Lowe argues that in her education, the colonized writer, the colonial subject, travels through the categorization of colonization: its forms, its placements, its politics, its valued meanings. In this education the novel is situated as literature par excellence; it is a superior form, its greatest hits already established. Minh-Ha states of this tradition, “Literature. Invoke the name. Follow the norms. Of. The Well Written.”54 The Novel’s education is set to internalize the superiority of colonial aesthetics and forms, and to inferiorize the colonized writer, simultaneously removing ancestral and native traditions, forms, and languages, as Lowe writes. This process creates, however, a rupture in the subject: the site of imperial examination, for its fluency and assimilation, becomes the grounds for antagonism. The colonized writer exhibits a “fluency in imperial language,” her prose’s clarity positioned perfectly as a literature ready “to do something else.”55
Ban en Banlieue is a “feral novel” set on “affirmative sabotage,” a collection of “[n]otes for a novel never written.”56 The work refuses linear narratives and satisfying resolutions. Its prose-as-abandoned-poetry writes a world unmade by colonial, racialized violence. Yet it is a world that is permeating with writing. In Ban en Banlieue a girl walks a distance alone. Her singularity and similarities set the stakes of her story, a narrative that has been catalogued by the state. Racialized and gendered discourses are interrogated, frame by frame, through the fractures of the English language. Ban, the feral novel, interrogates the context and history surrounding a girl walking home at night knowing it’s not safe, in a world where a protester is murdered and his memory denied—this accounting (language) a secondary fight, the accounting (language) of his death which must be contested. These events, Kapil argues, are linked whether the news reported them or not, whether history acknowledges them to be or not. Ban en Banlieue occupies the spaces that make it impossible for some bodies to survive to write a poetry that makes not only survival, but literature possible. This literature comes not from literature, but out of the politics of rupture, sabotage, monsters.
When Bhanu Kapil composes her Urban Dictionary entries under the title “Bhanu: A Failed Novelist,” these gestures are not merely playful jest, absurdist theater. Much like “being eaten alive,” “to sentence,” and “auto-sacrifice,” the title situates the performance as an ongoing rewilding. The form of the novel, in Ban en Banlieue and online, will undergo a series of assaults. The protestor/writer/girl commits to enacting a “failed” novel—that is, to antagonizing the most beloved colonial form, assaulting the very heart of its meat. Kapil writes, “The roar of the race riot dims. Ban is crumpled like a tulip: there.”57 Kapil’s literature defiles the novel, deforms its core. The novel collapses, “is crumpled,” into a human form—is Ban at the protest? is she walking?—and the pages of Kapil’s feral novel enact the painful realities of human beauty disregarded: a flower plucked and thrown away. This human novel form receives no coffin, no funeral, no burial, no effigy. It lies there in the pages of Kapil’s book, enclosed, unmemorialized by the auto-failed, cannibalized novelist in pursuit of a literature “not made from literature.”58
NOTES
1. I wish to thank Maya Mackrandilal, Lucas de Lima, and Jennie Freeburg for their generous comments. And so much gratitude for Bhanu Kapil—for her time, concern, and care for this process.
2. Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015), 7.
3. Bhanu Kapil, The Vortex of Formidable Sparkles (blog), thesparklyblogof bhanukapil.blogspot.com.
4. Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2001); Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2006); Humanimal, a Project for Future Children (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2009); and Schizophrene (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011).
5. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 78.
6. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1994). I wish to thank Grace Hong for directing me to the specific passages in Immigrant Acts. Much of this essay is indebted to rereading Lowe’s pivotal work next to Kapil’s poetry.
7. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 36.
8. Ibid., 36.
9. Kapil, Incubation, 12.
10. Ibid., 67.
11. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 37.
12. Ibid., 21.
13. Ibid., 78.
14. Ibid., 41.
15. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 35.
16. As Trinh T. Minh Ha reminds us, “We do not have bodies, we are our bodies.” See Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 36.
17. Kapil, Schizophrene, 53.
18. Ibid., 69.
19. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 32.
20. Kapil, Schizophrene, 71.
21. Ibid., 48.
22. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other, 80.
23. In Woman Native Other, Minh Ha writes of the importance of navigating silence: “Silence as a refusal to partake in the story does sometimes provide us with a means to gain a hearing. It is voice, a mode of uttering, and a response in its own right. Without other silences, however, my silence goes unheard, unnoticed; it is simply one voice less, or more point given to the silencers” (83).
24. This last idea is taken from Fatima El-Tayeb’s reading of Audre Lorde’s poetics in European Others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
25. I am using the terms “history 1” and “history 2” as theorized in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
26. Kapil, Humanimal, 26.
27. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 44.
