Key Quote
“"I can't hear the barista / over the coffee machine"”
Raymond Antrobus · With Birds You're Never Lonely
Focus: “hear”
The verb 'hear' establishes the poem's central tension — the urban world is designed for hearing people, and its noise creates barriers rather than connections for the d/Deaf speaker.
Technique 1 — CONTRAST — URBAN NOISE VS NATURAL SOUND
Antrobus structures the poem around a central contrast between the chaotic noise of a London coffeehouse and the meaningful sounds of the Zealandia forest in New Zealand. In the city, sound is a barrier — the coffee machine drowns out human speech, making communication impossible. In the forest, sound becomes a form of communion: bird calls are not noise but language, and the Māori woman who teaches them becomes a translator between the speaker and the natural world.
This contrast subverts (overturns) conventional assumptions about deafness. The poem suggests that it is not the d/Deaf speaker who is disconnected from sound but rather the city that produces meaningless noise. In the forest, where sounds have purpose and pattern, the speaker finds a form of hearing that does not depend on the auditory system alone — a multisensory experience that includes sight, vibration, and cultural knowledge.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
The poem traces a movement from urban isolation to natural connection — from a world where the speaker cannot hear to a world where hearing takes on new, richer forms. The Māori woman who teaches the speaker bird calls facilitates this progress, acting as a guide between human and non-human communication. Antrobus suggests that progress for d/Deaf people is not about 'fixing' deafness but about finding environments and communities that value different ways of experiencing the world. The forest does not cure the speaker's deafness; it makes deafness irrelevant.
Key Words
Technique 2 — COUPLET FORM & SENSORY IMAGERY
The poem is written predominantly in couplets — pairs of lines — which formally enact the theme of connection and pairing. The couplet structure mirrors the speaker's search for a companion, a communicative partner, a means of bridging the gap between self and world. The final standalone line breaks this pattern, creating an ambiguity that resists neat resolution — like the speaker's relationship with sound, the poem refuses to settle into a single, fixed conclusion.
Antrobus privileges non-auditory sensory imagery throughout the poem: visual details of the forest, the tactile experience of the environment, the spatial awareness of being surrounded by living things. This sensory hierarchy challenges the dominance of hearing in Western culture, suggesting that a world experienced through sight, touch, and vibration is no less rich than one experienced through sound. The bird calls become not just sounds but embodied experiences — felt as much as heard.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
d/DEAF IDENTITY & CULTURE
Raymond Antrobus is a d/Deaf British-Jamaican poet. The lowercase 'd' in 'd/Deaf' distinguishes between the audiological condition (deaf) and the cultural identity (Deaf). Antrobus explores how the world is designed for hearing people, creating unnecessary barriers for those who experience sound differently. His work challenges the medical model of disability, which treats deafness as a deficit to be cured, and instead embraces the social model, which locates the problem in society's failure to accommodate difference.
MĀORI CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE
The Zealandia forest in New Zealand is a predator-free sanctuary where native birds thrive. The Māori woman who teaches the speaker bird calls represents indigenous knowledge — a way of understanding the natural world that Western culture has largely forgotten. Antrobus positions this indigenous knowledge as a form of accessibility: it opens up the natural world in ways that do not depend on conventional hearing, suggesting that the most inclusive forms of communication are also the oldest.
Key Words
WOW — DISABILITY STUDIES & CRIP THEORY
Antrobus's poem engages with crip theory — a branch of disability studies that, like queer theory, reclaims a derogatory term to challenge normative assumptions. Crip theory argues that disability is not a personal tragedy but a social construct: people are disabled not by their bodies but by a world designed exclusively for able-bodied (or hearing) people. In the poem, the coffeehouse disables the speaker because it is designed for hearing customers; the forest enables him because its sounds operate on frequencies and in patterns that do not require conventional hearing. Antrobus demonstrates what disability scholars call epistemic advantage — the idea that disabled people have access to forms of knowledge unavailable to the able-bodied. The speaker's deafness allows him to perceive the forest differently, to attend to non-auditory signals, and to form a connection with the Māori woman that transcends the limitations of spoken language.
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