Let the Auto-Sacrifice Begin
Terri Ann Quan Sing on Bhanu Kapil
'It's time for the auto-sacrifice to begin.'
—Ban en Banlieue
'I breathe in the salty mist, walk back along the wild, shifting edge of everything.'
—The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
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I'm re-reading her entire oeuvre-to-date (six books) to think about why I've been so enduringly obsessed with the poet Bhanu Kapil. Whoever you are, reading this: You might also be split open by her. (This is a warning, and an enticement.) ‘Like bones before they are bones.’ (Ban En Banlieue) Was it standing for hours reading through the poetry sections in the newly built Borders in Rundle Mall, luxuriating in ‘The euphoria of theft’ (Incubation: A Space For Monsters); or was it in the almost-holy, now disappeared space of the Experimental Art Foundation in the bookstore adjoining the gallery space, amongst the artist manifestos and catalogues and the beautiful, impossibly expensive imported art books, where I first encountered this work? ‘Pink lightning. [...] Can you feel it? I am sending it right now!!!!’ (Ban En Banlieue) Wherever it was, I first encountered her work on the brink of leaving my own girlhood, at least at the point where I was probably still a girl, but was becoming self-aware of the dangers that being a girl opened me up to. Girlhood is a theme Kapil treats exhaustively: shaking it out, emptying its pockets of all loose change. 'The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike.' (Incubation: A Space For Monsters). I was an alienated and romantic teenage girl—enter the works of Bhanu Kapil: let the auto-sacrifice begin.
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Bhanu Kapil has written six books, beginning in 2001 with The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, followed by Incubation: A Space for Monsters in 2006, Humanimal: A Project for Future Children in 2009, Schizophrene in 2011, and then, a book long foreshadowed: Ban en Banlieue in 2015; and most recently: How to Wash a Heart in 2020. Throughout her still-expanding oeuvre, Kapil returns and returns to themes of migration and metamorphosis, to the violence of borders, and the pleasures and dangers of girlhood; the historical event of Partition and its aftermaths, white nationalism in Britain and elsewhere, violence against women. But to write this list is to risk a reduction of her work to a sociological function—after all, this work is formally innovative experimental poetry. With some irony, much of Kapil's work appropriates formal aspects of sociology—for example, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, begins with a numbered questionnaire; each poem beginning with one of those questions at the top: 'What is the shape of your body?' or, 'Describe a morning that you woke without fear.' Characteristic of Kapil's style, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers begins with a single idea, which grows far beyond its initial form:
'—the project as I thought it would be: an anthology of the voices of Indian women.'
and
'—the project as I wrote it: a tilted plane.'
If this book is an index of violence against Indian women, it is also a chorus: a tilted work that becomes more than it set out to be. Bhanu Kapil is a poet whose work folds so many genres into itself: prose poetry, poetry-document, documentary poetry, autotheory, 'auto-sacrifice', 'failed-epic', 'failed novel', 'intense biography':
'Write: the findings. Write what never ends.' (Ban En Banlieue)
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Kapil's second book, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, is an epic poem—about and addressed to Laloo, a brown girl in a red dress who is hitchhiking the highway. Incubation is a meditation on girlhood, which sits on the threshold of leaving childhood, just far enough away to have a critical distance, to be able to reflect. To begin feel the dangers of girlhood—the intense proximity between pleasure and danger, or between freedom and the capture of present and historical violences: 'listening to the obvious words at the end of a girl . What a girl is.' Incubation can be read as a non-obvious theory of girlhood:
'What is a girl? It is an ancient office.'
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I see my own girlhood in Laloo: 'a girl does it anyway: gets up and goes.' (Incubation). this is not quite naïveté of the dangers for a girl out on the road, but maybe an aberrant gumption, that shouldn't yet does exist. Laloo has guts, but doesn't exactly know that this is what the world requires of her: 'I like to think of her [Laloo] as ambient' (Incubation). But looking back, I do worry about her (about me):
'I wake up early in an irrigation canal, fall leaves in my hair, to this other light [...] It is dream-like to travel like this.' (Incubation)
In my own girlhood I was so ambient. 'I've passed from point to point, my pleasures coming in increments, like electrons. [...] Living this hitchhiking life in the land of known mutilators' (Incubation). And yet, I must remember that 'Each feral moment is valuable' (Humanimal).
