5 ideas
The title poem recalls Antrobus as a deaf boy waiting outside a London pub called The Perseverance while his Jamaican father drank inside. The father is remembered with both love and hurt: the same man who taught him to read and loved him also left him outside. The poem refuses to resolve the episode into either blame or forgiveness.
Lowercase 'deaf' names an audiological condition. Capital 'Deaf' names membership in a cultural and linguistic community built around sign language. A hearing-aid-wearing, speaking deaf child raised among hearing people can belong fully to neither group. This mirrors the split in the collection's poem 'Jamaican British', where a mixed-heritage speaker is not claimed wholly by either identity.
Hearing institutions treated sign language as something to eradicate rather than a language to respect. Forcing deaf children to lip-read and speak cut them off from a native language and a community, just as colonial schooling suppresses the mother tongues of the colonised.
Antrobus answers Ted Hughes's poem 'Deaf School' directly. He exposes how a celebrated hearing poet described deaf children from the outside, as lacking or animal-like. He then reclaims the right to say what deaf experience is. The lens is this: whoever holds the pen defines the disabled subject, so the reply has to take apart the original text, not merely add a second view beside it.
In 2016 Daniel Harris, a deaf man in North Carolina, was shot dead by a state trooper after a traffic stop. The trooper apparently read his failure to respond to spoken commands as defiance. Antrobus uses the case to show that systems which assume everyone can hear turn a sensory difference into a perceived threat, with lethal consequences.