An adaptation of Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, starring Christopher Eccleston, Fiona Shaw, Arinzé Kene, Noma Dumezweni and Garth Greenwell.
"We lived happily during the war / And when they bombed other people's houses, we / protested, / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough".
Deaf since the age of 4, when a doctor in his native Ukraine misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, Ilya Kaminsky learned as a boy to closely observe the world around him. When his family fled to the USA as political refugees and settled there, he taught himself English by translating American poems back and forth between languages.
His book Deaf Republic defies classification - it is a poetic narrative, a drama-in-verse, a contemporary epic. In an unnamed country, soldiers shoot dead a young deaf boy at a public gathering and the townspeople respond with refusal to hear the government's commands. Deafness becomes a form of protest and resistance.
This is a fable which speaks incisively about our political moment: about populations living under occupation and about governments at war with their own people. It is about our collective deafness to trauma happening elsewhere to others; and about the news we might choose not to hear. At its heart it is also a tender love story about a pregnant woman and her husband, caught up in this crisis; their love and joy set against the horror of events.
Sound Design by Aaron May