I want a sentence that shakes. A sentence that takes up the cadence of the nervous system as it discharges a fact.
Bhanu Kapil
In an online reading of How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry, 2020), Bhanu Kapil explained her “plan to get back to England”: to write a book of poetry brief enough that someone could read it while enjoying a cup of tea
and by the time they’d finished their tea the book would be over.
As a plan to launch her “comeback as a British poet”, it worked a treat. How to Wash a Heart was admiringly reviewed in the UK, and even won that most British of poetry awards: the Tea S. Eliot Prize.
The lightness of the cup-of-tea comment touches on Kapil’s deep subject, however: the hostility in hospitality. How to Wash a Heart tells, in quick and haunting free verse, the fragmentary story of the violent tension that develops between “an immigrant guest in the home of their citizen host”:
Though the outer conditions
Are xenophobic,
I only want
To bask in this exotic friendship.
When Kapil began as a writer, England was not hospitable to the kind of work she was interested in. She left for the US in the early Nineties, and began to publish, a decade later, in the experimental American poetry scene. Her second book, Incubation: A Space for Monsters (2006), appeared from Leon Works, a small press dedicated to “experimental prose and the ‘thinking’ text”. This month, a new edition has been published by the London-based publisher, Prototype.
Incubation thinks about hostility and hospitality via stories of hitchhiking in America. It evokes a fictional figure, “Laloo”, who shares some of Kapil’s experiences as a young Punjabi-British woman in England and America. But just as these experiences are not easy to narrate, so the character of Laloo also remains incompletely realised, a living glitch between sentences. Here is a single paragraph about her:
THE MANY COLOURS OF LALOO
A cyborg is an iridescent pleat. No. I want to write opposites — saturation of opposite colours (silver and Coca-Cola) that makes a person, like a fingerprint, obsessed with the liquor of patterning. This is more intense than painting in the best light in France or New Mexico. You could do it at night in your bedroom in Illinois. Unilluminated. Like in India, when the electricity goes, two or three times a day, all monsoon. Your grandmother lights candles and pours the water over your bent head in the dark, glittery courtyard where you live, together.
Kapil has an extraordinary ability to trace the precision and blur of thinking, and an instinct for images that leave unnerving sensory traces. To bracket “silver and Coca-Cola” as “the saturation of opposite colours”, for instance, is to mix many other things: solid and liquid; bright and dark; metal and sugar; sheen and fizz; treasure and trash. All these contrasts linger and combine, at the end of the sentence, in the paradoxical notion of “the liquor of patterning”: a strong, intoxicating drink which is also an orderly aesthetic perception. What does it mean to say “a person, like a fingerprint, [is] obsessed” with such a thing? A fingerprint is a form of patterning unique to a person — but Kapil’s syntax seems to suggest that a fingerprint itself can be obsessed with its own intricate whorls.
This approaches the inarticulate because that is what it describes: the young woman writing, or wanting to write, in the American dark — painting with the sound of words, slipping from “Illinois” into “Unilluminated”, and summoning up a dream of India, where the abstract alchemy of “silver and Coca-Cola” returns as the concrete reality of the “dark, glittery courtyard”.
One of the book’s recurring questions about Laloo’s elusive nature is whether she is a “cyborg” or a “monster”. The question marks the extremes of a spectrum centred on the “human”: the monster at one end is too animal, the cyborg at the other too robotic. It is the spectrum of a white patriarchal world along which Laloo (whose name means “the red one”) travels as a lone woman of colour(s). Kapil has described the resulting text as “crumpled and stretched” between genres: “a form of historical science-fiction, or prose-poetry that was also a kind of life-writing”.
Incubation is a unique book, but it does not exist in isolation. The publisher of Leon Works was Renee Gladman, herself an experimenter with the poetic sentence; the publisher’s acknowledgements to the original 2006 edition thank Claudia Rankine for her support; and Kapil’s authorial acknowledgements mention the starting-point of “the connection between a monster and a citizen”. Rankine would settle on the latter term as the title for a prose book about anti-Black racism in America and England. When Citizen (Penguin, 2015) won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the UK, it marked an overdue recognition in British literary culture both of prose as a poetic form, and of structural whiteness as a fact of daily life.
Citizen’s success changed how the prose poem was perceived here. Without it, for example, I wouldn’t have been able to publish The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018). And it was while editing that anthology that I read Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015), thanks to the advocacy of the poet and critic Sandeep Parmar — who later collaborated with Kapil and Nisha Ramayya on the influential lyric essay pamphlet about whiteness and colonial violence in poetry culture, Threads (clinic, 2018).
I think the re-issue of Incubation marks a moment that recurs in literary history: when writers once considered too strange, too difficult — who wrote on the edges of their culture with a mutual confidence in the necessity of their work — become those whose writing is most sought and valued.
Which is not, I hope, simply to be the white English academic finishing his cup of tea and filing Kapil neatly under “New Classics”. The 2023 version of Incubation comes with a “Notes on the Floor: Coda for the British Edition” (the American edition has a different updating). In side-slipping sentences, it continues the book’s restless quest to read itself and — like Rankine in Citizen — to ask who you are in relation to its world:
How eerie, actually, to open an out-of-print book — the Diary of a Monster? — as if it’s just washed up on the shore of the British Isles, sloppy and frozen, calcified, a balled-up piece of trash.
At first glance.
Unstick the pages.
Or toss it in the bin.
*
There’s a lineage of storytelling in this country that invigorates the monster as a figure from afar. The flag of the monster is the flesh of a person who belongs to the place that the monster claims as home.
Ex-human, a person might be tucked in bed and yet be seen through a window-pane, hovering in the air like a bat.
As a child, I visited Whitby with my class. Vanilla ice cream dripped down our legs. Fatherless and motherless for one day, we ruined our shoes in the sea. We bit each other’s necks.
The second section here is, I think, a story about how stories can change; how monsters are created by imagining a person beyond their personhood (the vampire at the window); how children on a trip to Whitby — where Dracula “washed up” from Transylvania in the form of a dog — can discover, through horror stories and ice cream, the joys of mutual monstrosity; and, so, how a national “lineage of storytelling” that fixes identity by opposition (person/monster, home/afar) can nevertheless lead to a liberation — “fatherless and motherless”, running to the sea — from what is inherited.
NOTES
The quotation beginning I want a sentence that shakes… is from Kapil’s essay “Poetics”, published in Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (2017), ed. James Byrne and Robert Sheppard.
On 25th May, I am involved in organising a one-day conference on “Poetry, Representation and the Archive” at the University of East Anglia where Bhanu Kapil will be the keynote speaker. It’s possible to attend both in-person and online. Registration ends on Thursday 4th May — you can read more about it here:
You can watch the “cup of tea” reading of How to Wash a Heart here:
And you can read the first section of Incubation here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53509/handwritten-preface-to-reverse-the-book