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A Memoir of Deafness and Africa
Holt Paperbacks
September 2007
On Sale: September 4, 2007
288 pages
ISBN: 0805082107
EAN: 9780805082104
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A young man’s quest to reconcile his deafness in an
unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote
African village that pulsates with beauty and violence
These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world
and amplify them.†Josh Swiller recited this speech to
himself on the day he arrived in Mununga, a dusty village on
the shores of Lake Mweru. Deaf since a young age, Swiller
spent his formative years in frustrated limbo on the
sidelines of the hearing world, encouraged by his family to
use lipreading and the strident approximations of hearing
aids to blend in. It didn’t work. So he decided to ditch the
well-trodden path after college, setting out to find a place
so far removed that his deafness would become irrelevant.
That place turned out to be Zambia, where Swiller worked
as a Peace Corps volunteer for two years. There he would
encounter a world where violence, disease, and poverty were
the mundane facts of life. But despite the culture shock,
Swiller finally commanded attention—everyone always listened
carefully to the white man, even if they didn’t always
follow his instruction. Spending his days working in the
health clinic with Augustine Jere, a chubby, world-weary
chess aficionado and a steadfast friend, Swiller had finally
found, he believed, a place where his deafness didn’t
interfere, a place he could call home. Until, that is, a
nightmarish incident blasted away his newfound convictions.
At once a poignant account of friendship through
adversity, a hilarious comedy of errors, and a gripping
narrative of escalating violence, The Unheard is an
unforgettable story from a noteworthy new talent.
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