Listening
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“I have never told anyone this before. But why am I even telling you?” said the young girl with whom I had sat for over 3 hours just listening. She had told me of dark secrets. Of how she had been indoctrinated into a world of witch doctors, demons and nocturnal rituals. Of nightly dreams travelling to strange places and how she was convinced those ‘dreams’ were no dreams at all but that they were reality. This frail teenage girl, whose life I shared in that moment and the secret life she painted were almost impossible to reconcile. As she talked about incantations and skin lacerations and blood bonds bound by sacred oaths, I shuddered but I listened all the same. I didn’t understand divinity enough to know my place in it or being confident in my power to ward off evil, yet here was a girl who claimed to have seen and touched evil sharing her experiences in this dark other-world with me. I was scared shitless but I listened.
Because I was born to listen.
I remember the many nights I spent listening to my mother from the age of about 7, in the darkness of lightless nights witnessed by a fully lettered Scrabble board and the demons that danced with the restless flickers of a dying candle. I recall how my mom would talk and talk — sometimes all night — about her pains in a failed marriage, about her dreams, her fears and the hurdles of being a single mother in an emerging world where she had no place. She talked about everything. So I think this training — to listen, came from her. At the time, most of the things she talked about were way beyond my comprehension but I would listen all the same. Even as a child, I had begun to realize that by just listening, I could share the burden of another person without saying a word even when I didn’t fully grasp what they were saying or what their motivations were.
Listening isn’t all about comprehension or criticism. At most times, it is simply about being there and that is all.
As I grew older, I heard a lot more stories of people: young and old, men and women (mostly women) and hearing these stories shaped my humanity in an odd way. It made me realize how checkered our many paths were and how they crossed. I began to see how different people perceived the same things differently and how it defined them. Most importantly it taught me the subjectivity of right and wrong. It was a study of the grayness of this world. I had listened to a self-acclaimed teenage witch, to women who traded their bodies for grades and money; to a man that had once tried to beat a foetus out of a pregnant lover’s belly. I had listened to countless stories of adultery and still hear them even now; heartbreaking stories of many women molested by priests and trusted men — one of the stories is so heartbreaking because I am a daily witness to how broken that young woman still is and worse knowing that she might never heal. I had listened to pre-teens (my age mates at the time) who had their sexual education in seedy brothels and everything in-between, even murderers. I recall a most shattering experience where a man, about 60 asked me in a liquor induced rant whether I had ever held another man’s neck up and slit it with a knife and watched the blood gush out. “My eye don see.” He kept saying as he told me stories too unbelievable to be true in a normal person’s world.
In my life as a listener, I have gone through changes too. There is no way you will hear all those things and not change. For one, it is the first act of altering yourself in order to win the confidence of others. How does someone carrying a burden so huge, at times bordering on the criminal, decide you are the one they’d rather share it with? Or how does an old man nearing the end of his life who you had a brief relationship with decide to imprint on your young heart their last conversations here on earth — the totality of their joys, sorrows and regrets. And how do you, after having being trusted with such a great responsibility protect that thing, especially when it greatly conflicts with your morality or the dictates of your essence? These thing of which I speak is a thing listeners will understand and the pains, one they will be able to relate with. There is also the mental conflict of your role as listener and now accomplice. When a man tells you he has murdered another man by slitting his throat or when a person tells you he is fucking another man’s wife and you know all the characters in this morally warped story what do you do? Are you under an obligation to run to the police to report the self-confessed murderer or tell the unknowing man about his wife’s dalliances with this … motherfucker? For a long time, I couldn’t reach a compromise on my role in these situations, especially those that hit close to home like that of the priest who has molested a girl I knew. What was the right thing to do?
The internal torture I went through in this self-flagellating phase is unprintable but I evolved from it somewhat, because deep within me, tied with my soul is a yearning to help with the burden of others so it wasn’t an option for me to stop listening. I remember attending a Catholic church once and sitting by the confessional and watching the priest listen to the long line of confessants that were waiting to see him. I realized that this man, this priest’s role was simple — to listen and admonish. Not reprieve, not criticize but listen and tell these people that they could be forgiven and that there was still love available to them. This brought me rest in unimaginable ways and renewed my desire to listen regardless.
Listening has also taught me more about my own bias. How I am quick to pile what I am hearing on either side of the scale of justice, while feigning an air or neutrality. “This one has wasted away his life,” or “this one is just a cheap whore” I would think at times while I nodded, with my whole body tilted to the speaker but my biases leaning in the opposite direction. As life happened to me and my whites grayed into confused colours, I began to see how not much different I was from these many people. How given the same set of defining circumstances and emotions, I was very likely to react in the same ways that they reacted. Listening taught me to see that there was no me and them. It was just us.
Listening has also opened me to eternal life truths. I have listened to illiterate old women start out in business selling knickknacks and growing to becoming serial real estate investors. I have listened to people tell me how they elevated their consciousness to the point of almost being prescient. I have listened to children say the most life defining things and true men of faith expound their beliefs in such simple yet powerful ways as to leave me in no doubt about the trueness of their faith. Listening has taught me that every story has a context — the teller’s context and there is always more than that side to the story. Listening has also put me in trouble a lot of times especially with desirable women with whom the line between confidant and lover has blurred.
But in all these, I have few regrets. I am grateful for the opportunity that life has given me to be a partaker in the joys and pains of these many people. I am grateful for their trust and the chance they have given me to see life through their eyes. I am grateful for the many things they have taught me — good and bad and most of all to my mother who started out by teaching me indirectly that listening wasn’t all about comprehension or criticism. At most times, it is simply about being there and that is all.
Osundolire Ifelanwa
