Q&A: Koleka Putuma -Revolutionising the archive and (backspace) dancing…‘Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come in’

AiW Guests: Koleka Putuma
Interviewed by: Siobhan Bahl, Freya Moulton and Tessa Rhodes
On 22 February, 2022

“This is what it is, or what it was, this is the evolution of it all…”

Koleka Putuma is an esteemed South African Theatre Director, Writer, and Poet. Her debut poetry collection Collective Amnesia (2017) won the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African poetry, and was named the 2017 book of the year by the City Press, and one of the best books of 2017 by the Sunday Times and Quartz Africa.

Putuma’s theatre productions include SCOOP (2013), UHM (2014), Ekhaya (2015), Woza Sarafina (2016) and Mbuzeni (2017/18). In 2019, No Easter Sunday for Queers premiered at the Market Theatre (published by Junkets in 2017). She is a Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative finalist for theatre, a Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 Honoree, recipient of the Imbewu Trust Scribe Playwriting Award, Mbokodo Rising Light Award, CASA playwriting award and the 2019 Distell Playwriting Award for her play No Easter Sunday For Queers (2019). 

In 2019, Putuma also founded her multidisciplinary creative company, Manyano Media, a creative company that produces literary and media-based works for syndication in publishing, film, advertising, television and theatre, to empower and help produce the work of Black queer women. In 2020, she extended this to incorporate the Black Girl Live Fellowship, an accelerator program designed to empower black queer women storytellers in South Africa with resources and business skills.

Putuma’s poetry collection, Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In (2021), explores the importance of archiving to include Black queer women. Her newest book, We Have Everything We Need to Start Again (Hot Key Books, June 2024, with a mid-May release date planned for South African readers – see below), is poetry that is geared toward YA readers, exploring themes such as identity, sexuality, gender and mental health, to guide readers through life’s biggest questions, discoveries and transitions.

We had the chance to discuss Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In with her over Zoom. Throughout, Putuma reflects on her personal experiences travelling in Europe to promote and perform her first collection, Collective Amnesia. The poetry of Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In then goes on to explore the different aesthetics and forms of memory, documentation, performance, hyper-visibility, and erasure that arise around women who are held within archives and/or cultures of celebrity, with the title inspired by a phrase popularised by South African anti-apartheid Afropop musician, dancer and activist Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song ‘Istraight Lendaba’.

Putuma’s poetry comes to the reader through each of the four of its titular parts – ‘Hullo’, ‘Bu-Bye’, ‘Koko’, ‘Come In’ – approaching the erasure of Black femme aesthetics in the public archives, and bringing back to life the stories of forgotten women in Putuma’s own lineage. Putuma also performed poems from Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In on stage, culminating in a docu-poetry performance film, a snapshot of which you can view here.

Our conversation originally took place in 2022. It navigates the act of re-archiving, giving voice and articulating the space between visibility and invisibility through Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In, touching on her performances of the poetry from the collection in the process. From this base, we talked further about the spotlight that she shines on Black queer women through her flagship creative arts company Manyano Media. 

Tess Rhodes, for Africa in Words: I would like to start by asking you about the women that you make visible through Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come in (henceforth HBB) and the research process behind that.

Koleka Putuma: I started writing HBB when I was still touring and publicising my first collection Collective Amnesia and I got a lot of invitations to come and talk about the work, mainly from Europe. 

During that time I found myself negotiating with what it meant to be Black and queer and South African, and viewing my body in those kinds of spaces. I started to feel this weird negotiation with ‘hyper visibility’ but also, at the same time, ‘invisibility’; between ‘being looked at’ and what people see and engage with when they look at someone like me.

When I started to write the poems in HBB I began to think about who else was having to negotiate themselves in the performance space? Who were these women who were doing this weird dance with visibility and invisibility, the media and the archives; being celebrated, but also being erased from critical materials? 

