Sometime last year when I was in northern Nigeria, the energetic voice of Andrea Bocelli blasted from my three-inch Bluetooth speaker, saturating the air with empyrean melodies: an hourlong compilation of Bocelli’s major hits throughout the years, sung in Italian and Spanish. I understand neither. “You should be listening to something you understand; these foreign singers could be cursing or berating us Africans,” a neighbor mumbled. I smiled and nodded, but I said nothing because I’m not sure I know how to explain melody to someone who can’t listen beyond language.
I discovered The HU on YouTube. They call their style throat singing. I don’t know how they do it — or understand the words unless a translation is embedded. However, I always mimic or, better, sing along, twisting my tongue to strange degrees to get my pronunciation right. My neighbors call my music a “playlist of noise.”
My playlist of noise is a folder that contains songs performed in other languages. It comes with a disclaimer: Hey! If you only listen to things you understand, then this folder is full of noise.
Somewhere on my playlist, I have a Japanese song by an artist whose name I can’t pronounce. French songs by Stromae. The HU sound like descendants of Genghis Khan, the great Mongolian emperor who almost conquered China. I’m not sure I understand how I always get around the language barrier, how I always enjoy mixtapes and albums in languages other than English or my mother tongue. What I know is that I get lost in the streamlike melodies, like the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey.
And then Stromae’s “Santé” will play. Then The HU’s “Yuve Yuve Yu.” Then Daddy Yankee’s “Limbo” and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito.” Then Galibri & Mavik’s “Federico Fellini.” For me, the melody of a strange song is like seeing with your eyes closed. Like reaching out to the moon with hands that grow out of your heart. Magic, isn’t it? Wandering off into an invisible garden like young Alice in Wonderland.
“You don’t have to understand it to love it,” I answered another neighbor, who asked me one cold evening, “How do you enjoy something like that?”
“Something like that”: the lexical stick people always use to poke at things they don’t understand. They fear. This must be dangerous.
Strange doesn’t make it dangerous, does it? It’s OK to look out the window and fall in love with the tiny voice of the sunbird singing in the woods in a bird’s language. I’m not sure I know what kind of bird built her nest inside the broken ceiling of my bathroom. Neither do I understand what she’s trying to say in her bird language. Chu tora chu tora chu. But it’s beautiful to know of a nonhuman neighbor who wants to communicate with songs. And when my neighbor-bird stops to sing because it is night, I lean against the window to listen to the melody of the trees and watch the moon cruising overhead, singing the lunar blues, another language I may never understand.
I have a list of things I may never understand. Like mathematics. Or humanity. Or how long we have got before everything implodes into oblivion. I know I will never understand the solar system, or the rivers cascading downhill, but I trust them to perform whatever eternal assignment they have been given. I don’t understand my destiny. But I will keep dancing to the strange melody of fate. I won’t pretend to understand how melodies can suck grief out of my spongy heart. Melody is the language of the soul. And it doesn’t need alphabets to be communicated.
I often feel that humanity, through many measures — religion, gender, race, fill-in-the-blank — has built a giant barbed-wire fence between what we understand and what we don’t. But right here above my head, one of the branches of this great neem tree casts a shadow for its human neighbors to rest beneath. Towering mercifully over us, shielding all from the blazing sun, the tree shelters even those people who are planning to cut him down for logs. On its branches, different birds sing aloud, calling out to the universe, trying to communicate with the forest, a forest that undoubtedly contains millions of things they can never understand.
A few weeks back I found Otyken, a Siberian band that loves to sing in the snow. The drummer drummed on a moving sled. When I put it on my WhatsApp status, I got the “weird” emoji I had anticipated. Even though the song I downloaded didn’t have a translation embedded, the language melted like snow and the music sank deep into my heart.
So tell me the language of happiness, and I will show you my playlist of noise. How unfamiliar and beautiful this world is, how full of strangeness and magic to share.
Hope Joseph Okolie is an essayist and poet from Nigeria who has written for The Christian Science Monitor, Augur, Stormbird, A Long House and other publications. He is a joint winner of the SEVHAGE/Agema Founder’s Prize for Creative Fiction.