I barely had time to pack

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A strategic retreat

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I was moving from Levenshulme, Manchester, the land of a thousand takeaways, to middle-of-nowhere Lugara, in the hills of Italy. And I was in the middle of root canal treatment. My dentist said go. There was family trouble brewing. Fam said go. Work trouble was in the offing. Work colleagues said go. The audiologist said you can only wear your hearing aids for six hours a day maximum, else your ears will get re-infected and remember how bad that was last time. So, I can’t…? No, you can go. But as a deaf person living with eight or nine hearing people how will we communicate, won’t I become totally isolated? My inner voice said, just go. Jump in the water. There’s a swimming pool. Go to Italy, finish your mytho-memoir-autofiction mashup and get it to your publisher before she changes her mind by coming to her senses and saying nah, can’t publish that, what the heck is it anyway? Ok, so I go, I decide. I will throw myself upon the kindness of strangers; I’ve done that before.

On the plane to Italy, a memory comes to mind of my uncle Kalu Anya Kalu, six foot two tall, in a flowing dashiki. We’re in Aba, eastern Nigeria. I’ve told him I hear nothing after dark as it is impossible for me to lipread then. No problem, he said. K.A.K. (as it reads on his letterhead) found five torches, and when the Nigerian electricity company NEPA cut the power supply (Never Expect Power Always was the joke) and the hotel generator failed, four of my cousins and K.A.K. flicked on their torches and shone them on their faces. It was so surreal I had to laugh. But it worked.

My Italian friends (may I call you that now?) were equally ingenious and accommodating. And they were all so beautiful – may I say that too? They learned to stand in the light for me so I could lipread, to talk to me only when facing me, to write times and dates down in case I misheard them. They passed a crash immersion course in deaf awareness. What usually takes two years, they achieved in four weeks.

But how was it for me? There were difficult days. Days when communication let me down. Days when a succession of attempts at conversation became increasingly embarrassing, when my repeated incomprehension of what was being said headed into farce, into the absurd, into sadness. I drew on two things. I’ve always played a thought game to help in such moments. Some of my acquaintances are serving long jail sentences. I ask myself: would they rather be where I am, or where they are? In the game, they choose where I am every time. My second resource is the saying of the Roman stoic Marcus Aurelius: ‘if it is bearable, bear it, and don’t complain.’

And there were joyful days, full of moments, so many of them. The beauty of an affectionate morning smile. The way a chair is re-angled for me. A brotherly hand landing on my shoulder. A conspiratorial wink. A sense that someone was always holding me, that they would not let me fall. The kindnesses of strangers who had become friends.

Enough of the navel gazing. What did you write? Did you benefit as a writer from having other writers around to reach out to for 25+ days – was it productive? Yes. My memoir mashup is an attempt at baring my soul while maintaining some form of literary fig-leaf to stop me collapsing into the twin puddles of misery and boasts. The other writers provided so many new ways of thinking about how to do this – listening, bouncing ideas around with me, and supplying techniques I’d never thought of – breadcrumbing, somatic recovery, anti-biography… I could do with a few more. I managed to throw down approximately 20,000 words. That’s a quantity of course, and begs the question: is any of it any good? I have no idea. But I’m OK with that. Doubt is part of being a writer. You don’t always get it right, but it helps to get it written down.

© Peter Kalu

Peter Kalu

Peter Kalu is a Manchester-based short story writer, novelist, storyteller, playwright and poet.