4 I wanted to match—roughly pinned to the sentence: the contractile-extensive tissues—throes, convulsions, peristalsis—of the body: in these moments—which are not moments: a syntax. But also: in the same place—the paragraph, you could say: the rough, overlapping and acoustic arcs of the violence to come. The violence, that is, that has already happened and is happening all the time. Is this why we don’t speak any more? Is it because we can’t speak about the two kinds of violence at the same time? I feel already your critique of my binary thinking, my black and white thinking, as you: called it. “Some bodies don’t somatize,” I wrote, and felt better. I felt better because it was true. I had come to the end of a certain way of writing about the body, its resistance to oppression.
5 Ban lies down on the ground at 4 p.m. on April 23rd, 1979, because she is, to use or mis-use Agamben’s animal technic, “The Ban and the Wolf”: already dead. Is the sound of breaking glass coming from Ban’s home, or the street? How can writing be the place where you get to work on the inside and outside at the same time? As I reached this more complicated place in the writing, I thought about the interoceptive nervous system: the part of us that regulates disgust, weightedness, nausea, balance. I studied disgust and learned that it is the hardest emotion, once experienced, once received, once seen, to dislodge. You feel it before you know what it is. You see the facial muscles organize and conceal this expression: fleetingly. You respond. But also you are disgusted, because this is a book, and in the book the racist is sharing space with the person subject to racism. I wanted to study the relationship between the almost subliminal facial tic of disgust, working with it directly as a core material of racism. Here, a person is flinching from a person, but also there is a corollary crumpling or freezing in the mid-section of the person who absorbs [receives] what has just happened: an experience that can’t, ever, be put into words. The thing, that is, that causes the fascia of the coccyx and the jaw to contract, bringing these two bones into relation.
6 How can a work that is about trauma, but also the neighborhood, also be the occasion of this—trauma—moving through? How can a book be the place where institutional trauma or violence is discharged from the coccyx? I used to think that this was what the sentence was for: the capacity of cadence to discharge a fact. I was wrong. At the same time, writing Ban, writing all my books, and on my blog, I had a very simple wish to preserve a cultural memory of the part of London I grew up in, a place that might not, by other Londoners, even be thought of as part of the city. How the milky lilac effluent of the canal runs parallel, you could say, or at odds, to the Thames. What is the earth memory of your book? Perhaps this is a way for us to be in conversation. No. I must integrate or work more directly with the soft palate and bony structures of that wrecked oval: the mouth. Whose mouth? Which mouth? Perhaps then we could speak.
PERPETUAL WRITING, INSTITUTIONAL RUPTURE, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF NO
The Poetics of Bhanu Kapil1
Eunsong Kim
The last phrase in the opening entry of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, titled “1. [13 Errors for Ban],” reads, “My error. I wake up. It’s time for the auto-sacrifice to begin.”2 On March 29, 2015, Kapil writes on her blog, The Vortex of Formidable Sprkles, “Every minute of my life I am writing. Like you, I am writing on every surface and every part of me, even the parts that are so numb they might as well be fins or a computer screen.”3 And on the evening of December 20, 2015, she sends me a note that states, “It is my new performance art. To say no.” Bhanu Kapil is a prolific poet, a singular performance artist, and an impactful activist and thinker. She has written five books—The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001), Incubation: A Space for Monsters (2006), Humanimal, a Project for Future Children (2009), Schizophrene (2011), and Ban en Banlieue (2015)—and she publishes her thoughts on contemporary poetry and life on her blog.4 Kapil has been invited to lecture and read at leading universities, from Harvard to Duke University, and has led poetry workshops for the past eighteen years. She is a groundbreaking Asian American poet, with an oeuvre that stretches familiar notions of the political and the aesthetic in literature and art. In Kapil’s poetic terrain, the structures of racialized, gendered violence are carefully examined through their aberrations, mythologies, allegories, and lived memories. In this introduction I want to propose that by centering the politics of violent assimilation, or the failures of assimilation, and the experience of racialized and gendered violence, Kapil’s prolific prose poetry enacts the “performance of no” through the labor of perpetual writing. Kapil’s poetic body depicts the urgency, the fury, and the tinder of contemporary poetry.