28. Personal interview.
29. Jennifer Lisa Vest, “What Doesn’t Kill You: Existential Luck, Postracial Racism, and The Subtle and Not So Subtle Ways the Academy Keeps Women of Color Out,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 12.2 (2013): 472.
30. Ibid., 492.
31. “Herald Exclusive: In Conversation with Gayatri Spivak,” interview by Nazish Brohi, Dawn, December 23, 2014. Available online at www.dawn.com.
32. Ibid.
33. Kapil, Humanimal, 40–41.
34. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 56.
35. In “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993), Cheryl Harris articulates how blackness has been historically and politically imagined: “Both the alternative usage of ‘Black’ and ‘African’ are fed by the impulse of oppressed people to deny legitimacy to categories propounded by their oppressors. It is the rejection of the right to control definitions of self and group identity. Thus, neither of these redefinitions situate around the axis of biological referents inherent in apartheid legislation. Instead, they implicitly or explicitly substitute the experience of oppression as the principal criterion and confront the problem of domination and subordination” (1763).
36. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 30.
37. Ibid., 106.
38. Here I am using blackness as it is defined by Jared Sexton and pushing back from the ideology that spins blackness as abjection. Sexton argues, “I think it paramount to adjudicate whether the fact that ‘blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay’ is, in the first instance, something that we ought to strain against as it strains against us.” See Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti Blackness: Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1 (Spring 2012), available online at csalateral.org.
39. Ibid.
40. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 32.
41. Kapil, Humanimal, 63.
42. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 44.
43. Ibid., 14.
44. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 8.
45. Ibid., 6.
46. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 41.
47. For a compelling reading of the narrative and form of Kapil’s work, see Dorothy Wang, “Speculative Notes on Bhanu Kapil’s Monstrous/Cyborgian/Schizophren
ic Poetics,” in Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, ed. Timothy Yu (Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2015).
48. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 41.
49. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other, 17.
50. Ibid., 41.
51. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 97.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other, 17.
55. Lowe powerfully argues, “The emergence of a racially differentiated U.S. society that cannot be captured adequately by the antinomy of mass and traditional culture obliges us to respecify historically what other sources of contradiction might exist aside from valorized modernist art. Asian American cultural forms neither seek to reconcile constituencies to idealized forms of community of subjectivity, nor propose those forms as ‘art’ that resides in an autonomous domain outside of mass society and popular practices” (Immigrant Acts, 31).
56. Kapil, Ban en Banlieue, 44.
57. Ibid., 48.
58. Ibid., 32.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Bhanu Kapil
BOOKS
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2001.
Incubation: A Space for Monsters. Providence, RI: Leon Works, 2006 (orig. ed.); Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2018 (new ed.).
Humanimal, a Project for Future Children. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2009.
Schizophrene. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011.
Ban en Banlieue. New York: Nightboat Books, 2015.
*“the future of color” is language from Rohini Kapil’s writing and thinking, spelled differently: “the future of colour.”
MAURICIO KILWEIN GUEVARA
POEMS
FROM Postmortem
Postmortem
Even the corpse has its own beauty.
EMERSON
These lips of Mr. Tunis Flood are cornflower
Blue. I have a set of cups like that.
I bring my ear to his heart but hear no murmur,
No vibrato, no baroque flutter of blood.
I love Pathology because there’s never any rush.
I sip my coffee. Think. Write, “Nipples the color of avocados.”
(How beautiful they are in the fluorescent light.)
Time to open and discover now the exquisite
Essence of Tunis Flood. Syringe: prick—
Vitreous humor for the fellows in the lab.
On my little radio Scarlatti plays, and when my door
Hinge creaks, it speaks. “Hello,” it says. I
Concentrate. Write, “Tardieu’s spots
Bruise the livid skin. Like violets in a shade.”
With my favorite knife I trace a line from heart
To chin. From sternum to pubis. I watch a man bloom,
And remove, remove. Each organ I weigh and record.
Perhaps I should have been a postman
To send my friends and lovers away,
Boxed, in parts. Why is there wind
In this windowless room? Where is my mallet,
My chisel? Calvarium: crack.
I hold your brain, Mr. Flood,
like a baby, and wonder what matter
Holds back the rush of memories.
And in what soft ridge lies the vision of your death?
