Ban's Identifications: Immigration and the Rupture of Identity in Bhanu Kapil's Ban En Banlieue

Ban’s Identifications:

Immigration and the

Rupture of Identity in

Bhanu Kapil’s

Ban En Banlieue

H a n a Z a n g a n a ( 6 3 1 3 3 4 5 )

S u p e r v i s o r : D r . J . L e w t y

M A T h e s i s – E n g l i s h L i t e r a r y S t u d i e s

3 0 J u n e 2 0 1 6

Ban’s Identifications: Immigration and the Rupture of Identity in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue

From A Far What nationality or what kindred and relation what blood relation what ancestry what race generation what house clan tribe stock strain what lineage extraction what breed sect gender denomination caste what stray ejection misplaced __Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Dictée

Hegel explains that the connections to oneself and their inner emotions, plus the sum of all the selves one identifies themselves with, will provide the person with self-knowledge (cited in Berenson 77). Thus, the making of or the description of a self or an identity is

mainly achieved by collecting all the internal and external pieces of chunk that make up one’s identity. Those external bits and pieces are the driving force behind Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue.

One of these external factors that significantly influenced Ban En Banlieue, is immigration. Immigration denotes the physical movement from one’s country of origin to a new host country. This movement is accompanied by certain losses, like cultural traditions and individual aspects of life, which will leave behind an impression on a person’s identity. Akhtar states in his book Immigration and identity that “migration from one country to another is a complex psychosocial process with significant and lasting effects on an

individual’s identity” (cited in Kogan 1206). The Immigrant’s identity will be changed and molded into a new one, according to the context of the group in which they participate at that

given moment. Therefore, immigrants will “emphasize different identities depending on the situation and context” (Brettell & Sargent 6). Their identities are torn and stitched at different points in order for them to participate in the host culture and to be acknowledged as members of the new culture.

Recently, all over the world, immigration has gained much media attention due to the Syrian refugee crisis and the inhumane actions the EU has taken to keep those refugees out of its borders. On the 23rd of June 2016, Fear of losing one’s jobs to immigrants and

xenophobia have culminated such that British voters voted to leave their membership in the EU. This xenophobic behavior was caused by misunderstanding the facts about immigration and refugees, and about the untruthful statements made by politicians and the media. The blaming of a group for the economic instability of today’s world will lead to racial

segregation within any given society, as is shown by the outcome of the British Membership in the EU’s Referendum. Reuven Snir explains that “intense globalization, widespread migration, the growing social and political uncertainty and insecurity” (173) have caused changes in the attitude towards immigrants and towards the making of their identities. Thus, immigrants, nowadays, find themselves falling victim to the growing xenophobic societies in which they live. This segregation will eventually lead to a minority group feeling unwanted and unwelcome in their host society. The immigrants’ identities, therefore, will be ruptured and pulled apart in every direction, and their sense of self will fall victim to the insecure lives they are leading in their host societies.

Violence against immigrants is a natural outcome of racism and xenophobia. Nevertheless, violence against the immigrants does not stop there, it takes on another turn when the immigrant subject is a woman, and especially from a traditional patriarchal Asian culture. She will find herself unwanted by the host society, and having no rights at all in her immigrant minority group. She becomes numb and unable to fight the external forces that try

to diminish her identity. Thus, her identity is torn apart even further and she will find herself lost in translating her identity. This leads to the second major external aspect of Ban’s identity, which is violence against women.

According to Taina Bien-Aimé, a speaker on the UN’s 52nd Session of the

Commission on the Status of Women, “every year, millions of women and girls, perceived to be less than fully human – by virtue of their birth - are beaten, raped, mutilated, burned, sold into prostitution, and murdered - often by their own husbands or other family members” (1). Half of the world’s inhabitants is female and millions of them find themselves violated, whether in their origin country or in their host country.

Violence against women can be of domestic or public nature. Public violence mostly translates to rape, which is one of the most hurtful and horrific violent acts against any woman in the world. The inequality women feel in the world is supported by the fact that only in the last six months of 2016, multiple rape assaults against woman have been reported and covered by many newspapers and TV channels. Examples of reported rape are the

Stanford Rape in America; Harayana’s gang-rape in India; Yezidi girls sexual abuse by IS in Syria and Iraq; and the gang rape of a 16 year-old girl by 30 men: which was put on social media and went viral in Brazil. According to the UN, over 35%1 of women worldwide have encountered sexual assault and rape during their life time. Oppression, violence and

inequality have led to many women feeling lost and unable to change the course of their lives. They find themselves helpless and unable to act against the oppressor or the abuser.

