Raymond Antrobus

- United Kingdom -

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works iii and Jerwood Compton Poetry. He is one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word Education from Goldsmiths, University of London. Raymond is a founding member of Chill Pill and the Keats House Poets Forum. He has had multiple residencies in deaf and hearing schools around London, as well as Pupil Referral Units. In 2018 he was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Award by the Poetry Society (judged by Ocean Vuong). Raymond currently lives in London and spends most his time working nationally and internationally as a freelance poet and teacher.

Raymond Antrobus has published two acclaimed pamphlets and was nominated for a Forward Prize for his first collection, The Perseverance. It is published by dynamic and innovative independent press, Penned in the Margins. Accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award & The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize. In 2018 Antrobus was awarded 'The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize', (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem 'Sound Machine'.

Raymond Antrobus was born in Hackney, London to an English mother and Jamaican father. The title poem, a sestina called The Perseverance, is the name of a pub on Broadway Market in London where Raymond’s dad used to drink and it recalls long hours waiting, telling strangers who ask that his dad is working. The quality of persistence burns brightly throughout the collection and in a range of contexts. Raymond Antrobus’s deafness was not immediately recognised and one poignant poem, part of a longer sequence called ‘Echo’, shows Raymond chanting ‘Antrob, Antrob, Antrob’, relishing being able to make his dad laugh, but unable to hear the end sound in his own name. Many poems contain such perfectly captured and vivid moments and are deeply moving.

Perseverance in the face of loss is also a theme in the book, not only personal loss such as through the illness and death of Raymond’s father, but wider loss, as a result of the discrimination and prejudice faced by deaf people throughout history and in different cultures and countries. This is fiercely captured in the poem ‘Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris’, a poem that describes the shooting in American of a deaf man because his sign language gestures looked aggressive to the policeman. The poem ‘For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent’ begins with three women found murdered, their tongues cut out, for speaking sign language.

Racism is also tackled, and intersects with prejudice, loss and perseverance. Poems also wrestle with the tension and contradiction that comes with multiple identities:

In school I fought a boy in the lunch hall — Jamaican.
At home, told Dad, I hate dem, all dem Jamaicans — I’m British.

He laughed, said, you cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness,
took me straight to Jamaica — passport: British.

As these examples suggest, Raymond Antrobus’s poems combine the personal and the political to stunning effect.

The Perseverance contains drawn images of sign language. Indeed signals and ideas around tuning in or out are deftly explored. The opening poem offers an insight into Raymond’s relationship with his deafness, as an immersion in a different world:

Even though I have not heard

the golden decibel of angels,

I have been living in a noiseless

palace where the doorbell is pulsating light

and I am able to answer.

Throughout this collection, Antrobus is able to maintain a dynamic tension between ideas around deafness as an infection, a defect and as a source of wonder and possibility and a ‘sanctuary’. For example in these lines:

So maybe I belong to the universe
underwater, where all songs
are smeared wailings for Salacia,
Goddess of Salt Water, healer
of infected ears,

The collection also offers multiple perspectives. Antrobus is a master of the dramatic monologue and we hear his mother saying, ‘when you’re raised poor the world is touched/ different’. The collection gives voice to deaf people throughout history, such as Mable Gardiner Hubbards who says, ‘To pass as normal I rehearse my listening in mirrors’ and a stunning sequence of poems based on an interview with a Deaf Jamaican woman about her arrival in England.

‘To Sweeten Bitter’ is a poem which encapsulates this bitter-sweet collection and also the range and depth of Raymond Antrobus’s poetry.

I ask dictionary why we came here —
it said nourish so I sat with my aunt
on her balcony at the top
of Barnet Heights
and ate salt fish
and sweet potato

Raymond Antrobus is a poet who absolutely and abundantly repays time spent listening and reading. According to Kaveh Akbar, ‘it’s magic, the way this poet is able to bring together so much—deafness, race, masculinity, a mother’s dementia, a father’s demise—with such dexterity. Raymond Antrobus is as searching a poet as you’re likely to find writing today.’

More about the poet

Poetry

/ Jamaican British

after Aaron Samuels

Some people would deny that I’m Jamaican British.
Anglo nose. Hair straight. No way I can be Jamaican British.

They think I say I’m black when I say Jamaican British
but the English boys at school made me choose: Jamaican, British?

Half-caste, half mule, house slave — Jamaican British.
Light skin, straight male, privileged — Jamaican British.

