Reading and talk with Koleka Putuma

The multi-award-winning theater maker, writer and poet Koleka Putuma will read from her collections Collective Amnesia and Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In, as well as some new material.

The best-selling debut collection Collective Amnesia from one of the country’s most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma’s exploration of blackness, womanhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explores the idea of authority in various spaces – academia, religion, politics, relationships – to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt. Through grief and memory, pain and joy, sex and self-care, this collection is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves.

In her sophomore collection of poems Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In, Putuma dances with the legacies of Black femme erasure, bodies and lives lost in the ledgers of history and memory (both taught and passed down). The poems in the book take a microscopic look at the endless comings and goings, the meetings and the partings, and the opening and the closing of doors, in archives and various registries of history.

On this evening, the author Koleka Putuma will read from both volumes and some other poems in English, and our ensemble member Anna-Gesa Raija Lappe will read German translations of Collective Amnesia. After the reading, there will be a discussion (in English) with the author about her work and the opportunity to buy books and have them signed by her.

Photo: Matthew Muller

Virginia Olivia Obiakor
Photo: Priscillia Grubo

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