'At the edge of the jungle was a seam [...] where things previously separate moved together in a wet pivot. I stood and walked towards it in a dream' (Humanimal).
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Humanimal, Kapil's third book, takes the form of a research project. This poetry-document follows historical archival research, and a trip to Bengal with a documentary film crew, to explore the lives of two 'wolf-girls' taken in to the Midnapore Orphanage in the 1920s, whose story is recorded in the journals of the Reverend J.A.L Singh. Humanimal works to give voice back to Kamala and Amala, to hear what they might have to offer future children:
'The cook fed us meats of many kinds. I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other's faces.'
In this book there are two 'reports' being written from more than two perspectives: one in numbered points, one alphabetical. The alphabetical, the more analytic voice, becomes more and more feral, and dreamy, and visceral—getting stuck at the letter 'O' and going no further into the alphabet: just O, O, O into image and sensation until finally: 'O. I've exhausted the alphabet'.
Throughout her oeuvre, Kapil’s writing mutates beyond her initial idea; the trace of the act of writing and its metamorphosis is not erased in the final congealment of the book. Most often, the book is written in the present tense, the reader sitting with Kapil as she writes the book . There is a sense that the work itself is a larger happening, and the book is only the trace of the bigger phenomena. The work itself cannot be contained, and so exceeds the capture of the book. A feral book. A feral oeuvre. And this is how her figures also are: feral. Her writing is trying to give itself over to the sun, the snow, to being co-written by the ghost, by the dream: 'A wet snow falling on the ruins' (Schizophrene).
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Her fourth book Schizophrene is more airy than the previous ones—the text is sparser, more fragmented on the page—this form is given by the giving up of an epic project: 'I threw the book into [...] a wet grid' (Schizophrene) and the abandoned work froze and then thawed and what was left became this other, frost-bitten, work: Schizophrene.’ Ban En Banlieue Kapil's fifth book, also has its genesis in an abandonment. Throughout this book, the writing struggles with what it is becoming: 'I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this' (Ban En Banlieue). Instead, a series of appendices to the writing that is endlessly deferred: 'I would like to present: a list of the errors I made as a poet engaging a novel-shaped space' (Ban En Banlieue).
Kapil's poetry is visceral and bodily. The body in Kapil's work is ever-present, always oozing with memory, with history; always open and fleshly to the reader: 'Imagine a body emitting red worms, thick as fingers and as long.' (Humanimal). Gestural, ritualistic, and forged in collaboration with the winter, or with memory, or with fate, or faith. In another act of spectral co-authorship, Ban En Banlieue opens with a scene of bibliomancy:
'I lean over the bookshelf and brush [touch] Dictee, a book I have not read for many years. I close my eyes then open them, my finger on page 4. A volt of violet [orange] fire goes through my body [...] In this way, Cha's 'dead tongue' licks the work. No. I feel her licking me. The inside of my arm, the inside of my ear. My error. I wake up. It's time for the auto-sacrifice to begin.' (Ban En Banlieue)
The overwhelming and unbearable intensities of that state of being perpetually unhomed: 'A mad progression that exceeds a central frame, like seeing something then falling down' (Schizophrene); or, this is specifically 'a stressor for psychosis' (Schizophrene). This eternal sense of being cast adrift on a sea of jeering white supremacy is an overwhelming force, an intensity driving a psychic fissure, fracturing, fragmenting: 'Because it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space' (Schizophrene).
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'Do you come from a suburb I come from a ditch.' (Ban En Banlieue) as a child in the 1990s I was terrorised by the spectre of Pauline Hanson with her yellow peril panic somehow her speech was embedded in my everyday , unchallenged so i swallowed it down: I was haunted by her demand to go-back-where-you-came-from: which, to my child-mind, involved an impossible process of a physical rending of limbs: the problem became which body parts will be sent to western europe, and which to southern china? 'The river flowed out of its given shape and into my eyes' (Schizophrene).
