Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

And all the time I was growing inside Mother and listening.

Listening, I gambolled in the womb. I turned somersaults and figures-of-eight. I saw nothing, felt only the warm stickiness of the amnion. No odours reached me in my chamber. Not the stink of gin or soap, spoiling meat or burned oil. A mermaid sings. I was not a mermaid. A grub in a preserving jar floats in an azoic age. I was not that grub. Without conscience, I took in every sound.

This is what I heard: the vicious spitting of feral cats, rug-beaters thwacking, traffic-bustle and crowds. Fat goats being led to market, their bleating disharmonious and afraid. Women pounding manioc. Hawkers singing shrill and repetitive love songs to vegetables, paeans to fish and fruit — shrimps, prawns, smoked alive! Lovely oranges, lovely fresh oranges — and tailors, their sewing machines chattering in bursts. Hiss and splutters were street food cooking in palm oil. I heard the punishing of boy-thieves. And at all times of the day and night the ringing of insects. The womb, helped by the resonance of the amniotic fluid, sounded with the buzz, the flutterings, the shrill almost musical droning. And in the rainy season, thunder and the wild mutiny of rain, the curtain cord striking the window. I noted the coursing hum of blood. The sea too was almost always present.

When I was twelve weeks in the womb my parents embarked on a tour of Nigeria. We — the three of us — travelled up from Lagos, past Ibadan and Illorin and, after crossing the Niger River, to the city of Zaria, where prayer-songs and cantillation echoed in my head, new sounds I took in hungrily. At Gusau I heard three bars of a chorus played on a piano, over and over again. My parents toured Nigeria, and the quiet but invasive whisper of the sea was replaced by the sucking-noise of car tyres on muddied roads, forest paths, long-drawn footfalls and aspirate conversation. I recall the unique echoing of public spaces, antechamber, church, mosque, state hall. The splitting crackle of a bush fire. Bird notes, one especially I remember, a flute-like call. And another, a kind of boom resembling the distant baying of a hound. I heard the slapping of limbs during wrestling matches. The agonies of a constipated child.

And if the sounds swept in any-which-way, I too was indiscriminate, so that amid the commonplace I also heard that which is normally held aloof, set aside for night or passed off with a quick intake of air, things which cannot be repeated easily: District Officers’ dirty jokes, lovers’ sighs, the death agonies of men. All of us, in the echo chamber of the womb, are able to receive the wildest spectrum of sounds; it’s simply that we cannot retain them as we grow up. Who, in their maturity, can recall the special sound of sunlight? It rings in the ears as when one circles the top of a fine-wrought wine glass. And the tumescent heat of Nigeria, which sprawls and rumbles like a jet aeroplane. I heard the almost unbearable sorrow of an elephant’s call, the sad music of the nightsoil workers at Five Cowrie Creek. I eavesdropped on smugglers’ tales, and they reminded me of prey-birds swooping, bent on murder. I perceived three worlds in the rhythm a girl beat out on an aluminium barrel at the same time each evening: the one that surrounds us, the reality that one can sense; the world of those who are dead and buried but continue to exist and may participate in our lives; and the splendid realm of objects, which hold in their very matter, despite their incapacity, the sign of everyone who has held them, traded, buried, smitten, pocketed, hurled, sought knowledge from, tapped out a rhythm on or packed away. My ears were keenly alert. They were small, yet they captured every sound.

It was not always this way. In the beginning, when I resembled a transparent grub, there was silence. In truth there was none because silence needs its other; and since I had no ears to speak of I had no noise and thus no silence. Rather, in the beginning there was a great emptiness. The silence was in me. And the silence was me. It lasted eighty days.

Then the first stirrings of sound. Tiny to begin with, as if woken from hibernation. Next, on top of — or it seemed beneath — this animal crackle awoke a steady hiss that resembled gas escaping; which grew more insistent, filling out at the lower registers, becoming more complicated. And then the sounds really began to break through into the womb because every day now — one hundred days had passed — a new bark or caterwauling echoed in my head. I experienced this noise wholly and without names. The only modulation was by degree of volume — and steadily the sounds grew louder. There were too many at times, too many scratchings and thunderings to take account of, too great a roar as the world turned audibly — I could feel the shrill vibration of the heat on top of everything — all this abundance of noise, this wall of life turned into an exclusive sound, white noise perhaps, but more brilliant and penetrating, like a Victoria Falls made not of water but of seething flowing electricity and light. I took in the timbres all at once, the whole diapason of life, and also I heard, faintly but unmistakably, the slow-grinding fire machinery and toil of the shadows under the earth and within it.

It was then, at the point when my hearing became of this world and also of another, I understood that this cacophony was made of many different sounds. Just as, five months after my conception, I recognized that light and shade, and even shadow, played on the walls of the womb, it came to me that no single entity could make so much noise. I had discovered timbre, yet I had no way of differentiating what was an awesome Babel. One must understand that, womb-bound, the foetus is separated from the outside by layers of skin and muscle. She is surrounded by viscous liquid, and like the sounds one hears when swimming or lazing in the bath, they are deadened, but also amplified, so that her ability to discern different tones is distorted by this mutedness and echo. I must emphasize that the early sounds of my gestation had no name. It was only later, when I resembled a shelled prawn, that I was able to identify them. At the time it was one great tumult, a torrent of sound, and I was threatened with drowning. Soon, it is true, I began to perceive differences. For instance, I came to understand that inside me, although a pathetic parody of throb, was a heartbeat, when before I knew only my mother’s thumping muscle. The murmur of my stomach was, I noticed, weaker and more aqueous than my mother’s superior gut. And then, in the sixth month of my gestation, I began to distinguish between the sounds of my mother’s internal workings and those from the outside. No longer did the sea match the flutter of blood though her veins and arteries. I next set apart the flurrying of the leaves, moved by the wind, from insect rustlings. And the rasping of lead on paper became marked in relation to the spiralling needle of a gramophone. All this is far from the final mastery I had over sound. Alien was any sort of classification system. This was to come later. My hearing was demotic and unprincipled.

It was, I understand now, the opposite of a photograph, which preserves only an image, divorcing, at the moment of the shutter’s click, sound from vision. My hearing resembled more willingly a wholly different, though related, invention of the nineteenth century — the phonograph: a machine that for the first time captured sounds, isolated them from the object from which they came, and stored them, as if frozen, until they were ready to be replayed. Sounds in general are connected with action and utterance, tied to the mechanisms that produce them. I had no notion of the shape of an elephant, only its call and thunderous walk. To this day I take pleasure in thinking of such occasions: always vague and indefinite, encouraging movement, the essence of my freedom in the womb and, in part, the reason for my reluctance to be born. For instance, the sound of a ship’s horn heard late at night so that the ship is obscured by darkness; or the sound of rain striking the roof of a house or tent, preferably at night; or birdsong in the trees when one cannot know if the bird is many-coloured or ugly spotted brown; or the sound of an orchestra tuning up in the pit which conveys an excitement, since not only are the musicians hidden but one cannot distinguish between their noise; or the many-levelled bell-peal on Sundays; who is tugging at the ropes, blind Captain? hunchbacked man?; or the soughing of the wind, heard beneath blankets so one cannot distinguish it from one’s frenzied breathing; or any noise that is distorted by the echoes of tunnels and arches, such as when one whistles or shouts beneath a viaduct and one’s voice returns undoubtedly one’s own but changed, the reflection of one’s voice; or, indeed, the diffusion of any recognizable sound into a space where it is distant, distorted, indeterminate and not easily made out.