Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

It was at that point that I began to question my powers of listening. I began to feel that the richness of my audile faculties was a danger to me. Where did all these sounds go? I felt my insides quivering. The glittering noises of Lagos which came surging towards me, arriving at first in what had seemed like a necessary sequence, began to confuse me. Soon I was unable to decipher or name the individual tones. In time I even found I couldn’t think properly. I mean I was unable to entertain ideas or sustain notions of a general sort. For instance, it became difficult for me to comprehend the word ‘footstep’. I could not understand how one word was able to embrace so many unique treads, and it pained me that a footstep heard at midday on the market’s gravel path should have the same name as the footstep heard at one o’clock on the asphalt pavement over Maloney Bridge. My own footsteps, my own voice, surprised me. I wanted to capture all these sounds, but I was condemned to listen to fragments.

In an attempt to contain the din in my head, I composed a catalogue of sounds. Now, all these years later, trying to recover this catalogue, I am plagued by doubts. I fear that, by committing it to writing, I will deaden what existed entirely in my head: the constantly shifting association of sounds. Displayed on my computer, my order will seem no order at all but an ugly, arbitrary act of preservation. What is more, it strikes me that the very act of preservation — the translation of sounds in my head to words on the page — signals the destruction of the very sounds I wish to save, just as for Linnaeus the only true subjects for contemplation were the specimens he collected and put to death, stifling life even as he tried to preserve it.

Nevertheless, I will transcribe my Universal Catalogue of Sounds (Lagos):

a) Sounds that come from me

b) Sounds that seem to rise from underground

c) Sounds that mimic other sounds

d) Sounds that I have never heard but which I will, one day

e) The sound that surrounds two people who’d like to speak but cannot

f) Sounds that only others can hear

g) Unearthly sounds

h) Sea-sounds

i) Sounds that cause my heart to beat faster

j) Sounds that have just caused a traffic accident

k) Sounds that seem commonplace but which become impressive when imitated by the human voice

l) Sounds that arouse a fond memory of the past

m) Wet-season sounds

n) Silence

o) Sounds that lose something each time they are repeated

p) Sounds that can be heard only in the month of January

q) Sounds that indicate the passage of time

r) Sounds that fall from the sky

s) Sounds that gain by being repeated

t) Insignificant sounds that become important on particular occasions

u) Outstandingly splendid sounds

v) Sounds that should only be heard by firelight

w) Sounds which I deliberately make, but which are not words

x) Sounds that come from inside me, involuntarily

y) Sounds with frightening names

z) Sounds that cannot be compared

One evening after supper, when Father and I were listening to the news, there came a clattering from the garden path. Suddenly Riley’s pointer was up beside us. Unable to decide who to greet first, she ran around the table, leaping and twisting like a salmon, until her tail caught the lead of the radio and sent it crashing to the floor. Father roared and struck out at her. But he missed and fell off his chair. Unable to understand his rage, Riley’s pointer turned then loped back into the garden, leaving us in silence, looking at the battered radio.

The radio never worked properly again. Father took it apart, then screwed it back together, but it was no use. It would emit a broken whisper and we heard only fragments of the news. On fiddling with the tuning knob, it would stammer into life. No matter what the announcer spoke about — the Suez crisis, or the slaughter of the Mau Mau, or the latest dance craze in America — he spoke in the same deep, authoritative, almost indifferent voice, making it impossible to distinguish between the already scrambled news items. This did not bother me at all. What did I care for the news? I was more interested in the moments when the radio fell to static silence. Each time I felt the mood of the evening change. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees, and I would tremble with excitement. Mistaking my emotion for fear, Father would joke, saying, ‘The radio must be tired tonight. Poor thing, it has fallen asleep.’ I could not forget that noise which was also silence. I felt drawn to it. It spoke to me of another world.

One night I sneaked out on to the veranda to fetch the radio and bring it to my room. I sat it on my pillow and switched it on. There it was, the silence! I put my ear to the speaker — and withdrew, for it seemed to emit a kind of cold breath coming from a distant world. I held myself still, listening to that pool of shifting quiet, feeling it float about me, inside me. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.

Soon I could think of nothing else. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any clear notion as to its source. It made everyday concerns seem trivial, and filled me with a kind of precious essence — acting in the same way as, years later, on meeting Damaris, I understood love to act. Where could it have come from, this powerful joy? It was connected to the radio silence, I knew, but went far beyond it. What did it mean? How could I grasp it?

Once after supper I followed Ade down to the bottom of the garden. I found him looking at a boxing magazine. That evening he didn’t tell me to go away, so I sat down by the lakeshore, and we looked at photographs of the boxers. Ade told me about Hogan Bassey from Calabar, who was famous throughout Africa; he had become featherweight champion of the British Empire. At school they talked of nothing else, and there were bouts in the playground. The best boxer, Olu (he whose incipient moustache had showed under the spotlights during The Snow Queen ), had bloodied another’s nose.

‘Well, but that’s nothing,’ Ade said. ‘One day I will be as good as Hogan Bassey hisself. Remember that no person can escape his right hook. If he gets hit, O, he hits back twice as hard!’ Ade stood up and started to swing his fists; jabbing, swiping, punching from all angles. When, finally, he stopped, he was breathing heavily, and there was a keen focus to his normally agitated eyes. Slowly and deliberately, he said, ‘Hogan Bassey has beaten every white fighter put against him.’ I recall the moment clearly, how he flashed his eyes then looked away, how he emphasized that word — white. I was stung. It was not the first time we had noted the colour difference. And yet until recently that difference had been a source of mutual interest. I thought: I hardly know Ade any more. He has a separate school-life, and separate friends, boxing one another, thinking of Hogan Bassey, and these friends knowing little or nothing of me, but hostile to me all the same.

‘I have something to tell you,’ I said.

‘OK, but remember I’m going to be a champion boxer like Hogan Bassey.’

‘OK,’ I said. And I began to talk all about the instances of silence in my life; I wanted to communicate something important. I told him about the season in 1946 when the skies became quiet, and I was conceived; about my first weeks in the womb, when I had no ears to speak of, and the silence was in me; about Mother’s funeral, her silence, which I could not grasp. I continued to speak, telling him about the period when I had lain in my cot, wide-eyed and unmoving. Without pause, halting Ade when he asked questions, I spoke of the cool quiet when he used to open the window and close the shutters of my room; of the silence dropping from the sky in ‘First Snow in Port Suez’; about my admiration when he had survived his beating without uttering a cry.