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Ban en Banlieue
Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue follows a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, in 1979, is the axis of this startling work of overlapping arcs and varying approaches. By the end of the night, Ban moves into an incarnate and untethered presence, becoming all matter soot, meat, diesel oil and force as she loops the city with the energy of global weather. Derived from performances in India, England and throughout the U.S., Ban en Banlieue is written at the limit of somatic and civic aims.
109 pages, Paperback
First published January 15, 2015
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About the author
Bhanu Kapil
30 books233 followersBhanu 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 115 reviews
March 9, 2016
Note: This review purposely attempts to mimic the style of this book.
Review, March 2016.
No, I don't think so. Ban lies naked on my coffee table, a wooden tray on a leather ottoman. Someone covers it with paper. No one takes off their clothes. But we -- eat -- chew -- blink -- ignore -- [hold up cookies in our fists] "What kind of book is this, ma'am?"
At 7:40 p.m. I began to write -- but did not write. What would I have written if I had read a different book? It is interesting to write a review that failed. But I did not write a review. I am interested in reviews but not in the vulnerable way that most reviews open a carcass to the air and let it rot. Let small black intestines writhe from her stomach. Let them dissolve into the asphalt as an oily residue. I laid down -- curled on my side -- considered -- the cats are confused and extend small pink tongues to lick the tile -- the charcoal -- the outline of her body is mine. Then I stopped writing. I did not ever start.
I analyze my glimpse of incoherence.
From one angle, it is beautiful. It gleams with bizarre images. Performance art -- reduced -- to poetry. But trying to be a novel, it blackens, oozes. Becomes a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash). A girl walks home in the first few moments of a race riot and I am confused. I want to know what happens. Everything happens, and because everything happens, nothing happens. When it was time for such a thing, I could not bear to pick up the book.
She is naked on many pages and in many cities and I don't understand why. Nobody seems to see someone do this. Exhibitionism is the wrong answer but the colors all fit, or they are unfamiliar pinks. I want to feel the taste of logic on my tongue but is it copper wire? Is there a groin? [There are crackers on the table]
Review, March 2016.
No, I don't think so. Ban lies naked on my coffee table, a wooden tray on a leather ottoman. Someone covers it with paper. No one takes off their clothes. But we -- eat -- chew -- blink -- ignore -- [hold up cookies in our fists] "What kind of book is this, ma'am?"
At 7:40 p.m. I began to write -- but did not write. What would I have written if I had read a different book? It is interesting to write a review that failed. But I did not write a review. I am interested in reviews but not in the vulnerable way that most reviews open a carcass to the air and let it rot. Let small black intestines writhe from her stomach. Let them dissolve into the asphalt as an oily residue. I laid down -- curled on my side -- considered -- the cats are confused and extend small pink tongues to lick the tile -- the charcoal -- the outline of her body is mine. Then I stopped writing. I did not ever start.
I analyze my glimpse of incoherence.
From one angle, it is beautiful. It gleams with bizarre images. Performance art -- reduced -- to poetry. But trying to be a novel, it blackens, oozes. Becomes a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash). A girl walks home in the first few moments of a race riot and I am confused. I want to know what happens. Everything happens, and because everything happens, nothing happens. When it was time for such a thing, I could not bear to pick up the book.
She is naked on many pages and in many cities and I don't understand why. Nobody seems to see someone do this. Exhibitionism is the wrong answer but the colors all fit, or they are unfamiliar pinks. I want to feel the taste of logic on my tongue but is it copper wire? Is there a groin? [There are crackers on the table]
June 1, 2015
"One thing next to another doesn't mean they touch."
- Bhanu Kapil
Motto for this notebook of collected fragments toward a novel that will never be written. The resonant action of a woman laying down on the sidewalk when confronted by the oncoming violence of a race riot, playing dead before her actual death, examined from many angles and eras.
- Bhanu Kapil
Motto for this notebook of collected fragments toward a novel that will never be written. The resonant action of a woman laying down on the sidewalk when confronted by the oncoming violence of a race riot, playing dead before her actual death, examined from many angles and eras.
March 23, 2016
More thoughts to come. This could have easily been one star but I prefer to save those for people who can't write. Kapil quite obviously can write in an intentional and lovely manner, but that isn't reason enough to publish this non-novel, non-poetry collection.
February 18, 2016
This review originally appeared on my blog at http://francesca-lisette.tumblr.com
+++
I have finished reading ban en banlieue, which in actuality means I have begun reading it, begun letting the book read me. this is the text as destabilised, delinearised encounter. i can’t remember the last time i read a book so exciting, so incendiary.
‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’
a litany of changing light, gathering in weird skies, a foreign (but all too familiar) england. ban is a novel of what happens when the poet encounters an image so arresting it (she) arrests the scene entirely. if i were a critic still absorbed in assessing what genre is, i would call the image which is the gurgling vortex of this work the poetic moment. here it is: a girl walking home from school lies down in the first moments of a race riot. at this moment she is overcome, deciding never to get up again. she’s also: NOT A GIRL, or not only that, in the same sense that all girls aren’t. ban en banlieue is a brilliant exploration of radical passivity, of adopting refusal as the fiercest strategy with which to fight race hatred, colonialism, sexual abuse: but it is also about peering into the darkness of that place, that yet inarticulable vague space in which a girl becomes ash rising above a city; bitumen, tar, blackness that descends, recoagulates, recoils, spits. a memory, a spirit, an autonomous and fearsome deity. & what is central to this writing is the body’s pulsing absorption and transmission, its recording function, enhanced and blown to smithereens – thus recreating the intricacies of the nervous system’s codes of fight or flight. in experiencing trauma, the body freezes and psychic resistance takes over. but that energy has to go somewhere. BAN is what happens after the tragedy, after the witnesses have left the scene; a haunting made visceral.
how rare to read a book so angry and yet deeply spiritual, generous and tender, all at once. how rare to read a book that not only invents but exposes its own cosmology. bhanu kapil has made from her attempt to write BAN, a book as dendritic body: notes, dedications, diary entries, rituals, performances, conversations, meditations, quotations – the spine of a book turned inside out, cyborgian, freakish, hairy stiletto limbs splayed out, dazzling.
this book SHIMMERS with urgency. ban en banlieue has the aura of both labyrinth and oracle: as you enter it, so it enters you.
+++
I have finished reading ban en banlieue, which in actuality means I have begun reading it, begun letting the book read me. this is the text as destabilised, delinearised encounter. i can’t remember the last time i read a book so exciting, so incendiary.
‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’
a litany of changing light, gathering in weird skies, a foreign (but all too familiar) england. ban is a novel of what happens when the poet encounters an image so arresting it (she) arrests the scene entirely. if i were a critic still absorbed in assessing what genre is, i would call the image which is the gurgling vortex of this work the poetic moment. here it is: a girl walking home from school lies down in the first moments of a race riot. at this moment she is overcome, deciding never to get up again. she’s also: NOT A GIRL, or not only that, in the same sense that all girls aren’t. ban en banlieue is a brilliant exploration of radical passivity, of adopting refusal as the fiercest strategy with which to fight race hatred, colonialism, sexual abuse: but it is also about peering into the darkness of that place, that yet inarticulable vague space in which a girl becomes ash rising above a city; bitumen, tar, blackness that descends, recoagulates, recoils, spits. a memory, a spirit, an autonomous and fearsome deity. & what is central to this writing is the body’s pulsing absorption and transmission, its recording function, enhanced and blown to smithereens – thus recreating the intricacies of the nervous system’s codes of fight or flight. in experiencing trauma, the body freezes and psychic resistance takes over. but that energy has to go somewhere. BAN is what happens after the tragedy, after the witnesses have left the scene; a haunting made visceral.
how rare to read a book so angry and yet deeply spiritual, generous and tender, all at once. how rare to read a book that not only invents but exposes its own cosmology. bhanu kapil has made from her attempt to write BAN, a book as dendritic body: notes, dedications, diary entries, rituals, performances, conversations, meditations, quotations – the spine of a book turned inside out, cyborgian, freakish, hairy stiletto limbs splayed out, dazzling.
this book SHIMMERS with urgency. ban en banlieue has the aura of both labyrinth and oracle: as you enter it, so it enters you.
January 16, 2016
"If I see this, this, and this, then even though I cannot see it, there must be a novel at the center of it." - a scientific hypothesis about the negative novel found here. I want to dislike this book more, but I actually find that I have a solid level of respect for it. I don't know if I would consider it a work of fiction, let alone a novel - and there will be some angry ToBers, I'm sure, who will rant about how this was included as opposed to X, Y, or Z - but at the same time, it achieves an incredible feat by presenting to us literally everything but the novel. It is the dark matter that surrounds a novel that is not once actually presented to us, but that we can still somehow see (or at least see an approximation of it) because we've been able to piece together the outline of it from everything else that surrounds it. It is intriguing but its hollowness is, in the end, overwhelmingly hindering to that same thought-provocation.