Then I started to think about celebrated musicians, celebrated icons, not just in music or in entertainment, but in politics, figures that we don’t necessarily see mounted up as statues in public spaces. I really wanted to find people who contributed to our liberation in South Africa, specifically women who contributed to the struggle but never made the textbooks.

Then I wanted to look at icons, like Brenda Fassie and Miriam Makeba, who are really big women in entertainment but also iconic in how they contributed to the struggle, and to music and the culture of South Africa; women like Audre Lorde and May Ayim; observing the different ways that Black women have contributed to academia, politics, scholarship, performance in ways that haven’t been written about enough.

TR: In a previous interview I saw that you said that you think it is important to celebrate Black female stories but not to do so as a response to the patriarchy. Given that HBB is your second collection addressing and responding to problems involving this, can you say that you’ve now achieved your aims?

KP: I don’t know if I have achieved it. I feel as a Black queer woman in South Africa, I’m confronted with a lot of those issues that are rooted in capitalism and whiteness and patriarchy on a daily basis. It’s so in my face the whole time. It’s quite difficult to frame your experience and not engage with those subjects or engage with those topics but I don’t think it’s completely impossible – I think it absolutely is possible! 

We are more than these bodies that live in patriarchal societies that have been affected by our histories in our past. There’s so much more that we could write about but I think for me, I don’t know if I’ve achieved it. 

I think we need to write about and talk about things for as long as it’s necessary to have the conversation. It’s important to have a dialogue about the things that are plaguing us, or disturbing our peace and our freedom.

I keep joking with people at the moment, saying ‘I think my next collection is going to be about the erotic’. I do think I’m going to write erotica poetry and move away from the politics and blackness and queerness and all these other subjects because I think that both of the books I have written really engaged with that, and now I’m feeling over it. 

I’m ready to move past it and talk about something else, talk about sex and erotica and addiction and other things that I’m fiddling with in my mind at the moment.

TR: Many of the women that you feature within the collection were not only performers but also prominent activists. As you’ve just been saying, you want to continue to talk about things that are ‘in the moment’ and prominent. As a Black queer woman who focuses on female empowerment, would you consider your poetry a form of ‘activism’? 

KP: I hope so. I think people in the world take up arms or they contribute to movements in different ways. I’d like to believe that no matter what period I was born into, my writing or poetry would still have been my chosen way of contributing to liberation and contributing to conversations.

I think judging based on how the work has travelled through the world, the conversations that it’s initiated and the debates that it has sparked, I would think that it’s a work of activism. Because I think that at the heart of activism is dialogue. People start certain movements so that we can begin to move forward and heal. Dialogue is a critical component of activism and I’d like to think that the poems spark some sort of dialogue, start conversations in different ways, open up those difficult conversations that people can’t necessarily just launch into. I think that that’s the beauty and power of poetry – it cuts through the bullsh*t – it gets people to talk instantly about what it is that the poem’s trying to say, what it’s saying to them. 

Siobhan Bahl, for Africa in Words: I’d like to focus on your attention to the gaze in HBB and how you translated this onto the stage in your performances that accompanied the collection. What struck me throughout the poetry was the attention to the impact of the European, male, media gaze on Black women. As you have already touched on, the experience of being intently looked at culminates in a paradoxical position of being seen, yet erased, of having a visible presence, yet having one’s image and voice claimed and controlled by external forces.

I was drawn to your choices of costume in your stage performances of HBB, particularly your bright white sunglasses and boiler suit. It felt like you were asking me to really look at you, to see what is visible, the bright clothing, yet what is invisible, the parts of you covered by said clothing.

To what extent did your choices of costume work to confront the gaze of the audience and translate your concerns around the gaze from the page onto the stage?

KP: One of the conundrums I was fiddling with was that my body and who I am is not a neutral space, not as a Black woman, not as Koleka. Whatever I do, people will see me. I worked on how to project a canvas of neutrality onto my body, where the other narratives of other women and stories could be embodied and lived.

