Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

What greater gift can you give another than to say: I see you, I hear you, and you are not alone?

There was no second place; there was only the first person who’d lost.

If they truly always knew what was best, if they could drive and have jobs and drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, if they could come and go as they pleased without asking for permission, if they could make hundreds of decisions about my life and their lives and only ever have to justify themselves with “because I said so,” then I had to believe them worthy of that exalted position. Without blind faith, the whole illusion of the child-parent relationship fell apart, because what is a parent more essentially than a child’s God? I would not lose faith in my Gods. And so, I waited for them to come get me.

We were each alone in the bubble of our grief, and while it’s true that misery loves company, sorrow is not reduced or diminished in any way even when it’s shared.

I wanted her to stay home with her brothers and me. I did not want her following in the footsteps of her father to Johannesburg, because I feared that, like him, the only way she would return was in a casket. I tried to keep her safe, but safety was always a prison to Nomsa. I spent my life trying to lock her inside, but she said I was locking her outside of the world. So I relented. I allowed her to come to this city to study so long as she promised she would not get involved in anything dangerous, but I should have known she was lying. The only thing a warrior cannot fight is her own fierce nature.

I tried to keep her safe, but safety was always a prison to Nomsa. I spent my life trying to lock her inside, but she said I was locking her outside of the world. So I relented. I allowed her to come to this city to study so long as she promised she would not get involved in anything dangerous, but I should have known she was lying. The only thing a warrior cannot fight is her own fierce nature.

But what quality of freedom will it be if it is won with blood? And after that? Once our rage has boiled and we have taken the life force of our enemies, have we not become the very people we have fought against, the ones who use violence against us? If we ever taste victory, will our fighters lower their fists and live in peace or will they always be looking for the next conflict? I despair that we are all becoming murderers, white and black alike, and that we will never be able to wipe this blood from our hands. I pray that I am wrong. 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.

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.

Lord, please take this hatred from me. Anger is a self-administered poison and I want no part of its contagion.

“I don’t know this song. They haven’t taught it to us at school.” “When in doubt, just do what I do, Robs. Hum if you don’t know the words.”

I wonder if that cut of the cord that so decisively separates mother from child is nature’s way of reminding us that we are no longer of one body and must start learning the process of letting go. If so, does any mother ever truly learn how?

When I hold my hand out to shake hers, she bats it away and engulfs me in a hug. I am too emotional to say anything and so I just hug her back. I am learning that friends can sometimes be found in the most surprising places wearing the most unexpected disguises.

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.

only then would I finally arrive at the truth about loss, the part that no one ever warns you about: that grief is a city all of its own, built high on a hill and surrounded by stone walls. It is a fortress that you will inhabit for the rest of your life, walking its dead-end roads forever. The trick is to stop trying to escape and, instead, to make yourself at home.

“Good people come in all different colors and speak many different languages, bad people too. And sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad things are the only things people know how to do because they do not know any better. One day you will see that for yourself.”

Black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, Christian, Jew, Englishman, Afrikaner, adult, child, man, woman: we were all there together, but somehow that eclectic jumble of labels was overwritten by the one classification that applied to every person there: “friend.”

I wanted to wipe away the tears that were running down his cheeks, but knew that removing the evidence of pain wasn’t the same as taking the pain away, which was what I actually wanted to do. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed by his tears either, so I smiled and allowed my own tears to fall

“Maybe it’s that the whites need the blacks so much and that puts you all in a position of power that scares us. Or maybe it’s just that everyone needs someone to hate, and it’s easier to treat people terribly if you tell yourself they’re nothing like you.”

that they could write their own story, and I wished with all my heart that it would be different for them, and that they would have their happy ending, or at least one that wasn’t too sad. I took one last look at the mother who never gave up and the prodigal daughter who found her way home, and it gave me hope that we imperfect creatures can find other imperfect creatures through the power of the imperfect emotion we called love.