More TK.
More TK.
January 31, 2016
In the notes section the author states, "I was interested in what happens when you don't say anything at all."
This book is what happens when you don't say anything at all. It is an anti-book. It was a colossal waste of my time. I only finished it because of the Tournament of Books.
Fellow TOBers. Skip it.
This book is what happens when you don't say anything at all. It is an anti-book. It was a colossal waste of my time. I only finished it because of the Tournament of Books.
Fellow TOBers. Skip it.
May 27, 2015
Folds out long limbs from itself into the world, into not-novel spaces and is in general a book of a blueprint that is also a building, a feat. Also beautiful to read.
February 9, 2016
There is something here, I just don't know what it is. I wasn't planning on reading Ban En Banlieue for this year's (2016) Tournament of Books (ToB) -- it just seemed too strange (just read that blurb above!) and was largely unavailable (no Kindle version, out of stock at most retailers), but alas I did find it and I figured what the heck, I can get through about 100 pages of pretty much anything, right?!? And that's what I got, 100 pages of pretty much anything. Literally.
It was pretty much everything in an artistic sense that is totally outside my comfort zone. The type of experience where I may see others standing in front of splotched-soaked painting or watching a person strip naked and rub themselves in charcoal (which I think(?) occurs here in Ban) and they have these very thoughtful looks on their faces while having these very deep conversations about the very deep meaning of the piece and all I am thinking is "What the f&ck?!"
On top of that, it's all very spiritual, new-age-y, hippy mother earth (the end notes actually contain the phrase "unicorn chrysalis")... which (wait for it) is also not my thing. Again, I am not denying that there is something here and I do "get" some of what Kapil is trying to accomplish here. It is not not interesting, which is the highest compliment that I can pay it and what did earn it an additional star in my rating.
So thanks to ToB for giving me the opportunity to try out an experimental read. It's good to test one's limits and boundaries every now and then. And now that that's out of the way...
February 15, 2016
Another TOB book that leaves me blank. I really don't have much to say about this one.
January 20, 2016
I'm afraid I didn't understand a word. This book has a great rep, but--sadly--I didn't connect with it at all.
July 3, 2021
I don't really understand this book but I think I might love it anyway. Maybe.
March 29, 2015
Slid into the bath with this book and emerged a little later, even more of a mermaid. than I was before.
November 29, 2022
Ok actually 3.5 maybe 4? I don’t know if I have a concrete rating. I read this for a philosophy class. It has beautiful phrases and a lot of heartbreaking, evocative syntax and movement. The overall structure and anti- made it a little hard to get into for me personally, but after ruminating I really appreciate this piece. It is a lot of everything and nothing working together and the space leaves a lot to consider. Extremely provoking, definitely recommend but it also definitely frustrated me. Don’t know if I can get on board with this as a “novel” but the poetics of it made its form more digestible. I think that is very much the point though, which is why I appreciate it.
Read
May 12, 2025"I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster. Monsters don't incarnate. They regress."
Am extremely interested in texts that are more than just text on the page. Books whose projects exceed the bounds of literary form. This is definitely a text that does exactly that.
Am extremely interested in texts that are more than just text on the page. Books whose projects exceed the bounds of literary form. This is definitely a text that does exactly that.
Read
March 27, 2018I did not understand very much of this, and I can't give it a star rating or review in good conscience. I did read all of the words though. Sometimes you just have to smash yourself with culture and hope that the reverberations serve you well down the road. I think that this is one of those times.
February 20, 2016
This is the first year I have a really good shot at reading the whole list of books for the Tournament of Books. That is the ONLY reason I finished this book. As in previous years, I have not enjoyed every book that's been on the list, but plowing through books I don't like can still be an illuminating experience once the discussion begins.
TOB organizers, you have led me wrong! This book centers around the idea of (not) writing a novel about nothing that will never be written and a character(?) named Ban who may be part woman, or part monster, or nothing at all. I was initially intrigued by the concept that this book was in reaction to a couple of violent events that we largely ignored or misrepresented, but in reality it is a lot of notes about performance art and self-indulgent, self-obsessed ramblings. It would have been MUCH more interesting had it actually addressed the events directly. This book is incomprehensible. Imagine my relief (and lack of surprise) when I saw that the last 30 pages were acknowledgements and notebook excerpts.
