The Quiet Violence of Dreams by Sello Duiker

Her exploration of womanhood, Blackness, queerness, traditionalism, trauma and everything in between has been so incredibly compelling that Collective Amnesia is the first poetry collection to have a 9th print run in the country. 'How many abortions have fallen out of your mouth while counting the men in your life?' These are among the first words that the reader is confronted with in Putuma's debut collection of poems.

The tide is turning and the past two decades have seen the steady increase in the number of works produced by queer people-and it's been yet another glorious revolution.

For far too long, queer people have been excluded from literature and prevented from telling their own stories in their own way. This also extends South African writers, of course. However, the work of writers such as the late Binyavanga Wainaina and even a contemporary such as Romeo Origun, have endeavored to go further and reconcile what it means to be African and queer against the backdrop where so many having portrayed the two as mutually exclusive identities. The works of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Es'kia Mphahlele, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Buchi Emecheta have undoubtedly produced seminal works which have cast African Literature into the spotlight.ĥ Books by African Writers You Need To Read This Summer In the same way that the voices of Black and African writers have been necessary in revolutionizing the world of literature and pushing back against dominant Eurocentric narratives, it has been equally important to witness the rise in stories that speak to the lives and experiences of queer people.

The Quiet Violence of Dreams by Sello Duiker