Silence, Music, Revolution: Jazz as Narrative Agent in Mongane Wally Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood

Abstract

SummaryWith To Every Birth Its Blood, Wally Mongane Serote has written one of the greatest jazz novels. Music is a character in the book that has voice and impacts the plot. It speaks not only to provide context or colour, but also participates in dialogue with the interior consciousness of the principal protagonist Tsietsi (Tsi) Molope. Tsi develops from a state of alienation and impotence to a purposeful actor. And the protagonist grows from a single person to a national community. The music develops from jazz to soul, from impotence to sexual agency, from alienation to political action. The importance of music is explicated more prosaically in a subsequent novel, Revelations, in which the youths of the Soweto uprising become the adult actors in “the new South Africa”. Democracy has brought not only the stresses of addressing historical injustice and the responsibilities of governance, but highlights a series of philosophical issues and cultural practices which are attendant to many uncertainties about the social reality in South Africa – questions that music can help answer.