Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

…

Immediately after the funeral, Mother’s coffin was burned. I was brought to our house in Ikoyi from where, the following day, Father left for England. He took a mailboat and buried her ashes in Botley cemetery, Oxford, to the right of the war dead. Before his departure, however, he overlooked one thing: he failed to name me.

I lay in my hot room at the back of the house. The sun fell between the shutters, describing a thin corridor of light from which I shrank. Why, I asked myself, had I not emerged after nine months? I had delighted in my gestation, in the sounds, diffuse and uncertain, that had filtered through into the womb. It was this same happiness, the happiness of the partially formed, that had fostered my unwillingness to be born and had killed my mother. Now — my thoughts continued — on the outside, I was assailed by a simultaneous spectacle of light, scent, flavour and noise. What disappointment! What fear and exhaustion! Having switched elements, mimicking the first creature to have crawled from sea to shore, I missed my spawning ground, that fecund soup out of which I had writhed and slithered and found myself breathing. I was, I thought bitterly, just like that Devonian creature: part fish and part creeping-thing, longing for water yet breathing air. I ached for the womb’s familiar dark.

But I had emerged. And it was so.

I lay in my cot, wide-eyed and unmoving, like a stuffed animal. Every morning I heard the Lagos clock strike seven, accompanied by a siren that called workers from their beds (whilst simultaneously, across the city, night-workers were travelling home to pit and cellar, obscure quarters where they would sleep through the daylight hours to which they were no longer accustomed). Already at that hour, the air was stifling, smudged with insects. The town centre was teeming with traffic pushing upward dust, currents of heat and smoke. To reach our house in Ikoyi, the European quarter on the east island, the sound of the clock and the siren surged through the streets, together with the noise of the traffic. Like a tide the wind gathered the rising sounds of Lagos: the music of wireless sets, the cockerel’s cry, trains heaving out of Iddo terminus and railworkers stamping their heavy boots; the noise travelling between brick walls and plywood, through the shanty town, where playing cards are slapped on crates and children play before the time of the greatest heat; the current of sound passes by way of the Jankara market, where hawkers’ voices compete for attention, drawing with them the grating of a carpenter’s saw, continuing east past the Saro quarter, the district of returned slaves, and proceeding over the Macgregor Canal and into Ikoyi; where by the roadside a sheet of newspaper flaps, its print bleeding on to the tarmac. The noise of the paper joins the morning chorus, which now flows past the racecourse, past Riley’s Import Merchants and to the lagoon at the edge of our garden. — From the shore the lawn climbed towards a thicket of rose bush; there the ground levelled and extended as far as the rear veranda, strung with bougainvillea, that fierce vine whose leaves obscured the sun but could not stem the yellow tide of dawn.

I lay by the open window, pale and withdrawn, like an etching of myself. Now I had broken from the confines of the womb, I was struck by the different acoustical qualities. The new brightness of tone, as when a pianist takes her foot from the dampener pedal, interested me keenly. I noted in particular the higher registers, birdsong and the tinny melody of a radio. I attempted to locate myself in space. But since I had no name, and had few ways to distinguish my thoughts from the noise about me, they — my internal life and the life of the town — became confused. I began to bleed into my surroundings and my surroundings bled into me, like the sheet of newsprint flapping on the street. We — the town and I — took on aspects of one another.

Many years later I read about the beginnings of the city of my birth. Lagos had grown out of the water. At first the area was a swamp. Green mist veiled that boggy expanse, where insect-life prospered, little else. The mosquito and the tsetse-fly, together with the heat and the shallow, hazardous passage from the sea, meant that few settlers managed to establish themselves. Over many centuries, however, different races arrived who learned how to survive and prosper. Each came by way of the sea; and each profited from it: Egba, who travelled east in search of fish and who built canoes and drew crawfish from the lagoon; Portuguese by way of their journey to India; slave brokers; merchants from North Africa and Europe; churchmen; returned slaves; the British. And each, in their individual way, reclaimed from the sea pieces of solid ground. Marshland was converted into mud huts. The veinings of creeks and inland channels were filled in or stitched with roads. Moles appeared at the harbour entrance, the channel was dredged, bridges built and canals cut, above which roads climbed and spiralled. Lagos spread outward, branching across the wetland, and as it spread, its centre was pressed upward, storey by storey, rising above the waves and spray. The water was tamed. But it was not wholly overcome.

Soft, dull, nodding, lit tremulously, hostile, refractive. — The water captured and bent the light, scattered and returned its rays; and one saw, laid out on its surface, a shining likeness of the streets. There was hardly a canal or lakeshore that did not have as much of the town in it as above. Vehicles, buildings, the gestures of passers-by, trees and their shaking leaves, all the hazy passages of sunshine and depths and tones of the sky — everything that happened or existed above ground was repeated upside down. And since the water was affected by the tide and ruffled by winds and crimped and eddied by a thousand unseen forces, Lagos, upturned, was transformed into a second town where order was mocked and rearranged. One saw the dark fabric of leaves, the reverse side of coins, creatures that live beneath eaves. Caught between the influences of concrete and water, Lagos softened, broke down the borders between dream life and reality; one felt as if the town had been constructed merely of gimcracks, and that the whole edifice would one day sink beneath the waves.

The duality of land and water marked the city of my childhood, and I too inherited the ability to live in more than a single world (so that, years later, when I went to live in the pits of the nightsoil workers, I felt quite at home). In appearance I was typical. Slightly large, due to my protracted gestation, yet slim-limbed and snub-nosed, I sported the appropriate number of toes and fingers. My skin was pale and downed softly. Without fuss I drank the milk formula my nursemaid mixed, released hiccups as required. And I slept, or rather did not stir, throughout the night. But my meekness belied the richness and turmoil of my inner life. Nothing in the way I looked could have suggested the complicated activity taking place in my head.

My ears were extraordinary. Crimson, membranous, graced with heavy lobes, they whorled their way into the hollow where ciliary movement stirred, absorbing the sounds. What else did I take in? A smell here and there that happened to find its way into my room, the sticky sweetness of milk formula. I filled my nappy whenever necessary but gave little else to the world. All my talent had gone into the development of my ears.

In those days I was tended by Taiwo, the nursemaid Father employed before he left for England. Previously she had hired herself out to scrub floors. On those unruly mornings when Lagos sang, Taiwo came into my room. The first thing she would do was close the window and throw open the shutters. The effect was to cut off the sounds and spill daylight into my room; with a hateful gesture she expelled both noise and shadows. Then she got me ready for the day. I was stripped and put into a robe. The tin bath rang out as she poured water into the tub, where she washed me vigorously, then towelled me down and clouded me with talcum. Finally she dressed me with equal spirit. It seemed that Taiwo, the former scullion, was simply doing what she knew best, had swapped mop and scourer for flannel and sponge, pumice and towel. I closed my eyes to her. She was a fat woman and sentimental. She had had a mission education and wore a pendant of the Cross. Some days she dressed in wide wraps of colourful cloth; on others her flesh was contained by a blouse. Her face was clove-black, and it was with cloves that she warmed the milk then pressed the teat between my lips. Once, as she bent to feed me, the pendant slipped from under her collar and struck me on the chest. Stung, I opened my eyes and noticed that her eyebrows were plucked. Taiwo called me ‘Ikoko Omon’, which in her language meant ‘Newborn Child’. I did not know this at the time, and I did not know she referred to me with an impersonal pronoun. It was her people’s custom to name a child one week after birth; and since I was now aged eight months, and still without a name, in her eyes I was not fully a person.