The Perseverance Read online

  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 —