Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches through memory, the monster and experimental prose at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She also teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She has written four full-length works of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works), Humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books). She is currently writing a novel of the race riot: Ban. The following exchange took place over email between November and December 2012.
Ivy Johnson: Lately I have been reading and rereading Schizophrene and I am struck by a theme of permeability. Right off the bat, it seems that there is a desire to make the manuscript permeable to materiality. Even before the book begins, you write: “On the night I knew my book had failed, I threw it—in the form of a notebook, a hand-written final draft—into the garden of my house in Colorado.” And this is how the book begins, with something like a chance-based procedure, where you relinquish the book, which “makes…an axis, a hunk of electromagnetic fur torn from the side of something still living and thrown, like a wire, threaded, a spark towards the grass.” I also noticed the fear of permeability communicated through a woman and her daughter, who were hospitalized for this fear. You say that if a spoon touched her lips, she had the terrible sensation it was slipping down her throat, or if one of her children brushed against her thigh, she felt as if she were going to swallow them.
What are the risks of living a more permeable life? How do you make yourself more/ less permeable?
The risk of permeability is psychosis if the outside and inside are merged or flipped. That is the extreme state displayed in Schizophrene. For ordinary life, the risk is not being able to stop yourself from doing something that even you don’t understand. I think of writing in a cafe on a Thursday evening. Ordering the tiny fragment of wine in a glass the size of a small house. I sip that wine and drift further and further from what I thought life would be. When I was younger, I used to do this by walking. Stand up and start walking toward a church in the East, says Rilke. I did that. Permeability in this sense is the crux of longing and action. So, it could be the kind of risk that brings immense pleasure, a soft future. But what I write about in the book you have read is a serial account of what happens: when the boundary of the body is transgressed by the sensation that what is happening beyond the body is happening within it. The book is relinquished, as you write. And begins to stir, bird-like, icy, in the garden. Just as writing does, in the body of a person “still living and thrown.” Toward the grass.
Deleuze and Guattari say in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on an analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.” Also, there is a beautiful passage where you write, “I lie down beneath the lemon tree then stand up, leaving an outline in the soft pink earth. I refill my silhouette with glossy, bi-color leaves creased down the middle, their seams bulky with dust; lemons from the lowest branches; bunches garlands of marigolds from the sloped shelf next to the Shiva temple, emptied from a white plastic bag; and divas from the shrine, still flickering like cakes. And hemp. The hemp is prebiotic, activated and repelled by the smoky flame.” This reminds me of the Earth Body Sculptures of the late Ana Mendieta.
Are these both influences on Schizophrene?
So, D/G plus Ana. Yes, the imprint or outline structures and behaviors are inspired by Ana Mendieta: are devotions or homage to her work: a fact that comprises the last note of my endnotes for the book. In 2005, I drove to Des Moines, Iowa from Colorado to see a retrospective of her films, installations, and sculptures, including the one she was working on when she died: La Jungla. Charred runes, tree remnant. The long drive back through Nebraska became the end of my second book, Incubation. The image of a charred rune glowing in the deep point of a jungle became a central motif of Humanimal, my third book. And for Schizophrene, I simply did it: I lay down: an inquiry I’d been unfolding in classes at Naropa and by myself, on riverbanks, for several years. This is the description of a class I taught at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program in 2007: “In Iowa, Ana Mendieta, a Cuban immigrant, created imprints of her body on a riverbank. Excavating these ‘siluetas,’ she then re-filled them with something new: red flowers, mud, tempera powder, fire. Using her work as a radiant lens, we’ll investigate our own ‘emigrant idioms.’ We will build and film siluetas. Writing, we’ll generate bodies at ‘a kind of boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourse.’ Linking our bodies to a landscape, we’ll also consider the question of homage.” I think the quote is from Elizabeth Grosz, another theorist who takes up notions of psychosis in the public domain: the idea that is psychotic not to know where you are, in a national space. And what helps that? What functions as proprioceptive: a boundary of felt sense? From cross-cultural psychiatry, I derived the idea that light touch—impersonal, secular (not necessarily, that is, with a healing or spiritual intention)— can bring: a vestibular and psychosocial balance to an individual at risk of psychosis or in the incipient stages of a psychotic break. The studies I looked at, which I’ve written about elsewhere, don’t speak to acute psychotic states. That said, I’ve also brought therapeutic touch into hospital settings, to contact or perform a kind of contact with people in catatonic states. Who are these people? My mother is [has been] one of these “people”; I’ve also worked as a volunteer in hospitals, for Boulder County hospice and for my immediate community. Touch has a valence that I am still trying to understand; it’s not only, as I said, the activity of contact that has an effect. The catatonic subject makes a silueta too, on the hospital sheets: an indigo light pulsing or strobing the prone form. Catatonia is the end limit of psychosis, in some accounts. I am not sure if I have been able to do this as a writer, bring someone back—help them to come back—but it is part of what my life has been in other areas. Ana is important to me because she links her art to the trajectory of bodies in the world. She wants to find a way to adhere to the earth.
