Bhanu Kapil

Well, well.. I got onto GoodReads to review this bk expecting to be one of the only people to review it &, Lo & Behold!, there are ALOTOF reviews, some of them very analytical, & ALOTOF ratings, most of them very high. A few people consider this bk to be bullshit. Interesting. I didn't expect much of a readership, I didn't expect much analysis, I didn't expect much controversy. I reckon the publisher did a good job of promoting this bk. The publisher of my bk "footnotes", Six Gallery Press, cd learn a thing or 2 (or 2,000) about promoting the work they publish. 6GP is abysmal. But that's another story.

"Incubation" was given to me by Amy Catanzano who's friends w/ Kapil. They both teach at Naropa. Perhaps many of the people who've read "Incubation" are students or ex-students of Kapil's.

In "Farren"'s highly analytical review of "Incubation" on GoodReads

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75604841

she writes:

"As I was wading into Bhanu Kapil's "Incubation – A Space for Monsters" it became evident to me that I needed to read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" in order to understand what was meant by "Cyborg" and "Monster"--terms liberally deployed and conceptually integral in Kapil's verse novel.

"Obviously Haraway's theory could be an entire class unto itself – but broadly, it's a reconstitution or a reexamination of traditional binaries (male/female, work/play, public/private, technological/natural, etc). These binaries are inadequate and have led to enormous ideological fractures that have left theorists and political operatives helpless. The problem, Haraway posits, is the framing of the entire system. In a technological world the conceptions of male/female work/play etc are rapidly dissolving."

&

"Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US."

Hhmm.. I have alotof criticism's of what Farren presents as Haraway's theory (I haven't personally read Haraway's work so I'm only responding to Farren's synopsis) - esp in the 2nd paragraph. Nonetheless, Farren seems to be SPOT ON about its relevance to having a clear-headed reading of Kapil.

The whole Cyborg/Monster play w/ identity in "Incubation" was an irritant/stimulus for me. Given that I read alotof SF, I'm accustomed to such terms in SF contexts - particularly CYBORG. I once dated a girl named Gail Litfin that I called a cyborg b/c she had a pump attached to her abdomen for the dispensation of insulin. She was a severe diabetic. A cyborg, to me, &, as far as I 'know', in conventional usage outside of Haraway's usage, is a being that's partially organic, partially machine. Since neither Kapil or her alter-ego Laloo fit this description [again, as far as I 'know':], the references to both/either as such kept me a bit off-kilter. Wch is fine & wch is one of the things that made this bk interesting.

As for "monster"?: Of course, "monster"'s meaning is much more various in society-at-large. It's most common meaning is probably something like "a creature of extraordinary properties negatively defined" - such as Frankenstein's Monster - & if we reiterate Farren's excellent "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity, a potent synthesis of many outsider identities, and so it is with Kapil's Laloo, who is a Punjabi British woman hitchhiking through the US." & substitute "Frankenstein's Monster" for "cyborg" then we come up w/ people being 'monsters' who're 'patchworks' of different cultural influences & conditions.

But the weakness of this is that Frankenstein's Monster is a patchwork of dead human parts reanimated. Kapil is alive & is a product of multiple cultures that're also alive. As for "outsider identities"?: "Outsider" is a relative term & there're an infinite variety of ways that a person can be "outside" something that have nothing to do w/ gender or ethnicity. I have no idea whether Haraway privileges (to use a word overused by academics) gender & ethnicity as 'outsider'-making elements but Farren's statement that "Haraway posits that women of color are representatives of cyborg identity" implies this to me.

REGARDLESS, Kapil's bk does seem to be, indeed, largely focused on the experience of a British girl of Indian descent hitchhiking in the US & the feelings of fracture involved in that experience.

So where is my fucking REVIEW?! The reader will notice that I haven't rated the bk. This can be taken as a compliment, as an avoidance, as a statement on the futility of the rating system. One of the things that I like about "Incubation" is that it falls outside easy categories. I wdn't call it a poem, I wdn't call it a novel, I wdn't call it a travelogue, I wdn't exactly call it a memoir - but it falls closest, perhaps, to the latter.

I've called Laloo, the main character of this text, the alter-ego of the author, Bhanu Kapil, b/c at least part of her narrative seems to parallel Kapil's own. What I don't 'know' is just how far the parallel goes: Did Kapil hitchhike across the US alone? If she did, as a girl, I know from personal experience, as a boy, that can be, but isn't necessarily, quite dangerous.

One of the things that strikes me as the most remarkable about "Incubation" is, once again, the way it exists as writing outside of genre. Kapil seems to've written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness motivated by underpinnings of diasporic sociology & psychology w/o confining herself to any particular method of how-to-go-there. This bk is apparently contextualized by some as "experimental" but I wdn't even call it that! I think she writes, it flows, it spouts from ideas & theories & experiences but I don't exactly think it 'experiments' in the sense of creating a structured situation to test a hypothesis - to initiate a situation to study the outcome. Maybe I'm 'wrong'.

It's further noteworthy to me that the cover art is the most 'lubricious' I've seen in a long time, w/ fluid possibly flowing from the vagina, but may not even be perceived as sexual by the casual perceiver b/c the figures copulating are multiple armed gods/goddesses presented in a somewhat stylized manner. I have to wonder whether such a potently erotic image wd be on the cover if it weren't so contextualized as Hindu mythology. This, in itself, seems very appropriate to the writing. Do readers get so caught up in the ethnicities of the bk that they don't notice the coming-of-age hero(ine)'s-journey?

To return to not rating this: I'm not even sure I LIKED THIS bk &, yet.. I will definitely read more by Kapil. Not rating it is a way of saying that the experience of reading it is somewhat beyond such things as 'like' & 'dislike' - such ideas are probably irrelevant to what I get or don't get out of the bk. My hypothetical not-liking has more to do w/ how-much-is-actually-being-sd-here? & am-I-as-stimulated-by-&-satisfied-w/-the-technique-of-saying-it-as-I-prefer?.… (meer)

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]

… (meer)

The author is playing on a level of meta that is too refined for me to value as much as others do. Ban en Banlieue is, as far as I can tell, a self-reflective documentation of an attempt to write a novel, an attempt that is continuously thwarted with the vastness of the subject, and also, thwarted by the way the character, Ban, a brown girl, intersects with all known Literature. The author writes of her attempts to find an appropriate story for Ban to inhabit. Ban en Banlieue is a record of these attempts.

That is my best guess, at any rate. The problem I have, though, is that it's very easy for something to be too hard to write about. That's a given. Whenever a writer sits down to make something happen, it's really really hard.

As I read I felt a little bit like I've felt at political gatherings, when I've find myself in solidarity with the proponents of a worthy cause that I too believe in. Maybe it's just before a March or political protest; maybe just after one. Someone gets a hold of a microphone and we all listen, of course, with respect and unified clarity of vision. In those gatherings we will give respect to whatever person happens to be at the microphone at any given moment, no matter how rambling their delivery, because the cause itself is a good one. Reading Ban en Banlieue was like listening to a well-meaning but rambling speaker who believes in a worthy cause that I too believe in.… (meer)