The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound

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.