Journal Article

The ‘becomings’: singing and songwriting with mothers and midwives at South-East Queensland

Mani, Charulatha

2022

Overview

How can songwriting show us the meaning of music and language for health and wellbeing in culturally and linguistically diverse mothers? This article examines the artistic processes in music-cum-health workshops involving new and expectant mothers and their midwives. The voices of the mothers of colour have been silenced historically and systemically. To give them social justice in a health context, singing is a powerful tool and songwriting links this tool to useful health messages. Through this article, the formation of a song on the placenta, a key part of the womb in childbearing, is traced through the stories of a music facilitator, a mother and a midwife. The storying highlights the importance of artistic processes for understanding the person within and their cultural identity. The article argues that cultural understanding of the participants in such arts-in-health programmes is important for socially just models of health care for those at the margins. From being instrumentalized as interventions that are 'administered' with an aim to garner health outcomes, art-based participatory approaches are now recognized as capable of activating culturally founded wellbeing in individuals. Through this article, I propose that as the focus shifts from what art does for health to what art means for a healthy life, the cultural vitality inherent in individuals and societies can be better championed in arts-in-health discourses. I discuss the artistic processes in singing and songwriting in a perinatal context involving mothers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their midwives. I argue for lenses to better understand the role of cultural practices in health research involving migrant and refugee communities. Using narrative inquiry, I trace intersecting trajectories wherein the storied life of a coloured mother is intercepted by that of a midwife, and of myself, a coloured female mother-researcher and facilitator. At the intersection emerges a song, as a process and product. This article advances that it is when artmaking processes are centred that the voices from the margins become heard, and it is when their voices are amplified that health research design becomes equitable and ethically sound.