SO LOUD!

Whispers, screams, and tales. The voices that surround us.

Art by: Tara Hejazi // THE UNDERGROUND

INSIDE VOICES

Music in your headphones

When I think of voices, I think of singers. I think of the worlds they create and encompass in the vibratos and runs of their voices alone. One of the most cathartic experiences in the world, and what arguably makes life worth living among other things, is lying down in your bed in your room with the lights off and your headphones in, night hanging overhead like a curtain, and while the entire world blinks in and out of sleep, between the occasional car horn or the lash of the wind, there’s music.

There's music that is made for nighttime contemplation. Hozier, Nina Simone, Current Joys. There are moments where songs feel like conversations, less like singing voices. A conversation between you and the singer, like someone weaving a tale of existentialist dread and grand, tragic love, a folktale, or a bedtime story. There are conversations between you and past versions of yourself—old wounds are reopened, the eeriness of the dark paints colour behind your eyelids in memories buried deep down like an object beneath a clothing heap, past layers of resentment and paranoia and acceptance that have cocooned specific moments in time, and the remnants of shells you no longer fit into. I think songs tell you about yourself—if not your past, then your present, or even your future. The voice you can’t imagine having, but it whispers to you in the music notes that follow the melody you’ve been hearing all your life.

The business of the mind

If I had to divide my mind into sections of noise, I would have a voice for everything. My mind is a continuous stream of consciousness without punctuation, interrupted only by external moments.

It is an avenue of forever to-do lists—you go through the business of reminding yourself what you need to do to survive, and then what you need to do to live, and then what you need to do for the rest of your life. That voice is semi-authoritative, and interrupted always by procrastination, or blind confidence, or slight rebellion. You don’t need a to-do list; you just need to live and be able to hear yourself doing it.

It is also a flash bulb of moments that are captured like polaroids—the gasping, body-flinging, fish-out-of-water laughs of my friends. Quotes from my favourite writers and how I imagine they would say them. Filed away sayings and vocal mannerisms from people I love—my parents humming when they make dinner. The soft smack my childhood hamster used to make with his lips was the only sound he ever made in his life. The uncanny way a cousin of mine was able to mimic the Sleep Country Canada radio ads, adding satirical spins to them.

It is a hive of buzzing that teeters between self-deprecating black humour and sarcastic inner monologue. The gossip I caught on the bus on the way to the mall. Snippets of celebrity interviews and movie trailers. Ruminating over the outfit I’m going to wear while washing grime from my face. What that smart kid in the lecture said. It never stops. My mind is simply never quiet, and retains a chaos comparable to New York traffic blockages.

There is one voice, though, that remains consistently pleasant.

I just figured out the next thing I’m going to write!

INSIDE/OUTSIDE VOICES

 Talking in your voice(s)

I think being a writer requires insanity. In my case, you are hearing voices all the time, even if they aren’t audibly loud. This extends far beyond just hearing a reading voice in my head when I crack open a novel and read somewhere. My brain is a constant flurry of voices. I hear radio static and sound bites of jokes I’ve heard years ago tunnelling around in my head in a cycle, and sometimes I smile to myself about it, and people think I’m crazy, especially if it’s in a public space.

I am the kind of person who talks to myself too. I am an incessant podcast of every waking thought that intrudes on my routine, and I supply both sides of the conversation. My voice cannot decide if I’m going to read my grocery list aloud to myself in the living room, sometimes with my own family members as creeped-out spectators, in English, or if I’m going to swear vehemently in French and bits of Arabic on the phone when I’m talking to my friends. I am a patchwork of languages that are taking their turns doing tasks.

“Wallahi!” I’ll say as I’m recounting some form of gossip to a friend, either in person or via text message—even my friends with no association to the Arabic language utter knowing laughs because I say it with such a pucker in the back of my throat, it is as if I am manifesting the audacity I’m talking about out into the open.

