The Quiet Ear

An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir

By: Raymond Antrobus

In this groundbreaking memoir, an acclaimed young poet explores what it means to live in the "in-betweenness" of the deaf and hearing worlds.

I live with the aid of deafness. Like poetry, it has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through. This book charts that art in the hopes of offering a map, a mirror, a small part of a larger story.

At the hospital where Raymond Antrobus was born, a midwife snapped her fingers by his ears and gauged his response. It was his first hearing test, and he passed. For years, Antrobus lived as a deaf person in the hearing world, before he was diagnosed at the age of six.

This “in-betweenness” was a space he would occupy in other areas of his life too. The son of a Jamaican father and white British mother, growing up in East London, it was easy for him to fall through the cracks. Growing up, he was told that he wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t black enough, wasn’t deaf enough.

It was only when he was fitted with hearing aids at the age of seven, that he began to discover his missing sounds: the high pitches of whistles, birds, alarms, the “sh, ch, ba, th” sounds in speech—all of it missing.

The Quiet Ear is an attempt to fill in those missing sounds in Antrobus’ own life, and how they formed his hybrid deaf identity. It’s a story of a journey of finding your path when there are no signs to show the way, and a testament to the people—his parents and teachers, artists, writers, and musicians—who helped form his language: spoken, written, and signed. It’s also about becoming a father to a hearing son, and trying to know the ways in which they might understand and misunderstand one another.

Weaving together memoir, criticism, and cultural history, and touching on both the spectrum of the deaf experience and how society fails deaf people, Antrobus finds his own way to reclaim his deafness as a power and a joy, and to reconcile his relationship to words and the world around him.

©2025 Raymond Antrobus (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A powerful and important book . . . This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus’s vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: his Jamaican heritage and his British one; his blackness and his whiteness; and, again and again, the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness. His voice is at once blunt and lyrical, angry and curious.”—Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Country of the Blind

“The Quiet Ear presents a complex portrait of deafness that goes beyond living without sound. Antrobus situates his own personal story of growing up not quite Black or deaf enough within larger contexts of D/deaf culture, race, masculinity, and colonialism. Lyrical, moving and powerful.”—Alice Wong, editor of Disability Intimacy and author of Year of the Tiger

“The Quiet Ear is expansive, generous, and massively tender—a beautiful exploration of an interior life grappling with several magnitudes of loss, and what can be found within them.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year