The Perseverance
Page 1
THE PERSEVERANCE
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.
ALSO BY RAYMOND ANTROBUS
POETRY PAMPHLETS
To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017)
Shapes & Disfigurements Of Raymond Antrobus
(Burning Eye Books, 2012)
PUBLISHED BY PENNED IN THE MARGINS
Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB
www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk
All rights reserved
© Raymond Antrobus 2018
The right of Raymond Antrobus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.
First published 2018
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International
ISBN: 978-1-908058-5-22
ePub ISBN: 978-1-908058-6-69
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
CONTENTS
Echo
Aunt Beryl Meets Castro
My Mother Remembers
Jamaican British
Ode to My Hair
The Perseverance
I Move Through London like a Hotep
Sound Machine
Dear Hearing World
‘Deaf School’ by Ted Hughes
After Reading ‘Deaf School’ by the Mississippi River
For Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent
Conversation with the Art Teacher (a Translation Attempt)
The Ghost of Laura Bridgeman Warns Helen Keller About Fame
The Mechanism of Speech
Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated
The Shame of Mable Gardiner Hubbards
Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris
To Sweeten Bitter
I Want the Confidence of
After Being Called a Fucking Foreigner in London Fields
Closure
Maybe I Could Love a Man
Samantha
Thinking of Dad’s Dick
Miami Airport
His Heart
Dementia
Happy Birthday Moon
NOTES
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the editors at the following publications, where some of these poems were published previously, often in earlier versions: POETRY, Poetry Review, The Deaf Poets Society, Magma, The Rialto, Wildness, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe Books), The Mighty Stream, Filigree, Stairs and Whispers, And Other Poems, International Literature Showcase, New Statesman.
I am grateful for support from Arts Council England, Sarah Sanders and Sharmilla Beezmohun at Speaking Volumes, Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, Complete Works III, Cave Canem, Hannah Lowe, Shira Erlichman, Tom Chivers, my mother, my sister and Tabitha. The Austin family who gave me a place to stay in New Orleans, where I finished the manuscript. Malika Booker, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Nick Makoha, Peter Kahn.
Big up Renata, Ruth and all the NHS speech and language therapists I’ve had over the years. Big up Miss Mukasa, Miss Walker and Miss Willis, the English and support teachers at Blanche Neville Deaf School who helped me develop language and a D/deaf identity in the hearing world. I am me because you are you.
The
Perseverance
‘There is no telling what language is
inside the body’
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS
Echo
My ear amps whistle as if singing
to Echo, Goddess of Noise,
the ravelled 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 Deafness is a kind of Atheism.
Who would turn down God?
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.
What?
A word that keeps looking
in mirrors, in love
with its own volume.
What?
I am a one-word question,
a one-man
patience test.
What?
What language
would we speak
without ears?
What?
Is paradise
a world where
I hear everything?
What?
How will my brain
know what to hold
if it has too many arms?
The day I clear out my dead father’s flat,
I throw away boxes of moulding LPs:
Garvey, Malcolm X, Mandela speeches on vinyl.
I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf.
The smudged green label reads Raymond Speaking.
I play the tape in his vintage cassette player
and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name, Antrob,
and Dad’s laughter crackling in the background,
not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus”
and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.
Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness —
Antrob, Antrob, Antrob.
‘And if you don’t catch nothing
then something wrong with your ears —
they been tuned to de wrong frequency.’
KEI MILLER
So maybe I belong to the universe
underwater, where all songs
are smeared wailings for Salacia,
Goddess of Salt Water, healer
of infected ears, which is what the doctor
thought I had, since deafness
did not run in the family
but came from nowhere;
so they syringed olive oil
and salt water, and we all waited
to see what would come out.
And no one knew what I was missing
until a doctor gave me a handful of Lego
and said to put a brick on the table
every time I heard a sound.
After the test I still held enough bricks
in my hand to build a house
and call it my sanctuary,
call it the reason I sat in saintly silence
during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached
The Good News I only heard
 
; as Babylon’s babbling echoes.
