In Review: Alice Vincent's 'Hark'

by Lottie Walker

I have slept with the radio on for years. I have fallen asleep to the murmuring sounds of strangers since I was a child, with the door firmly locked and my mother asleep in the next room. I’ve taken after my mother, who always has and still does keep the radio on, to, well, ‘keep her company’. From the close comfort of our two southwestern corners of the UK, we’ve rhythmically heard the same things: frontline reporting, community heroes, the weather forecast. It was via the radio that I first caught the wind of Alice Vincent’s Hark: How Women Listen. A story of sound and womanhood. It is a book in which the so-called good listeners of society grow louder, and in doing so, ask us to reconsider the cornerstones of our listening and the way in which others listen to us. 

Vincent’s journey begins towards the end of her pregnancy, at the edge of the Autumn equinox: a time known for its equal helpings of day and night, of lightness and darkness. I, the reader, have no experience of pregnancy. The only ultrasound I’ve ever received was in a doctor’s search for absence, not presence, of new life— a misguided attempt to resolve the mystery of my missing menstrual cycle. However, Hark transforms the ring of a familiar tuning tuning fork into the steady rhythm of a foetal heartbeat, drumming from the belly out into the exam room. We are reminded of that first hopeful murmur of communication: ‘It is fast, and it is strong, and it is ours, ours, ours—this tiny organ that signals the baby’s aliveness.’ Whether or not you have heard this same murmur before, you are nonetheless invited to partake in an encounter between the old and the new; a change which can be heard from page to ear. I for one have never experienced both reading and hearing a book at the same time. It is refreshing. 

As Vincent’s ribcage expands and her belly swells, she embarks into sound chambers where the body becomes nothing more than a wave, eventually travelling into the delivery room where the first cry of a newborn signals both a beginning and an ending. ‘We bring him home on a windy overcast day,’ she begins, with the new necklace of motherhood hanging from her neck. The fresh parents become attuned to the small hours and the faint sounds of breath between the primal screams. For Vincent, and the many other women of Hark, the cries stretch beyond the sleeping bodies of their newborns. In desperate communion they trade stories of phantom screams, new heightened awarenesses, spikes in their cortisol levels— the mental load of mothers illuminated. We imagine the body working tirelessly to supplement new life, but we might not have realised the ears were doing their fair share as well. 

I’m a quarter of the way through the technicolour spined hardback, I’m a woman in her late twenties negotiating hormonal impulses with my unreadiness to rear. Vincent has me pondering  my own capacity to welcome such monumental and maternal changes into my own world. Motherhood, as I read it here and understand it observationally, is precisely that, the warping of my world into their world. Beneath Vincent’s prose I think of the ears of my mother and sisters, my friends and their newborns, who know the contours of this shapeshifting more intimately than I do. My mother’s ritual of soundtracking morning and evening with the radio mirrors my own instinct to keep the static on when I feel alone. Because motherhood, and womanhood, can be lonely. Deeply, quietly lonely.

Two years prior to Harks’ release I read Vincent’s Why Women Grow, a book I often kept propped beside muddied pots and a splintering trowel. I began to consider the possibility that my interests in natural processes of growth and the art of tending stems from my womanhood. Conversely, it is my womanhood, the womanhood of Vincent’s and the women in her books which give us a confronting yet enlightening perspective on life and death— and the sounds in between. Then came Hark, and the myriads of possible ways which we listen as women was slowly detonated in my direction, a sensibility I hadn’t thought to name, because I’d long taken it for granted. Vincent approaches sound with tenderness and care, a writer able to tread lightly around difference, and charge towards revelation. As I tore through the book, her observations bled into the textures of everyday life. 

This year I’d begun taking British Sign Language (BSL) classes to supplement my teaching diploma. So, when early into the book Vincent explores life in the absence of noise, I was thankful — not all explorations of sensory experience acknowledge alternative ways of living in a world constructed by our senses. I’d witnessed an honest conversation weeks earlier between a fellow student and our instructor on the advice of where one should practise their BSL. ‘Put it this way,’ he began, ‘If you head into a deaf club looking for a subject to practise on then you might not receive the warmest welcome’. A firm but gentle reminder that there’s a big difference between a person’s way of living and your weeknight hobby, no matter how good your intentions. 

Detailing her own ongoing relationship to tinnitus, Vincent insists that she is nonetheless a ‘hearing person living in a world created by hearing people’. The chapter, Vibrations, goes on to detail an altogether different relationship to sound, referencing Jaipreet Virdi’s Hearing Happiness which details the history of deafness and its so-called cures. ‘Deafness has no meaning other that what is assigned to it, meanings created by hearing people projecting their own ideals of hearing and normality, or even meanings ascribed by deaf persons themselves’, it stands to reason that a world of sound designed and dictated by able ears is an indicator of who is and isn’t really listening. Vincent continues, starting with the thread of her own life and ears, to weave a new definition of listening which encompasses sound’s ghosts, vibrations and inconsistencies. With empathy and understanding she appeals that we make efforts ‘to actually understand what the world sounds like to them [deaf persons] first’ before we are certain of what and how we ourselves have heard. 