“Nah, fam, sorry,” is the most Canadian thing I have said since coming to Toronto, and I’ll tease my family members with the Toronto slang I’ve picked up, and it slowly isn’t a joke anymore. I unironically catch myself in the middle of calling someone a "wasteyute.”

“Ça craint” are the two words I say often in French, to myself or other people, alongside the usual “je suis totalement dépassé!” If anything is going wrong with the line at the supermarket? If I forgot I have an assignment due at 11:59 p.m. If I just can’t believe something embarrassing? Those are the go-tos.

If I’m not talking to myself out loud, I am talking to myself in my head—or other versions of myself. As a writer, the characters I create live in me, like pieces of paper torn from the notebook of my subconscious and folded into the nooks and crannies of my personality. If I’m trying out how a character will sound, I adopt their way of speaking. If I am reading over my work, I am no longer myself but living the kind of life I could have in a parallel universe. I don’t have a reading voice—I have spirits, narrators that wait their turn.

 Thoughts and feelings

My life is a series of expectations that are constantly thwarted by reality. I am often cradled and destroyed by the thought of things I should have said or done. Yet, I know if I gave voice to my thoughts all the time, it would not go over well.

Professor: This final portfolio is worth 50% of your grade!

Me, inside: Are they some kind of psychopath?!

Me, outside: Are you sure we couldn’t lower it to a reasonable 30 percent?

Crush, in second grade: I like you; do you like me?

Me, inside: OMG OMG OMG

Me, outside: Ewwwwwww, no!

Person: *compliments my writing at launch party*

Me, inside: Are you lying? Are you just saying that to make me feel better? Do you actually secretly hate me and want to punch me in the face?! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!?!

Me, outside: Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!

Mom: Are you sure I can’t read your writing?

Me, inside: I want you to know who I am, but I’m scared.

Me, outside: It’s embarrassing!

What's funny about voices is that they manipulate themselves, and contort. As a writer, I should not be saying that words often fail me. I should be telling the truth. But that is the truth. Words fail me, and sometimes I feel like my voice is going behind my back in uncertain situations and is holding me back when all I want to do is speak through my actions. I think writing is a happy medium for expressing those complexities. This is my voice, and if you know me, you’ll hear it. But if you don’t, you may still understand all those things that are left unspoken. Writing has a voice, but what often happens when work is stripped away from the creator is that it embodies someone else’s. Is that beauty, or am I losing myself?

 Voices in different situations

Do you ever find that your voice changes? I don’t mean puberty, or voice cracks. I feel like, on top of having an identity in voice that is fragmented purposefully and painfully, I first noticed that my voice took on new adaptive forms in different situations one day during my high school years.

My best friend and I were sitting in my room, talking and giggling, and my aunt called my phone as I was working my voice halfway through a joke, and I stood up and went into a corner of my room to answer. I feel awkward when talking on the phone, utterly unlike myself—it is like some part of me leaps out just for this situation, for this awkwardness, but my main body suffers all of the effects. I held the phone to my ear as I stood there, effectively making the situation awkward as my friend quieted down behind me. I swayed a little, hummed, and then started to speak in this measured voice that was the physical equivalent of fitting puzzle pieces together—slight, natural pauses, trying to stick French words together, and then the clasp of the tongue as words began to fit as I smoothed over them. When I finished, she did not hold back on her comment.

“Your voice gets quieter, softer, and slower when you speak to your French relatives on the phone.”

I figured I could’ve been vexed—my French wasn’t like my Cameroonian-born best friend’s French—I was impossibly Canadian without having the Quebec accent expected. But instead, I laughed a little and said, "Oh yeah?”

It’s followed me since that voices can map the expanse of entire personalities. The “hi” I say to my neighbour is not the “hey” I say to my seatmate in my co-op class. It’s “bye” when I’m leaving for school and “later” when I’m texting a friend. It’s “naw” when I speak to my brother, and he mimics me back, "nawwwww." But I could never say “naw” to my father.