There is much to describe about the poetic, performative, and critical work of Kapil. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to examine three aspects of her work that have not yet been discussed, but which have fueled her body of work and have also been the undercurrents of contemporary poetic discourse. I will describe these aspects as follows: poetry as a form for institutional rupture, poetry as perpetual writing, and poetry as the performance of no. Together, these dimensions narrate several features of Kapil’s writing: the Monster, the Cyborg, and their Immigrant Acts; her poetics of “rewilding”; histories of Black and Asian solidarity: her “constant poetry”; and, finally, her “novel failing.” These qualities and narratives do not encompass the spectrum of Bhanu Kapil’s expansive, performative, and complex poetry. They are, however, the aspects that best contextualize Kapil’s poetics and situate the urgent politics of her work.
The Monster, My Immigrant
I think about a monster to think about an immigrant, but Ban is neither of these things.
—Ban en Banlieue5
In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe describes the ways “immigrant acts” can be witnessed in Asian American cultural production.6 Lowe discusses the “‘performativity’ of immigration,” in which such acts are often vehicleized as dis-identificatory, resignified forms.7 For Lowe, situating immigration as a series of possible acts and performances is crucial: “One of the important acts that the immigrant performs is breaking the dyadic, vertical determination that situates the subject in relation to the state, building instead horizontal community with and between others who are in different locations subject to and subject of the state.”8 Immigration is the processes of fracturing one’s relationship to the various states that hold or deny one’s status, into the processes of horizontal community building.
In Kapil’s work, the immigrant act of fracturing the vertical relationship to the state is materialized through the metamorphosis of the monster. In the tradition of speculative fiction and postcolonial literature, her work has a long relationship to the monster form. In Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Kapil inspects and critiques the overlaps between monster and cyborg. She writes, “‘Cyborgs are built for assimilation into households and factories’ […] ‘You adapt to them and they learn how to ask questions […] In horror films, you can’t always tell if it is a cyborg or if it is a person, whereas monsters are always identifiable as such by their long black hair and multiple arms.’”9 In Incubation, cyborgs and monsters form the spectrum of immigrant horrors: to assimilate absolutely or to remain in the grotesque isolation of disassimilation. Kapil’s take on the cyborg is a primal rereading of Donna Haraway’s techno-post-racial cyborgs in “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Kapil’s cyborg is racialized and in proximity to the racialized monster. Perhaps it is she that visits the doctor and states, “I was a monster but the surgeon said no.”10 In poetry, is it possible to desire oneself out of the violent strictures of assimilation? Or perhaps the “I” requesting the operation is the girl speaker. Regardless, all the speakers, all the forms and aberrations of Incubations reverberate toward the monster. Such is their political position, their immigrant declaration.
In Ban en Banlieue, the monster is clarified precisely to be the Immigrant. The speaker pronounces this clearly, reminding us of the spectrum of performances in moving between
“Think about a cyborg to get to the immigrant”11 and “I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster. Monsters don’t incarnate. They regress.”12 The form of the monster is an irreproducible space; breaking verticalized, violent state operations is done through the performance of variegation. This, however, is a daunting conclusion for the immigrant dreamer, and so Kapil states, “I think about a monster to think about an immigrant, but Ban is neither of these things.”13 Ban is at the edges of immigrant, monster, and cyborg, by choice, through force, and through poetry. She is described as a “‘monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city.’ (Ban.) To be: ‘banned from the city’ and thus: en banlieues: a part of the perimeter.”14 The girl Ban is horizontal: she is held through the intimacies of the perimeter—a space surveilled by the state but most frequently overflooded with those the state cannot capture. And hence it is here that a new community (poetics) might arise.