Having just seen the brackets, despite my not yet having read it, I can't imagine that this book stands a chance against the critically acclaimed The Turner House, which I believe I will truly enjoy.
TOB organizers, you have led me wrong! This book centers around the idea of (not) writing a novel about nothing that will never be written and a character(?) named Ban who may be part woman, or part monster, or nothing at all. I was initially intrigued by the concept that this book was in reaction to a couple of violent events that we largely ignored or misrepresented, but in reality it is a lot of notes about performance art and self-indulgent, self-obsessed ramblings. It would have been MUCH more interesting had it actually addressed the events directly. This book is incomprehensible. Imagine my relief (and lack of surprise) when I saw that the last 30 pages were acknowledgements and notebook excerpts.
Having just seen the brackets, despite my not yet having read it, I can't imagine that this book stands a chance against the critically acclaimed The Turner House, which I believe I will truly enjoy.
Read
February 1, 2016Read this for the 2016 Tournament of Books. I am not assigning a rating as I can not fathom how to begin. This seems much more like some collection of thoughts for a novel and more notes about past and future performance art presentations. The inspiration for the material is the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young Indian woman and the 1979 death of a militant anti racist activist. It felt very much like trying to read something in a foreign language. I will be very interested in the TOB judgment and what other, smarter people have to say about this unique entry. 0 stars/rating not attempted.
March 31, 2022
There were moments of incredible, profound beauty here, accompanied by entirely too much… fluff? I did not fully understand the intention of the failed novel from which Ban was born until I read the endnotes; at times, the writing style, while obviously deliberate, felt a bit too forced. The text is at its best when Kapil abandons pretenses of being “Mad enough” or “experimental enough” and leans into a really unique orientation toward hybrid-form storytelling. Elsewhere, unfortunately, this text very vocally forces itself into a “sufficiently Weird” box, and consequently fails to hit a consistent emotional tenor. Again, some wonderful lines, but scattered amid sections I had to skim.
April 14, 2015
A few lines I jotted down from Ban en Banlieue:
It’s still not real to me – what the sentences are for and how long they might go on.
I want a literature that is not made from literature.
It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories.
Does the body of the witness discharge something too?
.
It’s still not real to me – what the sentences are for and how long they might go on.
I want a literature that is not made from literature.
It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories.
Does the body of the witness discharge something too?
.
August 7, 2015
A totally genre-bending "failed novel," this is a fascinating book that I think I would have to read at least two more times to understand. But perhaps that's not the point.
Also, some really gorgeous writing. It reminded me of Dionne Brand and Gertrude Stein.
Also, some really gorgeous writing. It reminded me of Dionne Brand and Gertrude Stein.
November 20, 2022
If I have to be honest, this just wasn't for me. I really felt lost and out of my reading experience. I truly believe that many academic references were made throughout the story and its reflective commentaries, and I simply didn't grasp them (cf. Elizabeth Grosz, whom I knew some reflections and yet didn't really understand the works Kapil was writing about in Ban En Banlieue). For those who get these references, Kapil's work must take another dimension and go way further. So, this was beyond my understanding. Still, some passages were very interesting to read, especially the events that happened in New Delhi in 2012. What to say apart from that, I did enjoy the performative dimension of it, with the significance of sounds and positioning of the body; the last part of the book, with the thank-yous parts were enlightening on some parts of the story itself.
September 8, 2025
I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this. [Hold up charcoal in fist.] i wrote the organ sweets—the bread-rich parts of the body before it's opened then devoured. I wrote the middle of the body to the end.
I want to lie down in the place I am from: on the street I am from.
Stupid me. I'm like a person waiting next to a fountain that's under construction for a lover who arrives, but is stupid.
(June Jordan: "I live like a lover / who drops her dime into a phone / just as the subway shakes into the station / wasting her message / canceling the question of her call:")
The one thing that I can say about this awful night is that there are no possessions. There is nothing to buy or sell.
I want to lie down in the place I am from: on the street I am from.
Stupid me. I'm like a person waiting next to a fountain that's under construction for a lover who arrives, but is stupid.
(June Jordan: "I live like a lover / who drops her dime into a phone / just as the subway shakes into the station / wasting her message / canceling the question of her call:")
The one thing that I can say about this awful night is that there are no possessions. There is nothing to buy or sell.
