Collective Amnesia

Since its publication in April 2017, Collective Amnesia has taken the South African literary scene by storm. The book is in its twelfth print run and is prescribed for study at tertiary level in South African Universities and abroad. The collection is the recipient of the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, named 2017 book of the year by the City Press and one of the best books of 2017 by The Sunday Times and Quartz Africa. It is translated into Spanish (Flores Rara, 2019), German (Wunderhorn Publishing House, 2019), Danish (Rebel with a Cause, 2019), Dutch (Poeziecentrum, 2020), Swedish (Rámus förlag). Forthcoming translations: Portuguese (Editora Trinta Zero Nove), Italian (Arcipelago itaca) and French (éditions Lanskine). Collective Amnesia examines the intersection of politics, race, religion, relationships, sexuality, feminism, memory and more. The poems provoke institutions and systems of learning and interrogates what must be unlearned in society, academia, relationships, religion, and spaces of memory and forgetting.

The poems and commentaries within these pages are an expression of a collection of individuals (everyday people), who have suffered from a partial or total loss of memory. They have forgotten how to love, how to temper justice with mercy. They've forgotten the joy of youthful exuberance and the wisdom that comes with time. They have forgotten time honored values or that under the skin we are one in the same. They have forgotten that there is something bigger than all of us and now they worship the creation and not the creator. As a people, we have become self absorbed and self indulgent. These expressions will aid in reminding us about what is really important, what is really in our hearts, or what should be.

An NPR correspondent explains how the Tiananmen Square massacre changed China, and how China changed the events of that day by rewriting its own history.

Immanuel Velikovsky called this book the "fulfillment of his oath of Hippocrates - to serve humanity." In this book he returns to his roots as a psychologist and psychoanalytical therapist, yet not with a single person as his patient but with humanity as a whole. After an extremely revealing overview of the foundations of the various psychoanalytical systems he makes the step into crowd psychology and reopens the case of Worlds in Collision from a totally different point of view: as a psychoanalytical case study. This way he shows that the blatant reactions to his theories (which are still going on today) have not been surprising but are actually inevitable from a psychological perspective - which equally holds for those who have defined our view of the world. At the same time he is able to reclassify the theories of Siegmund Freud and of C. G. Jung by finding a common basis for them. A journey through history, religion, mythology and art shows the overall range of the collective trauma and gives us - the patients - a message of extraordinary urgency and importance for the future.

By the winner of The Journey Prize, and inspired by a real incident, The Boat People is a gripping and morally complex novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage to reach Canada – only to face the threat of deportation and accusations of terrorism in their new land. When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father is overcome with relief: he and his six-year-old son can finally put Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war behind them and begin new lives. Instead, the group is thrown into prison, with government officials and news headlines speculating that hidden among the “boat people” are members of a terrorist militia. As suspicion swirls and interrogation mounts, Mahindan fears the desperate actions he took to survive and escape Sri Lanka now jeopardize his and his son’s chances for asylum. Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya, who reluctantly represents the migrants; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan’s fate, The Boat People is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Inspired by real events, with vivid scenes that move between the eerie beauty of northern Sri Lanka and combative refugee hearings in Vancouver, where life and death decisions are made, Sharon Bala’s stunning debut is an unforgettable and necessary story for our times.

An argument that individuals and collectives form memories by analogous processes and a case study of collective retrograde amnesia. We form individual memories by a process known as consolidation: the conversion of immediate and fleeting bits of information into a stable and accessible representation of facts and events. These memories provide a version of the past that helps us navigate the present and is critical to individual identity. In this book, Thomas Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, Patrick Watson, and Wenyi Zhang propose that social groups form collective memories by analogous processes. Using facts and insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and history, they describe a single process of consolidation with analogous—not merely comparable—manifestations on any level, whether brain, family, or society. They propose a three-in-one model of memory consolidation, composed of a buffer, a relator, and a generalizer, all within the consolidating entity, that can explain memory consolidation phenomena on individual and collective levels. When consolidation is disrupted by traumatic injury to a brain structure known as the hippocampus, memories in the process of being consolidated are lost. In individuals, this is known as retrograde amnesia. The authors hypothesize a "social hippocampus" and argue that disruption at the collective level can result in collective retrograde amnesia. They offer the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as an example of trauma to the social hippocampus and present evidence for the loss of recent collective memory in mainland Chinese populations that experienced the Cultural Revolution.

Mixed Race Amnesia is an ambitious and critical look at how multiraciality is experienced in the global north. Drawing on a series of interviews, acclaimed geographer Minelle Mahtani explores some of the assumptions and attitudes people have around multiraciality. She discovers that, in Canada at least, people of mixed race are often romanticized as being the embodiment of a post-racial future – an ideal that is supported by government policy and often internalized by people of mixed race. As Mahtani reveals, this superficial celebration of multiraciality is often done without any acknowledgment of the freight and legacy of historical racisms. Consequently, a strategic and collective amnesia is taking place – one where complex diasporic and family histories are being lost while colonial legacies are being reinforced. Mahtani argues that in response, a new anti-colonial approach to multiraciality is needed, and she equips her readers with the analytical tools to do this.

The title of the book is inspired by a South African phrase made famous by the legendary musician Brenda Fassie in her 1992 song, Istraight lendaba. Like the legend who inspired the book title and the song from which the name of this poetry collection was selected, Putuma wanted to build on the themes she explored in her first book, Collective Amnesia, and go straight to the heart of tackling the legacies of black femme erasure from society as well as in the arts. The success of Collective Amnesia, a bestseller that has sold over 6000 copies and been translated into eight languages around the world, saw Putuma perform for audiences across the continent as well as in Europe. “In writing Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come in, I wanted to reflect on my personal experiences of travelling and performing outside of South Africa and more specifically, Europe. I wanted to understand different aesthetics and forms of memory, documentation, performance, hyper-visibility and erasure. I wanted to look at how those things frame our understanding of women in the archive, legacies of archiving, celebration, fame, culture and black women on and off the stage,” Putuma says. The book is divided into four chapters dealing with subjects related to history, the erasure of black women from the archive and more personal poems where Putuma resuscitates the stories of women in her lineage who have had an influence on her life. “I wanted these excerpts to serve as a conversation between the poems and an archive of sorts - an archive of black women (living and dead) who are looked at, celebrated, uncited, erased and exploited. I wanted to make visible the words of black women who have had to navigate the complexities of a constant gaze that often renders the “looked at” invisible. In my quest, I wanted to further understand and challenge my own methods of citation, documentation and seeing – and in doing that – invite others to do the same,” she says.