The telephone conversation

FUNKE ADETUTU

Some days back, I was on a bus for a fun trip to some fascinating places outside of Lagos. Riding on a big bus like that was quite interesting, especially with the variety of faces on it, most of them unfamiliar. All the same, it was fun to meet new people. At least, it’s not a bad idea to add one or two friends to the bagful I already have.
Although it wasn’t a long trip, it was short enough to create the right atmosphere for the camaraderie characteristic of a group trip. As with most outings beyond Lagos or the country, it was a good time to relive the last moment we all had with our loved ones. And some people had to make last-minute telephone calls.
But you see, what surprised me the most that day was the rate at which the calls poured in. it was really amazing that almost everybody on board was receiving calls at the same time. What a cacophony of voices it was! While some spoke in whispers, others shouted at the top of their voices.
“Yes, we are on our way,” someone said behind me. “Kola, I need 4, 000. Please, let me have it before next Monday,” said another person. “What does he need 4, 000 for?”
“4, 000 what?” I asked myself. As if the speaker could read my mind, he responded: “4, 000 litres of diesel for the generator in the office.”
“Oh, I see. It’s diesel and not naira,” I said again to myself.
Just then, another person burst into a hilarious laughter that could turn a corpse in its grave. For most of us, it was so unusual for anyone to have laughed so loud alone, but then, cell phones have made just about anything possible.
When the environment became a bit less noisy, the various telephone conversations brought to my mind Wole Soyinka’s use of irony to depict the absurdity of racism in his poem, Telephone Conversation. But this time, I’ll take some steps away from Soyinka by calling my experience “the absurdity of humour,” which means laughing aloud without anyone else around. The speaker of Soyinka’s poem, a dark West African man searching for a new apartment, tells the story of a telephone call he made to a potential landlady. Instead of discussing price, location, amenities, and other information significant to the apartment, they ended up discussing the speaker’s skin colour. The landlady is described as a polite, well-bred woman, even though she is shown to be shallowly racist. The speaker is described as being genuinely apologetic for his skin colour, even though he has no reason to be sorry for something which he was born with and has no control over.
In short, the speaker is an intelligent person by reason of his use of high diction and quick wit, not the savage that the landlady assumes he is because of his skin colour. All of these discrepancies between what appears to be and what really is create a sense of verbal irony that helps the poem display the ridiculousness of racism.
Coming back to that afternoon, all the speakers were in a world of their own! They did not narrate their experiences after the conversations, but just recoiled to themselves, smiling secretly. You know, that kind of smile that usually refuses to leave the face long after the conversation has ended.
And so, one of the speakers who sat close to me heaved a sigh and began a kind of self-confession about a date she was supposed to honour but would be unable to because of the trip. The speaker had lied to the other person that she was on Victoria Island, whereas she was heading towards Ibadan! It is ironic that I call it a self-confession since the speaker had nothing to confess because she had done nothing wrong. In fact, I was enjoying the conversation since the phone was a bit loud. What the person on the other end said came through clearly, thanks to GSM technology! But making the speaker actually seem sorry for her lies showed how ridiculous it really was for me to let her know I was listening in on the conversation. Nonetheless, it seemed almost comical to me that anyone would tell such a brazen lie in the first place.