As a child I learned about the men who collect unica, a term which signifies objects that are the only one of their kind. Examples include: the stuffed corpse of Nipper, the Jack Russell depicted with his head cocked to the left, listening to the gramophone on the HMV record label; the tendrac Dasogale Fontoynanti, the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar in 1878; certain postage stamps, for instance a penny black printed with the queen’s head upside-down; a disc featuring the singer Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, the only one of his kind to have had his voice recorded. Collectors of unica operate under the oddest of circumstances. Not only are the objects handled by gangs of unscrupulous agents, they are much sought after, and thus the collector, almost always an optimist, is often duped into buying a fake. These men, with their combination of passion and gullibility, fascinated me as a child: perhaps I saw in their vain but somehow necessary activity a symbol of my listener’s art. It was because of those men that, as a child, I etched the word ‘unica’ on to the side of a biscuit tin. And in the tin, which sits before me now, I stored my favourite unique things. The tin measures twelve inches across and eight inches wide. Although the paint has faded one can make out a design of red-and-white arabesques in whose centre stands an elephant, her trunk gripping an identical tin which bears the same design of arabesques and elephant, tin in trunk, ad infinitum. Inside are some two-dozen items: my caul, my first tooth, a photograph of Father as a child holding tightly to a swing, a matchbox containing a pair of earplugs, a postcard entitled ‘First Snow in Port Suez’. Of these – a gathering of objects unique to me, a positive companion to my history – I will speak later. The tin marked ‘unica’ also contains less tangible traces of the past, marked by their absence, a kind of negative impression of my life, like the brightness on a wall where a portrait formerly hung. I include them in my collection precisely because they ought to exist, unique because they are not there. The most conspicuous absence is my birth certificate.
…
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.
By the time Father returned to Lagos, I was nearly a year old. I hoped he would name me and make new arrangements for my care. He did neither; he only looked in on me now and then to check I was not sick. During the day Father disappeared into his work at the Executive Development Board. In the evenings he ate supper on the veranda, after which, bent over the table with his drink, he read his maps and papers. But he was not able to concentrate for long and fell to toying with his watch. Sometimes, after eating, he would call for Taiwo to bring me out to the veranda. He would stand up to hold my gaze in a strange, determined way, then open his mouth and look around helplessly, as if searching for something. He had loved Mother and ached on account of her absence. Her death had upset something fundamental in him.
There were times when my father spoke to me. His voice, heard in this intimate way across the veranda, was not deep, as one might have expected from someone so big and dishevelled, but low all the same, and sometimes it reached the higher registers. I had disliked its intonation when he talked during my gestation; and I disliked it still, its breathlessness, the barely distinguishable quality of the vowel-sounds.
‘Daughter,’ he said one evening on the veranda, ‘there are times when I feel guilty that you have been left, not only motherless, but without a brother or sister, who might have distracted you from your loss. But, you know, after giving the matter some thought, I have to tell you that you’re fortunate to be an only child. You will never know the resentment that will develop between siblings, the cruelty.’ He lit a cigarette, which the wind smoked as he related the following story. – There was a shopkeeper who had two sons. He was so poor, he couldn’t afford to feed them. So one day he told them they were old enough to make their own way in the world. He divided twenty pieces of bread and a chunk of mutton into two equal packages, handed them to his sons, then waved them goodbye.
