Learning to Unlearn. Koleka Putuma’s Poetry and Performances

The aim of this article is to discuss some works of the South African poet, theatre practitioner, playwright, performer, feminist, and queer activist Koleka Putuma. The article’s main focus will be some poems from Putuma’s collection Collective Amnesia (2017), now a bestseller in South Africa. Collective Amnesia is the point of both arrival and departure of different kinds of art, such as poetry performances, video productions, and theatre plays. Putuma’s poems deal with historical issues and memory/ies, in particular with slavery and with the repressed presence of black women in South African history. By questioning the past and the way its narration registers and/or erases memories, Putuma produces a decolonial counter-discourse which conceives art as a political practice, that is a form of artivism, whereby notions of identities are complicated and extended rather than standardised and circumscribed. Drawing on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989), this article will show how in Putuma’s works borders and boundaries – in terms of gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, class, economic status, etc. – come to the fore in order to allow new and more flexible paradigms with which to narrate post-transitional South Africa. Many of the discourses emerging from her written as well as performed/filmed works promote a re-appropriation of black women’s bodies while endorsing their empowerment, also through a collective unlearning, a fundamental process if one wants to rewrite history/ies from female, feminist, and queer perspectives.