The Perseverance

The Perseverance is a prescribed text for HSC English Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture. It is the debut poetry collection of Raymond Antrobus, a d/Deaf British-Jamaican poet born in Hackney, London, and its poems explore deafness, mixed heritage and grief for his father through the language that shapes identity.

Raymond Antrobus was born in 1986 in Hackney, London, to an English mother and a Jamaican father, and he is d/Deaf - a British Sign Language user diagnosed deaf only as a child, after years in which no one, including him, understood what he was missing. Those two facts, a mixed British-Jamaican heritage and a deaf body in a hearing world, are the ground of everything in The Perseverance (2018), his debut collection, which won the Ted Hughes Award and made him the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize.

The prescribed selection is seven poems: "Echo", "Jamaican British", "Ode to My Hair", "Dear Hearing World", "The Ghost of Laura Bridgman Warns Helen Keller About Fame", "Doctor Marigold Re-evaluated" and "To Sweeten Bitter". To read them is to watch a single self being assembled out of competing claims: the hearing world sends the speaker to speech therapists, the English boys at school tell him to choose between Jamaican and British, a Jamaican cousin reads privilege in his skin and hair. Identity here is never simply given - it is named by others, refused, reclaimed, and finally spoken, or signed, back. Antrobus makes language itself the battlefield: a ghazal that will not let go of its refrain, a prose-poem addressed to the whole hearing world, a dictionary his dead father keeps giving him. Under everything runs the elegy for the Jamaican father, a difficult love grieved across the collection, because the father is both the source of the heritage and one of the people the deaf child could not always hear.

Antrobus's central achievement is to construct deafness as an identity and a culture rather than a medical fact. In "Dear Hearing World", addressed to the hearing majority, that identity turns militant, converting a private condition into a shared claim and relocating the failure to communicate in those who cannot sign.

The mixed-race self is something others keep trying to divide, and Antrobus keeps refusing the division through form. "Jamaican British" is a ghazal that opens "Some people would deny that I'm Jamaican British.", and its returning refrain, "Jamaican British", is built to keep saying the identity others deny. In "Ode to My Hair" heritage is written on the body, hair and ancestry becoming the same disputed thing.

Language is the true subject of the selection: who owns it, who is broken by it, who reclaims it. The poems record how spoken language was used against the deaf child, then claim deafness as its own linguistic order, so the mockery is exposed as the failure of the listener, not the speaker.

Grief is where the collection's two great subjects meet. In "To Sweeten Bitter" the father who gave his son dictionaries survives in the language he passed on, so heritage and mourning fuse into a single act. You inherit a person, these poems argue, the way you inherit a culture: incompletely, after the fact, and through the very language you struggled to share.