Mongane Serote's To Every Birth its Blood: History and the limits of improvisation

Abstract

Summary South African jazz carries a burden of optimism. It is consistently identified with an ebullient élan vital that resists the monomania of apartheid ideology. Mongane Serote's novel To Every Birth its Blood (1981) sounds a cautionary note in its exploration of the limits of modernist improvisation in the face of violent oppression. In exploring its representation of these limitations, this article addresses the critical debate regarding the disjuncture of its two parts that has inflected the novel's reception and reputation. More generally, it suggests ways in which representations of music might be read as either underscoring or as dissonant to the orders of narrative logic and modes of representation of the texts in which they occur.