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Ban En Banlieue was clearly bubbling up for a long time: 'It's time for the auto-sacrifice to begin.' (Ban En Banlieue)—in this book, many of the same constellation of themes, images, and concerns are brought to bear in the world of Ban—'Who is Ban?'—much of the text responds to this question. Ban is 'a black brown girl,' 'a girl on the floor of the world.' The book is a series of notes, experiments: attempts: to connect with or to evade, Ban. Who is Ban, and what is Ban? This is the question that constantly disturbs the speaker. And this book is for Ban: sections are named 'Embryology for Ban', and 'Errors for Ban' and 'Race drops for Ban'. The text itself seems to refer to a performance outside of the book. It is gestural, indicating events that are happening in the process of writing the book. Ban En Banlieue begins in London on April 23rd, 1979 at 4pm—the event of the Southall Riots incited by a white supremacist organisation the National Front. Ban lays down on the footpath to die 'in advance of the death they are powerless. To prevent': 'The roar of the race riot dims. Ban is crumpled like a tulip: there.'
In parts of Ban En Banlieue the text is instructive of a performance for Ban that has happened, or could happen according to these directions—'Lie down on the side walk next to the ivy [...] Observe the sky' (Ban En Banlieue).. The reader is directed to witness, or even to participate in the repeated performance of the ritual, until: at age forty, having outlived her own death at the site of the riot she lays down on the Partition border: its founding violence reverberating throughout her oeuvre: haunting, harrowing, nothing can repair these wounds or undo these deaths—Ban lies down with the ghosts. Not to reckon with them once and for all. Not to lay them to rest. Not to write an answer: 'This is why I write: to unfold the electrical grid of the nervous system.' (Ban En Banlieue)
A recurring image throughout Kapil's work is her mother's childhood memory of murdered women tied to trees, their wombs cut from their bodies as her family fled the violence of Partition; 'In the stories my mother told me, the border was dressed with organs' (How to Wash A Heart). The violence of border making and maintenance is no metaphor: 'when it rains, the grass is filled with blood.' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers). The horror and violence of Partition reverberates decades later, within the children who did not directly experience it: 'Deep in the map, I put my fork down and feel my jaw and teeth swell up. This is blood pressure: a flow, reversing itself, bit I can't quite manage it, the information.' (Schizophrene) the 'information' here is the mother's testimony 'an image [...] repeated to me at many bedtimes as a child' (Schizophrene) the scene that will haunt Kapil's body of work: a scene witnessed by her mother fleeing Partition in 1947: the abject scene of rape and dismemberment: murdered women tied to trees, their wombs cut from their bodies: 'when it rains, the grass is filled with blood' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers). Ban is caught between the aftershock of Partition and the white nationalist imaginary: 'What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English?' (Ban En Banlieue).
Kapil writes: 'I want to lie down [...] on the border of Pakistan and India: the two Punjabs. [...] I want to feel it in my body—the root cause.' (Ban En Banliue) Figures from across her books come together at the Partition border in Ban En Banliue: 'like animals. //Like schizophrenics. // Like wolves. // Emit light. Perceptible to the ones who also. Lie down on the ground. Lie down on the ground like that.' (Ban En Banliue) this performance, or the image of this performance, the image of her body—Ban's or the speakers or Bhanu's body, or all three in one—laying down on the physical border, putting her body in that haunted space: this is such a distillation of Kapil's poetics; of her poetic method (if 'method' isn’t' too crude a word to use):
'Ban returned to India, where her ancestors were from, and lay down, as close as she could get, next to the border with Pakistan. A few feet away, under the gaze of a military presence, two guards a few feet away from the Wagah checkpoint, she simply did this (lie down), then stood up with a long stick torn from a nearby tree, though the area is desolate, marked the outline that was left. Then she re-filled this shape with marigolds purchased, earlier that day, from the Shiva temple of a village further in. It must have been a Monday. Then she sat down next to this body and placed a hand on the place where its chest would be, and another upon her own. I began to write on Ban. It was this writing that led me further in, to the place I did not want to be, Ban's soul' (Ban En Banlieue).
