Silence Is My Habitat

In poetic essays, Jessica White reveals how deafness sharpens her perception and deeply attunes her to her landscape, community, and self.

“Where a biography recounts a human life, an ecobiography shows how that life has been shaped by its ecosystem,” Jessica White says. Deaf since she was four years old, she adapted by using her diminished hearing to heighten her sensitivity to her ecosystem and to the rest of the living world. Throughout her childhood, her attention wandered from nearby conversations to the morning sun on her forearms, to the thick scent of flowering oleander.

In Silence Is My Habitat, her poetic essays chronicle her life in Australia, the way deafness is in all the gaps of her existence. Her heightened awareness keenly attunes her to creeks fringed by mangroves, a triangular shadow of a flock of galahs flying overhead, kangaroos bounding through wheat stubble in the late afternoons. She writes of life in the university, a space largely built for the able-bodied, where she must accommodate herself to the world of the hearing. She finds solace in a community of deaf women, filled with contemporaries who she regularly communicates with, as well as early-twentieth-century naturalists, whose assimilation into the hearing world before her time provides a sense of familiarity and validation.

For White, deafness, despite the inevitable fatigue and isolation, is a portal to a rich, contemplative, and creative life. Her distinctive voice, both spare and in vivid color, beckons us to enter into a reframed perspective of the natural world—and the people—around us.