American Poets in the 21st Century
Page 33
I want to use another route to make the case for a poetics that “dreams of being eaten alive” as a form of institutional rupture. In a 2014 interview, Gayatri Spivak describes a concept she derived from the resistance labors of factory workers: “affirmative sabotage.” “I used the term sabotage,” she explains, “because it referred to the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside […] the only way you can sabotage something is when you are working intimately with it.”31 For Spivak, “affirmative sabotage” is about access to machines: “It is not destruction of the machines but using the machines to do something else.” She goes on to describe how Algerian women acting with the resistance and working in the maintenance departments in 1991 would go in early to use the mimeograph machines. In these formations, the machines are not being broken; rather, their “original” designs are being reworked and fundamentally ruptured through the imagination of new visions. Spivak states that affirmative sabotage is “not a weapon of the weak; it can only be done from a position of strength because the weak do not have the social ability to enter those discourses.”32
Affirmative sabotage can be used to discuss Kapil’s poetic institutional rupture. Ban en Banlieue, Humanimal, and Incubation take prose “to do something else,” to do something like poetry. This poetics examines what it has been taught not to examine: the violence of a racialized lived experience, the university and women of color academics, the imprints of everyday, ongoing racism, and the markings of all of this on the language, on dreams. In sum, to do something else with the institution of language. What to do with language that stems from the institution of racism, the institution of silence, the institution of rape, which make up the shape of contemporary US poetry? Kapil’s English formations are eaten alive: they come to life to poison and demand new literature. The wolf and the animal are pivotal in thinking of institutional rupture, as they are outsider forces. They are a reckoning of “rewilding” desires. In Humanimal, Kapil writes,
33. Animal myths, like that of a human consumed by a wolf, depend upon a girl. She loses her way one day, disoriented by the gathering shadow at the edges of a copse. Something glints deeper in, and she pursues it, imagining it to be candlelight in the window of a hut. But it’s a tooth. No. I can’t see her to completion, opposing myth which is life-like: pre-ecdystic, a transformative state. In this re-telling, the girl is gone forever and I’m not sure how she eats. I’m not sure how she survives the night.33
In its ethnographic meditation on the two “wolf-children” of Bengal, India, in the 1920s, Humanimal asks us, What does it mean to have been cared for by nonhumans, by wolves? How violent is human love, that it finds feral children, and with no reflection, kills the mother-wolf, and through discipline and language (forced assimilation) eventually kills the children? In such light, what kind of salvation does the human offer?
The poetics of rewilding, via animal myths, requires an eating alive and a girl. She is “lost” in the grid. This poetics imagines how institutions can hold her no more. The speaker in Humanimal “can’t see her to completion”—in other words, the current text is not her final destination, and the writer-narrator is held by a distance that causes her to worry “how she survives the night.” But the text confirms that her “pre-ecdysis” is only the loss of a former shell, a former skin. It is by having one shell that one learns how to remove and unearth another: it is something that one has already been trained to do. “Affirmative sabotage” is thus where the poet navigates the institutions of prose and racism to implant dreams of “being eating alive”—where the shedding of skin and the loss of one’s way is a terminus for a politics of rewilding.
Memories and Dreams of Black Solidarity
In Ban en Banlieue, Kapil writes, “Is Ban a ‘black’ person, using a mode of address she would not dare to in the United Kingdom? Is Ban black? Though now she is black. And flecked with silver. At the bottom of a river. On the street.”34 The Blackness of Ban is a tenuous and delicate line of inquiry. Suggesting Ban’s Blackness in the text demands that particular UK political and social movements be remembered specifically, perhaps extending to moments in transnational histories where Black solidarity constituted a powerful political position and a lived experience.35 Kapil writes, “To summarize, she is the parts of something as re-mixed as air: integral rigid air, circa 1972–1979. She’s a girl. A black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asian Brits self-defined as black. A black (brown) girl encountered in the earliest hour of a race riot, or what will become one by nightfall.”36 These gestures of solidarity are historically and socially rooted in movements that have since fractured, and their previous formations now circulate with powerful critiques: they cannot be romanticized, nor can they be metaphorized without replicating and enacting epistemological violence. Black studies rightfully asserts that Blackness is not a metaphor, a vessel, a receptacle in which a poetics or a politics might pass through for the sake of beauty and nonblack progress.