Vincent effortlessly intertwines her personal experiences with the sounds, voices and listening practices of others. Her book exemplifies the art of listening, a skill she herself so expertly demonstrates. In the challenges of early motherhood and her own diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), there are moments when we pause to listen deeply. Vincent paints the place from where we all result, a motherhood which resembles sounds and sights we recognise as children, and the uncanny experiences we are yet to know. Speaking on Hark, Vincent references Syliva Plath’s Morning Song; ‘All night your moth-breath/ Flickers among the flat pink roses’. I remember reading this poem as a seventeen-year-old A-level student struggling to comprehend the feeling. I now struggle to teach this very same poem to A-level literature students— labouring to emphasise the strain of consistent worry, the never-ending attendance to the seven pound creature’s wants, needs and breath. 

In respite from the ‘Moth Breath,’ we enjoy Vicent’s excursions to Beyoncé and Taylor Swift concerts. They are well timed portals to girlhood, reminding us of the ways we once might have inhabited the world more loudly— before shrinking ourselves to make room for the voices society deems most deserving of amplification. These memories prompt questions beyond How Women Listen: how have we been conditioned to listen? And more pressingly, how do women listen in a world that rarely listens back?

I’m reading and writing about women listening in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s historic ruling on April 16, which defined the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act as referring exclusively to biological sex. This decision is the first of many transgender discriminatory rulings to be passed by the hands of judges whose worlds might as well be on mute. Unfortunately, it has widely been hailed as a victory for gender-critical activists, raising pressing questions about identity, voice, and belonging— questions I’ve been grappling with in trying to understand the ideologies that shape these exclusionary movements.

By bringing Vincent’s work into conversation with our current moment, I want to propose that women are capable of listening in deep and unique ways; ways that are shaped by our bodies, our fears, our dreams, and our lived experiences. What saddens me as I put down the split spine of Hark is that this small miracle of a book exists in a world filled with terrible listeners, and those who are the best at listening are in return not actively listened to. Where we fail to listen, empathy breaks down bit by bit. There is more listening to be done— especially by those who have long demanded to be heard. Perhaps some of them, deafened by the volume of their own privilege, have forgotten what it’s like to be silent, to listen, to receive. Perhaps the women celebrating the rulings of the supreme court have forgotten what that feels like. 

In the chapter titled Phonelines, we are introduced to the Cambridge Lesbian Line, established in 1979 to support women living in isolation and secrecy. ‘When I first started thinking about listening,’ Vincent writes, ‘I thought about the people whose listening others rely upon.’ The phone line created connection across the thin air, a fragile yet vital tether to someone else’s world. Today, though we’re surrounded by constant communication, our capacity for deep listening, true attention, has been eroded by the always-on immediacy of technology. The quiet intimacy of shared listening has been replaced by the noise of online spaces that often discourage vulnerability, nuance, and the celebration of difference. Services like the Cambridge Lesbian Line have become so few in an age where non-judgemental strangers feel like only a dating app away. What remains are crisis line services designed to do just that, to cater to the moment of acute crisis. What if the resurgence of a non judgemental anonymous stranger prevented so many from reaching the point of crisis? 

Vincent’s work orbits around the idea of belief, what it means to believe and be believed. What happens when we, as women, are not, and sometimes struggle to even believe ourselves in a society that continuously devalues and debunks our experiences. In a chapter which indulges all of the spy novel-based fantasies shaped around national intelligence, Vincent is admitted into GCHQ. She pays a visit to two women who listen for a living to vital secret intelligence— looking for a hook and translating the conversations for analysis. ‘I was preoccupied with the notion of belief’ writes Vincent, ‘I’d been drawn to the sounds of the uncertain and the ambiguous because they reflected my own formative state’. When we are introduced to listeners (not spies) Tia and Jill, we learn of the intricacies of their training, their ability to apply their understanding of linguistics, and nuances of meaning to interpret crucial developments in international relations. They see the world differently, hear the world differently, through a heightened sensory experience. It is a world crafted by two women who do not dismiss a single thing, who do not assume to know what it is they have heard is the only truth. How delicious it would be to be listened to as intently as the spy at the end of the phone. It suggests a world in which we speculate what our ears receive, with all of our senses using the type of surveillance reserved for the state to tune up to our world. 

And yet, Vincent, in her portrayal of all these auditory dimensions and the silences between, offers us such a privilege. For the readers who revel and struggle through the threads of womanhood, who inherit and inhabit its complexities— there is Hark. There is the affirmation of Yes, I do hear what you hear. ‘I feel these selves knitting together: the girl I once was, the woman she grew into, the mother I am becoming.’ In the process of becoming, we partake in the process of listening.  

LOTTIE WALKER is a writer and teacher living in London. Her work has featured in The Mays Anthology, The Cambridge Review of Books, NEA and SpamZine. She is the author of The Blue Book Substack.

Art by Cordelia Wilson