This numbness caused by immigration and violence was the starting point for Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue. Bhanu Kapil tried to write a book about marking “the violence received by the bodies of women in the place that I am [was] from” (Ban En Banlieue 90). Bhanu Kapil writes about violence and racism through a young girl’s body on “the floor of

the world” (48). She explains in Ban En Banlieue that Ban “is linked to] domestic (gender) violence, alcoholism and sexual abuse that unfold at home,” and that writing Ban was also about “an historical fiction… [about] the cultural goals that I had as a writer, the desire to speak to the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe” (96).

Bhanu Kapil wrote Ban En Banlieue in a hybrid form of prose and poetry. This hybridity enabled Bhanu in writing Ban’s fragmented identity. Ban’s fragmented identity is only visible through the writing of other selves. Hegel writes in Phenomenology of Mind that “the Other Self is the only adequate mirror of my own self-conscious self; the subject can only see itself when what it sees is another self-consciousness” (Hegel cited in Berenson 77). In other words, and in order for Bhanu Kapil to write Ban’s identity, Bhanu will need to write the characters she identifies Ban with. The dissected identity of Ban will only be visible through the writing of other selves, as Ban is a summation of all those other identities and events that have shaped her identity.

Therefore, this thesis will evaluate the representation of Ban’s identity through the representation of the other characters and events Bhanu Kapil uses to describe Ban’s Identity. The founding argument will be that Bhanu Kapil’s Ban En Banlieue represents the rupture of an immigrant’s identity and illustrates how this rupture can be written about through the external aspects that have had an influence on the immigrant’s identity.

This goal will be achieved through dissecting Ban En Banlieue and revealing the underlying fragments and identities that Ban is identified with. The first part of the thesis will shed light on Bhanu Kapil and how she tried to write Ban En Banlieue. This part will

describe the methods used by Bhanu Kapil and her relation to the book Ban En Banlieue. It will also put the base for the construction of Ban’s identity. The second part will allow a further explanation on the notions, the self and identity. Followed by the third part that describes Ban’s first identification, which is with Bhanu Kapil, and how they are linked. The

fourth part will describe the impressions left on Ban’s identity through immigration and the politics of non-belonging. The fifth part will assess how the errors described by Bhanu Kapil progress Ban En Banlieue’s narration. The errors are the characters Bhanu identifies Ban with. Those characters are, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kapil Muni and the mermaid, and Nirbhaya. The sixth and last part of the thesis will assess whether Bhanu Kapil succeeded in stitching all the different identities of Ban through Ban En Banlieue.

BHANU KAPIL & BAN EN BANLIEUE

Bhanu Kapil sets out on a journey into writing an autobiography of a person by not writing about her internal aspects, but, rather explore her external aspects. Bhanu writes Ban through the events and historical movements that might have shaped Ban and not by expressing Ban’s thoughts and ideas but, rather, through other parts of the self. The whole making of this piece of art is on itself an explosion of notebooks, performances, witness notes, historical events, and errors Bhanu went through while working on the book, and then metaphorically sliced to pieces on a butcher’s block to produce the different aspects and fragments of Ban’s identity.

The book starts with “1. [13 Errors for Ban]:” where the errors made through the writing are stated, and ends with “Butcher’s Block Appendix” , where Bhanu shares

passages from her notebooks. This strange accumulation of notes, performances, errors in the writing and historical events produces a book that, on itself, becomes the embodiment of a person who is lying down on the ground, as the cover illustrates. The book becomes the literal opening of the self, which is described through words on its pages. It stands for the dead body that transforms into something else, and how the opening of the page is like the opening of the legs. Ban’s nudity is revealed by opening the pages and reading the written words. Bhanu Kapil beautifully illustrates the symbolic value of the book on page 63, where she writes:

On a bank, where the stems transplant themselves upon our skin.

Because we’re dead. We lay down on the riverbank and never got up again. Our ******* turned into red flowers that flared then rotted away, in the banal image of the body’s reproductive system appearing outside it, as a gent. The yellow stamen that stabilized the parts of the page that looked boring, when we glanced down at the page, just lying there, with its legs open.

A book of time, for time and because of it.