The boys walked into the forest. After a while, the older brother, Sagoe, suggested they rest for a while and eat something. They should eat Little Brother’s food first, said Sagoe, since he was smaller and weaker and would soon tire if he had to carry all that food. So they rested, and ate, then continued their journey. After several days of this, all of Little Brother’s food had gone. When he became hungry, he asked for some of Sagoe’s share. Sagoe refused! Little Brother reminded him that they’d agreed to share their bread and meat. Sagoe thought for a minute, then said, in a strange voice, I will give you some food, but only in return for an eye. Little Brother cried and pleaded, but in vain. Finally, he agreed to give up an eye. Sagoe tore out Little Brother’s left eye, then gave him a piece of bread. They continued their journey, Little Brother trembling with the pain. And he was still hungry! That piece of bread he’d received had scarcely made a dent in his appetite. When once again Sagoe stopped and sat down to eat, Little Brother could stand it no longer and pleaded for more food. Sagoe thought for a bit, then said he would give him more bread, but only in exchange for the other eye. What could Little Brother do? He pleaded for mercy, but Sagoe remained firm. Finally, Little Brother decided that it was better to be blind than to die of hunger. All right, he said, take my eye. So Sagoe tore out Little Brother’s right, remaining, eye. Then, without the slightest bit of pity for Little Brother, who lay on the ground writhing in pain, he unpacked his bread and meat, took out a portion, left it beside Little Brother, and walked away. Hearing the twigs crack underfoot, and guessing what Sagoe had done, Little Brother begged him not to leave him alone there in the forest, weak and blind and without food, where he would surely die of hunger or be devoured by wild beasts. But Sagoe had gone.
I understood then that my father was lost. His wandering, decayed imagination, the imagination with which he had designed his world, and machined it, and bounded it, that same imagination was racked and transcended by my mother’s death. His movements became furtive, difficult to interpret. He was not so much a presence, I thought, as a kind of silhouette, thrown like the wardrobe’s shadow, around which, out of habit or superstition, Taiwo made sure to steal a wide berth. I did not feel lost on those evenings on the veranda, but rather invisible, like a dusty heirloom of uncertain origin. This did not trouble me greatly, because my mind, or rather my audile facilities, were keenly active and absorbed most of my attention.
So I lay and listened, and occasionally Father spoke to me on the veranda. My nursemaid fussed over my appearance. I felt empty, closed my eyes and drank from the teat. A year went by in this way. And then, one afternoon, whilst I was feeding, a thought came to me: how was it that each afternoon my window was open and the shutters closed? It was not Taiwo’s doing – she who arrived each morning and poured light into my bedroom and spread silence – for she had no use for shadows. At some point in the afternoon, as I struggled in sleep, someone was correcting my nursemaid’s hateful work. I knew because I would wake into shuttered darkness and vibrant sounds. For many weeks I was puzzled. Then, when I woke once before my usual time, I found a boy watching me – I knew it was he who had closed the shutters and opened the window. He was sitting on a stool beside my cot, pressing his face to the bars. We watched one another unblinkingly. His teeth were very white. I noticed that his hand picked at the hem of his shorts, his belly button, the knots of hair that were thickening on his head, and one leg persistently shook. I could feel the vibrations through my cot.
In the afternoon Taiwo sat in her room across the corridor, sewing angels for the Christmas fair. It was on account of her religion that she was sentimental. The firstborn of twins, the younger of whom had died, she said she knew what it was to lose family: and perhaps this was why she permitted the boy’s presence in my room – I think she believed the companionship beneficial.
After our first encounter I woke often in the half-light to find the boy seated on the stool, watching me. His eyes seemed a kind of climate, wild and busy, with flecks of red spoking inward, each pupil merging into its dark iris, so dark I thought they were of the same black pigment. He looked. I looked. We looked at one another looking. And I began to feel that I was emerging from my emptiness. No longer did I wish to return to the womb. I could not deny it; I was beginning to like life better. Outside, a hot wind blew. The shutters stirred. I reached slowly through the bars to still the boy’s trembling leg; I felt how bony his knee was and how soft the skin. For a moment the leg rested; when I withdrew my hand it resumed its shaking. He looked harder; he was interested in my fingers with their tiny pink nails. He knew I had done wrong, I think, which fascinated him; he got a strange satisfaction from it. Now and then the Lagos clock would strike, and he, who was always moving, but whose gaze rarely faltered, would look up for a moment or two.
Ade was four years my senior. He wore blue shorts and a jumper from which Iffe, his mother, had cut the sleeves. Mornings he spent with Iffe at Jankara market, where she traded onions. She brought him back in the afternoon, to their compound at the side of the house, where he was cared for by his father Ben, our cook. But he was spending longer and longer in my room and eventually started to return after his evening meal.
