The tenth and final episode of the Feminism Under Corona chapter follows a conversation with poet, playwright and theatre director Koleka Putuma. Author of the poetry book Collective Amnesia (2017) and the play No Easter Sunday for Queers (2017), she is Founder and Director of Manyano Media, a multidisciplinary project that produces and supports the work and stories of black queer artists and queer life.

In a digital encounter last year, Koleka and rapper and songwriter Sho Madjozi were talking about ways of moving the poetry industry forward. Apparently, the term poetry is not related to industrial production. However, a closer look shows that poetry is indeed a part of the industry. For not only books or the materials that make them up are produced, but poetry and its authors have to negotiate continuously with contracts, copyrights, royalties, dissemination and presentation processes, etc. The work of poets and the writers encompasses not only the writing itself alone, but at the same time a constant task of administration and care in order to not only understand the system of the cultural industry they belong to, but to find out how to be able to enact with it. It is for this reason that for Koleka, poetry includes everything that makes it happen in very different ways.

This conversation with Koleka Putuma took place at the end of January 2021. Koleka was in Cape Town and Sonia was in Berlin. They talked a lot about poetry, as a practice, as part of her early biography and as a working context. The pandemic appeared also from the social impact and political power that language holds. As we know, the very nature of a virus includes as part of its evolutionary process continuous transformations over time. The fact that these new variants appear in specific regions of this planet should not add national labels to the new mutations. They produce ideological implications and spread accumulated prejudices. And yet the media and many governments insist on referring territorially to processes that are beyond national identities. Structural violence against women and femicides are a pandemic long before the one produced by Covid-19. At the present time, not only do the two coexist structurally, but the current situation generally intensifies violence against women. Every Three Hours (2019) is a poem by Koleka Putuma that refers to the murder rate of womxn in South Africa and the insufficient state and social support to end this pervasive violence. In a world that depicts so many forms of violence in graphs and statistics, poetry and words are able to speak of what numbers do not count and do not tell.