…A book as much poetry as it is a forbidden or unfunded area of research. The book stands for the arduous writing of Ban’s life through a passage-way, namely the writer Bhanu Kapil. Bhanu Kapil stated in an interview with Laynie Browne for jacket2.org that the “refraction of these notes – the way they magnetize the event – resembles poetry, in the sense that poetry, for me, is the work of the fragment…I get to be the fragment too.” By embodying Ban and becoming one of Ban’s fragments too, Bhanu accomplishes what she first sees as errors, namely writing a hybridity of prose and poetry, and describing a character by their fragmented leftovers. Bhanu further explains this by stating that “I am trying, as a writer, to write the body [character] to its end-point and beyond. Why? That is why I am writing this novel. To reach into that other space – a radical index” (Interview jacket2.org). For reaching into the ‘other space’ Bhanu had to examine the forces which shaped Ban through their impressions left on Ban’s entity. In her interview with Rowland Saifi for htmlgiant.org, Bhanu explains this by saying:

I want to document the forces a body comes to bear or withstand, not through the articulation of those forces but, rather, their impressions. This is why a raindrop indents the concrete with atomic intensity. This is why the dark green, glossy leaves of the ivy are so green: multiple kinds of green: as night falls on the “skirt.” The outskirts of London: les banlieues.

Furthermore, Bhanu Kapil explains in her interview with Laynie Browne for jacket2.org, that to be able to write Ban, she “lay[s] down on the floor of the world and rotated [gesticulated] there, in the mud: which is nudity. In the UK, I lay down next to the ivy on the sidewalk and set mirrors; there. Propped in the ivy. And studied the sky; a sensorimotor sequence. And gathered: witness notes. Nervous system notes. To return to the novel; in another form.” By doing the physical things the character has done, and literally lying down on the asphalt and giving up, Bhanu was capable of changing form from the writer of an event to the expresser of the surroundings, the seer of color, and the tool or pass-way through which Ban can be expressed.

Bhanu Kapil tried to embody Ban in order to write her. This embodiment allows Bhanu to become the witness of Ban’s life instead of only being the commentator. In the interview Bhanu Kapil explains that the witness position:

Allows me [Bhanu] to send light: to Ban, at the same time that I am notating Ban’s residual movements…How the body is a series of rough arcs. And how the novelist is the person who holds the space for what the body wants to be. This is proprioception, the act of letting the body know – through light touch and the sensing/directing of energy to the body’s outer membrane or ‘field’ – where its limits are. (jacket2.org)

Bhanu further explains that she wanted to “open my eyes as Ban and study the particulate, dazzling field of earth materials, to feel the air on my body and what it might be like, to be exposed like that, even in a minimal way, a curated way, and to: give up” (jacket2.org). Bhanu Kapil was trying to become Ban, she was trying to write Ban through the impressions left on Ban’s ‘black body’ and through places Ban had visited. The results seem tentative at first and the books reads as if it is almost a failure in the making. Nevertheless, by expressing the errors, stating the notes and the failures the writer accomplished the things she was trying

to represent. Bhanu actually produced a book in which the expression of the fragments of an identity becomes the red thread that keeps Ban En Banlieue together.

Bhanu Kapil explains that while writing Ban she was interested in “memories that are never received, never written down, or prevented perhaps, at the instant that they

form”(tingemagazine.org). Bhanu is writing about an identity that is more presented on the surface of the skin through scars that are left by external forces – the impressions – instead of describing the events themselves. It’s about the shape that is left on the asphalt with the green ivy and the coldness, rather than the approaching riot itself. It’s about the fire that touches the air and changes color instead of the heat of the fire that is burning someone’s skin.

The compelling questions that then arise are ‘who is Ban’ and ‘what is Ban’. Bhanu Kapil answers this question in her interview with Rowland Saifi for htmlgiant.org and explains that:

Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash) scraped off the soles of running shoes: Puma, Reebok, Adidas. Looping the city, Ban is an orbital of smoke. To summarize, she is the parts of something re-mixed as air: integral, rigid air, circa 1972-1979. She’s a girl. A black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asian Brits self-defined as black. A black (brown) girl encountered in the earliest hour of a race riot, or what will become one by nightfall…Ban is unreal. She’s both dead and never-living: the part, that is, of life that is never given: an existence… Ban is ten. Ban is nine. Ban in eight. Ban is a girl walking home from school just as a protest starts to escalate; the National Front have decided to hold their annual meeting in the council hall of a neighborhood with an almost entirely immigrant — Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican, Bangladeshi — community. Pausing at the corner of Lansbury

