8 minute read
IT’S COMPLICATED
As he publishes a follow up to his acclaimed first book, London-born poet Raymond Antrobus is troubled and fascinated by language, history and what he discovered on a Library shelf
The prose poem Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated by the British poet Raymond Antrobus begins with a sign language lesson:
… if you are crying and someone asks, “are you crying?” you must answer with a smile and nod to affirm, “yes, crying”.
The poem refers to the short story, Doctor Marigold, by Charles Dickens, which is about a London street trader who adopts a deaf girl and learns to communicate with her. She grows up, marries and becomes pregnant. Antrobus’s poem continues:
Let’s love that Sophy and Doctor Marigold invent their own home signs. Let’s love that Sophy goes to 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.
Raymond Antrobus at The London Library
Photo: Taormina Miller
It is not the only work in which he explores contradictions and oppositions, and not the only past text on deafness with which Antrobus has directly engaged. He was diagnosed as deaf when he was six – he can hear some frequencies and uses powerful hearing aids. Communication, power and inclusion are themes that run through his work: an acclaimed first chapbook and follow-up pamphlet, To Sweeten Bitter (2017), and a first book collection, The Perseverance (2018) – named partly after the Hackney pub in which his father used to drink – that won accolades including the Ted Hughes Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize, the first poetry work to do so. Hughes himself appears in it. His poem Deaf School is published entirely redacted; a subsequent piece by Antrobus reworks quotes from it (“Ted is alert and simple”). Antrobus also includes a section of a lecture given by Alexander Graham Bell, with the majority of the original text erased. Graham Bell was a powerful advocate for oralism, teaching deaf people to speak rather than sign, which he found primitive. Antrobus’s version of the lecture leaves fragments to reveal a hidden truth behind Graham Bell’s words such as “His incorrect instrument”. He calls the original lecture, like Deaf School, “a harmful document, a dangerous document.” Reading an 1843 notebook of Charles Dickens’ in The London Library, on the other hand, Antrobus felt, “what a tender, curious, sensitive man in some ways.” Unlike Hughes and Graham Bell, Dickens sought out deaf people to interview, to explore beyond his own worldview. The work might be problematic, sentimental, but “first and foremost, he was a storyteller,” says Antrobus. “He was looking for stories which would complicate the human experience.”
Something else about Dickens resonates with Antrobus – he was a performer who “understood the power of his body and his voice in his work, [which] also makes me gravitate towards him.” Antrobus broke through on London’s spoken-word circuit aged 17. He teaches alongside his writing – first in mainstream schools and more recently moving into deaf education (after reading that 75% of people born profoundly deaf in the UK are classified as illiterate) – and sees writing, teaching and performing as indivisible. Growing up, Antrobus’s Jamaican father would record poems from the radio onto cassette tapes – including from dub poets Miss Lou, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith – and play them back, then ask Antrobus to recite them. His English mother read him William Blake aloud. He saw Adrian Mitchell reciting poetry through a megaphone at anti-Apartheid marches, and “never separated an engagement with literature from an engagement with performance”. Antrobus doesn’t class himself as a native British Sign Language (BSL) speaker, as he underwent speech therapy before learning to sign aged 11. BSL still has no legal status in Britain, unlike Welsh or Gaelic, a sign that the struggle for an acceptance of deafness as “a positive value”, as the late American psychologist Harlan Lane put it, with its own culture and ethnicity rooted in sign language, is ongoing.
Antrobus performs at an Out-spoken poetry event in London, 2019
Photo: courtesy of Out-spoken
“There are people who believe that because of the, in some ways colonial baggage of the hearing world, you will find more purity and more space for yourself in the deaf world, if you turn off your voice and just sign,” Antrobus says. “I know people who made that choice – for some that’s a political decision and for others it’s practical. I’ve been someone who tries to place myself in both of those worlds.” With mixed race heritage – his poem Jamaican British is on the GCSE syllabus – Antrobus once said that he needs a “quadruple consciousness”, drawing on WEB Du Bois’s notion of the “double consciousness” that Black people require in a white world. Antrobus’s poem Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris finds him in a New York café, when a black policewoman enters, carrying weapons. The poet is thinking about a young, black, deaf man recently shot by police and killed, and the last word he learned in American Sign Language: “Alive – both thumbs pointing at your lower abdominal, index fingers pointing up like two guns in the sky.”
