“You are inverted, always, above the place at which you are caught. Caught living.”
-Bhanu Kapil, in an interview with Katherine Sanders, BOMBLOG, Sept. 2011
In a September 2011 interview on BOMBLOG, Bhanu Kapil told the story of her first book, published a decade ago. She was an hour into labour, less than twelve hours from giving birth to her son. The phone in her kitchen rang and she picked it up. It was Patricia Dientsfrey from Kelsey Street Press, telling Kapil that they were going to press immediately, and needed a title for her book. She had been having some difficulty titling the manuscript, but when Dientsfrey called, Kapil impulsively said “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.” And then she hung up, to give birth. Kapil recalls that at a certain point, during labor, she thought, “This isn’t pain. It’s intensity.”
One feels much the same affect when consuming Kapil’s newest work from Nightboat books, Schizophrene. The emotion elicited is not so much suffering as it is a beleaguering sense of fervency and magnitude. In the book’s opening “Passive Notes:” Kapil writes:
For some years, I tried to write an epic on Partition and its trans-generational effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on. Towards the end of this project, I felt the great strength of the page: its ability, as a fibrous surface, to deflect the point of my pen.
While this introduction sounds systematic enough, the italicized words create echelons in the mind, a type of ranking of ideas and subjects. During these “Passive Notes:” other words are highlighted –the screen, reflective, touch, had failed, house, winter, fragments, decayed—which produce a layered representation on the page, a painted image by way of words. Through this accumulation of thoughts we come upon a telling narrative: one night, when she knew this manuscript had failed, she threw the notebook in her garden. It snowed that winter, into spring, when she finally retrieved her notes again and began to re-write “from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages.”
This idea of time and decay is central to Schizophrene, which haltingly, in prose, traces the junctures of migration and schizophrenia in diasporic communities, primarily in India and Pakistan. I say haltingly not in slight, but rather to illustrate the subtleties in recounting experience which is communicated in sparse sentences on the page, hemmed in by an exquisite use of blank space. One page from the section 4. ABIOGENESIS reads as follows:
Dreamed I left my coat on the aeroplane.
This sole sentence appears at the top of the page, the rest which is left blank, yet it conveys key points which reappear in the collection: the sub-conscious, journey, personal property. Throughout the text, inquiry is elected (rather than a straight recounting) to explore the trauma (in the context of racism and violence) experienced by immigrant women. Even though the questions are not voiced directly, the demand is clear: in a diverse world how does an artist reconcile oneself with the suffering of affected sectors of society, is reconciliation even possible, and how then to communicate in a scientific yet emotionally relevant context?
These are large concepts, and Kapil handles them well. In eight sections, written in first-person quasi-poetic and intellectually rigorous prose, Kapil guides the reader from her garden in Colorado (where the manuscript was discarded) to South Asia, and to affluent neighborhoods in the United Kingdom where she grew up. Hardly any distinction is made between the “I” of the book to the author herself, positioning Kapil as one of the recipients “the displaced” as Karla Kelsey stated in her review of the book. The immediacy of the first person abolishes the partition between author and subject, Kapil uses herself as a sounding board and a medium:
My mother’s mother put a hand over my mother’s mouth, but my mother saw, peeking between the slats of the cart, row after row of women tied to the border trees. “Their stomachs were cut out,” said my mother. This story, which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many bedtimes of my own childhood.
Sometimes I think it was not an image at all but a way of conveying information.
In Schizophrene, narrative is conveyed through an ancestor or in an interview (such as the one taking place at London’s Institute of Community Health Services), through a notebook holding corroded sentences which survived the snow, or through dreams, which the author describes in startling cinematicism:
I dreamed of a tree uprooted by the river and instinctively, I climbed up. In the roots, I saw a velvet bag knotted with string, bulky with jewels. I wanted to give it to the family who squatted on the land. They were white. They had long, brown and knotted hair…
These moments, intimate and sensual, create a fractured portrait. They allude to—without articulating directly—a fragmentation of the self and society. Can exploring racism and trauma begin to mend history, or at least come to terms with memory? Kapil writes:
A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can’t be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.