Drive and the Uxbridge Road, she hears something: the far-off sound of breaking glass. Is it coming from her home or is it coming from the street’s distant clamor? Faced with these two sources of a sound she instinctively links to violence, the potential of violent acts, Ban lies down. At first, she’s frozen, then folds to the ground…Ban lies down on the sidewalk next to the ivy…I narrate a person’s decision to lie down forever on the ground, in the rain, in England. As even more time passes, as the image or instinct to form this image desiccates, as Ban herself becomes a kind of particulate matter…This is the part of Ban — a novel of the race riot — my first formal attempt at an anti-colonial literature — that still continues.

Ban, as Bhanu represents her, becomes many things at once. She starts representing characters, events, and also materials, stuff, smoke and ash. Ban is a young girl during the riots; Ban is a young woman violently raped in 2012 in India; Ban is a young woman burned alive on her husband’s pyre; Ban’s godmother is “Cha’s dead tongue” (Ban En Banlieue 7); Ban is Blair Peach; Ban is an immigrant; Ban is Bhanu herself; Ban is the race riots on the 23rd of April 1979; Ban is the memorial ritual for Nirbhaya; Ban is the book Ban En

Banlieue; Ban is “a ring of oily foam” (28) that is left on the street as a stain; Ban is “a warp of smoke” (30) which is everywhere and impossible to gather; Ban is “a snake who has escaped from time” (40); Ban is “a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city” (41); Ban is “a puff of diesel. Something like a smudge, already dispersing. A warp of smoke looping around the orbital road surrounding London” (50); Ban is the “long black hair…carried…on the sole of a shoe” (74); Ban is “a memory of public events that supersedes, perhaps, the grid of touch” (62); Ban is schizophrenic; Ban is dead and alive; Ban is a therapy. Ban is the discharge of “everything that was wrong” (57); Ban is “the mermaid who drifted past Kapil Muni in the Bay of Bengal in a novel” (99-100); Ban is

Kapil Muni, Bhanu’s “ancestor” who “sat on a spit or island of sand. He does not appear in a physical form in Ban, though he helped what happens in Ban. Pink lightning. The rain.

Peacock copper wire. Circuits of light and color: of different kinds” (100); Ban is “the images of another person’s childhood” (99); Ban is “a portal, a vortex, a curl: a mixture of clockwise and anti-clockwise movements in the sky above the street” (42-43). Ban becomes a novel of “an account of a person who has already died, in advance of the death they are powerless. To prevent”(20).

The fragmented characters used in Ban En Banlieue, through which Bhanu Kapil tries to express Ban’s character, are Bhanu the writer;; Cha and her Dictée; Kapil Muni and the mermaid; Blair Peach and the race riots; and Jyoti Singh Pandey ‘Nirbhaya’ and the violence against women she symbolizes. These characters are introduced and inserted throughout the book. They are re-inserted as an entity at the last page of the chapter ‘Auto-sacrifice (Notes)’, which has the role of a conclusive poem that stitches all the characters together and, by doing so, reveals the residues of the impressions left on Ban’s identity and the arduous work of describing someone through their fragments. Caroline B. Brettell explains in her article, “Introduction: Migration, Identity, and Citizenship: Anthropological Perspectives”, that the important point is that identities, are constantly in the making, flexible and fluid, constructed in relation to changing contexts” (4). Therefore, writing these identities, in this case Ban’s identity, needs to be constructed according to the different contexts and events that have shaped her personality.

Bhanu Kapil writes Ban through identification with different characters throughout history. In doing so, she accomplishes illustrating the fragmental process of the making of an identity and the importance of the personal indexes ‘she’ and ‘her’. Bhanu sets Ban on the map of the world and starts describing her through ‘she’s’ Bhanu attaches to Ban. On page

56, Bhanu Kapil tries to explain Ban’s personifications through notes she had taken, Bhanu Kapil writes;

Ban comes across as a person with a soft heart, but what I slice off is the ‘she.’ Who, in this day and age, refers to a person for the first time as ‘her’? Who is this ‘her’? Is Ban a black person, using a mode of address she would not dare to in the United Kingdom? Is Ban black? Through now she is black. And flecked with silver. At the bottom of a river. On the street. (56)

The poetic ‘I’ used in Ban En Banlieue, is most of the times Bhanu Kapil herself trying to either explain further what she is trying to convey or emphasize what she wants to achieve by writing the book. Bhanu Kapil is trying to get into Ban’s mind by getting into her own mind. As Hegel explains: “If we consider mind more closely, we find its primary and simplest determination is the ‘I’. The ‘I’ is something perfectly simple, universal. When we say ‘I’, we mean, to be sure, an individual; but since everyone is ‘I’, when we say ‘I’, we only say

something quite universal. The universality of the ‘I’ enables it to abstract from everything, even from its life” (Hegel cited in Berensen,78).

