Silence is my Habitat

A tactile and olfactory journey through a silent ecosystem.

Jessica White has been deaf since she was four years old. Where an autobiography or biography narrates the story of a person's life, an ecobiography dwells on a person's interaction with their ecosystem, and how this shapes their sense of self. The essays that follow detail how deafness encouraged and shaped her relationship with the natural world.

"Deafness made me observant and quiet. Because I could not hear enough to join in on conversations, my attention often wandered or was absorbed by sensations other than sound- morning sun on my forearms, the thick, sweet scent of flowering oleanders, the triangular shadow of a flock of galahs flying overhead. On the long bus trips between school and home, I watched the sorghum burnishing as it ripened, and kangaroos bounding through wheat stubble in the late afternoons, into trees that cast long shadows. I felt the bus shake as it rattled over cattle grids or veered into the corrugations on the gravel roads."

These essays consider how deafness shapes the interfaces between the writer and particular environments, given how she can only hear particular sounds, as she navigates the world through the tactile and olfactory.