Antrobus has talked before about mixed feelings in relation to the spoken word scene and its associations, often limited and perhaps racist, telling a Poetry Foundation podcast: “My engagement with literature was almost erased. It’s like this assumption that, ‘Ah, ok you do spoken word, so you’re going to know about rappers... It’s like, ‘Well, yes, and this’ – you know, ‘Yes Jay Z, yes [Jamaican poet] Andrew Salkey’”. He likes to think of poetry by definition as “figurative language with a shape. If you take away any of the baggage that poetry has, of being this very elite, grand venture, then just call it [that], I think that allows more people in.” The rise of spoken word has continued to open fault lines in the poetry establishment that someone like Adrian Mitchell was keen to crack in the 1980s and 90s – for example, Rebecca Watts writing in PN Review in 2018 about an “open denigration of intellectual engagement” by a new generation of popular, young poets finding audiences on YouTube. “I’m not trying to simplify anything,” says Antrobus. “I think the work is still complicated and engages with capital ‘L’ literature. And I don’t think that what I’m writing is propaganda, I generally don’t have my own agendas with it. I really am trying to figure something out and my belief is I can figure it out through language.” The real-world impact of the language that we have access to is not lost on him. Speaking on Radio 4 in 2019, Antrobus said, “writing poetry, being a poet, finding ways to articulate who I am to the world has manifested a different kind of world for me.”
All the Names Given - photo courtesy of Picador
Antrobus joined The London Library in 2017. He had been studying and practicing teaching, but wanted to write more, and what he found was unexpected. “It’s funny, libraries are meant to be really quiet places,” he says, “but sometimes I had to take the books away and read them where I could slam my fists on a table or shout.”
He had looked up the shelf on deafness, where he discovered “books that I didn’t find anywhere else” – and he read all of them. Associations between signing and primitivism were a constant thread. He took in deaf education from the 17th to the 20th century, Goya learning sign language after going deaf, and Queen Victoria’s advocacy for deaf schools (she also learned sign language). There is also a “murky” history of Helen Keller, the American advocate for the blind and deaf whose picture Antrobus remembers on the walls of his deaf school. “This is the thing with knowledge,” he says. “As well as finding out more about the atrocities, it complicates the victories, the harmonies.”
He says he’s unsure how this material will work through him and into his work, but a newly published collection, All The Names Given, may provide some answers. He was married in 2019 to an American, and recently spent time there teaching, particularly in Oklahoma. One new poem drew on texts between him and his wife while they were separated for months during lockdown – 800 pages of which were used as evidence in his green card application (“Tabitha; y haven’t u told me u luv me/Raymond; I’m literally writing you love poems”). How power plays out in society has been under the microscope more than ever in the time between his two books being published. Did being in America reveal better or different ways of meeting the challenges of inequality? “I’m baffled and in awe of the kind of linguistic gymnastics English people are doing to separate themselves from [America],” he says. “You think that England isn’t complicit in what’s happening [there]? It’s literally the same thing.” As a teenager moving around in London, he was frequently stopped and searched, or watched, by police, and in the US, “It feels the same, like you have to be cautious and aware… you have to know how you’ll be read. The difference is the police are armed.”
The response to the slurs that followed the England football team’s defeat in the European Football Championship finals angered him: “Covering up the hate graffiti, instead of actually talking about it, there’s a real prism to enter there, a real reality. You can talk about the history – those aren’t just American words.” The etymology of his own name features in the new collection, which explores more his relationship with his English mother, rather than his father, whose death shortly before The Perseverance coloured that book a great deal. Antrobus travelled to Cheshire to uncover more about his surname, which is maternal. Naturally, the “most documented” early Antrobus was the wealthiest. “Guess how he got rich?” he asks.
All The Names Given is out now, published by Picador