Eat callaloo, plantain, jerk chicken — I’m Jamaican.
British don’t know how to serve our dishes; they enslaved us.

In school I fought a boy in the lunch hall — Jamaican.
At home, told Dad, I hate dem, all dem Jamaicans — I’m British.

He laughed, said, you cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness,
took me straight to Jamaica — passport: British.

Cousins in Kingston called me Jah-English,
proud to have someone in their family — British.

Plantation lineage, World War service, how do I serve
Jamaican British?
When knowing how to war is Jamaican, British.
/ The Perseverance

‘Love is the man overstanding’
peter tosh

I wait outside the perseverance.
Just popping in here a minute.
I’d heard him say it many times before
like all kids with a drinking father,
watch him disappear
into smoke and laughter.

There is no such thing as too much laughter,
my father says, drinking in the perseverance
until everything disappears —
I’m outside counting minutes,
waiting for the man, my father
to finish his shot and take me home before

it gets dark. We’ve been here before,
no such thing as too much laughter
unless you’re my mother without my father,
working weekends while the perseverance
spits him out for a minute.
He gives me 50p to make me disappear.

50p in my hand, I disappear
like a coin in a parking meter before
the time runs out. How many minutes
will I lose listening to the laughter
spilling from the perseverance
while strangers ask, where is your father?

I stare at the doors and say, my father
is working. Strangers who don’t disappear
but hug me for my perseverance.
Dad said this will be the last time before,
while the TV spilled canned laughter,
us, on the sofa in his council flat, knowing any minute

the yams will boil, any minute,
I will eat again with my father,
who cooks and serves laughter
good as any Jamaican who disappeared
from the Island I tasted before
overstanding our heat and perseverance.

I still hear popping in for a minute, see him disappear.
We lose our fathers before we know it.
I am still outside the perseverance, listening for the laughter.
/ Sound Machine

‘My mirth can laugh and talk, but cannot sing;
My grief finds harmonies in everything.’
james thomson

And what comes out if it isn’t the wires
Dad welds to his homemade sound system,
which I accidently knock loose
while he is recording Talk-Over dubs, killing
the bass, flattening the mood and his muses,
making Dad blow his fuses and beat me.
But it wasn’t my fault; the things he made
could be undone so easily —
and we would keep losing connection.
But praise my Dad’s mechanical hands.
Even though he couldn’t fix my deafness
I still channel him. My sound system plays
on Father’s Day in Manor Park Cemetery
where I find his grave, and for the first time
see his middle name, osbert, derived from Old English
meaning God and bright. Which may
have been a way to bleach him, darkest
of his five brothers, the only one sent away
from the country to live up-town
with his light skin aunt. She protected him
from police, who didn’t believe he belonged
unless they heard his English,
which was smooth as some up-town roads.
His aunt loved him and taught him
to recite Wordsworth and Coleridge — rhythms
that wouldn’t save him. He would become
Rasta and never tell a soul about the name
that undid his blackness. It is his grave
that tells me the name his black
body, even in death, could not move or mute.
/ Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated

‘If a written word can stand for an idea as well as a spoken word can,
the same may be said of a signed word’
harlan lane

My BSL teacher taught me about affirmation and negation,
saying, in sign: if you are crying and someone asks, “are you
crying?” you must answer with a smile and nod to affirm, “yes,
crying.”

I thought about Charles Dickens. About everyone laughing
and crying in 1843 while he performed Doctor Marigold.
The story is of a Cheap Jack trader pushing his cart through
east London, who adopts a deaf girl called Sophy after
losing his own daughter, because grief never leaves, it just
changes shape. Dickens visited deaf schools, interviewed
the students before shaping his story.

So let’s love that Sophy and Doctor Marigold invent their
own home signs. Let’s love that Sophy goes to a deaf school,
learns to read. Let’s laugh when two deaf people fall in love.

Let’s laugh when Sophy writes a letter to Doctor Marigold
hoping the child is not born deaf. Let’s laugh at the people who
hope their child is born with a pretty voice. Let’s speak in the
BSL word order — sign you speak? — while celebrating and
rolling our eyes at the signature sentimental ending. It’s said
that as Dickens read in Whitechapel, hearing people cried
in the street when Sophy spoke (an unexplained miracle).

I want my BSL teacher to sign to everyone in 1843, are you
crying? I want everyone to smile and nod, yes, crying.
/ Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris

When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car
the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.