November 9, 2020
“Radical modernity requires something of me, an aesthetics of violence, to write the larger scene”
I initially hated this, purely because of how much I struggle with the disjointed and jarring writing style that New Narrative writers are so fond of. In all honesty, I don’t think I really ‘got’ it - but there were some powerful passages and quotations throughout and it was a quick read. I’ll most likely give it a re-read at some point.
I initially hated this, purely because of how much I struggle with the disjointed and jarring writing style that New Narrative writers are so fond of. In all honesty, I don’t think I really ‘got’ it - but there were some powerful passages and quotations throughout and it was a quick read. I’ll most likely give it a re-read at some point.
Read
June 26, 2023notebooks ; self, forming others, trapping them - trapping them for the self as the self / creating something in text by way of extratextual events with no way of legitimizing them as fiction or fact within the text itself.
December 3, 2023
Violence is laid down bare in ban - intimate, cellular, consuming - while verbal hand keeps you from touching, grasping, licking - perpetuating through desire and fascination. The end notes were my favourite, when protest was sidelined and thought softened.
January 4, 2025
Another book I was supposed to read in undergrad. The art of saying coherent things incoherently, turning nothing into something that is nothing again. I don’t know what I took away from this. I definitely needed age to appreciate this one.
February 10, 2022
This book is confusing and it is beautiful. You have to keep your mind soft when reading it, try to not “figure it out” so much because the book doesn’t give many specific details of what the subject of the non novel really was until the end notes. I relate to the authors need for notes/notebooks, fragments and how ideas can evolve and build off each other until the project becomes too “monstrous”, too difficult to explain or put into words. I would also understand how some wouldn’t enjoy this book, I wouldn’t recommend it to most.
March 18, 2016
I don't think this book should be called a novel. It's more like notes for or pieces and fragments of a novel, as well as some sort of diary about the author's art. A novel is supposed to have certain elements that this "book" just doesn't have at all. In fact, it seems to mock the fact that it knows it doesn't have these elements. At one point more than half way through the book, the author says she feels sorry for the reader for having read this far when there's nothing there!
I read this book because it was a candidate in the 2016 Tournament of Books and I'm rather mad at the contest for including it. I don't understand why they thought anyone would want to read this "book." There are some well-written and memorable lines but most of it doesn't make sense. The book has an interesting premise-- it claims to follow a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot, as well as a protester who dies at the hands of police during a London riot in April of 1979.
But the girl is mentioned so much in the same way over and over again and nothing is ever resolved. So is some girl named "Ban," a different but seemingly related character the author keeps trying to write about but admits she can't, so she just throws a bunch of notes in there about what she would write about if she could, what she wrote about and chopped up or deleted after saving into some other file (?), and art she made in Ban's honor and where it was performed or displayed. Whereas the protester guy is barely mentioned at all.
I'm sure there's some larger piece of the puzzle I'm missing, some statement the book is trying to make but I didn't get it and just didn't care. The author talks a lot about how hard it is to fit what one wants to say into a novel, and how she's not used to that medium because she's a poet. Which made me want to ask her, okay then, why are you wasting my time with this self-absorbed drivel you know isn't a novel and that you admit you couldn't write the way it should be written?
This book made me so mad that I don't even want to write about it any more. The only good thing about it was that it was very short-- and of course, many of the last pages were full of acknowledgements and gratitude to people and foundations who for whatever reason thought it was a good idea to help this author publish this "book." There were also more notes about the notes that were the "novel."
I hate to not finish books and I only finished this one because it was so short and I was hoping I would find something redeeming in it. (As if it's not obvious by now, I did not.) I very rarely give any book 1 star but that's how much I disliked this book. It was not my cup of tea-- and not my type of "novel."
I read this book because it was a candidate in the 2016 Tournament of Books and I'm rather mad at the contest for including it. I don't understand why they thought anyone would want to read this "book." There are some well-written and memorable lines but most of it doesn't make sense. The book has an interesting premise-- it claims to follow a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot, as well as a protester who dies at the hands of police during a London riot in April of 1979.
But the girl is mentioned so much in the same way over and over again and nothing is ever resolved. So is some girl named "Ban," a different but seemingly related character the author keeps trying to write about but admits she can't, so she just throws a bunch of notes in there about what she would write about if she could, what she wrote about and chopped up or deleted after saving into some other file (?), and art she made in Ban's honor and where it was performed or displayed. Whereas the protester guy is barely mentioned at all.
