THE QUIET EAR

A poet who lives at the intersection of many worlds tells us what it’s like.

Antrobus, the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry, is the son of a Black Jamaican father and a white British mother, raised in East London and still living in England. He was born with deficiencies in his hearing—he describes them as blackouts at certain frequencies and of certain syllables—which make it hard to say, even for him, whether he is Deaf (an identity), deaf (a physical condition), or something else, like “hard of hearing,” a term that usually applies to older people with a disability developed later in life. He was not diagnosed until age 6, and up to that time, and at some points since, he was simply assumed to be slow or dyslexic. He tells his complex story, with its parade of teachers, mentors, antagonists, comrades, and heartbreakers, alongside accounts of other deaf painters, musicians, and writers. One is the Palestinian teacher of the deaf, Hashem Ghazal, father of nine children, six of them deaf. An ambassador for deaf people with a 2015 TED Talk, Ghazal and his wife were killed in a Gaza airstrike in 2024. Another sad story is that of Antrobus’s schoolmate Tyrone, who ended up hanging himself in jail when deprived of his hearing aids. At a peak moment near the end of the book, Antrobus gathers all these characters together on an imaginary ark: “I sometimes imagine an all-hearing God, a white cloud with one tiny ear and one giant ear, neither needing help from hear­ing aids, neither missing any sound, and this all-hearing God heard enough of the world and decided to destroy the all-hearing world in a great flood, and we mere mortals needed passage to the Deaf world, to integrate it into a world we must share.”

Illuminates a unique corner of experience with clarity and compassion, including compassion for the author’s younger self.