Also, still thinking about siluetas, have you ever seen this image by Francesca Woodman? (1) Her photographs are amazing. What about Capitalism and Schizophrenia? You write, “An economy is a system of apparently willing but actually involuntary exchanges. A family, for example, is really a shop front, a glass plate open to the street.”
If the trigger for schizophrenia, in young Caribbean men and middle-aged Indian and Pakistani women (in London) was found [see: Dinesh Bhugra and Peter Jones’ groundbreaking studies of migration and mental illness] to be not race, but the race factor [ethnic density] then we are in the realm of economics [urban housing] as much as the biology itself. Contemporary epidemiologies of psychosis link cultural and environmental factors to the body. Transgenerationally, I think about pre-migration factors as well; violent societies but also poverty, in the case of my family, as motivating factors. A kind of non-desire.
Perhaps this invented word or idea, “non-de- sire,” can bring us to the oily torso reflected on the floor in the photograph by Francesca Woodman—that I had not seen before but which links to Mendieta—to part of the discourse of outline, imprint, the body as something that presses against a surface in order to exchange life with a surface. Is that what it takes to feel like a person on the earth? In Chicago, on the windowsill of the Renaissance Gallery, I took a pencil and wrote: “I want to have sex with what I want to become.” There was a blizzard. I had to give a reading. It was my first visit to that city; the snow fell upwards into the sky. I felt awkward in my bridal trousseau, that I had chosen as my outfit. It was bright pink and covered with gauzy gold dots.
Ethnic density is the idea that, for an immigrant, living in a neighborhood with few immigrants is worse—as a trigger for psychosis—than living in an entirely immigrant neighborhood. Just one or two other brown faces, if the immigrants are brown—which they are not, anymore, in the part of London where I am from—they are Eastern European—Romanian, Croatian, Polish— is also not good.
My father was infernally poor. He dragged himself out of the sky to get to England. My mother took a bloody passage from Pakistan to India after [during?] Partition. I feel those effects are still omnipresent, fifty or more years on. How is that possible? Ancestral vibration is something I can work with directly in the book because I am working with sound, phonemes, the light that words give off. That is one of my goals. My goals are non-commercial. I can’t tell if that’s good or bad.
While we are on the subject of borders, what about language as a border? It seems that something about this is happening in Humanimal. Also, were you thinking about Joan Retallack Poethical Wager in this passage when you mention “swerve” which Retallack sees as being necessary in poetics to break us of habitus, which she defines as culturally congealed thought? And again, in your passage, the habitus goes back to regulate the body.
No, Retallack has Not been an influence. The swerve, for me, is not a poetics; it is a movement—the condition, that is, of a reversible or concurrent trajectory. Like a double life line. I think here there is a sub-question for me about experimental lineage: who do you read in order to become a writer? In the U.K., I read—exclusively—contemporary British, South American and European fiction, for example. The swerve was the frame: Indian writing in English, for example. Or writing translated into English that did not begin as English. Now, my theory people are: Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Alphonso Lingis: people writing about biology and society in the same space.
