Content area
Full text
Identity and memory infuse Gregory Maqoma's work Beautiful Mc. In this essay, I shall discuss how he dances his identity and creates meaning in the places around himself through the dialogic interplay of his body with music, narrative, and audience, while complicating notions of past, present, and future. In such processual qualities, Mr. Maqoma's work resonates with that of certain traditional and contemporary visual artists of other parts of Africa in addition Iu his own, as I shall hope to demonstrate from my own research among Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and with reference to works of several outstanding artists from Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Picture the stage of Beautiful Me as a memory theater in the form oí a lukasay a wooden board that serves as a mnemonic device for Luba people (Fig. i). A lukasa is a motherboard of Luba thought: It helps organize vast data sets of different sorts, from cosmology to seating protocol before the king, placement of medicina) plants in the royal compound to choreographies dramatizing the origins of kingship. Though only the size of a Kindle e-book reader, it is simultaneously a representation of a female body with its many marks of beauty and biography; a blueprint of a king's domain with its codes of conduct and political secrets; and the entire Luba landscape with its sacred locales and spirit capitals of former rulers. A liikasn is covered with beads of many colors, shapes, and sizes, as well as shells and bits of metal, each of which refers to a sacred locale or a journey, migration, event, or other datum. A lukcisa can only be interpreted by court historians who have been inducted into the profundities of Luba thought and who narrate histories of political import. By tracing a pathway through the maze of beads, a historian recalls or composes a narrative, recognizing pertinent relationships in the possible sites of memory. To determine a history in a labyrinth of memory is to trace a pathway through a forest of symbols (Roberts 2002-03).
Every time a Luba historian performs a recitation, the narrative undergoes transformation, depending upon the audience, the place, and the circumstances of the moment, just as Mr. Maqoma states that his work...