I'm sure there's some larger piece of the puzzle I'm missing, some statement the book is trying to make but I didn't get it and just didn't care. The author talks a lot about how hard it is to fit what one wants to say into a novel, and how she's not used to that medium because she's a poet. Which made me want to ask her, okay then, why are you wasting my time with this self-absorbed drivel you know isn't a novel and that you admit you couldn't write the way it should be written?
This book made me so mad that I don't even want to write about it any more. The only good thing about it was that it was very short-- and of course, many of the last pages were full of acknowledgements and gratitude to people and foundations who for whatever reason thought it was a good idea to help this author publish this "book." There were also more notes about the notes that were the "novel."
I hate to not finish books and I only finished this one because it was so short and I was hoping I would find something redeeming in it. (As if it's not obvious by now, I did not.) I very rarely give any book 1 star but that's how much I disliked this book. It was not my cup of tea-- and not my type of "novel."
April 22, 2025
Neat, like performance art as poetry. However, frequently frustrating when it veers so far into the abstract as to be impenetrable. Nonetheless, Kapil is doing fascinating things with language. I think she is at the height of her powers in her reflections on writing, sensory descriptions, and musings on relationships. Here are some favorites:
“I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this. [Hold up charcoal in fist.] I wrote the organ sweets - the bread-rich parts of the body before it’s opened then devoured. I wrote the middle of the body to its end” (19).
“And the veins of the nearby plants flood with sugar. The sugar and the sky suck the body of a black woman. They surge towards her through the mud and air. Pinned there, scrawled, like a name. A woman (girl) so black she radiates a limited consciousness. In this scene without depth, she is supine, lifting her arms very carefully then setting them down; an image that is never exhausted, though I write it again and again. With a careful hand” (34-35).
“Focus hard on life to write a novel. / Try not to be afraid. / Perhaps for one night. / You don’t have to be afraid.” (60).
“It is the last day I knew you in the time that we touched” (79).
“I love him in a way that unknots me from the sky-” (80).
“Drugged. / Pretty. / Dressed in white.” (81).
“Yesterday, I oiled then braided my hair. I washed myself. I ate a balanced meal with milk. I poured a glass of milk into the sea. / Imagine the cloud of milk as it dissipates.” (84).
“I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this. [Hold up charcoal in fist.] I wrote the organ sweets - the bread-rich parts of the body before it’s opened then devoured. I wrote the middle of the body to its end” (19).
“And the veins of the nearby plants flood with sugar. The sugar and the sky suck the body of a black woman. They surge towards her through the mud and air. Pinned there, scrawled, like a name. A woman (girl) so black she radiates a limited consciousness. In this scene without depth, she is supine, lifting her arms very carefully then setting them down; an image that is never exhausted, though I write it again and again. With a careful hand” (34-35).
“Focus hard on life to write a novel. / Try not to be afraid. / Perhaps for one night. / You don’t have to be afraid.” (60).
“It is the last day I knew you in the time that we touched” (79).
“I love him in a way that unknots me from the sky-” (80).
“Drugged. / Pretty. / Dressed in white.” (81).
“Yesterday, I oiled then braided my hair. I washed myself. I ate a balanced meal with milk. I poured a glass of milk into the sea. / Imagine the cloud of milk as it dissipates.” (84).
August 10, 2015
I didn't want to finish Ban En Banlieue. It's like chewing the most delicious meal of your entire life -- you don't just want to swallow it whole, you'd rather savour it, chewing slowly, tasting it meticulously, and allowing the aftertaste to linger after taking another bite. There's so much packed into the 109 pages. Bhanu Kapil's writing is evocative, delicious. It's unlike anything I've ever read. It seems to stem from her other books, forming a stronger and almost entirely new exploration.
What I like about it is that it defies category.
Kapil writes the fragmented brain, the fragmented self. It's experimental -- there's a section written by choosing random pages from old notebooks, there's a childhood memory. Even the end-notes and acknowledgments find themselves within the form, rather than existing separately like I see in many other books. Her words are pithy, sentences within themselves. Sometimes they hint, almost teasingly, towards Kapil's personal life (perhaps I'm a bit nosy and want more!)
"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." (63)
What I like about it is that it defies category.
Kapil writes the fragmented brain, the fragmented self. It's experimental -- there's a section written by choosing random pages from old notebooks, there's a childhood memory. Even the end-notes and acknowledgments find themselves within the form, rather than existing separately like I see in many other books. Her words are pithy, sentences within themselves. Sometimes they hint, almost teasingly, towards Kapil's personal life (perhaps I'm a bit nosy and want more!)
"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." (63)
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