IDENTITY

Prior to moving deeper into the dissected fragments and identifications of Ban we need to consider what the self and identity are and what the involvement of others subscribe to the making of a person. Many philosophers were intrigued by the notions self and identity. Descartes stated that identity depends upon the fact that “I am a thinking substance or being” (cited in Marshall 77). Hume argues that identity is “a relation which a thing has to itself” (cited in Marshall 78) and asserts, as James D. Marshall illuminates, “that personal identity is merely a series or collection of impressions/ideas, without any substantial underpinning entity to provide any unity, and that the notion of identity as a relation arises from the imagination”

(78). In contrast, Nietzsche and Foucault state that it is experience which creates the self and the ‘I’ (Marshall 84). Foucault further states that the self “is not a substance. It is a form, and this form is not always identical to itself in each case one plays, one establishes a different relation to oneself” (Foucault cited in Marshall 84-85). Thus, the self becomes a performance one performs at different stages and places in their lives. James D. Marshall clarifies

Foucault’s notion of identity by stating that the self is “rather a form, or something

conceptual…a form here is like a category (the self) which may be filled in various ways” (Marshall 85), and to various reasons. Thus, identity becomes a representation of the self through performances made by the self in different contexts. Besides, identity also becomes the embodiment of those different fragments performed by the self.

There is an important distinction to be made about identity and identification, as many of the characters written in Ban En Banlieue are mere identification of Ban, made by Bhanu, in order to write Ban’s identity. Ernesto Laclau explains in Robert Dunn’s book Identity Crisis that the term identity “designates an object of discovery or recognition, implying an originary essence defining the person. [While the term] identification refers to a process of identity construction” (Laclau cited in Dunn 3). Robert Dunn further explains that the social and cultural changes in a person’s life have “engendered identity crises in both senses. Belief in a substantial identity determined by birth or inner life experience has been seriously eroded in twentieth century philosophical and social thought. At the same time, sources and means of Identification in the form of agencies external to the individual have proliferated beyond our wildest imaginations” (Dunn 3). A person’s internal experiences and traits have lost their significance when demonstrating or writing about a person’s life. In contrast, identification with the external aspects of a person’s life and external agents have gained more academic interest in the last few decades, and this notion of identification is of great importance for understanding Ban En Banlieue.

Ban En Banlieue is the product of Ban’s external traits, external agencies and identifications with the world around her. The book explains all the things Ban is identified with in order to write her identity. Thus, we read, through Ban En Banlieue, the external events and people who have shaped Ban, and whom Bhanu Kapil identifies Ban with. Through the fragmentation of Ban’s identity, we learn the self. Reuven Snir puts it very delicately and says “that the process of identification creates identity and we recognize ourselves when we are hailed: you identify me and I become that me that you have

identified” ( 171). Therefore, when Bhanu is writing Ban she is identifying Ban’s character through the process of Ban’s identification with the world outside and those who have

preceded her in their struggle with the external world. Reuven Snir suggests that there are two major models in the construction of identity. Namely, one model that “assumes there is an essential content to any identity which is defined by common origin or common structure of experience” (172). The other model emphasizes “the impossibility of fully separate distinct identities” (172). Thus, identity, becomes the internal aspects – the origin – stitched with the external aspect – the outside world – which are performed by a self to construct one’s identity. Those different parts can be mixed and separated at the will of the person who is performing their identity.

Additionally, Stuart Hall writes that “identity is a structure representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative…it has to go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself” (Hall cited in Snir, 172). In case of Ban En Banlieue, it is Bhanu Kapil who is trying to make Ban go through the ‘eye of the needle’ in order to write all the aspects of Ban’s identity. The external, historical events and

characters bring Ban closer to being identified as such, without literally writing Ban’s own thoughts and the internal emotions that construct Ban’s identity.