Kapil seems acutely aware of the tensions between raising the memories of British Black and Asian solidarity movements in this contemporary moment. The Blackness of Ban is raised as a question for the reader, a delicate political (t)issue. And yet the violence of Ban’s lived experience and her position are not up for questioning: “Though now she is black. And flecked with silver. At the bottom of a river. On the street.” I want to pair these fragments with the following notebook entry from the “Butcher Block Appendix” to Ban en Banlieue: “Blackening the pages is writing. Circuitry. Detach the arms from the legs and rub dry with ‘silver mittens.’”37 For Kapil, an Asian British, Asian American poet, to define Blackness as writing, and to situate Blackness as the embodiment of future poetic discourse, is to link her language project to previous political formations of Blackness, as well as to an unthinkable horizon of new solidarities.38 In “Ante-Anti Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Jared Sexton argues that it is not a matter of the potential application or exclusion of Black studies, but that the entire foundations of revolutionary political thought and discourse are built upon formations of Blackness and Black studies. Regarding Lewis Gordon’s theorization of Black thought, Sexton writes, “1) all thought, insofar as it is genuine thinking, might best be conceived of as black thought and, consequently, 2) all researches, insofar as they are genuinely critical inquiries, aspire to black studies. Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”39 These statements are resolutely not for the multiculturally inclined administrator or for the state-of-denial white modernists—they transcend their camps. I want to suggest that Kapil’s reference to Ban’s political history—a moment in which Blackness was The Name that constituted all of the political endeavors of Asian immigrants, Asian communities—is not only a poetic homage but a direct and explicit call as to the possibilities of future solidarities. I also want to suggest that calling in on this political history, Kapil as a first-generation Asian American is not offering a nostalgic description but is providing instead an explicit interrogation of the possibilities of poetic thought. What might it look like to aspire to theory (Black studies), as Asian American writers? How might we, Asian American writers, reimagine a poetics connected to theory (Black studies)? Such questions are not abstract questions, but formulations that link Kapil’s poetics to transnational, global movements against anti-Blackness and neocolonization.
However, these formations remain delicate because the lived experience of Blackness (of venturing unprotected, of being banned, of protesting a politics that is refused legibility or accountability, of deaths unaccounted for by the state) can never be a vessel. It is not a vehicle that readers and writers can travel in and out of. And yet as Sexton states so clearly: Blackness is theory. Kapil’s work labors to situate the theory, the history, and the memories into a poetics that constantly reiterates: “Blackening the pages is writing.” This poetics imagines “a literature not made from literature”40 (much like Gordon’s call for Blackening the world), in which the act of Blac
kening becomes the writing. Blackening is not like writing. Blackening is writing. These are poems for a futurity that our current literature cannot grapple with.
Here I would like to address how the use of “silver” in the earlier lines reverberates. I mulled over endlessly how “flecked with silver” and “‘silver Mittens’” might be understood. Silver might be a reference to the problematic representation of Blackness—what is gleaned on top of the body and deposited afterwards. Silver is the surface we are taught to read and analyze. However, this might be too simplistic a reading. Then the internet informed me that “silver mittens” is a colloquial term for boxing matches, boxing tournaments, and boxing clubs. “Silver” here then could be the markings of chips, cracks, and splinters that cover the body before and after the fight. It is the weapon used during the attack, and it is also the markings that reveal that a battle occurred. All the possibilities that I’ve been able to deduce thus far triangulate back to a formation where Blackness, protest (writing), and writing (Blackness) are interconnected via violence. In this “literature not made from literature,” everything is vulnerable, every part of this history is vulnerable except the memories of revolution. Those memories form the stream that becomes poetry for a literature unlike its previous terrors. I read in Ban’s Blackness Kapil’s poetic movement toward the imagining of new Asian American solidarities and dreams.
Perpetual Writing
I wrote another book like a blue lake then drained it, to write from a dip.
—Humanimal41
With some anger, the kind that builds up over years, in the absence of social services, I write sentences for days.
—Ban en Banlieue42
Ban en Banlieue wrestles with protests and state violence in intimate immigrant spaces: banlieues. The book is dedicated to Blair Peach, a teacher, activist, and martyr. “He is the martyr of my novel,” Kapil writes, “although he does not appear in it […] He appears before the novel begins.”43 This dedication, this memory of the protest held in London on April 23, 1979, where Peach was murdered, situate the work in time and space. Kapil weaves multiple positions, ideas, and sentiments throughout the book, grappling with the banlieue as a state-defined space. In doing so, she takes up Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, bare life, “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”44 Banished from the city, the home oikos, “[i]t can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”45 As Kapil writes, “To ban, to sentence.”46 The possibilities of interpretation of this line are boundless. There is the act of becoming Ban—the figure, the heroine, the riot. It could also be a form of address in fragments, as “To ban” the figure, as “To Kapil” might evoke. There is also the more literal act of exclusion—yet in this composition, the exclusion is a directive, an action, and not the experience. Here, it is not to be banned. Here the exclusion is conditional, impersonal, and yet directed. “To sentence” reconfigures the ban. “To sentence” reiterates how one might read “ban” as literally declarative. “To sentence” clarifies that a crime has come before; it signifies that this is the resolution after the crime. “To sentence” in this context is the authoritative speech, the rhetoric that justifies the punishment: banishment. Yet too, “to sentence” is without a direct speaker or a direct object, and floats as an ulterior.