My telephone voice is not my school voice; it is not my club voice. I remember recently spending an entire evening at a launch party with strangers talking in a loud, exuberant voice, every word dissolving into the air like soda bubbles, my inflections at the ends of sentences rocketing towards the sky, and then as soon as I escaped into the rushing, cool night air, I felt myself let out a relieved exhale, and my voice collapsed back down a few octaves. It regained its rasp around people I had known for years, like it just needed a place to lie down.

Sometimes it slips out—I read a passage for school in my theatre kid voice, and then I sit down at my computer and my emails sound like her. I am everything at once, and my voice knows no bounds. I snap, I sigh, and I devour words between my teeth, and all are witnesses to watch it and see the more intimate scraps dribble out.

OUTSIDE VOICES

 Open Mics

 I don’t trust my voice at open mics until I am in front of the microphone, and it just happens. I start to speak like I am the most powerful person alive, and I leave everyone under the illusion that I believe it too. I am a generally reserved and mousy person—there are not enough fingers on both hands to count the number of times I’ve been told to speak up or repeat myself. There have been too many moments where I felt my voice didn’t matter, that my mumbles were met with sarcasm, and that muteness was a means of survival.

But when I’m reading my work, written by that voice inside me that has been restrained, I don’t believe in chains anymore. I have something to say, and people are going to listen. My voice is free to be whatever it wants, and for once, we are not at war with each other. It weaves itself through the gasps and pauses of its own essence and slithers down beneath my feet, elevating me on a platform of confidence.

 How people say the things they do and how their voices sound

One of my best friends has a Newfoundland accent, and it causes her to say things differently in English. As someone who is bilingual, I figured English is hard enough already without the variations, but this friend and I sometimes find ourselves in the same boat of being laughed at good-naturedly by other friends because of these occasional slip-ups that reveal ourselves.

“Neck-ah-lace” pronounces my friend as we sit in the cafeteria with our group.

“It’s necklace. You know, neck-liss,” everyone is saying to her.

“Neck-ah-lace!” She giggles defiantly, and I can’t help but love how she is tender and careful with every part of the word in the way she says it.

We had a substitute teacher in junior high who expelled the word “necessary” out of its word status from how often she said it, to the point where it just seemed like a sound that was an extension of her, like a yawn or a sigh.

“It’s necessary to complete the homework sheet for tomorrow. It’s necessary to ask for help when you need it. Is that really necessary? It’s not necessary to do the bonus questions.”

She had become “Ms. Necessary” in our eyes, an entire identity tied to the way she strong-armed that word off her tongue, like it required some effort to be grappled with, something that was reflexive and impossible to call off. I can never hear or say the word necessary without hearing it in her voice.

Tsk is something a childhood friend of mine would say often. He’d say it in variance, always laced with impatience, exasperation, fury, and sometimes even humour.

Tsk, while we waited for our ice-cream orders on summer days, the sound at that temperature was so soft that it could be written off as a small pant from the heat, and I would giggle that I had caught it.

Tsk, while I insisted we watch one more movie when I’d sleep over at his house instead of sleeping, because I fretted over how many movies we’d be able to get through before some inconvenience of life tore us apart.

Tsk, with his fists curled in his jacket pockets and his mouth curled in a frown or sneer.

Tsk, and then a laughter that ascends quickly and shakily, followed by a playful shake of the head, and, “really?”

I say “I love youuuuuuu” and mean all the “u”s. I drag my voice out every time, halfway between playful and insistent. If there’s one thing my voice can’t mince, it’s sincerity. I need to say it completely: the ways in which I love people. I figure the easiest way my voice can conceive of that is by stretching itself thin to accommodate all those "u"s in the hopes of bridging across the distance that the way you sound doesn’t matter as much as the things you say. I want to affirm with my whole voicebox that I love—it is one of the only matters in which I can never be silent.