Voicing fluid voices: reflections of the multivalence of voice in Miriam Makeba’s art and life

Abstract

The article examines voice and voicing in translation processes in music, using on the one hand the example of Miriam Makeba, and on the other hand, features of African choir, in order to develop a broader argument about the musical and political significance of the multivalence of voice. The article begins with a re-valuation of some of the contributions of Miriam Makeba and their relevance to contemporary concerns of the twenty-first century, specifically to societies such as South Africa. It reflects on some of the salient revelations in her autobiography as well as on her music, her style and her politics. I argue that Makeba deployed voice as a sophisticated vehicle of translation with a vision of multivalent and plural futures. In the final section of the article, I reflect on my own artistic involvements and experiments using choir, both in translating African choral traditions to contemporary European performance contexts, as well as in the African repurposing of Western choral elements. My interest in voice and embodied translation is not merely technical, but reflects a political concern and vision, which at its core, strives towards a recalibration and reconstitution of concepts of Africanity, not as rigid and exclusionary, but rather as multi-valent and pluriversal.

Keywords:

• Miriam Makeba
• embodied translation
• African choir
• voicing
• multi-valence
• postcolonial memory

Notes

1 I witnessed one example of this predicament during the Black Archives and Intellectual Histories Seminar on 22 August 2018 at the University of Cape Town, where I was invited to speak with Thokozani Mhlambi and others on ‘The Meaning of Makeba Today’, https://www.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/328/calendar/events/2018/BlackArchivesandIntellectualSeminar22Aug.pdf [Accessed 19 June 2019].

2 For more on Nadesen and her work interests see https://barnard.edu/profiles/premilla-nadasen.

3 I must stress here that I recognize that when Venuti summarizes ‘fluent translation’ he is doing so to distinguish it from his own approach which involves a deliberate disruptive or ‘foreignizing’ translation.

4 For a fuller discussion on amaKholwa see Mokoena (2011).

5 See https://m.polity.org.za/article/a-better-life-for-all-fact-checking-the-ancs-2019-election-manifesto-2019-02-11 [Accessed 15 May 2019].

6 See https://ft.com/content/e6e8a39e-1e53-11e4-ab52-00144feabdc0 [Accessed 17 May 2019].

7 https://www.musicinafrica.net.

8 https://panafricanspacestation.org.za.

9 https://brittlepaper.com.

10 https://africasacountry.com.

11 https://afropunk.com/festival/brooklyn/.

12 Plaatjies, D., recorded discussion entitled ‘Re Mixing Music’, 5 July 2017 at National Arts Festival, Grahamstown. For more details see https://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Main-programme-pages2.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation: [Grant Number 99082].