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How To Wash A Heart, her sixth and most recent book, is a departure from her previous prose-style with its line breaks, and more conventional poemish typesetting. This book was written to be read in one sitting, in the length of time it takes to drink one cup of tea. The poems themselves are untitled; or, the book is made of one book-length long poem. This book addresses the conditional belonging of the immigrant as the 'guest' of the white nation: 'This is the voice of this book: an immigrant guest in the home of their citizen host' (How To Wash A Heart). The host reads the speakers diary and gets angry about how her thoughts reflect badly on them—there is no private, psychic space allowed for the guest. For the narcissistic white citizen—everything is about them: 'As your guest I trained myself / To beautify / Our collective trauma'.
The constant spectre of white nationalism (for Ban in Ban En Banliueu, for the Schizophrene, for the speaker in How To Wash A Heart) pushes the heart and the psyche toward shattering. Kapil's work in this area engages with medical research findings of high rates of heart failure and psychosis among minoritised, migrant communities: 'The guest knows that host logic / Is variable' (How To Wash A Heart). It is a constant strain to sit always at the mercy of the whims of the white nation:
'It's exhausting to be a guest / In somebody else's house / Forever' (How To Wash A Heart).
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All these women, all these girls, have endured all this violence across time and place—India, England, the United States. But they haven't merely endured, nor merely survived; they have become something more, something uncontained, overflowing. 'I'm not writing about myself as a rational human being' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers). Ban, and Kapil's other girls—schizophrenes, wolf-girls, hitchhikers—become something beyond their destinies of silent death. This bestiary of figures that populate Kapil's oeuvre are not heroines nor anti-heroines —and they could not even fit this frame if they desired it. They are not asking to be redeemed; they are not asking to be saved. Kapil's monsters are such an affront to the system because they go off on their own. And what you survive shapes you in unpredictable ways. That is to say—these brown girls do not become exemplary victims. Instead, Kapil's girls become feral, become wolves, become mermaids, become hitchhikers. They wear red, they are mortally endangered—and they continue on:
'I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster' (Ban En Banlieue).
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Her writing is a vortex turfing everything out! The way her work moves through and then beyond 'the obvious words at the end of a girl' (Incubation) works with duration and repetition beyond the point of exhaustion and into the monstrous:
'A book of time, for time, and because of it. // A book for recovery from an illness. A book that repeats a sentence until that sentence recuperates its power to attract, or touch, other sentences' (Ban En Banlieue).
Questioning, answering, repeating, building, and re-answering: from the body, from sex and blood, and murder and desire, from nausea and quiet horror; returning and returning to those threats and spectres felt most acutely. Its not quite about representation, or survival, but an uncontainable and possibly unrepresentable, fleshy, existence: beyond a mere reaction to circumstance. In this way, Kapil is a theorist of a feral agency, a poet of latent freedom.
and! just as I begin to think of transcendence, freedom, her work pulls us back to the body, to memories held in and carried by the body: 'It's the bloodiness of remembering everything. [...] (My brain is too exposed. Old jelly. Inedible.)' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers):
'WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?
I rubbed an orange along the lines of my throat, to cool my blood. Am I alive? Yes. I am stretched out like the arms of a Hindu effigy, or an animal that lives in the sea. Sometimes, I'm scared I won't feel a damn thing. That is why I've stretched my body out. It's a net for a man. But a man is made of water. And I am pressed, face down, upon these boards. The muscles of my shoulders. My legs. (But you cannot jump into the earth.) Yes you can. Push harder' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, emphasis in original).
