The Shift with Koleka Putuma: Poetry as a tool for connection
In The Shift, UN Live’s thought leaders explore how music, art, media, and even everyday spaces—from stadiums to dinner tables—can become stages for more connection, inspired empathy, and collective action. In today’s Q&A, Annesofie Norn, UN Live Lead Curator and Head of Comms speaks with Koleka Putuma, award-winning poet, playwright, and theatre-maker. Read along as she shares how poetry and imagination can become tools for connection and understanding.
It’s time to rethink—and imagine the futures we want to create.
Q: Your debut collection Collective Amnesia became South Africa’s best-selling poetry book of this century — translated into multiple languages and taught internationally. How did that reach influence your sense of art as a vehicle for societal change? What responsibilities — or gifts — came with that visibility?
A: It is a gift to be able to practice art that reaches people, places, and even educational institutions. It’s humbling to even be in a position to receive feedback about the impact of your work in real time. I do not take this for granted. Poetry for me is a tool for connection, and I appreciate the ways it has connected me to people and opened me up to mechanisms of observing and being with the world. For me lately, writing and offering an artistic gesture comes with the responsibility of being intentional and slow about what it is that is made and not adding to the noise, but taking time to practise and be with the work vs practising and doing the work for the sake of consumption. The reach has made me a believer in poetry’s ability to invite others into conversations in whatever pocket of the world they find themselves in. In this climate where censorship is gaining traction and being weaponised to discourage dissent, speech, or the act of speaking, and insisting on holding each other through dialogue and communication is both a protest and a promise to never be silent/silenced.
Q: In Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In, a multimedia docu-poetry performance, you dance with archives and erasure — bringing to life women whose stories were never written. How do you see this act of re-archiving as a form of activism? What does it feel like when audiences see what was once invisible?
A: What comes to mind first is Toni Morrison's challenge to Ralph Ellison's novel ‘Invisible Man’. “Invisible to whom?” she asks. I have been carrying this provocation with me ever since I read it, because it always brings me back to what I perceive as central to my own enquiries and desires. Some of the figures and stories in ‘Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come In’ are visible and central to many people; it just depends on the lens that is looking. Today I would change so much of the framing around this collection because language matters. Perhaps at the time there was a process of unveiling and first-encountering I was undergoing when working with the archives I was sifting through while writing. And maybe this will be a similar experience for some readers who, through reading the poems, will encounter names, events and other prompts for the first time.The collection is concerned with the issue of whose voices end up on historical record and which figures have traditionally been overshadowed by other people’s versions of events and perspectives. This collection itself also carries my biases. Ocean Vuong talks about how “What we say we see says a lot about who we are…” What does it say about the speaker who looks up at the sky and sees ruptures? There’s an autobiography in the gaze, in the sight.” Mostly, it feels like this collection is an invitation to look and interrogate what we know and look closer at our symbols of remembrance, disdain and adulation.
‘Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In’ performed at Wiener FestWochen Festival in Vienna 2021
Q: As the founder of Manyano Media and the Black Girl Live Fellowship, you create platforms that empower Black queer women storytellers. What role does imagination play in liberation, in re-storying the world?
A: In the realm of imagination, there are no restrictions, requirements, or guidelines that need to be followed. Anyone and anything is possible. The act of liberating one's own imagination is often prompted by the stories we see and consume. Shifting the perceptions we once had about ourselves and those depicted in the narratives we are engaging with can be a powerful experience; it can transform how we approach our relationship with each other and our differences. Bringing stories and voices to the fore that honour and celebrate the diverse narratives of Black and queer people in South Africa today is one aspect of Manyano Media's work. What we have been able to collectively create through the fellowship reminds me that there will always be more stories by and about Black and queer people. The stories initiate conversations about queerness in a homophobic society, Blackness in a racist society, womanhood in a misogynistic and violent society, and freedom of speech in an increasingly repressive society—and continue to stand unapologetically against that society. It’s important to harness our collective courage to use our voices as a catalyst, inspiring others to follow suit.
