In poems such as ‘suicide’ and ‘apartheid’, Putuma affixes a footnote to the title, no more than a heavy sentence or so in content, and leaves the reader there in the liminal white space between introduction and resolution. Others take the opposite approach, though both have equal power. Several of the poems in Collective Amnesia tell stories that so enrapture you to the point where you find yourself carried across several pages before you remember to blink. Putuma goes as far as to name her as part of her ‘lifeline’ in what is presented as the poem-that-is-not-a-poem of the same name. Her prose carries something of Audre Lorde in it – both ephemerally and quite literally.
It gives the impression that while this collection is powerful on paper, it could be transcendent if performed aloud. The repetition in this poem, over and over again, describing how colonialism and its knock-on effects wear one down little by little, is exquisite. ‘mountain’ in particular focuses on how unthinkable it should be for someone to take a mountain in a country they essentially invaded and claim it as private property – and yet it happens, with mountains, with people, with ways of life. Much of the third act of the collection, ‘Postmemory’ (following ‘Inherited Memory’ and ‘Buried Memory’), picks apart the hypocrisy of colonizers and their descendants claiming they can own anything on stolen land. You can’t go up the mountain without going past my property,
Here, she explores what it means to be a womxn (her own insistent terminology) in a world where men feel entitled to your space and your body what it means to be a lesbian under the eyes of Christianity, or under the hands of a lover what it means to be a Black South African living in a country that white people laid unjust colonial claim to. Putuma’s poetry is heavily intertwined with her own identity. Beautiful, thought-provoking, and scorching in its honesty, Collective Amnesia is a cathartic pouring-forth of words left unsaid for far too long. This collection as a cohesive entity offers no such pretence or platitude. In her poem ‘hand-me-downs’, placed boldly near the very beginning of her debut collection Collective Amnesia, South African poet Koleka Putuma writes: ‘I have learnt how to say my glass is half full even when it’s broken’.
0 kommentar(er)