I don’t think it is fully possible to get on stage and ask people not to read or see me. But, I tried to experiment with the idea of how to create a costume and looks where the audience is asked to engage with me as a performer that has the potential to take on other characters and narratives. To engage with me and the stories, those that have been erased and made invisible, around me.

It is not just poetry about me and my experience. The experience of being Black, queer and erased, from the archive, from politics, isn’t a singular story. It is not just my story, it is the story of multiple women.

Costume and staging allowed for multiple narratives to come in and out of that space.

SB: I see – so your staging choices allowed these women, their voices and stories to exist equally and at the same time as your presence and voice as the poet.

KP: Yes. It contributed to creating a place where the text and the other narratives could land.

I also wanted to play with the contract we have in theatre. The audience, they come, they dress up, they sit there and they look at you for an hour. When you think about that, that is super weird. It also made me super aware of myself. 

I wanted to play with the possibility of me looking at the audience; where I am also looking at them. Bringing the audience into a contract where sometimes I choose to not allow them to look at me. So, I’m going to put on this eye apparel for half of the show, because I am asking you to not be fixated on me and what my eyes are doing but instead to look at the stories that are happening around this body on stage.

SB: In a way, this relates to the stories of the women you mention throughout the collection. These are famous women who were focused on as celebrities, performers, singers, scholars. There was a fixation on a certain narrative strain of their lives, which circumvented their personal lives, their struggles and complexities.

KP: The media and the people who write about figures and icons write what they want to see. There is so much around these women. They are multifaceted, whole lives. They are more than just their contribution to performance, politics, and academia. They were sisters, mothers, and daughters. They did things around the thing that the media portrayed them as.

Performance can be such a 2D experience. The audience looks at the picture happening in front of them: it’s flat. But these women require a 360° gaze. I try to ask the audience to really grapple with all the other things and stories that happen in and around my performance.

SB: I found the reading process of HBB like grappling with a manuscript that was open, still in process. I really enjoyed the textuality of the slashes, crossing outs, visual gaps and brackets. It added to the sense that the lost archive of these women’s stories is still being edited and worked on, that in tracing back these edits we can rediscover the lost parts of their lives that were cut to fit the image the media wanted them to conform to.

How did you tackle recreating this narrative feel on stage?

KP: We played a lot with embodying this thing of the backspace. If it were to be in your body and the space of the stage, what would it look like and feel like? How do you create the textures of making a proposal and then deleting it? How do you divert the proposal when you change your mind? This is essentially what happens in the book.

Writing and engaging with scholarship and the archive is such a messy process; you read pages just to write two sentences. It is long and tedious and messy and nonlinear. For me, the process of getting there is so much more interesting than the arrival itself. I wanted to open up this process to the audience, for them to see how I got there, how I chose the right word, the times I deleted and changed what I was going to say. I want them to see, damn I tried!

It was about making this process naked.

Freya Moulton, for Africa in Words: I wanted to start by talking about Manyano Media which you founded in 2019 to create and archive new cultural artefacts. What inspired you to establish this platform and do your motives respond to struggles you have faced in challenging entrenched narratives regarding Black and queer women?

KP: When I graduated from theatre school, those initial years were incredibly difficult. Everything I know now about being a creative and a creative entrepreneur, regarding creative productions or products, I learned through very difficult processes of exploitation and failure. I realised there was so much that I could have learned as a student. 

I wanted to start a programme that would do two things: that would allow fellows to make work while having a space to experiment with an idea and be funded. Also, to not have the pressure of having that idea fully realised, or tied up in a neat little bow: that it could just be a space where they could play, fail, and fail with other people, to have a community where they could make and be. Which was really based on everything that I wished that I had in those initial years after graduating. 

FM: Having had a look at all the available translations on your website, you can buy your works in English, Danish, German and Spanish. Do you have plans to have your work translated into African languages as well going forward? 