In an interview in TINGE magazine, Kapil says: “In this sense, to throw away the book is to stop the book. To stop is an act of proprioception; it gives the book a severe limit. In the arc of a book’s flight into the dark garden, nothing happens and nothing can happen. This is my anti-colonial stance, my anti-colonial desire, in retrospect.” After the self and the text are displaced, what remnants of language persist? Kapil doesn’t give us answers, yet she doesn’t need to. In the end, Schizophrene is as much about the impossible task of writing such a narrative, and the intricate virtue of that impossibility. ~RS
-Bhanu Kapil, in an interview with Katherine Sanders, BOMBLOG, Sept. 2011
In a September 2011 interview on BOMBLOG, Bhanu Kapil told the story of her first book, published a decade ago. She was an hour into labour, less than twelve hours from giving birth to her son. The phone in her kitchen rang and she picked it up. It was Patricia Dientsfrey from Kelsey Street Press, telling Kapil that they were going to press immediately, and needed a title for her book. She had been having some difficulty titling the manuscript, but when Dientsfrey called, Kapil impulsively said “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.” And then she hung up, to give birth. Kapil recalls that at a certain point, during labor, she thought, “This isn’t pain. It’s intensity.”
One feels much the same affect when consuming Kapil’s newest work from Nightboat books, Schizophrene. The emotion elicited is not so much suffering as it is a beleaguering sense of fervency and magnitude. In the book’s opening “Passive Notes:” Kapil writes:
For some years, I tried to write an epic on Partition and its trans-generational effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on. Towards the end of this project, I felt the great strength of the page: its ability, as a fibrous surface, to deflect the point of my pen.
While this introduction sounds systematic enough, the italicized words create echelons in the mind, a type of ranking of ideas and subjects. During these “Passive Notes:” other words are highlighted –the screen, reflective, touch, had failed, house, winter, fragments, decayed—which produce a layered representation on the page, a painted image by way of words. Through this accumulation of thoughts we come upon a telling narrative: one night, when she knew this manuscript had failed, she threw the notebook in her garden. It snowed that winter, into spring, when she finally retrieved her notes again and began to re-write “from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages.”
This idea of time and decay is central to Schizophrene, which haltingly, in prose, traces the junctures of migration and schizophrenia in diasporic communities, primarily in India and Pakistan. I say haltingly not in slight, but rather to illustrate the subtleties in recounting experience which is communicated in sparse sentences on the page, hemmed in by an exquisite use of blank space. One page from the section 4. ABIOGENESIS reads as follows:
Dreamed I left my coat on the aeroplane.
This sole sentence appears at the top of the page, the rest which is left blank, yet it conveys key points which reappear in the collection: the sub-conscious, journey, personal property. Throughout the text, inquiry is elected (rather than a straight recounting) to explore the trauma (in the context of racism and violence) experienced by immigrant women. Even though the questions are not voiced directly, the demand is clear: in a diverse world how does an artist reconcile oneself with the suffering of affected sectors of society, is reconciliation even possible, and how then to communicate in a scientific yet emotionally relevant context?
These are large concepts, and Kapil handles them well. In eight sections, written in first-person quasi-poetic and intellectually rigorous prose, Kapil guides the reader from her garden in Colorado (where the manuscript was discarded) to South Asia, and to affluent neighborhoods in the United Kingdom where she grew up. Hardly any distinction is made between the “I” of the book to the author herself, positioning Kapil as one of the recipients “the displaced” as Karla Kelsey stated in her review of the book. The immediacy of the first person abolishes the partition between author and subject, Kapil uses herself as a sounding board and a medium:
My mother’s mother put a hand over my mother’s mouth, but my mother saw, peeking between the slats of the cart, row after row of women tied to the border trees. “Their stomachs were cut out,” said my mother. This story, which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many bedtimes of my own childhood.
Sometimes I think it was not an image at all but a way of conveying information.
In Schizophrene, narrative is conveyed through an ancestor or in an interview (such as the one taking place at London’s Institute of Community Health Services), through a notebook holding corroded sentences which survived the snow, or through dreams, which the author describes in startling cinematicism:
I dreamed of a tree uprooted by the river and instinctively, I climbed up. In the roots, I saw a velvet bag knotted with string, bulky with jewels. I wanted to give it to the family who squatted on the land. They were white. They had long, brown and knotted hair…
These moments, intimate and sensual, create a fractured portrait. They allude to—without articulating directly—a fragmentation of the self and society. Can exploring racism and trauma begin to mend history, or at least come to terms with memory? Kapil writes:
A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can’t be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.
In an interview in TINGE magazine, Kapil says: “In this sense, to throw away the book is to stop the book. To stop is an act of proprioception; it gives the book a severe limit. In the arc of a book’s flight into the dark garden, nothing happens and nothing can happen. This is my anti-colonial stance, my anti-colonial desire, in retrospect.” After the self and the text are displaced, what remnants of language persist? Kapil doesn’t give us answers, yet she doesn’t need to. In the end, Schizophrene is as much about the impossible task of writing such a narrative, and the intricate virtue of that impossibility. ~RS
