Sometime early this year in northern Nigeria, the energetic voice of Andrea Bocelli blasted from my three-inch Bluetooth speaker. The music streamed until the air was saturated with melody. An hour-long compilation of Andrea Bocelli’s major hits throughout the years. Sung in Italian and Spanish. I understood 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 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 there is a translation embedded. However, I always mimic or, better still, sing along, twisting my tongue to some strange degrees to get some pronunciation right sometimes. My neighbors called my music a playlist of noise.

My playlist of noise is a folder that contained songs performed in other languages. It’s a disclaimer: Hey! If you only listen to something you understand then this folder is full of noise.

Somewhere inside my playlist, I have a Japanese song by an artist whose name I can’t pronounce. French songs by Stromae. Songs by probably the descendants of Genghis Khan, the great Mongolian emperor who almost conquered China. I’m not sure I understand how I always get around this barrier. How I always enjoy mixtapes, and albums, in languages other than my mother tongue or English. However, I know I do get lost in the stream-like melody 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”. Then Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito”. Then Galibri & Mavik’s “Federiko 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.

“You don’t have to understand it to love it,” I once answered another over-inquisitive 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 something or someone or some culture they don’t understand. They fear. This must be dangerous. Strange is dangerous!

Strange doesn’t make it dangerous. Does it? It’s okay, and beautiful, 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 the name of the bird who 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 that there is a nonhuman neighbor who wants to communicate with songs; even if we don’t understand one another’s languages. 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, the moon crusading outside, singing the lunar blues, another language I may never understand.

I have a list of things, like my neighbor bird, I may never understand. Like mathematics. Or humanity. Or how long we have got before everything implodes into oblivion. I know I can never understand the solar system. Or the rivers cascading downhill. But I trust them to do 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 could suck grief out of my spongy heart. Like how I could relate to something way above my level of comprehension. It takes courage to thrust myself into the beautiful hands of the unknown. Trusting my feelings as they dance the way feelings dance to songs. Melody is the language of the soul. And it doesn’t need alphabets to be communicated.

Humanity through many measures—religion, gender, race, [fill in the blank]—has built a wall, 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 Iroko tree casts a shadow for its human neighbors to rest under. Towering mercifully over us, shielding all from the blazing sun, even those people he doesn’t know are planning to cut him down for log. On its branches, different birds sing aloud, calling out to the universe, trying to communicate with the forest. A forest that undoubtedly contains a million, possibly billions, of things they can never understand.

A few weeks back I discovered 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 anticipated that already. Even though the Siberian song I downloaded didn’t have the translation embedded, the language melted like snow and sank deep into the cavity of 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. A world where even the strangest of beings have magic to share with the world.