Koleka Putuma

South African poet, playwright and performer, Koleka Putuma published the best-selling collection Collective Amnesia in 2017. At the crossroads of the intimate and the collective, in this collection she questions her own condition as a woman, black, lesbian, from a working-class background and having grown up in a country still marked by its colonial heritage. From this position at the intersection of oppressions, Putuma explores the levels of memory, both living and repressed. She is also the founder of Manyano Media, a structure that supports black, queer and female writers and theater professionals. Koleka Putuma's poetry is rooted in two major traditions: slam, a socially-charged spoken word, and the Christian religion, which haunts her work as much as it challenges its existence. This tension between imposed faith and subversive creation is one of the central themes of Collective Amnesia. Carried by a powerful, demanding breath, and deeply rooted in its time and social context, Putuma's poetry recalls the rallying power of poetry. It asserts itself as a space of freedom, free from temporal, narrative or formal constraints. Through this freedom, Koleka Putuma doesn't always tell the story, but she does say - forcefully - the complexity of the world around her.