KP: Man, that’s the dream. I wish for that to happen, but there are logistical and financial realities. Europe has the money to take the work and translate it into these other languages, whereas I live in a country where the arts are extremely underfunded. To even think about having the work translated into one of the twelve languages we have is going to require so much work in acquiring the funds and resources to put that into action. 

There’s also the reality of not being as fluent as I would like to be in my own mother-tongues. I can read on a very basic level Xhosa and Zulu, but in terms of writing poetic texts, poetry is sophisticated and rich in idioms and metaphors, and I don’t have those tools even in my own language. 

Sometimes we aren’t always able to articulate the things we want to communicate because we just don’t have the language; or sometimes, while the language that we do have is English, acting as the lingua franca, it’s not always the best to use because a lot gets lost in translation – which is ironic because it’s the language we use most often in order to understand each other. Even as I’m speaking to you now, there’s some translation that I am having to do because of Xhosa being my mother- tongue. I constantly have to do that translating to be able to extend this space in this way and to have this conversation. 

If language was a person, I would have a very complex relationship with that person! 

It presents me with such beautiful and amazing things, but it also complicates my life. Hence language is unreliable as it provides us opportunities to dialogue and to access different things, but in many ways, it troubles us in the sense that we can end up in a lot of hot water because of language.

FM: In HBB and on your website, you highlight how Black and queer women are often remembered and celebrated after death and tragedy. In response, you founded Black Girl Live [a fellowship designed to provide poets and theatre makers with resources and a space to create new work, under the mentorship of Putuma] alongside Manyano Media, to celebrate and empower Black and queer women in the now. 

How has your journey been so far with the fellowship and what are your hopes for its future?

KP: Black Girl Live was first considered as a relief fund in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. Thinking about the sustainability and longevity of the fund, we decided to turn it into a fellowship that would fund Black queer women. The journey so far has been incredible. This [2022] is the second year of the fellowship; we had two fellows last year, Ayanda Nxumalo and Hope Netshivhambe, and have two this year, Lukhanyiso Skosana and Nasfa Ncanywa. 

When I think about change-making I get very overwhelmed about the bigger picture. Like, ‘we’re going to change the world!’. Oh, my goodness, how do we even start with that?! 

For me, it’s easier to think about small moments of victory or of change that will eventually add up. So, thinking about how to engage with two Black queer women storytellers at a point in time will eventually add up to an archive of these narratives and stories, which will begin to change the narratives around Black and queer women, not just in performance, but outside of those storytelling spaces as well.                      

I hope the programme becomes something that’s lived for ten, twenty years, so it can create this body of work that people can refer to and reference when people ask about the story of Black queer South African women’s experiences. To be able to point to those stories and say, okay, this is what it is, or what it was, this is the evolution of it all, this is the reality of it. I really hope that it can achieve that, over time. 

Siobhan Bahl, Freya Moulton and Tessa Rhodes were final year undergraduate students studying English at the University of Exeter in 2022. When this interview took place, they were enrolled on the African Narratives module which engages with literary texts and production from the African continent from 1960 to today. Koleka Putuma’s debut collection Collective Amnesia was also a core text on the module, making this interview an invaluable resource for further study of her work. 

Putuma’s latest book, We Have Everything We Need To Start Again, is a YA (14+ years) poetry collection, illustrated by Adriana Bellet, all about “figuring out who you are and embracing it”.

It is due out on 20 June 2024, with Hot Key Books (UK/US), with South Africa pre-orders – available now! – expected to ship after May 13th.

Further details of Putuma’s work, productions and publications can be found at her website, with links to how to get hold of her books, mentioned in this interview and beyond, there too: https://www.kolekaputuma.com/publications

To catch up with the latest from Manyano Media, head to the website’s Home page, here> https://www.manyanomedia.com/

The previously mentioned snapshot of Putuma’s docu-poetry performance film of poems from Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In is available to watch on YouTube – below: