The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil

by Bhanu Kapil

Poetry. Asian American Studies. THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.

Genres: Poetry, School, Fiction, British Literature, Asia, India, Read For School

Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian poet who lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Kapil taught for many years at Naropa University and Goddard College. In 2019, she was awarded the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. During this time, she completed her first full-length poetry collection to be published in the United Kingdom, How to Wash a Heart (2020). Kapil received the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry in 2020.

Reviews

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

save me, esoteric montage-like chorus of prose poems, SAVE MEEE

[Priscilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing can be lovely, or at least interesting, but this book did little but, well, piss me off from the beginning. The "voices", for much of the book, were so homogenous that I found it hard to buy the premise that this is a collection of many women's voices. Also, the book aims to illuminate/illustrate/give voice to/recreate/whatever the "women's experience" (whatever THAT is), but by and large every entry is about a man in some way, as if to say that woman can only define herself by her 1) lovers or 2) father. Also also, I hate it when books tell me that they're going to give me the "women's experience" because then, when they ultimately fail and alienate me, I'm left feeling that I must then be some sort of failure as a woman. Also also also, I would like to know how Kapil made her selections of these pieces - that is, what did they look like before she started editing them and how much of what she was given don't we see? She says in the intro that she did nothing to the responses in terms of grammar or punctuation or how a given woman filled the space on the page, but am I then to believe that every woman she encountered - from ladies in laundromats to professors and poets - writes in block prose poem form, and that the vast majority of women start every paragraph with a sentence fragment?

I think the problems and issues of this book outweigh and out shine whatever pleasure I can derive from the language. However, I'm not sorry that I'll be teaching it this fall. I was expecting and understanding that it would be difficult for students because of the language, but I also now think it will be very useful to have a highly problematic text as a way into discussing truth in writing, problems that can occur when one person is speaking for many, how you tell different voices on a page, etc.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This rhizomatic text of dispersed and often displaced voices — women scattered across continents, each carrying their own traumas, ties, and appetites — somehow manages both to cohere as a powerful chorus and remain strikingly individuated. I felt surrounded but never crowded, called to listen but never forced.

I wish there were more concrete language to describe what was happening here, and perhaps the best way is to rehearse Kapil’s own process: this experience was like listening in on the recorded sessions each of Kapil’s participants had with a series of provocative, open-ended questions. The answers — theirs and Kapil’s and mine — ensure that this book does not end at its scant 100 pages, but instead extends into every element of readers’ (and, I’m sure, contributors’) craft. A vital text for any writer.

[Amira Hanafi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent a lot of time while reading this book flipping back to the cryptic introduction. It did not detract much, though, from the dizzying colors that arose from this prose. Some of the passages in this book of answers had me gasping. Bhanu Kapil composes in the little cracks between. If you're thinking of reading this, do it now. And read Incubation too. Then I'm going to read them again with you.

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Punjab. Late spring. Sitting at the edge of my bed, I lean down to put my sandals on. Next to my sandals: a dark, hollow skin, as long and thick as a man's leg. The skin of a king cobra. When I touch it, the colour yellow explodes, at the base of my spine. Rises like shot, up, then out of me. Something that happened that morning: there is something in me, it must be met."

(from '66. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?' p78)

[alicia gan · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely exploration of what it means to be a woman, an immigrant, a lover, etc. my personal favs were 32, 33, 85, 20

each piece was evocative, though in a vague, half-formed sort of way. this book reminded me that beauty can exist without full understanding, that familiarity and empathy can coincide; all conveyed thru poetry that is distinctively raw/honest

the only thing i will say is the that premise confused me: the writing seemed too homogeneous to be unedited words from different women being interviewed. the thematic continuity between each piece disproved that premise, at least for me (there's no way continuity would exist if these interviews were not at all tampered with). regardless, still a great book

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

actual rating: 3,5 stars
I was really excited to read this book as the author has almost identical heritage as me (one parent from India, one from England, and grew up in North America). I thought the fraught premise of belonging would be an interesting exploration within this context, each “chapter” (usually a page each) begins with one of twelve broad questions she outlines at the beginning. Unfortunately I feel the execution fell short of the idea, there were certain parts that were brilliant but mostly it was too vague and unclear, and not in the good way.

[sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

what an incredible work. so amazing i decided to write a substack on it :P
https://open.substack.com/pub/sofiaka...

[Rob Hendricks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS BOOK.

Bhanu Kapil overtly frames her work as jumping off from inquiry at the intersections of feminist and post-colonial discourse, but not so much ultimately, as it might first seem, in the mode of cultural critique, but rather as a pointed effort to construct a kind of anonymous, collective field or talisman of belonging, a kind of written refuge, which represents in abstraction her particular social location, touching deeply upon her own personal experience of being an ancestrally Indian woman born in England and living in the United States. Kapil’s relationship to culture seems deeply problematic at the level of belonging and mattering, such core emotional needs, because of the layers of simultaneous identity and alienation in which she exists. (Living in English language and culture, but carrying a deeper belonging in Indian culture, but at such a great remove.) The global history of English domination, plus the more immediate history of her family and of herself, as migrants, implies junctures of violent dislocation and loss of context, as well as choices made with a sense of agency along a trajectory away from any original cultural matrix. The voice of her poetry serves belonging and mattering in two ways -- one, by generating a sense of likenesses, solidarity and identity around the experiences represented, and two, by co-creating a space in which these experiences can be seen, heard, and known, as the fused experience of a group, received in a larger matrix of understanding and resonance outward.

Kapil claims to have integrated the language of many speakers into her work. She claims this without offering any clear delineation of “voices,” without holding herself accountable to any linearity of narration, but availing herself of some linearity nevertheless to generate focus, momentum, pattern and appeal. My gut sense is that Kapil draws on her source material most especially with an eye for certain kinds of language, which will help her to create the special world, the special atmosphere and ambience she desires. My gut sense is that Kapil is creating a vivid and sensual world for herself, pleasurably psychotic, transmogrifying and beautifying her suffering by re-contextualizing it and making more space for it. When she establishes categories of thought with her “Twelve Questions,” but then deploys these categories erratically throughout the work, filling the containers they create with tangential and loosely adjoining content, the overall effect is distortion. The questions ultimately serve to help establish depth and meaning, even though the answers basically evade the questions, evoking and insinuating emotional experiences that seem like they might be vaguely cogent.

Despite Kapil’s claim that she is weaving the voices of many women, the voice of her work bears a remarkable consistency of tone and resonance. The self presented by Kapil in Interrogation of Strangers does not reside in an individual consciousness, but it is curated by an individual consciousness. She makes it clear in the introductory apparatus that she personally identifies with the content of her text, and that she has woven her own memory and imaginative experience into the fabric of her book. There are thematic consistencies in this book, which presumably span across its disparate sources: the body, its smells and fluids, love relationships with parents and men, the self seen through the lens of parents and men, absences, contemplative experiences in relation to landscape and fine art and the objects of dailiness, family narratives of becoming. A dislocated but congruous self seems to emerge from these disparate thematic points of reference. The congruity of this co-created self, strikes me as deeply and wonderfully authentic, and I think that authenticity is essential to a work like this, as it is the fundament of the sort of belonging towards which the work seems to be striving.

By structuring the book around the “Twelve Questions” and then answering the questions with densely symbolic and discontinuous material, Kapil establishes a very fruitful tension wherein the reader wishes for answers and receives something more like pure experience, pure awareness, the turning and turning of self-reflection, memory and desire, as lives are metabolized and smoothed into a larger skein of comprehension.

I REALLY LOVED THIS BOOK.

[Denise R Weuve · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are lines, even multiple lines that are really gorgeous and wrap themselves in the beauty of prose with the poetry ribbon. And it is prose poetry as it were, but in the end it is not a shining example of great prose poetry. Yes there have been 3 printings, and yes the concept is amazing; asking the same 12 questions to multiple women and given them voice. These women (though acknowledge by the author that she would being representing them through her voice) are a blur of each other. Their difference missing, their beauty lost.

I'm often saddened by what i saw as missed opportunities, such as in 16 where the second paragraph (stanza, if it makes you happy, but this is a prose poem, and technically it is a paragraph) where the embodiment of the prose poem lives. It is delicately formed with a poets touch, but aware of that which makes a prose poem a prose poem with the addition of the surreal and a narrative that takes you elsewhere; the way good writing always does.

Again the concept here, as well as in her other books, is fabulous and i am jealous that I do not think that way, but as I read this throughout my mind would often wander to her contemporary, Shivani Mehta, and leave me wanting to reread Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded.

