Winner of the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry 
Commended for the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize 
City Press Book of the Year 2017 
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2017 
This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country’s most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma’s exploration of blackness, womxnhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explodes 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, Collective Amnesia is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves. 
Koleka Putuma was born in Port Elizabeth in 1993. An award-winning performance poet, facilitator and theatre-maker, her plays include UHM and Mbuzeni, as well as two two plays for children, Ekhaya and Scoop. Her work has travelled around the world, with her poetry garnering her national prizes, such as the 2014 National Poetry Slam Championship and the 2016 PEN South Africa Student Writing Prize. 
Second Edition published by Manyano Media in November 2020. Foreword by Lebogang Mashile.

Collective Amnesia

Literature & Fiction

Putuma, Koleka

Poetry

Koleka Putuma

The title of the book is inspired by a South African phrase made famous by the legendary musician Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song, Istraight lendaba. 
Like the legend who inspired the book title and the song from which the name of this poetry collection was selected, Putuma wanted to build on the themes she explored in her first book, Collective Amnesia, and go straight to the heart of tackling the legacies of black femme erasure from society as well as in the arts. 
The success of Collective Amnesia, a bestseller that has sold over 6000 copies and been translated into eight languages around the world, saw Putuma perform for audiences across the continent as well as in Europe. 
“In writing Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come in, I wanted to reflect on my personal experiences of travelling and performing outside of South Africa and more specifically, Europe. I wanted to understand different aesthetics and forms of memory, documentation, performance, hyper-visibility and erasure. I wanted to look at how those things frame our understanding of women in the archive, legacies of archiving, celebration, fame, culture and black women on and off the stage,” Putuma says. 
The book is divided into four chapters dealing with subjects related to history, the erasure of black women from the archive and more personal poems where Putuma resuscitates the stories of women in her lineage who have had an influence on her life. 
“I wanted these excerpts to serve as a conversation between the poems and an archive of sorts - an archive of black women (living and dead) who are looked at, celebrated, uncited, erased and exploited. I wanted to make visible the words of black women who have had to navigate the complexities of a constant gaze that often renders the “looked at” invisible. In my quest, I wanted to further understand and challenge my own methods of citation, documentation and seeing – and in doing that – invite others to do the same,” she says.

Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In

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Books by Koleka Putuma

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Koleka Putuma publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Collective Amnesia

Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In