quiet Ear." Thank you so very much.
ANTROBUS: Thank you for having me. This has been an honor to be heard.
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