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Eleanor Wachtel: Do you remember when you wrote your first poem?

RA: Hmm. An early memory I have of writing a poem was like a heartbreak poem and this girl I really liked -- obviously she didn't like me back, so I had this line, Last night I missed you last night I hugged myself and kissed you last night was lonely until I mingled. If all the dreams are arrested you My soul is the last time I invested in you. Never knew I'd be left in destitute. Never knew but to think of you is all left to do. Never knew but discovered that you were never true because you turned and did everything you swore you'd never do.

EW: Wow, she must have been some girl [laughs]. You still remember the poem.

RA: Well, my mom is a huge fan of William Blake and she would recite William Blake poems to me and tell me about William Blake's life. On my bedroom wall she put up a picture of the poem ‘London’ by William Blake. So every time I hear or see a Blake poem it grounds me in a way with my mom. And my dad also loved poetry. But his relationship with it was a bit different. So the poems that he loved were, there’s a poet called Linton Kwesi Johnson, Miss Lou, and these are poets from Jamaica who would perform their poems. And he would have tapes, cassette tapes, and videotapes of you know of these performances and he would play them to me when I was growing up. And so like Miss Lou, she had these lines that are still in my head. “What a devilment in England, then rage war and curse the worst. But me wondering how I'm going to stand colonization in reverse.” You know, it’s music, so I've got those two kind of angles, those two histories of poetry that were just around.

RA: Yeah. I mean I've never really found it useful to compare, to separate them. Because when you think about how long and deep and sophisticated the oral tradition is, and then in comparison how young and also deep and sophisticated our history of literature is. They complement each other, they speak to each other. So for me trying to say that you can only have one without the other or that one has more value than the other is not useful. Having said that I wouldn't deny that there are aesthetic differences. But in the same way we have poets who, there are poets who you'd go to because of their sound, because of how they lean on sound. And there are poets you would go to just because of how they present an image and they've prioritized that and this idea.

RA: Oh yeah.

RA: Yeah I do actually. I find myself reading it in my head. I mean suddenly if it's moving me, often it's because it's singing, often it's because there's something there that's like, oh no, this is asking for my breath. And that's how I personally get more from poetry. And I mean having said that there are still poems which I love to kind of experience in silence in my head you know. So there's no, I'm not a puritan about any way one way to experience or enjoy poetry. You know I think every poem is its own species, its own energy.

RA: Sure. So what I'd say about ‘Happy Birthday Moon,’ it was inspired by a children's picture book of the same title,. ‘Happy Birthday Moon,’ and it was the picture book that my dad used to read to me about this bear who lived out in the mountains and he would stand at the tallest mountain of his forest and he would call out over the mountains and on this one particular night it happened to be the bear's birthday. So he says, “It's my birthday!” and the bear's voice echoes through the mountains and comes back to him and he hears the echo, “It's my birthday!” and the bear says to himself, “Wow, it's the moon's birthday as well.” So this whole book is about this bear having this conversation with the moon slash himself you know. So yeah. So this poem is a pantoum.

RA: So there's two lines that repeat throughout the poem so it's like an echo. It brings in repetition.

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.

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.

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?

EW: Raymond Antrobus with his poem ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ . It's a it's a touching portrayal of your relationship with your father which we'll talk about in a moment. But you say that that was the beginning of language for you. Why that particular experience?

RA: He didn't know I was deaf. No. He found out a bit later on.

RA: Yeah I mean I mean I suppose I've got to a point now where I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily call it a hearing problem. Because a hearing problem would say that there was something wrong with me. And really what the problem was, was the world around me didn't understand what my needs were. So my mom bought this telephone and I remember her saying that this particular telephone was really loud and had it installed. And at this point I'm about six or seven. And the first day the telephone is in it rings and she's looking at the telephone ringing in and she's looking at me not responding. And then something just kind of clicked for her. She's like, oh wait, I think Raymond might be deaf. So I had a hearing test and lo and behold it's true.

RA: Yeah I mean I was … They told me I was dyslexic and I had severe learning difficulties. I was struggling to read and write. So I was getting, I was getting attention for it. And you know it was a misdiagnosis. And I remember even when I was that young, I remember thinking to myself I'm not stupid. I don't think I'm incapable. But I became very aware that that's how people were suddenly perceiving me. And that -- talking about early powerful memories -- that was a memory that was a very ingrained memory in me, that my response to that trauma is to still believe that I have to prove my capability. I have to assert who I am. I have to find the language which can correctly present who I am to the world. You know it's that kind of urgency to do that. I still feel and it's poetry that has given me that that medium in a way.

