Hum If You Don't Know The Words

I’m nearing the tail-end of my South African adventure, and fittingly I find myself on a safari, literally looking for things with tails (Lions, yes! Leopards, not yet!). We’re currently in the Madikwe Game Reserve, which is five hours north of Johannesburg, within a kilometer of Botswana’s border.

With the exception of one night I spent in the Sahara in 2009 after a Moroccan camel ride gone awry, this is the most remote place I’ve been in my life. We’re 30 minutes from the reserve’s southern border, more than an hour from the nearest paved road, and further still from the trappings of modern life.  While there are many drawbacks to spending the week in the bush, one notable advantage is plenty of time to read. I began Bianca Marais’ debut novel, Hum If You Don’t Know The Words, in the car on the way up here. Four days and more than 400 pages later, I’m done.

Hum If You Don’t Know The Words is a novel narrated by two different characters: Robin, a white ten-year-old from Johannesburg, and Beauty, a black woman drawn to the city from her Transkei homeland in search of her teenaged daughter. Robin’s story is told in the past tense, while Beauty’s is written in the present, but both perspectives build towards a classic “they both save each other” resolution. Robin is confused and grieving following the racially-motivated murder of her parents, and Beauty cares for her (and cures her of her prejudice to boot!). Beauty, meanwhile, is trying to track down her daughter and her job caring for Robin gives her both an alibi for being in Johannesburg and a surrogate child to love and protect. Like many things in this novel, this win-win relationship is a little too clean to be credible, but it’s enjoyable despite its implausibility.

Marais, who is South African-born and now lives in Toronto, cleverly weaves many apartheid-era events and cultural artifacts into her story. The Soweto uprising, miners’ strikes, District Six evacuations, passbook requirements, international sanctions, and news media censorship all become plot points or asides along Robin and Beauty’s journey. A few of Marais’ history lessons are heavy-handed – like when Beauty finds herself getting schooled about Nelson Mandela’s accomplishments in a safe house by a woman dubbed the “White Angel” – but most are subtle and succeed at being both entertaining and educational. 

I liked this book, though I know I’m grading it on a curve. The New York version of me may have balked at the stock characters, might have been skeptical of Beauty’s absolute goodness, and likely would have had qualms about the white savior complex exhibited by two of the book’s protagonists. But the Madikwe Game Reserve version of myself – the version that’s deep in the wilderness and in need of both diversion and a sense of connection to the outside world – doesn’t have the luxury of being particularly critical. That said, my sympathy stops somewhere short of Marais’ clumsy cliffhanger on the book’s last page, which makes it clear that she’s planning a sequel of sorts:

“I didn’t know what the future would hold. I didn’t know that the story Beauty and I shared was far from over, nor did I know that the winding paths our lives would take – mine and Beauty’s and Nomsa’s – would go on to become so entangled that all these years later, I’m finding it impossible to pull apart the knots to separate them. But that’s another story for another time.”

Frankly, I’m not sure the world needs any more stories about Robin or Beauty. Though, who am I kidding? If I wasn’t leaving this game reserve tomorrow, I just might.