Lowe argues that “the immigrant is at once both symbol and allegory for Asian Americans.” For her, “Immigration as both symbol and allegory does not metaphorize the experience of ‘real’ immigrants but finds in the located contradictions of immigration both the critical intervention […] and the theoretical nexus.”15 The immigrant (the Monster, the Cyborg) is simultaneously symbol, allegory, and the body.16 The symbolic, the allegorical, and the bodily implode, refusing all reason. As Kapil writes in Schizophrene, “Psychotic to live in a different country forever.”17 Yet nevertheless remaining, she writes, “Later that night it rained, washing the country away. A country both dead and living that was not, nor ever would be, my true home.”18 To repeat Lowe: the immigrant is not pure symbol, pure allegory, pure body. To isolate one condition, to metaphorize the performances of immigrant acts, to insert white universality into the historical specificity that Bhanu Kapil is working out of, and the lived specificity from which she writes, would be dire mistakes. To insert modernist universality or abstracted beauty would be to deny the “defying language” Kapil labors through, performs in. Additionally, it would entirely miss how the horizontal commitments in Kapil’s poetics operate, as well as how her poetics works as rupture from white nationalist canonical texts. As Lowe argues, “Asian American work is not properly or adequately explained by the notion of postmodernism […] for Asian American work emerges out of very different contradictions of modernity: out of the specific conditions of racialization in relation to modern institutions.”19 Kapil’s poetic immigrant, monster, cyborg, wolf, and girl stem from the very specific processes of racialization and the contradictions of the racialized subject in modernity.
These contradictions are most openly bared in Schizophrene. In the “Acknowledgements and Quick Notes,” Kapil remarks, “The language of neighbors and architecture—the spatiality of psychosis—I derived from Elizabeth Grosz. […] The link between racism and mental illness is one that I made by myself then encountered in the work of the British psychiatrist Kamaldeep Bhui and his mentor, Dinesh Bhugra.”20 So when she writes, “Psychotic to live in a different country forever,” “psychotic” must be seen as the symbol and allegory and the experience of Immigrant. In this case, the very condition of racialized lived experience is an immigrant’s relationship to mental illness, as well as to Western notions of rationality. The usage of “psychotic,” much like the usage of “immigrant,” is tied to a lived, communal experience. So then, too, must the resolution from the symbolic, allegorical, and bodily come from lived, communal experience. Kapil writes, “I cannot make the map of healing and so this is the map of what happened in a particular country on a particular day.”21
Kapil’s situating the loss of healing as the documentation of a trajectory is the essence of immigrant poetics. Trinh T. Minh-Ha articulates the stakes of this tradition: “You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-relocation-reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice—you know. You try and keep on trying to unsay it, for if you don’t, they will not fail to fill in the blanks on our behalf, and you will be said.”22 Kapil articulates her immigrant acts into a language that could not be dreamed by the colonial gaze, the English language: free of silence,23 her poetry maps the impossibilities of monstrous immigration.
The Performance of No/Eaten Alive:
Poetry as a Form for Institutional Rupture
There is a small history of artists and poets who have performatively exited their respective communities and mediums: Laura Riding’s denunciation of poetry, Tehching Hsieh’s 1985–1986 “No Art” performance to withdraw and reject art, Arthur Rimbaud’s silence, Lee Lozano’s exit. The politics of refusal, and the ongoing exiting performance, is a history to grapple with. Even far less investigated is what Kapil describes as “The Performance of No,” of remaining within the confines of a community, a medium, and a form, while saying and repeating No.