Aunt Beryl Meets Castro
listen listen, you know I
met Castro in Jamaica in
‘77 mi work with
government under
Manley yessir you
should’da seen me up in
mi younger day mi give
Castro flowers
a blue warm warm
welcome to we
and mi know people who
nuh like it who say him
should stay smokin’ in
him bush, our water and
wood nuh want problem
with dat blaze, but Castro,
him understan’ the history
of dem who harm us, who
make the Caribbean a
kind of mix up mix up
pain. Me believe him
come to look us Black
people in the eye and say
we come from the same
madness but most people
nah wan brave no war and
mi understand dem, but
mi also know how we all
swallow different stones
on the same stony path.
Most dem on the Island
hear life in some Queen’s
English voice but I was
tuned to dem real power
lines, I was picking up all
the signals. Some of dem
say, you know too much
yuh go mad, there a fear
of knowledge for the
power it bring and mi
understand dem just
trying to live and cruise
through life like raft
cruise Black River,
Hunderstan’?
My Mother Remembers
serving Robert Plant, cheeky bugger,
tried to haggle my prices down.
I didn’t care about velvet nothing.
I’m just out in snow on a Saturday market morning
trying to make rent and this is it:
when you’re raised poor the world is touched
different, like you have to feel something, know it
with your hand. You need to know what is
worth what to who. I’ve served plonkers
in my time. That singer, Seal, tried to croon
my prices down. I was like, no no, I’m one
missed meal away from misery, mate!
I used to squat in abandoned factories,
go to jumble sales and come home to piece
together this cupboard, filling it with fabrics.
Then I met this wood sculptor, had these tree-trunk
forearms, said, why not go to
Camden Passage on Wednesday?
I had this van, made twenty-eight quid.
Look, everything I sold is listed in this notebook.
Fabrics, cleaned from your Great Gran’s house.
Vintage. People always reach back to times
gone and that’s what I’m saying,
people want to carry the past. Make it
fit them, make it say, this is still us.
I’d take sewn dresses made in the ‘20s.
Your Great Gran was a dressmaker,
you know, dresses carried her. I wore
this white and green thing to
her funeral. Sorry, guess everything
has its time. Are you ready to eat
or am I holding you up?
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.
Ode to My Hair
When a black woman
with straightened hair
looks at you, says
nothing black about you,
do you rise like wild wheat
or a dark field of frightened strings?
For years I hide you under hats
and, still, cleanly you cling to my scalp,
conceding nothing
when they call you too soft,
too thin for the texture
of your own roots.
Look, the day is yellow Shea butter,
the night is my Jamaican cousin
saying your skin and hair mean
you’re treated better than us,
the clippings of a hot razor
trailing the back of my neck.
Scissor away the voice of the barber
who charges more to cut
this thick tangle of Coolie
now you’ve grown a wildness,
trying to be my father’s ‘fro
to grow him out, to see him again.
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.
I Move Through London like a Hotep
What you need will come to you at the right time, says the Tarot card I overturned at my friend Nathalie’s house one evening. I was wondering if she said something worth hearing. What? I’m looking at
her face and trying to read it, not a clue what she said but I’ll just say yeah and hope. Me, Tabitha and her aunt are waffling in Waffle House by the Mississippi River. Tabitha’s aunt is all mumble. She either said do you want a pancake? or you look melancholic. The less I hear the bigger the swamp, so I smile and nod and my head becomes a faint fog horn, a lost river. Why wasn’t I asking her to microphone? When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain. You watch their brains navigate channels with BSL interpreters in the corner of night-time TV. Sometimes it’s hard to get back the smooth sailing and you go down with the whole conversation. I’m a haze of broken jars, a purple bucket and only I know there’s a hole in it. On Twitter @justnoxy tweets, I can’t watch TV / movies / without subtitles. It’s just too hard to follow. I’m sitting there pretending and it’s just not worth it. I tweet back, you not being able to follow is not your failure and it’s weird, giving the advice you need to someone else, as weird as thinking my American friend said, I move through London like a Hotep when she actually said, I’m used to London life with no sales tax. Deanna (my friend who owns crystals and believes in multiple moons) says I should write about my mishearings, she thinks it’ll make a good book for her bathroom. I am still afraid I have grown up missing too much information. I think about that episode of The Twilight Zone where an old man walks around the city’s bars selling bric-a brac from his suitcase, knowing what people need –– scissors, a leaky pen, a bus ticket, combs. In the scene, music is playing loud, meaning if I were in that bar I would miss the mysticism while the old man’s miracles make the barman say, WOAH, this guy is from another planet!
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 —