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?