It was 1949. The rainy season had begun. I was nearly three years old and still did not have a name. If besotted, grieving, hard-working Father identified me with one, I did not know it. In semi-darkness Ade sat on his stool. Beside me, on a bedside table, stood a hurricane lamp, which threw a circle of light on to the wall. In this light the silhouettes of a thousand insects danced. The scene – accompanied by the rain, which beat a rapturous applause on the roof – absorbed us completely. At one point Ade raised his arm, and his hand, having moved in front of the lamp, was transformed into an enormous shadow on the wall. I laughed. Ade saw the effect, and his other hand joined the first; I watched the shadows: sometimes they came together and leaned, and leaned further and swayed, frequently they divided and spun, the movement effortless, dreamily pelagic. I stood up in my cot, fed my arm between its bars and thrust my hand in front of the lamp. We began to play, Ade tilting his hand to one side, me taking the opportunity to dip beneath them. It was then, I don’t know why, as the insects circled, and our shadows danced, the thought came to me that had we not discovered this game, then we – Ade and I – might have quickly grown apart; but now we had made a surer connection.
For several evenings the shadows of our hands danced on the wall. Yet I found I missed our previous contact, face to face, on either side of the cot’s bars. Something had changed in me. And something had changed and developed between us. And I knew this change was because of the game. Taiwo seldom noticed our animated wall; she dozed in her room or decorated herself or read spiritual pamphlets. Neither Ade nor I thought to fashion an object with our hands. Perhaps this was because the shadows themselves were imitations, and it did not occur to us to form an object – Pisces, a swan – and have it represented itself by a likeness. Or perhaps it was simply that we did not have time to develop the game, for not long after something happened to end it altogether.
The evening we played the game for the last time, Father returned early from work and invited a colleague for backgammon and drinks. His colleague laughed in shrill bursts that did not impart mirth, a mad laugh that unsettled me and kept us from our own game. My father lost badly that night. He was very low. The two argued. A glass was smashed. The colleague walked off. Father poured himself another drink, and for several minutes we heard his footsteps pacing the veranda floor. Ade and I returned to our game, the silhouettes of our hands danced on the wall. Soon we heard my father’s footsteps growing louder. He entered the house and crossed the hallway. The footsteps grew louder still, stopped, my door drifted wide, and there stood Father. We withdrew our hands from the circle of light. Father’s face was worn, the blond hair bound in crested tufts. Neither Ade nor I moved or spoke. At that moment Taiwo drifted or flowed into the room. She had painted her eyelids purple; I thought she looked magnificent. At that moment Father saw the crucifix hanging from her neck. He went to her and unhooked her necklace. He held the crucifix before his eyes, then walked to the lamp and let it fall in front of the shade. We all turned our eyes to the wall. There, framed by the circle of yellow light, hung the shadow of Christ, fixed to the cross. The shadows of insects swarmed all around him. No one spoke. We all looked at Christ and the insects. There was a silence. Then Father addressed us directly for the first time that evening.
‘Here is Christ on the Cross,’ he said. ‘All kinds of insects are flying up to him, in order to torment him. When he sees them his spirit fails him. At the same time a moth is flying around Christ … Kill him, the insects shout to the moth. Kill him for us!’ Father’s voice became very quiet. ‘That I cannot do, says the moth, raising his wings above Christ, that I cannot do, for he is of the house of David.’
After the incident with Christ and the insects, Ade and I never again performed our shadow dance. Surprisingly, I did not suffer on account of the end of the game, although I regretted the change that came over the house, the dubious way Taiwo regarded Father, whom she seemed thereafter to consider idolatrous. And I too had found it strange, the story of Christ and the insects, could understand neither its origin nor meaning, and for many years believed it a symptom of his grief-cracked mind. But some three decades later, when we were living in Scotland, shortly before my father died, I came to understand, if not the significance of the incident, then at least its origin.