Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

The young people are singing a song, one that is accompanied by the beating of a thousand drums and makes my heartbeat quicken. Yet, as much as I want to sing along with them, I do not know the words. Perhaps that is what it means to get old: you must let the young ones sing their own songs.

likely. I clutched the brick in one hand and Johan’s hand in the other. I was mute. I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.