Bhanu Kapil is a hugely important author working today. Her writing is inventive and invokes a now to often critical historic moments of violence or trauma.
This poem is one of many from Kapil that are startling in the examination provided. The cross-temporal boundary examination of historical affect on those living through this moment, its racial violences, and the grief littered throughout. Ban en Banlieue is one of my favorite works for this hybridizing reason. It accomplishes so much in such little space.
To quote Lindsay King-Miller from her review in Muzzle Magazine,
“Ban en Banlieue is less concerned with overarching structure than it is with tiny moments and objects–debris, gestures, tiny rituals. These things, described in the book as “auto-sacrifice,” stand-in for more obvious and expected novel components like characters, subplots, a denouement. “Invert yourself above a ditch or stream below a bright blue sky,” writes Kapil in “Meat forest: 1979.” “Then pull yourself up from your knees to clean.” This is one of many direct instructions to the reader throughout Ban en Banlieue, intended perhaps as ways of accessing the emotional content of the story, spells to invoke Ban who never was.”
I apologize in advance for this reading - while I practice reading these poems several times, I unfortunately couldn’t get a reading without some catching of my voice on words, or some faltering of steadiness. Ultimately, I came to accept that, perhaps, my difficulty in reading this poem aloud was a part of the spoken experience of the poem. Sentences littered with debris catching my tongue-feet.
If you haven’t read this work, consider buying it from Nightboat here, or requesting it from your local library.
"Notes for a Novel Never Written," by Bhanu Kapil