Visceral and sensual and incantatory, Kapil's poetics demand over and over the transcendence of imposed limits, commanding and instructive: 'Yes you can. Push harder.' As well, the imperative to 'go' is repeated throughout Incubation: 'A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going' (Incubation). The long writing-research process, the process of trying to conjure the erased into presence through poetry: 'I walk through alternating bars of sunlight and shadow, luxuriating, nowhere' (Humanimal). There is an awe and shock bubbling up in this body of work; a monstrous and unnameable power that comes close to bursting into the world through writing a haunted girlhood; so repressed in language, pushing up against the membrane, to stretch out toward bursting: but with 'Such slowness. // These words took years to arrive.' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers) The present moment always threatening, or promising, to burst. movement, play, opening a monstrous space for possibility & dreaming. reparative work of survival—to go on. To lay down. To marinate. & to go on. To cultivate 'the habit of the dream' (Schizophrene).
With their genesis in the cruicible of a haunted girlhood, Kapil's bestiary of girl-monsters find voice in these books, these books are the current 'findings' of evidence for the possibilities for girl-monsters. 'Write: the findings. Write what never ends' (Ban En Banlieue). And then, the pleasures of poetry; of the lush moment, even as it is monstrous. the intensities of being. the intensities of being a body in the eternal present, in unending flux. Kapil's poetics does not let the constellation— of images, events, psychic rubble, historical ruptures, present conflict —end. They spin, repeat, regress, refract, in ritual—an unending exorcism. Kapil's professed 'failure' to produce a novel, or to capture a concluded narrative instead gestates new resonances, becoming irresolution as an ethical style. No closure, just vibing in and with the unresolved and unbearable intensities of the world present, past and probable. Perhaps to draw conclusions is a grammar of burial. Successful evasions of closure and of capture: ritual escapes.
—O! i'm so resistant to writing this, 'It makes my blood roar to think of you reading it. So intimate a text.' (Incubation: A space for monsters) but i think my own girlhood grapplings with 'hybridity' is what drew me to Kapil's work in the first place (and i'm so grateful to have found it all those years ago):
'The politics of the membrane: there are pathways from the outside to the inside, and back again. [...] The shifting meniscus of all touch. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SKIN.' (The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers)
—working through her oeuvre now, it's clear that I found comfort in the abject and monstrous liminality explored in her work; that vibes also with not having to look at these directly, not wanting to make 'hybridity' into a concrete marker of identity to wear around my neck. just staying in the ooze of poetry, of multiplicities, the flotsam and jetsam of perversity and possibilies beyond: Kapil's work offered me an exploration of hybridity that sits in irresolution—that draws power from mess, from tangled roots:
Hybridity is a genre still forming. Hybridity is building something to attract not the insects: but the light. So, in a way, it’s a void, a kind of fertility’ (Ban En Banlieue).
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Kapil's oeuvre grapples with everything that is inherited in the process of being a 'brown girl on the floor of the world,' inheriting past apocalypses still present and felt; the violence of border making and maintenance: Ban and her sisters lie down with the ghosts. Not to reckon with them once and for all. Not to lay them to rest. Not to write an answer, but: 'to unfold the electrical grid of the nervous system' (Ban En Banlieue). Certainly, Bhanu Kapil has opened at least one portal of possibility for brown girls to be in and with their own abjection, and from there, to find a voice—and to use that voice to speak to write to think even if it turns out to be monstrous: 'I don't want to beautify our collective trauma' (How To Wash A Heart).
Kapil's poetry gives itself over to the sun, the snow, to being co-written by the ghost, by the dream. Her work is so potent in our uncertain, apocalyptic time: a poetic resource for past, current, and future apocalypses: 'building something to attract not the insects: but the light' (Ban En Banlieue).
her work opened poetry to me- and gifted a poetics that is visceral and historical and high stakes and impure —that dwells monstrously whole in a world so hostile to brown girlhood now everything is bleeding together everything is oozing together just staying in the ooze of multiplicities, of perversity and possibilies beyond:
O! let's close this auto-sacrifice with a line from her first book, let's:
'breathe in the salty mist, walk back along the wild, shifting edge of everything.'
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Works Cited
✷ Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001).
✷ Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006).
✷ Bhanu Kapil, Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street Press, 2009).
✷ Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011).
✷ Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015).
✷ Bhanu Kapil, How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
Terri Ann Quan Sing writes poems and writes about poems. You can find more of her work in Meanjin, Peril, Mascara, Sydney Review of Books, Rabbit, and elsewhere. @terriannqs