Ban en Banlieue

By Bhanu Kapil

An evocative exploration of body and politics by one of our most exciting innovative writers. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Release date: Jun 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643620497

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil is the author of several full-length collections, most recently How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society selection. Kapil was born in England to Indian parents, earned a BA from Loughborough University and an MA in English Literature from SUNY Brockport. A Fellow of Churchill College (University of Cambridge), Kapil was elected in 2022 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Other recognitions include a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors (UK). For twenty years, Kapil taught seminars on performance, contemplative practice, poetry, anti-memoir, and hybrid forms at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. According to the poet Jenny Zhang, ‘Bhanu has a way of speaking to those of us who move through life feeling at once alien and recognizable, she speaks to us—the cyborgs, the aliens, the displaced, the feral, the untamed.’

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BAN EN BANLIEUE

BAN EN BANLIEUE

Bhanu Kapil

NIGHTBOAT BOOKS, NEW YORK

©2015 Bhanu Kapil

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

2nd Printing, 2016

Print ISBN: 978-1-937658-24-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64362-049-7

Cover photograph: Back Garden, Colorado, 2013.

Design and typesetting by Margaret Tedesco

Text set in Plantin and Futura

Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

Distributed by University Press of New England

One Court Street

Lebanon, NH 03766

www.upne.com

Nightboat Books

New York

www.nightboat.org

Hayes, Middlesex, 2012.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS

[13 Errors for Ban]

Auto-Sacrifice (Notes)

END-NOTES

1. [13 Errors for Ban]:

A preface. Ash. A sore.

A re-telling—tiny movements—of a scene from Ban. The weight of my head pushing down on the floor opens my mouth, says Laura Ann. It’s not the mouth that wants to open, necessarily. It’s the gravity, the pressure, the force…. As Laura Ann’s mouth [jaw] opens, deep in the pose, I notice that her legs part. From behind. At that moment, I realize I have not written the part of Ban that is about sex—the bad sex of the riot. Two weeks later, exhausted, trying to write [re-write] Ban, as I do every day, I lean over to the bookshelf and brush [touch] Dictee, a book I have not read for many years. I close my eyes then open them, my finger on page 4. A volt of violet [orange] fire goes through my body when I read these words: Now the weight from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward. It stretches evenly, the entire skull expanding tightly all sides the front of her head. She gasps from its pressure, its contracting motion. In this way, Cha’s dead tongue licks the work. No. I feel her licking me. The inside of my arm, the inside of my ear. My error. I wake up. It’s time for the auto-sacrifice to begin.

2. AUTO-SACRIFICE (Notes):

Though I cannot bear it. I make a table out of the notes and smooth down its long red tail. A ribbon. That extends into the aisle. I press click and the sentences are abruptly regulated in ways a baby could have figured out. No offense to babies. No offense to chimpanzees. I think of the grid as a sanctuary, an orphanage, a home—for the sentences to be. Though at any moment I might press click again. In fact, I went to a sanctuary for chimps in Louisiana, near the border with Texas. At any time, the chimps could be removed—to a lab at Oklahoma State University—for a test. An experiment. Then returned. I went there. I pretended to be a volunteer with Jordan and JT, two MFA students from Baton Rouge. We stuffed Donkey Kongs with peanut butter and threw them over the hedge. Is this how you become a writer? It’s still not real to me—what the sentences are for and how long they might go on.

3. STORIES:

No, I don’t think so. I wrote a companion series or sequence of childhood stories to lie next to Ban, but when it was time to publish them, here (in section 3), I pressed the delete button and stored them in another file. I am not interested in disclosure. I am interested in discharge, said Petra Kuppers in the café in Berkeley that served vegan chocolate cake in 2011. We were meeting for the first time. No stories of early life, or any part of life, were exchanged, in the culture I was now a part of yet distinct from my own. I’m sorry, said Petra Kuppers, but I’m not interested in your story. I’m not interested in where you are from.

4. END-NOTES:

Extreme gratitude to the other writers and non-writers who encouraged me to take risks in venues of all kinds. Curation worked out for me. Performance art worked out for me. It helped me to think. Is there something wrong with me? I withheld the stories now this. These notes that are not for writing but for you. For example, I didn’t get to the part with Kapil Muni—a section [incarnate], regressed: a woman who—Ban-like—contorted [leaped] out of a sacrificial [bridal] fire and is [was] carried out to sea—the Bay of Bengal—on the backs of tiny pink dolphins. How her burns were sucked and fused by sea creatures: their microscopic mouths. Bronze-copper, supine—mid ocean—she’s balanced on the back of a whale. Lightning strikes her body in a pagan tableau and she: opens her milky eyes. Kapil Muni—seated—opens his third-eye as she drifts past Sagar Island—and sends a beam of gold [rose] [blue] light to her. I wanted Ban to receive the energy too, simultaneously, here—but would blank out—each time—the section, the time, the body. What kind of person blanks out eternal time? It is okay. Not even in the end parts could I approach this area, the gift, a color healing so radical it extends to a future self—that was not mine.

5. BUTCHER’S BLOCK APPENDIX:

97.5% of the work of Ban happened in notebooks, public or otherwise. One day, my neighbor put her butcher’s block on the curb. I got it and washed it down, stacking the notebooks in the three wire cages beneath the chopping board. I printed out the pages from my blog, where I had written Ban in a frenzy, and tucked those in as well.

Reviews for Ban en Banlieue

[bravenewbks · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

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]