Institutional critique is a form of art practice that has been processed, debated, debunked, salvaged, and cherished for some time. In thinking about Kapil’s poetics, I want to propose that what she develops is a form of poetic institutional rupture—where the narrative is eaten alive; where characters are formed and eaten alive; where racialized and gendered experiences are centered; where the violence of immigration, migration, and settlement are situated in their psychic imprints (irremovable from poetry); where writing and poetry are constant; where performances are set up to enact “No’s” or to labor through a “No”; where assimilation is not possible; and where solidarities are reimagined to situate a literature that does not require the creation of internalized others.24 This poetics catalogues what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as “history 2”—the record of resistance against official narratives (“history 1”) and capital—to offer the poisoning of life.25 In this cataloguing, “[e]ach feral moment is valuable,” as Kapil writes in Humanimal.26 And in this space, Kapil’s poetry asks us: What would institutional rupture as poetry look like?
One answer in Kapil’s poetics is “being eaten alive.” She writes, “Ban dreams of being eaten alive by wolves.”27 “Being eaten alive” is the experiment, the milieu, the narrative terrain; it has to do with the way Ban en Banlieue refuses to peer, to glimpse beyond the frame. The imagination of the text demands that we do not avoid the possibility of potential engagement or potential infection. Kapil’s poetics demands that if we venture near the gruesome, the ruptures, the other as she appears scarred, dead, we must halt, perform an “auto-sacrifice.” The auto-sacrifice is demanded against entertainment, pleasure, leisure—the wolf looks at you and is sprinting. The consumer becomes prey. You know that you may only remain as sacrifice. Voyeurs who stayed asking for one more song will not survive. Engagement with the text requires the performance of laying your body down. Additionally, “eaten alive” suggests the dynamics of the racialized body amid institutionalized violence. The gesture is twofold: it is a description of the racialized body within the institution, and it is a prescription for the racialized body to negate all inward negotiations and internalizations. Perhaps, it is also a prescription for the racialized body to reject the human form: to be eaten alive and to survive writing, as something else.
To inspect language is to inspect the institution of language, the management of language instruction, the management of poetic circulation: the university, the museum, officialized spaces of poetic distribution. The a priori of eaten alive is to bite into the flesh of one’s institutions. How does a poetics, a language, a form, rupture the imagination, the circulation and processes of the structures that surveil our bodies, our lives, our work? On November 28, 2015, when I commented that in all of her books, there is an eating alive, Kapil asked me, “Is there a correlation between my institutional experience and my poetry that the situation can only be resolved with my death?” Metaphor here is not a vehicle of voyeuristic travel, but of purge and release. Kapil stated of these scenes that they are “Rupturing of my own being; the release of my contents.” She contin
ued, “To be eaten alive is to poison, in some sense, what is eating you.”28
Kapil’s observations about her institutional experience have been echoed and reiterated by many other women of color academics, particularly by Black feminist thinkers. As the philosopher Jennifer Lisa Vest states, “The police are killing Black and Brown people every day […] the Academy is also killing people of color: the extent to which it is sacrificing Women of Color in particular. In subtle and unsubtle ways […] universities are killing women of color.”29 The direct links between Kapil’s ruptured narratives (the slow eating, the eating alive) parallel what too many women of color academics have written about their existence in the academy. As Vest writes of post-racial racism, “Racism has merely morphed. It has become outwardly milder, while remaining inwardly, interpersonally, and structurally destructive.”30 Vest’s outlining of how racism works in notions of the “post-racial” is another way we might think about the poetics of eaten alive. Here, “eating alive” and “eaten alive” become powerful prescriptions for thinking about how racism is experienced and narrated. Institutionalized racism exists as intimate and at times private encounters. It uses sophisticated and academic language—and the combat response to this institutionalized racism has been to use sophisticated and academic language. The act of eating alive, however, is a refusal to partake in the performance of diversity. Kapil’s characters, sentences, and poetics declare eating alive as the process in which the body negates “inwardly” intimate forms of institutionalized violences and leaves no possibility of negotiation. This is why “Ban dreams of being eaten alive by wolves”—hers is a dream of nonhuman, institutional rupture.
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