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The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound
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About This Book
Raymond Antrobus uses life writing, criticism, biography, and a poet's sense of images that bind and unbind argument, to create a groundbreaking and daring examination of deafness. Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at age seven. He discovered he had missing sounds: bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. His teachers thought he was slow and disruptive. Some friends didn't believe he was deaf. Moving from London to Jamaica and the United States, The Quiet Ear tells the story of Raymond's upbringing by an English mother and Jamaican father, his first experience using hearing aids, his troubled adolescence navigating his deaf identity, and the parallel mainstream and deaf education systems. It also explores how masculinity and race complicate the shame of miscommunication, his formative introduction to literature as a way to connect with the world, and how the deaf body is 'performed'. Throughout, Raymond sets his remarkable story alongside those of D/deaf cultural figures, historic and contemporary, the famous and under-recognised—the models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up.
Reviews
"Through this wise, intimate and questing book, Antrobus goes from being a six-year-old able to find magic in such a diagnosis, to a poet and educator who would like people to reassess how they see deafness ..."
"Spellbinding ... Unforgettable ... It's masterful."
"Antrobus' negotiation of the complicated features of his identity, as well as his vulnerability and sheer skill as a writer, make this slim volume utterly moving and remarkable."
"While short, this memoir is far reaching, and although sewn together in a way more similar to a series of essays than a standard A to Z life story, it speaks volumes about how difference can be an advantage ..."
"A poetic reckoning ..."
"Compact, powerful ..."
"Lucidly braids all of this into an effortless, often lyrical account ..."
"The Quiet Ear lacks the intellectual rigor and finely wrought prose of Leland and Jones's memoirs, as well as other works such as Jan Grue's I Live a Life Like Yours and Emily Rapp Black's Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg."
"Illuminates a unique corner of experience with clarity and compassion, including compassion for the author's younger self."
"Poignant, illuminating, and perceptive."
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