04/05/2025
What can sound do when language becomes dangerous?
Artist and researcher .waheed turns to a language we all inherit: the hum. In Urdu, hum also means we. In 2019, while visiting Lahore during a wave of student protests and parallel uprisings in India, students on both sides of a militarized border were reciting the same revolutionary poems and humming the same banned songs, without ever speaking to each other.
These were the words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib, and others incarcerated for their voices
Hum and Hum II are multichannel sound installations that engage polyphonic humming as a potent form of collective resistance and remembrance, layering frequencies across time and place to reveal a borderless kinship among liberation movements, led so often by women.
These works carry sound and struggle from Palestine, India, Kurdistan, South Korea, Chile, Iran, and Nunavik. Different languages. Different histories. Bound by the ways women, political prisoners, and marginalized communities have turned humming, lullabies, and folk song into strategies of refusal and care Humming, as she reminds us, lives on.
In Palestine, women developed tarweedeh, a coded form of song sung beneath prison walls to pass secret messages to their loved ones. In South Korea, university students sang a K-pop ballad, “Into the New World,” as riot police closed in, sparking what became the Candlelight Revolution. In Iran, Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye” became the anthem of a movement led by women and girls, sung in defiance after the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini. In Chile, the feminist collective LASTESIS performed “Un violador en tu camino” in the streets, a street action that echoed across the world. In Nunavik, Inuit performers Beatrice Deer and Sylvia Cloutier revived katajjaq, a form of Inuit throat singing passed between women. In South Asia, Dalit mothers sing lullabies that carry the teachings of Ambedkar and imagine a world without caste. And in Turkey, Kurdish singer Nûdem Durak, imprisoned for singing in her native language, continues to hum in solitary confinement.
Published in our Tongues issue, where we trace language in its many forms.
