Koleka Putuma
Poet
“I’m sitting downstairs in my lounge. On the table I am working on are books, a wine glass, keys, coasters and random grocery slips. There are two bookshelves on my right. On top of the one bookshelf are candles, a typewriter, incense and a book about the life and work of Frida Kahlo. On the walls are mirrors, paintings and photographs. There is some sunshine coming through the sliding door. Which is rather lovely.”
Multi-award-winning poet Koleka Putuma writes to us from Cape Town, a place whose city bowels know they don’t deserve her ilk, but have produced those like her because it so desperately needs them.
It might have been after winning the PEN SA Student Writing prize in 2016 for Water, her eviscerating homage to the relationship black people have to water and the seas, that the poet, writer, performer and theatre practitioner rose to the public’s consciousness as an intrepid envoy for the fallist generation’s collective will to #Fall everything oppressive as it stands. But her name was already synonymous with winning before that.
She spent most of 2016 refining the skills of capturing audiences, darting between stages, planes, trains and writing tables, preparing the words for her ascent in real life and on the internet.
Next month, she will stage her first theatre production, a play called
Ekhaya, created specifically for three to seven year olds, about home, migration and belonging.
She’s also working on her first book,
Collective Amnesia, based on a collection of poems.
It’ s not difficult to become a visible creative person in the internet age. What requires skill is holding the attention of followers and critics when words are your currency and intersectional activism is the mountain you have chosen to climb without losing them with didactic raging.
Last year, Putuma sporadically started test performing and posting verses on social media written by a part of her repertoire she calls Parafeen, a misunderstood “pohet” whom Putuma says “will spark some interesting conversations around the ideas of language and representation in the spoken-word scene”.
Parafeen’s jarring English word and sentence construction is at first glance unnerving, then familiar, then extremely timely in the cultural atmosphere of decolonisation.
Parafeen’s first one womxn poyetry show is called Mothertongue
Malfunxion and will debut in 2017, a year Putuma hopes to get people “to understand and respect that poetry is a craft that is time and energy con- suming and that is must be paid for” with the money poets deserve instead of with “exposure”.