[Carrie Chappell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will remember this collection for its unique invitation to the female interior. Rider's text is another example of how physical and sexual confinement and abuse force the mind and heart to express. While sensing the borders of our prison, we turn inward to grasp other freedoms with an alarming specificity, a revolutionary awareness of self and other and the otherness of self.

I am still not sure how Rider composed these poems, as she admits in the opening that the book stems from her interviewing a number of Indian women. Is this poetry? Yes, I do think so, but it is altogether creepy to feel excited by these voices, in that an elation would somehow condone the entities and constructs that have for so long silenced or manipulated these women. Yet, I can praise this as art because, to me, this text does represent a common struggle. All of us, it feels, are pushed by exterior forces, some gentler than others, into certain recesses in order to maintain sanity and identity.

I'll return to this book's passages often, I imagine.

[Roz Ito · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live by these sentences. Writing is dangerous.

The above is from one of the responses to the question "Describe a morning you woke without fear," and it pretty much sums up this book for me. Gutsy & risky, volatile & inspiring, Kapil's interrogations of strangers & self strip language & recollection down to the rawest root, the scariest, most vulnerable core of the many secrets that must be confronted head-on (especially by women) in order to survive, in order to be alive. An intense, at times terrifying, read; the one thing I wished it had was more seams & linkages between the responses of self-revelation that make up the book as Kapil eventually wrote it and the original "spoken (tape-recorded) or written response[s]" that Kapil elicited from the numerous unnamed Indian women whom she apparently interviewed on three different continents at the start of the project.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kapil is a master of repetition that doesn't bore. It's not a repetition like Gertrude Stein. Kapil's is more nuanced -- you might not notice it right away. It's not poetry as in poetry about beautiful landscapes or people necessarily, it seems to have bodies and places and diaspora and pain. Maybe poetry as in pain. But also poetry about invisibility, to me, maybe. It took me so long to read since I kept certain favourites or ones I desired to reread bookmarked. I reread them many times before reading it all.

I also love the cover which is reminiscent of Ana Mendieta's Silueta series. Perhaps some themes in Mendieta's artwork and Kapil's work allign.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book. It was recommended by a friend, a poet who is -- like Kapil -- a fearless explorer or form. Then I came upon Jean Valentine's poetic responses to some of the twelve questions Kapil asked of strangers (and, ultimately, herself) in the book. And I was drawn in. For me, the twelve questions transcend Kapil's "answers," but that's fine. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers is marvelous in its risk and inventiveness. Its private lyricisms are infectious. And I most admire its daring, how it explores interiors and exteriors so honestly.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

seized me in the moment I needed it most. completely arresting, powerful.

these are the questions we need to ask ourselves to remind us of our humanity. our identities. how we survive. how we go on living despite pain, despite injustice.

PS: having completed it, oh my god, can I tell you all, can I tell the world how beautiful this book is? is it possible to break my heart and strengthen it at the same time? the world, it brims.

[Nathanial · Rating 4 out of 5]

one thing that the goodreads' summary doesn't mention is that b.k.r. had originally set out to interview women in those three countries, using her 12 questions, and then compile their responses into a book. in her preface, bkr explains that she instead took 'the sound of their voices' as a template, and allowed her own words to emerge from there.

[Eric]

This is a link to Bhanu Kapil reading her work:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsoun...

[Ching-In · Rating 5 out of 5]

I held my breath while reading & re-reading this gorgeous book.

[Elle Klock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life. I carried it around with me for years.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The giving up of, again. Over and over, isn't it? Isn't it? Can't." And then, scrawled, in his delicate colonial script: You are always pretending.

Even this sentence is suspect: indefensible; potentially, already, rewritten. It's not even that. It's the bloodiness of remembering everything. I am bored of memory. I am bored of description. (My brain is too exposed. Old jelly. Inedible.)

I'm not sure what to make of this work by Bhanu Kapil. It isn't poetry, it isn't prose poetry, it isn't prose. I don't know if it's a diary or journal or, as the introduction notes, revised and organized snippets of transcripts from strange women confined to a windowless cell for half an hour to write their gut reactions to 12 questions. And that bothers me: This work has a two-page introduction yet I haven't a clue what target she is trying to hit. She notes this in the introduction:

--The project as I thought it would be:
an anthology of the voices of Indian women.