On borders. I know that I want the border in a book to match up, somehow—directly or indirectly—to the fact of the border in the world. I’ve written and thought about this extensively in other places, and I teach through this fact: the border is not a metaphor. I think this is why sentences and forms are the way they are in what I write: the place where the border is registered more than it is constructed or made visible. Syntax is primal, inherited, an ancestral vibration coded as movement: ease of movement but also restriction, refraction, abandonment, warfare’s bed. I think of the commas and semicolons, for example, as butcher’s hooks; sites of visceral comprehension. A way, also, to point away from the forward movement of time in a narrative; towards history. That meat shop. Writing a sentence is thus a way to think about land mass, colonial history and the body at the same time.
Looking at the sentence from Humanimal, what I notice is the way that expression balks. I do not like to analyze my own actual writing. I like your use of the phrase: “regulate the body.” I definitely want to have that in my books—these immense forces that I feel, sometimes, have pinned me to the ground as myself. What I write is not autobiography—or intended as such—but I seem to have accidentally written one.
The theme for 580 Split this year is Obsession. What are you currently obsessed with?
I am obsessed by public records into the inquiry resulting from Blair Peach’s death on April 23rd, 1979. I am obsessed by the protester. I am obsessed by the anti-Nazi campaign that was intensely active in the late 1970s. And the potential need for one now. I am interested in the precursors to contemporary riots and revolutionary actions.
What haunts you?
Love Lost.
Have you been following the protests taking place in New Delhi following the gang rape and murder of the unnamed, 23-year-old medical student? It is horrifying. What do you think of the response of a crowd in Assam, India, who captured senior official Bikram Singh Brahma, and publicly stripped and beat him for a rape accusation?
Yes, yes of course. Re: following the rape, evisceration and murder of the girl on the bus from Delhi. Today I was wearing a kurta—a sort of short dress worn over jeans—that I bought in a market less than five minutes away from where the girl and her friend were left [thrown]. In June. In December. I spoke about her body as sacrificed, in some sense, in a public talk I gave today—thinking of how some things, some events or parts of events will never be integrated. How sacrifice is most powerful when it is witnessed; I think in this case there are three sets of witnesses: her male friend, the group of people (including the police) who gathered around her bleeding body on the ground and refused, for over an hour, to help; and us—the protesters in India and beyond India, who are perhaps distinct from the women everywhere who feel, for an instant, the news of what happened to this girl’s body as a convulsion of the smooth muscle in their own. I haven’t followed what is happening in Assam, but I have been writing about the protests in Delhi on my blog and hearing about it, accounts of these protests, from relatives there. I’d like to go back to what I said and remove the word sacrifice actually; it came up following the talk I gave, not during it. Still thinking things through. The talk I gave today was on narrative, trauma and the nervous system, with a particular focus on sexual violence—thinking, also, of Ban—who is caught by a gang of boys in the opening minutes or hours of a historical riot, the riot of April 23rd, 1979. I think I already talked about this girl in another answer to one of your questions, Ivy. Ban lies down on the ground because—in Agamben’s words—she’s “already dead.” I get that. The part of being an Indian woman or girl that is the enactment, over a lifetime, of a kind of social death. I want to think more about shame.
What are you working on now?
Tonight I had a conversation with the playwright and graphic novelist, Susan Kim. She said: “Ban is eternal.” She said: “Ban is a stain that doesn’t wash off.” No matter how much a person was to write Ban, Ban never recedes— a persistence that resembles staining—the stain of a leaf on the sidewalk—but also, unlike a stain, never fades. Therefore, perhaps I am still working on Ban. At the moment, it [Ban] is being read by a publisher but I am aware—depth-like—that the publisher may say no. That is okay. It is okay to fail. It is okay not to be the most fantastic writer ever. What I care about is writing itself—that the magic is happening, when it does and can. I experience Ban’s magic most intensely when she reappears: when the slab of the sidewalk beneath her begins to tilt, the tree roots distending the concrete with its seams of northern European moss. Hang on. I am also writing an essay on Gail Scott’s “The Obituary” for Laynie Browne’s anthology on novels written by poets. My next collections are: “India: A How-to Primer.” And a book of urban-rural spa treatments co-authored with the poet-novelist, Douglas Martin. That’s a lot of name-dropping. Can I just say that I think of other writers as unicorns, the kind of people who invert themselves above rivers and read the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in the bath?
