Abdullah Ibrahim and the uses of memory1

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the South African jazz composer Abdullah Ibrahim and the uses of memory in music that he wrote in 1970s South Africa. Through an analysis of blues and church hymnody as musical signifiers in Ibrahim's piece “Mamma “, the paper shows how Ibrahim's compositional language at the time was embedded both in his personal experience as a musician and in the experience of many of his listeners. Drawing on Michel de Certeau's notion of “sites” that embody the “presence of absences”, the analysis extends to an argument that the climate of memory in which music was written in the 1970s ‐a time when the absence of social normality in South Africa and the exiled status of many musicians, including Ibrahim himself, created a dislocation of space and time experienced by many people ‐ was a site in which a shared “space of memory “ was created. In this space, nostalgia for a lost past, both personal and political, could also give rise to the imagination of what at the time was still an almost unimaginable future after apartheid.