FROM Poems of the River Spirit
A City Prophet Talks to God on the 56C to Hazelwood
I say
Seems like everyone’s sleepy as the Chessie cat
I say Captain
look at your river old Monongahela
Even John the Baptist would not wade in that water
Never mind I know the catfish big as sharks
Hmm mm Hmm mm
And the things they pull up from there
the bones of horses the bodies of men
grand pianos pig iron toilets Singer sewing machines
two railroad ties crossed
spiked at the breastbone
old cars even parking meters down there time expired
God
don’t be like the people tell their children sit far away
like the man from the State says Take your pill Take your pill
Don’t talk back ’cause you might alarm the other passengers
But he says I know you know they know
they’re just puppet voices in your head
You think my brain’s polluted with intergalactic debris
I think we’re all lice on a fat rat’s back
rolling down the incline
into the river of the Anti-World
Smile
while the orphan child dresses us for the wake
Wake
and suffer the wildflowers to come unto me
Hazelwood Avenue
Ring the bell Ring the bell
I say
Even the Turk’s Cap of God will rust in the Garden of
Old Raw Iron
I say
This is my stop
This is where I step down
The Easter Revolt Painted on a Tablespoon
¿Dónde está el pueblo?
El pueblo ¿dónde está?
El pueblo está en las calles
buscando unidad.
Los pueblos unidos
jamas serán vencidos.
POPULAR CHANT
Above everything I make a jagged, blue edge
and the Andes. Along the front and back of the handle,
I detail a greenhouse of fourteen thousand roses.
From the scooped tip as the tin rises, I place the president
of my country on the balcony of Hortua Hospital. Shouting
into an already antique microphone. Ordering the army
on horseback to charge. To destroy the squatters’ camp.
I want you to hear the constant thudding, the long screams,
the galloping over mud. How it sounds
when the boy with five hundred roses
strapped to his back raises a burning branch
to touch the horse’s chest. To show that motion: hooves
and the olive uniform falling through the mist. To freeze
the instant of boiling water splashed in the face
of a young corporal. I steady my hands to focus:
the quick slice of a bayonet through tarpaper, rocks in flight,
the revolvers popping until you can hear nothing buzz,
the hundred bodies of Policarpa filling up a common grave
in the pit of the tin spoon. I paint the basilica on fire,
as a wild, orange dove flies out of the stained glass.
On the back of the belled end, I make the other world:
where my mother lifts a clean shirt out of the aqueduct;
where my father shepherds our only cow, without a stick,
up the mountain from the grassy suburbs below.
FROM Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose
Self-Portrait
It looks, at first, like a wall of blue sky, some cumulonimbus threatening to build up on the side by the fire exit. You need to walk over to the other part of the canvas and get down on your knees and there I am by the floor: the size of a railroad spike. I’m naked, head shaved to the bone, and the bead of water that fell a minute ago from the ceiling magnifies by three times the point at which my feet are crossed. Only now is it possible to tell where the errant vein disappears into the ankle. The other sound, beside the tinnitus of air conditioning, is the unseen pounding from a forge.
A baby anaconda cords my neck like an emerald helix. These moth wings are spread like a dark bell in the city; my eyes are about to open. By chance, the long molecule of a pheromone has just caught on a lash.
Mirror, Mirror
My twin brothers were conjoined at the elbows until the age of two and a half. When one walked forward, the other pedaled backwards. They learned to dance by watching two candy wrappers swirl in the wind. If one said, “Tre
e,” the other whispered, “Root.” My father cut the connective tissue with a fresh razor blade one morning after breakfast, and the two cried wildly for a long time because they felt invisible, a torso beside train tracks.
To this day each brother cannot fall asleep unless his back is against a wall.
A Tongue Is a Rope Bridge
I’ve returned to Colombia to translate (at least that’s what my grant application promised). The wind is starting to kick up on the mountain path. I dictate entries for a glossary I’ll never finish to the invisible woman who sits eating papaya.
Bendición = Seven days of rain, then after lunch Luzmilda’s shadow on the white kitchen wall.
Manicomio = The spider walking back and forth across the ceiling, wondering which is deadlier: The seam of tiny red ants climbing up the bedpost or the mother scorpion hidden by the barred window.
Mano = The absent lover of the blue pitcher left under the flowering tree.
Camera = Wild black rabbit.
Almohada = The dream in which I listen to the motes of dust floating up like hot air balloonists over the foothills of the unmade bed.
Polillas = Your eyes, I say to the invisible woman as she tosses the peels and dark glossy seeds into the stream thirty feet below.
Madrugada = A photograph coming to life in the darkroom.
Duende = The appearance of small boys in large green hats, sometime in late afternoon. I heard from Alicia how they took the professor’s son and dragged him to the place under the earth. When he returned, the skin had been stripped from his face and his clothes were in shreds.
Vicario = Reader of this page, So-and-so, with your arms at your side and a taste of pennies in your mouth.
Tunjo = A gold object found in an Indian burial mound. In other words, a prickly pear.
Estar = Where is she?
The invisible woman has long stopped writing. She’s so far ahead on the turning path, all I can see in the wind with my weak eyes is the blue-green tulle of the willow.
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