“To sentence” is not merely a double play between authoritative judicial processing (to sentence the criminal) and the act of narration. It hooks imperatively the language of authoritative judicial procedures to narration. “To sentence”—that is, to complete a sentence or to compose a sentence, or to offer a sentence, falls in line with the dynamics of officialized history. In this light, it might be useful to think again about “to” as a form of address: “to ban” and “to sentence” the offerings, the writings that the writer-narrator has produced. I would like to play with the simulacra that Kapil’s composition offers, as a method that treats the prose and the narrative in Kapil’s work as refashioning the rupture poetics that comes out of perpetual writing. While readers and critics have commented on Kapil’s use of prose and of narrative,47 I want to complicate the implication of prose in poetry in Kapil’s writings.
The prose in Ban operates as an immigrant function. We believe she is clear; we assume she labors for direct comprehension. All the clarity professed in Kapil’s work offers fragments of a text that cannot be translated or transcribed but is instead immigrant poetry as weaponry:
“To ban someone is to say that no-one may harm him.” Agamben.
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. In this sense, to study the place where the city dissolves is to study the wolf. Is this why some of my best friends have come from the peninsula of Long Island?
To ban, to sentence.48
When Kapil sets Agamben next to various definitions of banishment, perimeters, and an anecdote, and then concludes with her ars poetica, we cannot feel nestled and clear inside the writing. The writing, while in a syntax most English language speakers might recognize, is convulsing new formations, new meaning.
The play of clear syntax, and perhaps even clear separate phrasing, is an interplay between powers. Trinh Minh-Ha writes, “Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flower, together they flower, vertically, to impose and order.”49 Clarity is pulled from the powers of sentencing, yet here, clarity becomes an immigrant duty: of speaking clearly, of being understood, of assimilation into an undetectable language. The obscurity in Kapil’s poetics is hidden in the way immigrant acts might hide the knowledge of a second or third language in public, but the knowledge of this language permeates the fashioning of clarity.
After all, poetry is often defined in negation. The difference between poetry and prose is that poetry is not prose—and prose is clear. Prose is that which allows the reader familiarity, comfort in the lineup of things to come. Of course, the literary credo of our time is that all of this should be blown up. But how? And by whom? Kapil writes:
To abandon is thus to write prose. “Already dead.” Nude. A “wolfe’s head” upon a form. The form is the body—in the most generic way I could possibly use that word. The nude body spills color. Blue nude, green nude. The nudes of pre-history in a pool of chalk in an Ajanta cave. Agamben’s thought familiar to me, already, from the exchange of Arjun and Krishan on the battlefield. The idea that you’re already dead. I should stop writing now.50
Prose abandoned (banned) as poetry enters the perimeters of memory and myth. Prose abandoned as poetry into a continuum of writing: to write (to sentence), endlessly. Which is not the same as automatic writing. Perpetual writing is not the act of deluding oneself out of consciousness for the sake of high art—perpetual writing is writing as the act of writing through sentencing. When cyborgs and monsters are to be witnessed as the specter of immigrants, writing is the act that eats them alive.
Bhanu: A Failed Novelist
As the event unfolds both after and before. As the text of a present moves so rapidly it cannot be written. This is why immigrants don’t write many novels; only emigrants do. I write to you at night, for example, when even my body is hidden from view.
—Ban en Banlieue (70)
There are fifteen Urban Dictionary entries under the user “Bhanu: A Failed Novelist.” The definition of “Humanimal” there, “Even an angel can be feral,” is akin to Agamben’s “inoperative angels,” which is likewise akin to “feral novels.” To examine closely the chosen title “Bhanu: A Failed Novelist,” I turn once more to Lisa Lowe. In discussing how Frantz Fanon situates the colonial form of language, Lowe writes, “The imposition of the colonial language and its cultural institutions, among them the novel, demands the subject’s internalization of the ‘superiority’ of the colonizer and the
‘inferiority’ of the colonized, even as it attempts to evacuate the subject of ‘native’ language, traditions, and practice.”51 The function and form of the novel, in Western literature, is rooted in its superior colonial form. The novel, which is often defined as the bildungsroman, carries the aesthetics of colonial expansion and the affect of proper citizenship. It has been adeptly theorized that the form and function of the canonical, Western novel is complicit in the politics of liberal subject making. Writers and students are taught to revere and imitate the novel’s form and replicate its politics, and canons are taught to test this knowledge. Lowe argues that the novel form or system is one that the colonized subject actively works to breach: “Yet the colonized subject produced within such an encounter does not merely bear the marks of the coercive encounter between the dominant language and culture, constructed as whole, autonomous, and disinterested, and the specificities of the colonized group’s existence.”52 In being educated to internalize colonial superiority, the colonized subject (writer!) instead develops parallel, horizontal tracks. This might be another way to view “affirmative sabotage,” “the performance of no,” and “being eaten alive”—as a literature fully cognizant of one’s devourment, yet altering the terms of devourment. As Lowe argues, “Such encounters produce contradictory subjects, in whom the demands for fluency in imperial language and empire’s cultural institutions simultaneously provide the grounds for antagonisms to those demands.”53