‘The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids’: A poet stands up to misunderstanding

When Raymond Antrobus released his first poetry collection, he titled it “The Perseverance.”  

Early on, family members thought Mr. Antrobus, born in London to a Jamaican father and a British mother, had a learning disability. At age 6, he learned he was deaf. His father showed little interest in trying to understand his son’s experience. As a young adult, Mr. Antrobus says he tried to pass himself off as “an able-bodied hearing person” by not wearing hearing aids. He lost several jobs due to misunderstandings.

His beliefs about what it means to be valued shifted when he started to develop an interest in writing poetry. “It changed how people started talking to me – and in a good way,” recalls the writer, who channels his experiences into poems that invite listeners into his world.

His latest project utilizes a fresh medium. The feted poet has recorded an audio collection, available via Bandcamp, titled “The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids.” But it’s not purely a spoken-word album. Grammy Award-winning producer Ian Brennan created audio effects and fractured musical accompaniments to emulate how people who are deaf encounter sound. That’s in keeping with the intent of Mr. Antrobus’ work. The poet aims to inspire understanding and inclusion. 

“He’s a treasure,” writes professor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, a representative for the Voices Reading Series at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, via email. This year, the program bestowed its Lucille Clifton Legacy Award on Mr. Antrobus. “Raymond’s writing exemplifies a devotion to the craft of poetry and a deep compassion for individuals who have been misunderstood, mistreated, and misrepresented due to their identity and perceived worth as humans,” says Mr. Coleman.

Mr. Antrobus’ love of poetry started at an early age. His mother read William Blake to him; his father recited the words of socially conscious reggae icon Linton Kwesi Johnson. But his first formal attempt at poetry, a high school homework assignment, was met with accusations of plagiarism by the teacher. 

“She was convinced I couldn’t have written it,” says Mr. Antrobus. “I kind of felt often misunderstood and undermined at school.”

A few years later, Mr. Antrobus wrote a breakthrough poem, “The First Time I Wore Hearing Aids.”

“I’d shared something that people didn’t really know or understand,” he says in a Zoom interview. “The kind of conversations I was having with the people around me became, to me, more interesting. More meaningful.”

Mr. Antrobus’ award-winning work covers social justice, racism, and his sometimes strained relationship with his father, who didn’t live long enough to see his son’s success. In 2021, Queen Elizabeth II honored Mr. Antrobus for his services to literature. Two years earlier, he won the prestigious Ted Hughes Award. One of the judges of that prize was Mr. Johnson, the reggae icon. 

“Affirmation is such a powerful thing when it comes from the right person,” says Mr. Antrobus. “This kind of blows apart so many stories now that I had about myself and my worth.” 

Reflecting on that award ceremony, his thoughts turn to his late father. “I would love to have seen his face, just me standing next to Linton and, you know, him shaking my hand,” he says with an affectionate laugh.

Mr. Antrobus curated 16 poems for the audio collection. While many of the narratives are autobiographical, some also chronicle the plight of others. “Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris” was a response to a North Carolina state trooper shooting a deaf man in 2016.

“When stories only exist as newspaper headlines and they are commodified, they’re irrelevant the next day,” he says. “But if you write a poem or make some art from it ... it sustains if it’s a successful piece of work or poetry.”

Some of Mr. Antrobus’ earlier poetry roils with a fury on behalf of those who’ve been victimized. But his work has begun to evolve. He recalls critics of his poems that wondered whether it was possible for him to, as he puts it, stand in his deafness and Blackness but in a way that’s joyous. In a poetry workshop, Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze offered advice that he’s never forgotten: “She said something like, ‘Where’s the air in your poem?’ Meaning, ‘Where’s the hole that your reader can look through and receive some air,’ like to fit themselves into what you’re talking about?”

One of the poems on the audio album, “I Move Through London Like a Hotep,” attains that empathy by detailing the writer’s misreadings of other people’s lips. Inside a Waffle House in Mississippi, he can’t tell if the person opposite him is saying, “You look melancholic” or “Do you want a pancake?”

Mr. Antrobus’ 2021 book of poems, “All the Names Given,” is the culmination of what he calls “a bit of maturity and illumination and again, like really thinking hard about what is the impact? What is it I’m trying to put into the world?” 

This year, the writer’s work has featured in notable efforts to advocate on behalf of people who are deaf. When protesters marched to London’s Trafalgar Square in March to successfully campaign for the government to legally recognize British Sign Language as a language of England, Wales, and Scotland, deaf actor Rose Ayling-Ellis read Mr. Antrobus’ poem “Dear Hearing World.” She also appeared on television to employ sign language to read Mr. Antrobus’ 2020 children’s book, “Can Bears Ski?” The poet was surprised. He praises Ms. Ayling-Ellis’ soulfulness.

“Again, it was that kind of affirmation that something that I had written, something that I just felt in my spirit, in my soul, in a way – if we believe in such things – but it felt like such a justice,” says Mr. Antrobus. “It was soulful enough, just writing those works, just creating them.”