Collective Amnesia

The Audio Experience

By: Koleka Putuma

Narrated by: Koleka Putuma

Collective Amnesia: The Audio Experience is the marriage of sound, poetry, music, and theatre making, a storytelling experience for the ears, transporting the listener from their reality into the worlds of the poems.

This audiobook serves as a way to connect sonically and virtually with lovers and supporters of the work, translating the book into sound. It now has a space and platform where folks can return to the work over and over again. Following the format of the book, Koleka Putuma narrates all 51 poems in three parts: "Inherited Memory", "Buried Memory", and "Postmemory"; accompanied by an original score, a choir, and a string quartet. Created and produced in partnership with Paper Cranes Collaborative.

Collective Amnesia, the Anthology

The collection is an exploration of blackness, womxnhood, and history. The poems demand justice, insist on visibility, and offer healing. They explode the idea of authority in various spaces - academia, religion, politics, relationships - to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt. The poems will touch on subjects of grief, joy, sexuality, identity, religion, rage, language, and the intersection of all those things.

©2020 Koleka Putuma (P)2020 Koleka Putuma