Storying Silenced Queer Narratives: Koleka Putuma’s re-membering and re-memorying of Queer Trauma in No Easter Sunday for Queers (2019)

Abstract

Contemporary theatre in South Africa has a history of hegemonically framing narratives that prevalence cisheteronormative stories. These narratives exacerbate the already existing acts of violence resulting from systems that place queerness against the backdrop of marginality. Inquiries in queer histories, identities, and sexualities arouse questions of belongingness, emphasising perspectives and tensions that many queer people in South Africa grapple with due to inherited systems of silencing. This article applies a dialogic framework between Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) and Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009) to explore the process of queering contemporary theatre and performers in South Africa. In this article, I explore how the work of Koleka Putuma, with specific reference to No Easter Sunday for Queers (2019), participates in the act of carving out a space of belongingness through embodied modes of re-membering and re-memorying through theatre and performance. The orientation of Putuma’s work guides this paper to ask: in what ways does South African queer theatre confront systems of power, violence, and dominance that silence queer people in contemporary South Africa?

Keywords:

• queer theatre
• Koleka Putuma
• re-memorying
• South African contemporary performance
• re-membering

Notes on Contributor

Kamogelo Molobye is a choreographer and performer. He is also a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Theatre and Performance Department specialising in movement studies and choreographic practices.

Notes

1. Hein Viljoen, ‘Marginalia on Marginality’, Alternation 5, no. 2 (1998): 10–2 (12).

2. The spelling in this paper follows from the sentiments of Nita Harker who writes, ‘I actually think the challenge – particularly that it is hard to pronounce in your mind as you read it, is that it forces one to stop and think, that it is not just easy and nice and recognizable – part of the point and the draw. To me it represents the complexity of gender’. As such, womxn is used as an inclusive spelling originating from the second wave of feminism that serves to include Black women, trans and nonbinary people in feminist politics, while at the same time avoiding the sexism and patriarchy perceived in ‘man’ or ‘men’ in the traditional spelling. Cited in Mark Peters, ‘Womyn, wimmin, and other folx’, The Boston Globe, May 9, 2017, https://www3.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/05/09/womyn-wimmin-and-other-folx/vjhPn82ITGgCCbE12iNn1N/story.html?arc404=true# (accessed January 27, 2022).

3. Viljoen, ‘Marginalia on Marginality’, 12.

4. Sarah Alimahomed, ‘Thinking outside the rainbow: women of color redefining queer politics and identity’, Social Identities 16, no. 2 (2010): 151–68 (151).

5. Kamogelo Molobye, ‘What role can physical theatre play in reimagining democracy in South Africa?’ in Theatre and Democracy: Building Democracy in Post-war and Post-democratic Contexts, eds. Petri Jansen van Vuuren, Bjørn Rasmussen, and Ayanda Khala (Norway: Cappelen Damm Akademisk/NOASP, 2021), 121–40.

6. Lucky Mathebe, Bound by tradition: The world of Thabo Mbeki (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2002), 139.

7. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), xvi.

8. Judith Butler, ‘Remarks on ‘Queer Bonds’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2, no. 3 (2011): 381–7 (387). This talk is a modified version that appears in Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 2–3, 52–4.

9. No Easter Sunday for Queers showcased at the Mannie Manim Theatre at Market Theatre, August 20–25, 2019. The paper makes reference to the performance of August 23, 2019 which I viewed as an audience member.

10. Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘Artists and Revolutions’, Tribute, May 1988, 144, quoted in John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 174.

11. Yvette Hutchison, ‘Aesthetics of South African Women’s Embodied Activism Staging Complicity’, Contemporary Theatre Review 28, no. 3 (2018): 356–66 (356).

12. Temple Hauptfleisch, Anja Huismans, and Juanita Finestone, ‘Unwilling Champion – an interview with Reza de Wet’, Contemporary Theatre Review 9, no. 1 (1999): 53–3 (55).

13. Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 2009), 151.

14. Alude Mahali, ‘A Museum of Bottled Sentiments: the ‘beautiful pain syndrome’ in twenty-first century Black South African theatre making’ (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2013), 2.

15. The use of the ‘Other’ borrows from Edward Said’s discourse on the effect of the West as a coloniser of the East, creating social, cultural, and political images about the Orient as inferior to the West. I borrow from this theorisation and extend it to marginal identities (as defined above) to frame non-normative identities as prejudiced and perceived as the ‘Other’. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003).

16. Barbara Boswell, ‘‘Conjuring up her wholeness’: post-transitional black South African women’s poetry and its restorative ethics’, Scrutiny2 21, no. 2 (2016): 8–26 (9).

17. Chelsea Haith, ‘‘I question why I understand what she has said’: Language and decolonial justice in Koleka Putuma’s debut poetry collection Collective Amnesia’, MoveableType 10 (2018): 38–9 (40).

18. Tami Spyr, ‘Performing Autoethnography: an embodied methodological praxis’, Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 6 (2001): 706–32 (710).

19. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, ‘Introduction’, in Auto/ethnography: rewriting the self and the social, ed. Deborah E. Reed-Danahay (New York: Berg, 1997), 1–20 (3).

20. Spyr, ‘Performing Autoethnography’, 710.

21. Trinh Minh-ha, When the moon waxes red: writing postcoloniality and feminism (New York: Routledge, 1991), 157.

22. Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Memory, Metaphor, and the Triumph of Narrative’, in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, eds. Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19-27 (20).

23. Mahali, ‘A Museum of Bottled Sentiments’, 3.

24. Yvette Hutchison, ‘Memory and Desire in South Africa: the museum as a space for performing cultural identity?’ in African Theatre: Southern Africa, eds. Martin Banham, James Bibbs, and Femi Osofisan (Cape Town: David Phillip, 2004), 51-68 (62).

25. Ashley Hall, ‘Critical reflections on donor influence and the role of critical communication pedagogies in the classroom’, Communication Education 69, no. 3 (2020): 387–95 (390).

26. Koleka Putuma, Collective Amnesia (Cape Town: uHlanga, 2017).

27. Koleka Putuma, No Easter Sunday for Queers (Cape Town: Manyano Media, 2021), back cover.

28. Nondumiso Msimanga, ‘Foreword’, in Hauntings: an anthology of plays, ed. Katlego Chale (Johannesburg: The Market Lab: Diartskonageng, 2021), 7.

29. Leon de Kock, ‘“There is the Black Man’s Story and the White Man’s Story”: Narratives of Self and the Valence of “Stories” in Post-apartheid Culture’, Journal of Literary Studies 32, no. 3 (2016): 36–58 (51).

30. Pumla Gqola, What is slavery to me? Postcolonial/slave memory in post-apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 8.

31. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2003), 3.

32. Ibid., 20.

33. Birgit Schippers, ‘Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?’, Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2011): 231–38 (232).

34. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

35. Xavier Livermon, ‘Queer(y)ing Freedom: Black Queer Visibility in Postapartheid South Africa’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2012): 297–23 (304).

36. Maurice Halbwachs, Individual Memory and Collective Memory: the collective memoir (Harper & Row Colophon Books: New York. 1980), 22.

37. Patrick S. Cheng, Radical Love: an introduction to queer theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011), 9.

38. Martin A. Conway, ‘Sensory-perceptual episodic memory and its context: autobiographical memory’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365 (2001): 1375–84 (1375).

39. Hlumela Mpiti, ‘Collective Amnesia, by Koleka Putuma’, Education As Change 24 (2017): 1–5 (4).