Poetry connects us to how it feels to live in this nation
Afew weeks ago, I wrote in this column about poet Tony “Longfella” Walsh speaking lines of comfort and encouragement to the people of Manchester in the wake of a terrorist attack. I claimed poetry is all around us but we are generally in denial about its ubiquitousness — as much as we are about its value.
This is open to dispute. You could say it is all very well for poetry to help people who are mourning but it does nothing to intervene in the world; it bemoans injustice but it does nothing to create conditions under which justice might prevail. Not in SA, anyway. Perhaps it once did, when it roused mourners at political funerals or protesters at a march. But today?
You could say that poetry remains, for most people, something they battle with at school and happily leave behind. You could say that even performance or slam poetry, the more popular form, has a niche audience but almost no one will pay money for published poetry.
If that is so, then riddle me this: Nick Mulgrew of uHlanga Press recently announced that Koleka Putuma’s debut volume of poetry, Collective Amnesia, has sold 2,000 copies since appearing in April and is going into another print run.
To put that into perspective, keep in mind that a nonfiction title is generally considered a bestseller in SA if 5,000 copies are purchased; for fiction in English, publishers brand a book a “bestseller” if half that number of copies are sold.
Suffice it to say that Putuma’s sales figures would be the envy of prominent South African poets like Lebo Mashile and Keorapetse Kgositsile.
What is it about Collective Amnesia that has sent it so rapidly into the (admittedly still modest) stratosphere of local poetry publishing? One aspect is an energetic marketing strategy, for which Mulgrew and his team should take a bow. Another is that the book has been prescribed on at least one university literary studies course. The chief reason for Putuma’s success is, of course, the poet herself — she has struck a chord with an audience and readership hungry for words to express their feelings about life in this country beyond the overworn discourses of political rhetoric, the laboured essayistic mode of the “think piece” and the banalities of popular culture.
The signature poem in Collective Amnesia — which is, after all, chiefly concerned with memory — is called Water. In an important sense, this poem testifies to the primacy of the spoken word; while it is an award-winning piece of text (winner of the PEN SA Student Writing Prize in 2016), the popularity of Water rests on Putuma’s performances of it.
And what does the poem remember? The ritual of “going to the beach every New Year’s eve”, which — although it is ostensibly a happy occasion — she relates to the combination of fear, respect and grief invoked by the sea in the minds of black South Africans.
The poet offsets racist jokes “about black people not being able to swim,/ Or being scared of water” with reasons why she cannot view swimming in the sea as innocent “fun”: the ocean took black people away from Africa into slavery and it brought white colonisers.
So, she intones, instead of seeing the beach solely as a place of leisure, “we have come to be baptised here/ We have come to stir the other world here / We have come to cleanse ourselves here / We have come to connect our living to the dead here.”
I revisited Water in the wake of Helen Zille’s semi-apology for her posturing about the benefits of colonialism.
While I have read dozens of eloquently damning responses to Zille’s tweets and her defences, none of these has conveyed the effect in Putuma’s poem, which so boldly chastises the “audacity” of the white superciliousness that Zille’s writing on colonial legacies seems to espouse.
WH Auden wrote that, while “poetry makes nothing happen”, it is itself “a way of happening”.
Putuma’s poetry won’t change SA, but it offers an invigorating “way of being” in our troubled country.