RA: I think I think it was, it's tricky because at first I wasn't in a deaf school so no one else around me would have been deaf. And I would have been given these hearing aids and first I'm thinking oh this is pretty cool. And then suddenly it gave me attention I didn't like. And you know, when you start kind of like fancying people other people, you know, that hyper consciousness is like, oh no, maybe they don't like people who have quote “special needs,” you know. So yeah all of that kind of self-consciousness played into me, I think, denying that part of myself. Not wanting that part of myself to be seen or spoken about or noticed. So I think yeah I think that was a journey. But at the same time I do understand that it's a journey for so many of us. So many of us grow up hyper conscious of ourselves and how we’re perceived. I think I just had that extra layer, actually layers, really, of being deaf, growing up in a household which was Jamaican and English and you know all the different languages involved and there were different etiquettes. And you know, so, it was tricky.

EW: Because you were doing this 25 years ago.

RA: So my first job was a lifeguard. So for people who have trained as lifeguards, they’ll know that a lot of the signals are whistles and I don't hear whistle.

RA: Yeah. Yeah exactly. I don't hear any high frequency sounds. And the sound in swimming pools environments are very difficult anyway. So I'm just sitting on my lifeguard chair just super aware, like overcompensating for everything and ready to react. But the thing is that kind of constant intense attention tires out your brain very quickly. So I fell asleep in the lifeguard chair. All right. So that was that was the first warning I got and this was in my first week. And in the second week was being in the chair and it was a very crowded day. It was a weekend, a Saturday. Lots of families in the pool, a wave machine was on and I saw a boy in the deep end, about 10 years old and he looked like he was drowning and I was watching him and then I heard a sound which I thought was a whistle, and I thought it was the long whistle, which meant, “Lifeguard, get into the pool.” So I jumped into the water and I got this boy out from under the water. Turns out he wasn't drowning, he was just playing around. But now there's a lifeguard in the swimming pool, there's a panic. So then there was all this commotion happening. Families are now dispersing from the pool where everyone is, some kids have started crying, a real alarm goes off now and then I remember just kind of being left in that deep end and the wave machine just kind of settling down, just like, me treading the water. I mean my manager was watching, saw the whole thing. I remember him just shaking his head. And he called me into his office. Lost my job, you know. So yeah, that was one of the things that kept me coming back to poetry because poetry was this thing I could just do on my own. You know I didn't rely on anyone. If I let anyone down, it's only myself.

RA: Yeah exactly. These are my directions, and that's what poetry is to me like that truly is like these are my own directions

RA:

My ear amps whistle like they are singing

to Echo, goddess of noise,

the raveled knot of tongues,

of blaring birds, consonant crumbs

of dull doorbells, sounds swamped

in my misty hearing aid tubes.

Gaudí believed in holy sound

and built a cathedral to contain it,

pulling hearing men from their knees

as though atheism is a kind of deafness.

Who would turn down God?

Even though I have not heard

the golden decibels of angels,

I have been living in a noiseless

palace where the doorbell is pulsating

light and I am able to answer.

a word that keeps looking

in mirrors like it is in love

with its own volume.

I am a one-word question,

a one-man

patience test.

What language

would we speak

without ears?

Is paradise

a world where

I hear everything?

How will my brain

know what to hold

if it has too many arms?

I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf,

smudged green label Raymond Speaking.

I play the tape in his vintage cassette player

and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.

Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness —

EW: Raymond Antrobus, reading his poem ‘Echo.’ The Gaudi church that you referred to in your poem was designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi. How did you feel being in that space?

EW: In one section of that poem ‘Echo’ your two-year-old self is saying your name over and over or trying to say your name. What was it like for you to hear your voice which your father had recorded on those cassettes?

EW: But you have it and you have the image of it.

EW: And to be on the on the, I won't say the B side of Miss Lou, it's still pretty it's still pretty great.

EW: So in terms of your father's affection for you to put you there.

EW: your father has a strong presence throughout much of your work. What was he like?

EW: Do you know why he came when he left Jamaica?

RA: Yeah,he came for work basically. You know the war had ended and he said he -- Winston Churchill came to Jamaica and he went to see him. You know Winston Churchill shows up in this lavish car. He's been driven around Kingston and he gives a speech, talking about how great and proud he is of the Jamaicans and what a great contribution they've done for the war and how wonderful it would be if Jamaicans could come to England and help rebuild the country. And you know my dad was inspired by that.

RA: He did. He was a painter, decorator. He was a mechanic. You know he was a manual laborer you know. So he yeah he did. He did. He was moving around a lot. And then ended up in Hackney where he met my mom in East London at a reggae night they were both at. And yeah. I mean I'm the second kid so, I have an older sister. So it was yeah. They were … They had so few things in common to be honest, my mum and my dad. But one thing that they did have in common was poetry. They both had that.

EW: Raymond, could you read the title poem from your new collection, The Perseverance. As you were saying your father struggled with alcohol …

EW: That's the name of the pub in Hackney.

EW: It really is what an amazing.name.

EW: I thought for a poet to have a pub named ‘Perseverance,’ I thought he must have made that up. [laughs]

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.

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.

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

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.

RA: I think, I think it’s … it's a tricky one because, because when my dad would drink he would be a different person to who he was when he wasn't drinking. And I'm a boy, I'm a child like, you know, like any child they just, they want to be loved, right. They need that, it grounds them. You know, that certainty. So my dad -- it was like trying to love two very different people, you know. So I guess I was this boy who was just caught up in that, like, and confused by that. Like, how do I, not only how do I love this man, but even that question of actually, like, is there only one version of him that loves me?, you know. So … I'm trying to be really kind to that boy though, you know, he’s still in me. And so I think that's something about getting older, becoming adults, I think we don't really grow up and you know and become someone else. I think we grow with those other versions of ourselves. And I think those other versions of ourselves deserve compassion and understanding and in some cases forgiveness.

RA: Yeah, but--

RA: Yeah.

RA: You can't you can't give someone something that you can't give yourself you know. So I have to be able to forgive how in some ways how hard that boy was on himself because he didn't think he deserved love. He didn't think he deserved the attention. You know, that that he was craving and he didn't want to want it, but still wanted it. And that's a torment you know.

RA: His own trauma. I think that there's so many things that he would have gone through, that I just would never truly understand. You know, he was born in rural Jamaica. He had you know about nine brothers and sisters and he's by far the darkest skinned of them, and he's the one being sent away from the rural land, from Birch Hill, Patty Hill, where he was born. And he, you know, I think he never really recovered, I think, from his childhood. I think he carried childhood trauma with him all the way through and it made him, um, I dunno, yeah, it hurt him. It made him angry and that pain that he had he couldn't help but project it. Because I don't think he wanted to hurt anyone, you know. So I don’t think in the end he realized how much he was hurting his family. But again he… the thing that he's left me with is his kindness. You know, I don't think he deserves my anger or my… yeah. My anger is not, it's not going to help me in this case. I think anger can be useful, but in this case I think writing through these poems has helped me to, again, understand him and frame him in a way that I can love him in the way that I wanted to, in the way that I wasn’t able to as a young boy.

RA: Yeah. I have a line in another poem that says, ‘Grief never leaves. It just changes shape.’ And that’s what it’s done. Like my grief for my dad is still very much in me. And I think grief -- that's it for a lot of us isn't it? But it's just changed shape. Having written this and kind of had all this time to meditate and wrestle with the language of the memories that I have, has given me, I think, some comfort. Some comfort.

RA: What he would tell me about Jamaica was mainly in the music that he would play me. Bob Marley's line: ‘Rock stone was my pillow.’ You know you can't really separate the sound of a place -- like the sound and landscape of a sound -- you can't separate reggae, in a way.

RA: I thought Jamaica was a difficult place. As soon as I got there, I was like, this is tough. You know. it has a... there's an intensity to Jamaica. So I'm from London, I'm born in London, where the intensity is very fast, it's very on the go. People are very much got places to go, things to see. And so when you interact with people in London, it’s often -- if you're in sync with London as a city -- it’s very much like, ‘Where's your bathroom? Where's your toilet?’ Just demands. ‘I want that. I want that. I need this. I need this. Go.’ Like you begin so many conversations in London with demands.

So for me my response to it was, wow this is really harsh, because I feel people are not responding well to me. And I'm also deaf, so I'm not used to, you know, the accent. And so, I, yeah, if I'm honest, I remember feeling very afraid of speaking with people in Jamaica, because I felt it like, you know, judgment. Judgment is a big thing, you know.

RA: I try and go back to Jamaica now at least once a year. So I have an uncle there. I've got a lot of cousins there. And yeah, you know, being… particularly since my dad passed away, like, it's a place that I go to to…. You to be with him. Like talking about what it was that he gave me. He gave me the sound of the island, and through food and music, and through, I suppose, even his accent. I hear it. I hear people talking like him. So it's a way that he's still with me, you know, when I'm in Jamaica.

EW: Could you read your poem ‘To Sweeten Bitter’?

To sweeten Bitter.

So, To sweeten Bitter.

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 saltfish

and sweet potato and green banana

and watched people holding hands –

EW: Raymond Antrobus with his poem, ‘To Sweeten Bitter.’

RA: Yeah because they update them. The Oxford… there are so many editions of The Oxford Dictionary. It's crazy, it's crazy. You know there’s like ‘New Words Edition’ and then there’s like editions that they've included the thesaurus part. And then there's dictionary editions where they’ve included regional words. You know? There’s so many. And that was something that my dad really did leave me with. He always talked about the importance of dictionaries, you know. He's with me in there too, in them.

RA: You know I read an interview last night in the Paris Review by Allen Ginsberg. And this is Allen Ginsberg speaking in 1966, and he's just done a tour around England and he's asked this question which is fascinating: he's asked how he feels about English poetry. And his take is, ‘Well, English poetry is... ‘ I'm going to say it even kinder than he did [laughs].

But he basically said that. it's very traditional. A bit too traditional. And it's kind of stuck in its own traditions. And the way that people speak around England -- so in places like Newcastle and Liverpool and London -- are so different. But the way they seem to be writing poetry is like this assumption that… it’s all this high class poetry, the Queen's English and all this kind of stuff. And then he ends it by saying, ‘I wish that English poets had more guts. And just wrote as they spoke, because it's rich.’ You know.

RA: Yeah, yeah that, you know. Because that was his… in Jamaica, colourism is, you know, it's a whole other language for race relations in Jamaica, which is very different to anywhere in Europe. You know, they have this term called ‘high brown,’ meaning, you know, you’re black -- if you're in an English context, but in a Jamaican context, you’re white… you’re ‘high brown.’

RA: Like, for each poem, something can feel very true in a moment. And what I'm serving in a poem is that moment. So in the moment I was writing that poem, my most important identity was being a son. The next day maybe my most important identity was being a gardener [laughs], a wannabe gardener, or I dunno, just for a moment. So you know I did… I did become conscious of that; of my relationship with my mom and how I was writing so much about my dad. But ultimately I realized that I was trying to reconcile the grief of losing my dad, which is where he kept kind of coming up. And there were so many kind of loose ends within our story, within the narrative we have of our history, of our… I don’t know, of my childhood, and whether or not he was, you know, a good dad in some ways or a good enough dad. Yeah.

RA: It’s complicated, it’s in a different way, I think. You know… I don’t know. I still need to write those poems [laughs].

RA: Poetry is the only form that I can think of, where truly you can have so many things going on in just one line. Just one line can have all these compounded meanings. And that's the function of poetry. Right? My favourite and most simple definition of poetry is: ‘Poetry is figurative language with a shape.’ It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It really doesn't. And what it does is, particularly as a reader of poetry, there are so many different voices and so many different histories that other people have written into. So many of my favourite poets are also… they’re also historians as well as storytellers. You know, they’re also, in some cases, comedians as well as -- I'm going to use the term ‘emotional historians,’ you know. It's such a multi-genre kind of function, poetry.

RA: Yes. Oh yes…

RA: Oh my god. First off, I, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. You're the first person to ask me, in public, about that, about the connection between the poem ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ and the book.

So what I did was, with this poem, I rewrote it. I took it all completely apart and I wrote it as a kind of poetical journey for the young me -- for the kind of picture book that I think would have really empowered me as a young deaf boy, who just didn't have the language to understand who he was, and what it was he was dealing with as a deaf person. And not just for him but his parents, for his hearing parents, who also didn't know what it was and how to navigate, you know, that … how to guide a deaf child through the hearing world.

EW: It's great to have the chance to meet you. Thank you so much.

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Writers & Company Raymond Antrobus Episode Transcript

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