When Raymond Antrobus talks about deafness, he rarely talks about what has been lost. Instead, he talks about what has been found
The award-winning poet and author Raymond Antrobus spent much of his childhood being told that his deafness was a deficit to overcome: doctors measured it, teachers tried to correct it, and hearing people explained it to him. It took years before he felt able to define it for himself.
“I live with the aid of deafness,” he writes in The Quiet Ear, a memoir that explores identity, language and belonging through what he calls an “investigation of missing sound.” Rather than arguing for one approach to deafness over another, the book asks a different question entirely: What happens when we stop seeing deafness as something missing, and begin to see it as another way of experiencing the world?
BETWEEN WORLDS
Growing up in East London in the late 1980s and 1990s, Raymond slipped between worlds. Born with high-frequency deafness that went undiagnosed until he was six, Raymond got hearing aids at age seven. He spent his early childhood constantly being told he had misunderstood instructions without knowing why. Teachers assumed he was inattentive, while others thought he was slow. It was only after Raymond’s mother noticed he couldn’t hear the family’s exceptionally loud telephone that the truth emerged.
After his diagnosis, he attended a deaf school, but still never quite felt he fully belonged anywhere. Perhaps, he reveals, this was because he was the son of an English mother and a Jamaican father, which meant navigating questions of race alongside disability. In the end, he often felt caught between identities – rather than fully accepted by any of them.
For years, the language surrounding deafness reinforced that feeling: “I was constantly told that what I was hearing was wrong without understanding why, which meant I couldn’t trust myself or the world around me.”
Labels such as “hearing impaired” or “hearing loss”, never seemed to fit his experience either. What finally shifted his perspective was discovering the idea of ‘deaf gain’, a term coined by artist Aaron Williamson. Instead of asking what deaf people lack, it asks what deafness makes possible.
“It isn’t just about empowerment,” says Raymond. “It’s an invitation to be curious.”
LESSONS TO LEARN
That curiosity runs through every part of his work. Whether writing poetry, children’s books or his memoir, Raymond returns to what he calls “missing sound”. It’s a phrase that extends far beyond hearing alone. Missing sound can mean misunderstanding, miseducation or the stories that have never been told.
What frustrates Raymond most today is not deafness itself, but society’s limited imagination around disability: “I’m so bored and disheartened by the lack of imagination people have around accessibility,” he shakes his head. “Representation isn’t simply enough.”
Accessibility, he argues, is too often treated as a legal obligation or an afterthought, instead of an opportunity for creativity. In his own work, he experiments with subtitles, British Sign Language, visual poetry and performance. He sees access not as a compromise but as another artistic language.
“I think of accessibility as a creative opportunity,” he says. “To connect, to make, to invent.”
SOUNDS OF OUR LIVES
That same lack of imagination is evident across the education system. Despite years of campaigning, British Sign Language has still not secured the place in mainstream education that many campaigners hoped for. Raymond points to the failure to introduce a GCSE in BSL as one example of how deaf young people continue to be overlooked. He also worries about the continued closure of deaf schools and the increasing number of children being placed into mainstream education without adequate specialist support.
Had he been born today, he believes he probably would “not have attended a deaf school at all.”
Instead of viewing this as progress, he sees it as a consequence of shrinking resources, along with a misunderstanding of what deaf children actually need: “It’s a lazy, cruel lack of understanding and funding,” he says, speaking passionately about the issue.
Sadly, the consequences extend far beyond the classroom. Raymond describes meeting hearing parents whose children have recently been diagnosed as deaf. Many are convinced that their child’s future has suddenly become smaller. “I’m basically meeting grieving parents,” he explains.
His role is not to dismiss those emotions, but to offer another possibility. Through workshops in schools and conversations with families, he introduces parents to deaf history, deaf culture and successful deaf role models they may never have encountered before. Time and again, he says, parents leave with a “different vision of what their child’s future might look like.”
THE DANGER OF SILENCE
Raymond has become one of Britain’s most visible deaf writers, and acts as an advocate for many charities. However, he’s cautious about the change representation makes: “They invite us to stand in Parliament, we take a bow, have a little round of applause. And then we go home, and nothing has changed.” Recognition, he argues, means very little without policy changes that tackle the big issues like employment, education, and the countless structural barriers disabled people continue to face every day.
His memoir closes many of the questions he carried as a child, while opening new ones as a father raising a hearing son. But he does not dwell on the sound he cannot hear. “We don’t have to live by our ears alone,” he concludes.