Q: Your theatre work — like No Easter Sunday for Queers or Mbuzeni — addresses deeply political, intimate realities: queer visibility and the rituals of grief, for example. When vulnerability meets activism on stage, how do you feel the space changes — for the audience, for those represented, for you?
A: Both plays consider how we create space for communal grieving, whose loss counts, and which grounds—be they cemeteries, borders, or religious—separate or unify us in the wake of a world inundated with death and suffering. The texts primarily explore how we talk, don't talk, or find it difficult to talk about loss and grief. It also looks at the influence of unquestioned ideas and myths and how a society governed by them may be simultaneously safe and deadly. There is this unspoken pressure that has seeped into our society to want to curate vulnerability or only show parts of it that are palatable in some ways, and we see this play out more clearly online. The beauty about theatre is that we get to sit with and share something unfolding in real time. During this hour (or longer), we are all committed to being in an environment where we give and receive with the highest level of attention. We are in a time where intentional listening and attention span is being eroded by our devices and the demands of the world that are constantly vying for our attention. It’s beautiful and necessary to be together in public and listen to stories that delve into difficult subject matters (and lighter ones), stories that model what it means to love each other enough to bear witness to the horrors, but also our humanity. The space also changes because we sit in the emptiness of what cannot be retrieved, and that emptiness is met with a myriad of possibilities.
‘Mbuzeni’ performed at The Artscape Theatre, 2018
Q: You’ve said your work “insists on visibility and offering healing,” and that it asks us to question “what must be unlearnt” across religion, politics, academia, and relationships. How do you see that unraveling of old narratives — through poetry, performance — as a form of radical transformation? And if you were to name it directly: what is the change the world is most in need of right now?
A: I’m not sure if these are the words I would use at this moment because it feels like too much of an ambition “to insist on visibility and offer healing” – tangibly speaking, I wonder what I meant by that at the time. Lately, I have been fascinated by writers, scholars, and artists who are connected to practices of tending (attending) to the earth, land, prayer, and rituals—writers whose work is concerned with making sense of the world changing by observing the climate, plants, animals, and our relationship to all of it. I have been led to this curiosity by my own desire to return to the body’s innate intelligence as a tool of healing and rewiring. I have been thinking about what Amitava Kumar says, “To be an artist or a writer, you have to be in the business of serious noticing.” And in turn, what does the discipline of noticing do or undo in me and my practice? I was recently reading Sherry Ning’s article, “What Should Remain Hidden?” The extract below is something I resonated with: “Contemplation” comes from the Latin, contemplatio, which comes from templum—the space marked out for augury, a sacred space reserved for watching the signs of the divine. Templum is also where we get the word “temple”, a consecrated space. With the prefix con-, meaning “with”, contemplation means to be with the temple, or to dwell within the sacred space of attention. Contemplation is much deeper than thinking. It implies a religious observation. It implies intention, slowness, interiority, reverence.” In this fast-paced, chaotic and violent world we live in, it seems very necessary to slow down and exercise reflection frequently. For many people, being quiet and slow is neither a reality nor an option, but I consider how much we—not just humans, but the planet itself—could gain from slowing down and observing our ever-changing environment. The grief is so accumulative that we need more time to process the impact of it all.
Q: UN Live’s mission is to use culture to connect people across borders and inspire empathy and collective action. From your perspective, how can poetry and performance cultivate that sense of a shared global “we,” while still holding space for the depth and complexity of our local and personal stories?
A: Culture enables us to see each other - through our stories, shared across borders and cultures. A story about burial rituals in a small town in Africa may resonate with a room full of people in Oslo, or a story about friendship in South Africa can reflect the views of someone in New York. These portals into each other can offer us insight, understanding and thus, empathy.
Q: If you could gift the world a single image, poem, or line that carries the change we most need, what would it sound or feel like?
A: “We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.” ― Gwendolyn Brooks
We extend our sincere gratitude to Koleka Putuma for sharing her wisdom and valuable insights with us, exploring the conversation on the power of poetry, theatre and imagination to reconnect with ourselves and the people around us.