Hum If You Don't Know the Words

“No ceilings crouch above us, bisecting the thatch roofs from the dung floors. No partitions cut through the communal space to separate us into different rooms. Our homes are borderless just as the world was once free of boundaries; there would be no walls or roofs at all except for the essential shelter they provide.”

Beauty’s home reflects her philosophy about the importance of community and connection. She describes her open hut as the social antithesis of how she knows Western houses are often designed, emphasizing the fact that her own culture doesn’t expect privacy, separation, or otherness, instead embracing opportunities for family and community bonding. Her home symbolizes this beliefs.

“They spend their three-week vacation time lying on the beaches, swimming in the warm Indian Ocean and fishing for free food when they could afford to buy it in shops. Why they lie for hours in the sun trying to get brown when they find our own skin color so displeasing, I do not know.”

Beauty notes the irony of how the white colonists in South Africa fish for fun rather than sustenance, getting rich in other ways and then spending their money on vacations. An even keener irony is apparent in her sardonic comment about their fondness for tanning in the sun when they systematically discriminate in all areas of life against those whose skin is naturally dark.

“Mothers weave through the traffic, babies tied to their backs with towels or blankets. Schoolchildren mingle with women in maids’ uniforms. Men in overalls stop to talk to those in three-piece suits. Fires burn in braziers with mielies roasting atop them, and peddlers call out their wares for sale.”

Beauty describes the scene in Soweto using imagery and parallel structure. She describes the city this way to emphasize the movement and life there. This normalcy and flow of life contrasts what she soon witnesses at the peaceful student demonstration as the police arrive, which decidedly departs from normalcy and ends inexplicably in the flow of children’s blood.