-- The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane

And, perhaps, a "tilted plane" crashing into a beautiful mountain is an accurate description of what exactly is accomplished here. If this work is a consolidation and reworking of the experiences recorded by these interrogated women, then the work is fascinating because the disjointed narrative spirals in such a way the women's voices become a single woman within the text with a sense of history, context, etc. If the narrator is Kapil wallowing in her own personal experiences, it's tacky and narcissistic.

To provide a clear indication of what this work is like, I'll quote one of the passages at length:

19. WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF YOUR BODY?

I took notes. But once, after the first few months, he stole my notebook, tore out the pages with all the sexual sentences, photocopied them. His yellow teeth. His Nick Cave albums. His love of eggplant parmesan. And so there are gaps. A surprise ending: and then I see him again, and my whole body is full of spicy eggs. The tangles of my menstrual hair. The swell of my lower body.

I can smell myself."I knew this woman," he said, "Her vagina smelled of flowers. Have you ever considered using a douche?" I met him in the spring. Walking home along the canal bank, I'd snap off tiger buds. Lily heads, and eat them. They tasted good, but I got the shits.

This passage represents the entire lay of the book. Again, I don't know what to make of it. Is she combining the responses of a lot of interrogated women and creating these paragraphs out of it, working the original material like a collage? Or is she, as is often the case, pissed off about someone from somewhere about something?

Truthfully, if #19 strikes your fancy, this work is for you. If not, there's not a whole lot of variety here. Not sure what Kapil is achieving here.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

REASONS TO BE cheerful: I had not heard of Bhanu Kapil until about a year ago, when a poet who often has good recommendations mentioned her to me. I bought this online. It's from a small press--Kelsey St Press--and is very sparely presented; it bears no blurbs, no descriptions, not even an author photo. As I do, I checked to see what year it was published (2001), and then noticed that my copy was the seventh printing, from 2018.

Seven printings!

Not too shabby.

And the book is astonishing. In the 1990s, Kapil undertook a project to interview as many Indian women as possible all over the world, asking them all the same twelve questions (e.g., "How will you begin?", "Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?", "Describe a morning you woke without fear"--the whole list is on page 9). This book contains her own answers to the questions, ninety-eight prose poems in all (each question gets several answers), all but one contained on a single page.

Reading the book, one accumulates a rich sense of Kapil's parents, work, and love life, but not so much by straight exposition as by a mosaic method, each poem dazzling in its discontinuities, clear and often independent images, startling juxtapositions. For a short example, here is number 46, an answer to "Describe a morning you woke without fear':
I've followed you as far as I can. To this ribbon of silver plastic, fluttering from a tree: innards of a tape you gave me: madrigals, etc. I threw it out the window last winter, at night, when the bone stars were rising in the trees.
So we have an ending--"I've followed you as far as I can"--then the precise but inexplicable image of the plastic ribbon in the tree. Tinsel? No, a heaved cassette, suggesting anger, displaced violence, but when the bone stars (bone stars) enter the scene, a serenity gathers, and we have a sense of why this was a morning without fear.

Each poem is in a kind of membrane like that, its own city-cell, but the membranes are permeable, so as one reads the book, recurring elements combine and recombine, making a world.

What a great book.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have complicated feelings on this one, and it’s almost entirely because of the introduction! This collection of poems is stated as a documentary project taking place over four years, where the author sought to create an anthology of the voices of Indian woman using recorded interviews or written responses. I love this concept, and I love the results. I am stuck on this:

“My aim was to ensure an honest and swift text, uncensored by guilt or the desire to construct an impressive, publishable “finish.” In editing this anthology of responses, I did not attempt to “clean up” their roughness or rawness in terms of syntax, grammar, spelling, punctuation, or the way in which they filled the space of the page. The only alterations I made were in converting responses, or parts of responses, into English.”

Given the consistency of the writing throughout all of these poems, I have my doubts that all of the interviewees were able to speak so eloquently or abstractly on the ten “prompts” she gives, or what relationship a lot of the answers bear towards the prompts. The voice in every poem seems too consistent for the supposed multiplicity of interviewees. My best guess is that these are sort of found poems/erasure poems based on the interviews, but I found her introduction unlikely. I got very distracted by these problems when I began reading.

The poems themselves are beautiful and dark, often centering on relationships and violence. While I felt Bhanu Kapil’s introduction may have been misleading, the poems themselves feel very honest and embodied in the women she has recorded, and they contain the guilt and desire she wanted. I feel she perfectly achieves her task. But the titles of these poems set me back, because they often feel disjointed from the poem itself. Does poetry happen between the space of each title (a response to a question) or does it set readers on the wrong foot? It was this structural element I had a problem with, and I think it could have been resolved with a more sufficient explanation.

