Anastasiia Danyliuk
Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma is a strikingly successful debut rooted in explorations of identity, memory, history and resilience.
If you were to hold on to the ever-unfurling thread of your memory and let it lead you down the labyrinths of conscience, how far would you follow its trail? How many generations back would you travel, how many faces would you recognise in passing, how many new routes would fall under your footsteps before you come to a sudden halt, met by a pair of all too familiar eyes watching you curiously from the mirror’s surface? It takes unbelievable courage to face the rawness of history tangled in our veins, its harrowing thrum and resilient fire. The kind of courage that overflows the pages of Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma.
“it still takes me by surprise when a book rushes to the top of my favourites straight from the course syllabus”
Throughout my graduate degree in Anglophone Literature, I discovered many wonderful literary works. Yet, it still takes me by surprise when a book rushes to the top of my favourites straight from the course syllabus as swiftly as Collective Amnesia did. It found me on a summer evening, alone in my old room, gasping for words. It left me still holding my breath.
KOLEKA PUTUMA
Born in Gqeberha, South Africa, Koleka Putuma is an award-winning poet, writer, and theatre director. Her poignantly personal pieces are rooted in explorations of identity, showing that words and memories are charged with the power to create an avalanche of change.
“In a little over a hundred pages, she creates a unique space for self-expression”
Collective Amnesia, originally published in April 2017, is Putuma’s first poetry collection, a strikingly successful debut. Shortly after entering the literary world, it got well-deserved recognition, being placed among collective favourite books of the year according to such publications as City Press, The Sunday Times, and Quartz Africa. In 2019, Collective Amnesia was awarded the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, receiving praise from judge Bernardine Evaristo.
Indeed, Koleka Putuma positions her poems at the intersections of identity, bridging intimate depth with the unfathomable vastness of human experience. In a little over a hundred pages, she creates a unique space for self-expression, simultaneously holding up a mirror to the reader, to the world, and the history of injustice.
MEMORY AS A POETICS OF RESILIENCE
The theme of remembering and forgetting weaves its way through each of the three parts of the poetry collection: Inherited Memory, Buried Memory, and Postmemory. Memory here has many faces: strength, grief, trauma, connection, reckoning, revelation. It is merciless and healing. It is a smouldering ember ready to erupt into an all-consuming fire. Most of all, it is unyielding in its resilience. This motif falls into the gentle embroidery of Black Joy and Hand-me-downs, and reaches its first crescendo in Reincarnation:
“You are third-generation
Messiah.”
Koleka Putuma’s writing not only has a distinct voice, but even the slightest change in tone is unequivocally punctuated by the dynamism of form, rhythm, and pacing. This voice also reverberates with fierce honesty, falling in step with the thunderous echoes of previous generations:
“If this land was really yours,
Then resurrect the bones of the colonisers and use them as a compass”
Collective Amnesia explores the polyphonic coexistence of marginalised identities, religion, history, and raw, unfiltered emotions. The lines of No Easter Sunday for Queers cascade into bullet points in sync with the thump of a heart overwhelmed with fear, hope, and longing for words that keep failing it. In Public captures the feeling of grief so profoundly, that it is nearly comforting in its vividness and sincerity. The opening of Local cuts right to the core with razor-sharp vulnerability:
“My mother tongue
sits in my throat like an allergy
It feels like I will die if I speak it
It feels like I will die if I don’t”
This is not the kind of book that will slowly work its way into your heart, breaking down one wall of doubt after another. Instead, it will take you by storm, keeping you up re-reading, re-experiencing, and re-remembering.
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