I use the past tense though this is irrelevant
in Daniel’s language, which is sign.

Sign has no future or past; it is a present language.
You are never more present than when a gun

is pointed at you. What language says this
if not sign? But the police officer saw hands

waving in the air, fired and Daniel dropped
his hands, his chest bleeding out onto concrete

metres from his home. I am in Breukelen Coffee House
in New York, reading this news on my phone,

when a black policewoman walks in, two guns
on her hips, my friend next to me reading

the comments section: Black Lives Matter.
Now what could we sign or say out loud

when the last word I learned in ASL was alive?
Alive — both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal,

index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky.
/ To Sweeten Bitter

My father had four children
and three sugars in his coffee
and every birthday he bought
me a dictionary which got thicker
and thicker and because his word
is not dead I carry it like sugar

on a silver spoon
up the Mobay hills in Jamaica
past the flaked white walls
of plantation houses
past canefields and coconut
trees past the new crystal sugar factories.

I ask dictionary why we came here —
it said nourish so I sat with my aunt
on her balcony at the top
of Barnet Heights
and ate salt fish
and sweet potato

and watched women
leading their children
home from school.
As I ate I asked dictionary
what is difficult about love?
It opened on the word grasp

and I looked at my hand
holding this ivory knife
and thought about how hard it was
to accept my father
for who he was
and where he came from

how easy it is now to spill
sugar on the table before
it is poured into my cup.
/ Happy Birthday Moon

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it,
his deaf son who slurs his speech.
Dad taps the page, says, try again.

Tonight he gives the Moon my name, but I can’t say it.
I say Rain-nan Akabok. He laughs.
Dad taps the page, says, try again,
but I like making him laugh. I say my mistake again.

I say Rain-nan Akabok. He laughs,
says, Raymond you’re something else.
I like making him laugh. I say my mistake again.
Rain-nan Akabok. What else will help us?

He says, Raymond you’re something else.
I’d like to be the Moon, the bear, even the rain.
Rain-nan Akabok, what else will help us
hear each other, really hear each other?

I’d like to be the Moon, the bear, even the rain.
Dad makes the Moon say something new every night
and we hear each other, really hear each other.
As Dad reads aloud, I follow his finger across the page.
/ notes

‘Echo’: Kei Miller’s line appears in his collection, Light Song Of Light (Carcanet,
2010). There is an essay about this poem published on poetryfoundation.org,
titled ‘Echo, A Deaf Sequence’. Thanks to Don Share for featuring this poem
on The Poetry Magazine Podcast, March 6th 2017.

‘Jamaican British’: Inspired by Aaron Samuels’ poem ‘Broken Ghazal’, in The
BreakBeat Poets (Haymarket Books, 2015).

‘The Perseverance’: The Perseverance is the pub on Broadway Market my Dad
used to drink in. ‘Love is the man overstanding’ is from Peter Tosh’s ‘Where
You Going To Run’ which appears on Mama Africa (EMI, 1983). This poem
is a Sestina.

‘Sound Machine’: James Thomson’s line is from ‘Two Sonnets’, originally
written in 1730 and reprinted in Don Patterson’s Sonnets 101 (Faber, 2012).

‘Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated’: ‘Doctor Marigold’ is a short story written by
Charles Dickens. This poem would not exist without Jennifer Esmail’s Reading
Victorian Deafness and my BSL level 2 teacher, Debora who teaches for the BSL
organisation in London, Remark!

‘Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris’: Written after reading the CNN
article, ‘After trooper kills deaf man, North Carolina family seeks answers’ in
August 2016. The case was dropped in January 2017 and no one was charged.

‘Happy Birthday Moon’: A pantoum inspired by Frank Asch’s children’s
picturebook of the same title.

A note on the spelling of D/deaf

Thoughout the book, these poems use variations of big D and little d D/deaf.
Big D Deaf people are those who are born Deaf and tend to learn sign before
spoken language is acquired and regard their deafness as part of their identity
and culture rather than as a disability.

Small d deaf people are often those who become deaf in later life, after they
have acquired a spoken language. Their relationship with deafness is more
medical than cultural.

Raymond Antrobus

- United Kingdom -

Poetry

/ Jamaican British

/ The Perseverance

/ Sound Machine

/ Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated

/ Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris

/ To Sweeten Bitter

/ Happy Birthday Moon

/ notes