[Sarah Leister · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and powerful read, and a great example of contemporary poetry that seeks to convey feelings and experiences in a different way. I found that a couple excerpts, especially at the beginning, were hard to decipher and therefore not particularly effective. However, as you read on and become more used to the method Kapil chose to write the piece and subsequently start seeing connections between the excerpts, it becomes especially compelling. I found that there were many powerful lines that resonated with me, especially towards the middle (but I also felt like these middle excerpts were the most straightforward to understand). The way these women's stories were told was thought-provoking, tragic at times, and beautiful. Though vague and very subtle, the prose was very effective in bringing about certain emotions.

I felt a bit confused and taken aback by how Kapil characterizes the work in the beginning, as going in you don't realize how much Kapil rearranged and used creative liberty when writing the responses of these women, leading to confusion. For the first couple of excerpts, you are less moved by the work and more sitting there stumped, trying to understand whats happening on the page.

Once immersed in the work, though, its more of an experience than an understanding. I liked the commentary on beauty, motherhood, shame, desire, aging, and feeling separated from your home (being one place yet feeling the pull of another).

I think I could take even more from the prose upon a reread.

[haley joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is difficult today. The orchard. (Making something.) I see making a shape there” (12)

"It is difficult. He is always with me. These are the scraps" (13)

"Floating candles. The incommensurable distance. I forgot to memorize his face" (14)

"She kisses him with a kiss she learned from books. Sticky. Sometimes, for days, weeks even, she forgets that she is going to die" (22)

"Sometimes you feel very pleased to be on the move again. Sometimes you miss your father so badly, you dream of an opaque ocean filled with pink flamingos. Your father is waiting for you in a cafe with striped awnings on the far shore. He is eating fish and chips, and pomegrantes. You swim and swim. When you reach the sand, he's gone. You take his battered brown shoes in your arms one by one, cradling them like the littlest ones with the flapping dusty tongues, the ones you have to bring inside, to wean" (30)

"The disaster is the gift. And it was." (32)

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am not writing about myself as a rational human being. I am writing about the substances of an animal and female life: magic, pain, the cracked nails of four feet, and the days like this one, when it is difficult to speak to a good-looking man."

"In the language we made up one night, the word for lover was the same as the word for a neatly folded manuscript you don't look at for one year."

"I remember the oiliness of my fingertips, and the smell of human flesh, upriver, burning. [...] How I sat for hours, drinking the hot, sweet, milky tea, my last night there before I headed south, to Jaipur. A red desert. The opposite of a sea. Its aftermath."

Such a great poetry collection to return to over time. I read it within the span of a couple hours. Every word serves a purpose.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful and interesting premise - a British-Indian poet interviews other British-Indian women by asking a series of 12 questions and weaving together their answers. There is no narrative line here, and the resulting mini-sketches flesh out a facet of who these women are, but I felt there was rich material that could have been more deeply dived into. The poet's disclaimer at the beginning explains the project and states that she did nothing to edit her interviewees' responses, but since the works are all told in one cohesive voice, that doesn't necessarily ring true.

[Martissa Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this stirring, cloudy read, Kapil strings together the embodied experiences of multiple Indian and East Asian women (including herself) and stitches them inseparably to the masculine. Every question asked begs to implicate the silence lived and maintained by the one questioned. We are all complacent, active and victims to the ways patriarchal society renders us speechless. Trapped in our longing and in our exhaustion to fight — we wonder the clock of our lives grappling with the cost of silence, the ever morphing shape of our bodies and how we will begin and die again.

[Achille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dope concept. Bhanu Kapil travels around the US/UK/India asking the same 12 questions to multiple women. She weaves their responses into a collection of prose poetry that is intimate, kaleidoscopic and understatedly elegant. Really brilliant stuff here.

[gold cs · Rating 5 out of 5]

raw language circling a perfect kind of notation, both sparse and bursting with implications about how women maintain themselves in postcolonial subjectivity. I read this first in 2020 in an intro poetry class in college. It was difficult then, but now it just rang and rang.

[Hannah Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

#sealeychallenge day 3: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by Bhanu Kapil. I feel grateful to have inherited this copy from a poet friend (Gina Abelkop) and to have her notes + red marks following me across state lines 🌱