Ban en Banlieue

Trying to offer a clear critical comment on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue is particularly challenging because it so stridently seeks to side-step the rational, hierarchical, closed-system imaginations which generate race riots, which churn women’s bodies into sexual fodder and carcasses tossed out of vans, which demand that we see mental illness as an individual disorder rather than as a human soul crying out amidst inhuman cultural paroxysms. “Centered” around a race riot in 1979 London, Kapil’s text belies the notion of fixed centers or single origins of cultural violence. Instead, she offers a variety of emotional, psychological, and spiritual loci around which her text coalesces. To cry out. To fail. To rise like diesel smoke in a hot summer wind.

Kapil abandons the palimpsest as a visual form in favor of a practice of addition and emendation in time, translating the visual form of the palimpsest into a book of cyclical, amalgamating prose—a book that can be inventoried even as its contents resist being mapped or contained.

The project is presented as an abandoned novel that reads as a document of Kapil’s expansive and varied process of researching, planning, and writing. “A brown girl on the floor of the world” is the central image, and the porous relationship between Ban’s story and the story of Kapil writing and thinking about Ban is fundamental throughout. Kapil casts and recasts descriptions of Ban alongside documentation of the author’s own acts of lying down, undertaken through performances, protests, and somatic exercises. The result is a complex and deeply engaged “literature that is not made from literature.”

It is not a novel so much as a birth, a death, a violent “discharge.” It was born from an accumulation, a messy building up of notes which was—according to Kapil—assembled by chopping it up on a butcher’s block. The body of Ban en Banlieue was assembled through violence, a body assembled by means of its own violent deconstruction. Even unto itself, this might seem like a self-contradiction that cannot be reconciled. Kapil’s beautiful, bleeding, half-dying, half-living, anti-novel is well aware of this.