Hearing/seeing Raymond Antrobus – Durham Book Festival Laureate 12th October 2019
This was an evening of illuminations. Did I miss a lot by following in my copy of the poems from The Perseverance (2018)? Watching the newer poems, I know I did, because here sign languages come into their own and open up the world of communication (and miscommunication) I, like other hearing people, miss all of the time. Geoff, my husband, tells me that much I would have enjoyed I missed precisely because of my desire to follow visible words – to confuse the ‘reading’ with the visible read. There is, I begin to think, a kind of insensitivity to reading that ties the eye to the book and ears to the reading voice.
That world of embodied meaning: gesture and then more formal sign languages – and these poems depend on real differences between British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL). This is at it most moving in the poem , ‘Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris’. Here the misinterpretation of gesture in communication is used to make real our understanding of the ‘noise’ in all languages, that make poetry so attentive to multiplicities in all communications/miscommunications in the world. It is all about the difficulties of reading in the visual and suddenly illuminates themes of diversity and the variability in access to power in all interactions. It is so profound.
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 finger pointing up like two guns in the sky.
In the text a graphic of the ASL for ‘alive’ appears below these lines but Geoff tells me that, in noticing this, I missed a world of moving ambiguity in the delivery of the poem. I have learned therefore something I can’t now put right but which will, I hope, change me in the future. These habits of listening in a literate world where linguistic signs take hegemony over the oral and the purely visual will, I promise myself, change me.
Some mistakes can’t be redeemed – mistakes that have caused such a high percentage of deaf children to have to fight harder for literacy, mistakes in misunderstanding Harris’ hand communication. These mistakes are irreversible. Power distributions are there matters of life and death. I understood why Antrobus’ poetry is often angry, and even why Ted Hughes is a rightful object of anger in some respect when he resorts to demeaning language about deaf children, ‘unaware’, ‘removed from the vibration of the air’ (p.41). I felt a bit guilty when I read the inscription he put in our copy at the signing:
Thank you!
Your eyes/ears
C. Durham
Perhaps we have failed in imagination in ways equivalent to Hughes on this occasion.
Raymond’s Dad seems to speak to us from The Perseverance poems and hearing Raymond read can feel like a séance when that man, that father, misguided but embodied in love, appears as a voice embodied by his son. We learn how to ‘overstand’ rather than ‘understand’. This is a poetry about power and delivered in and with power, even when it touches on a primal powerlessness:
…, every deaf child whose confidence
Has gone to a silent grave, … (p.37).
His new poems deal with working with deaf children in schools and high-security prisoners. Some lines sing still in my head (aural and visual memory) but this is not the place to try and reproduce what is not yet published.
We can only wait in hope, thanks and humility. Here is a new and wonderful poet – to me at least!
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
Lovely write-up. And yes, Raymond Antrobus definitely made us think about how we read with the ear, eye, or finger following the words on the page. So humane, empathetic and as you say, ‘profound’.
LikeLiked by 1 person