(This article was originally published on the 17th of September, 2018)
Njabulo Zwane
i sharpen knives in the long night, awaiting the final siren. i’ll blood-drum up the alarm should none come. build a dam of skin. kgositsile scribbled notes from no sanctuary, i feel the ripping of throats in this asylum.
-Lesego Rampolokeng, “Gabi Sings Tonight”
What is “classical” music, if not vomit from Europe’s Cartesian babalaas;a sustained attempt at the creation of the individual thinking being? With Tefiti: Goddess of Creation, Gabi Motuba defies this singular subjection; so to call it her debut solo would be a refusal of her “consent not to be a single being.”In a similar fashion, Tefiti refuses rigidity, a dangerous refusal that promises marginality to the musician who dares transgress the borders that function to police genres. These borders have got to be understood as a product of the development of the academic study of music in Western Europe, namely musicology. From henceforth, audiences could choose between “high” and “low” forms of music, with so-called classical music being the highest of them all. In our case, black improvisational music, or what the critics and fans alike call “jazz”, has its roots (or routes maybe?) in fugitive practices that musician-theoretician Tumi Mogorosi– who is also Gabi’s life partner – terms the “de-aesthetic”. But with the passage of time we have witnessed the arrested development of this practice. As Charles Mingus says,
“let my children have music. Jazz – the way it has been handled in the past – stifles them so that they believe only in the trumpet, trombone, saxophone, maybe a flute now and then or a clarinet… But it is not enough. I think it is time our children were raised to think that they can play bassoon, oboe, English horn, lull percussion, violin, cello. The results would be –well the Philharmonic would not be the only answer for us then. If we so-called jazz musicians who are the composers, the spontaneous composers, started including these instruments in our music, it would open everything up, it would get rid of prejudice because the musicianship would be so high in calibre that the symphony couldn’t refuse us.”
Surely Pharoah Sanders’ injunction also applies to this music – jazz has got to have freedom. In the interim, the operations of the contemporary jazz musician are double-edged; revelations and concealments being the order of the day. You hear it if you have to.
Gabi and Tumi’s 2016 project, titled Sanctum Sanctorium, stands as monument to that which they, we, hold in our hands. At a personal level, these two are holding their daughter Thari eNtsu Mogorosi, whose beautiful spirit animates both albums. Besides sharing the same name with the fourth song on Sanctum Sanctorium, Gabi tells us that it was actually Thari’s love for the 2016 Disney animation Moana that inspired the name of this latest offering. In this movie the heart of the island goddess TeFiti is stolen and must be returned to preserve life on the island. This is not unlike the situation that jazz finds itself in today. As life-giving music, this black cultural practice has been reduced to live-gigging music for paying audiences who demand to be entertained.
[J]azz has got to have freedom
Tefiti is a timely reminder of the impossible sociality made possible by black maternality. Be it in the church or the shebeen, the spirit of the mother has been a constant generator of black life.Gabi’s offerings invoke the spirits of the queens of African antiquity in a time that has rendered such excavations as “Hotep”. Her singing of their names is not only a caution against the pitfalls of “woke” consciousness, but also a present embodiment of that which lies before. The colonial encounter subjugated Black people to a position of non-subjecthood. In an operation that speaks to Fred Moten’s point about resistance being prior to power, Black people’s attempts at self-actualisation have usually looked to the pre-colonial past. But because the roots of blackness lie in the routes that the people have traversed, from Tembisa and Timbuktu,we are confronted with the sad reality that there might be no peaceful beginning to go back to.
Yet the question remains,“Soyaphinathina?”Rangoato Hlasane describes this situation as a “persistent fraught placedness”, where the township standard “Meadowlands” has functioned as both a lament and a ballad. Perhaps the solution may lie in what Gabi refers to as an “ancestral becoming” on the last song. This type of actualisation sounds like a rupture with the pasts as we know them and an encounter with what Saidiya Hartman calls the “anticipated future.” I want to suggest that Tefiti is a history of this pre-post-present uncertainty; a fabulation of those moments of silence in the hold of the slave ship or istimela; which is to say that it is born out of the slippages between the two senses of representation.
Tefiti is a timely reminder of the impossible sociality made possible by black maternality
This meditation on silence contrasts with Gabi and Tumi’s other project titled The Wretched (no guessing what is being invoked here), which investigates the screams that haunt and animate Black life. In a country that has mastered what Khanyisa Papu refers to as the “strategies of forgetting”, Gabi’s demand that we remember her is a violence in the archive. SeTswana sere mosadi o tshwara thipa ka bohaleng; and if ethics and aesthetics are one in the same, the stringed instruments can sound like knives cutting through the genre of Man to the uninitiated ear.
(i) Charles Mingus, Liner notes to Let My Children Hear Music.
(ii) Rangoato Hlasane, “Go tsamaya ke godi bona vs. We Will Not Move!: The Persistence of Fraught Placedness in the South African Song”, Paper presented at Wits Department of African Literature’s Weekly Seminar, 10 April 2018.
V Njabulo Zwane is a Jozi-based cultural worker trying to write about sounds and stuff like that. . .
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