Consequently, Ban’s identity becomes transparent and ever changing. The external aspects are ever changing because the world outside is constantly changing. Ergo, Ban’s internal aspects change as well. Hence, Ban is constantly identified with what is at hand in the external world, in which Ban is situated. These identifications allude to the possibility of Ban’s transparency through embodying other characters to become written. Bhanu Kapil is continually changing and re-inventing Ban through others. Stuart Hall clarifies this and states that:

Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead of identity as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. (cited in inventing/ Re-presenting Identities in a Global World introduction xii)

Subsequently, Ban becomes a product of her surroundings. Ban is the summation of all that is internal and external. Ban’s self is no longer treated as endless and complete. But rather as changing and re-inventing itself. Ekaterini Lygoyra further illuminates the changing of the self in her article “Name Uses” by stating that:

The self is no longer considered to be continuous and complete, having an ‘inner core’ which remains whole and stable during the person’s social life. ‘The cultural fields of the classes, the genders, sexuality, ethnicity, race and nationality’ are ‘fragmented,’ so the social subjects do not have ‘stable co-ordinates.’ As they move through these various contexts, they form various cultural identities. (142)

These continuous changes and cultural identities are what Ban En Banlieue is about. It is due to these cultural fields that Bhanu Kapil is enabled to write the different external stories that

describe Ban’s identity. In her article “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging” Nira YUVAl-DAVIS appealingly writes that:

Identities are narratives, stories people tell themselves and others about who they are ( and who they are not) …The identity narratives can shift and change, be contested and multiple. They can relate to the past, to a myth of origin; they can be aimed at explaining the present and, probably above all, they function as a projection of a future trajectory. (202)

This is what Ban En Banlieue as a book, and Bhanu Kapil as a writer, are aiming at.

Particularly, writing the self (Ban), through multiple layers, events, characters who on their turn relate to and represent many historical events and other characters: be it mythological or actual. Stuart Hall argues that “Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture ‘in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves” (Hall cited in Snir 172). Thus, Ban becomes a collection of historical events, characters, present events, and also, a future

extension of the self. Ban “lies outside of time” (Ban En Banlieue 21) and Bhanu Kapil tries to write someone else’s memory through her own personal memory in combination with the collective memory, which she identifies Ban with. This is Bhanu Kapil’s “auto-sacrifice” (7) for Ban and in order to write Ban. Bhanu needs to devour Ban’s past, present and future pieces to be able to write her, and while doing so Bhanu made errors. Bhanu Kapil writes on page 23 of Ban En Banlieue that “the error is that I chose to write my book in a place where these colors and memories are not readily available. There is no bank. Instead, I scream them – I scream the colors each to each – and this is difficult. It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories”. There is no bank with stored memories which are of great value to one’s existence and which can be accessed easily. Rather, there is a

collective memory presented through history and stories of others that can be used to describe this particle called Ban, who was once alive.

B(H)AN(U)

During one of described performances mentioned in the beginning section of Ban En Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil says: “I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this. [Hold up charcoal in fist.] I wrote the organ sweets – the bread-rich parts of the body before it’s opened then devoured. I wrote the middle of the body to its end” (19). The devouring of the body from its middle to its end is what Bhanu Kapil is accomplishing through the publishing of the notes and the poem as different sections of the same book – but still one product. The notes, quotes and performances become the middle of Ban and the writing of the book becomes the end parts that are the hardest to describe, specifically, the different aspects of Ban’s identity through the different characters, the Banlieues. Further down the same page Bhanu Kapil writes her struggle with writing a novel as a poet:

On September the 4th, 2010, at 7 p.m., I began to write – but did not write – [wrote]: notes for a novel never written: a novel of the race riot: (Ban.) As my contribution to a panel at the limits of the poetic project – its capacity: for embodiment, for figuration, for what happens to bodies when we link them to the time of the event, which is to say – unlived time, the part of time that can never belong to us – I would like to present: a list of errors I made as a poet engaging a novel-shaped space, the space of a book: set: on a particular day and at a particular time: April 23rd, 1979. (19-20)

The capacity to writing a novel-shaped poetry book about the race riots and their impact on the little girl on the sidewalk reveals errors that are impossible to avert. These aversion and

errors, are what engage the reader deeper with the book. The errors become the descriptive, informative and factual parts of the poems and prose yet to come.

Bhanu is also concerned with bodies during an ‘unlived time’ of a certain event. She wonders what happens to bodies during a historical event like the race riot of 1979, in one of London’s suburbs. The story then starts, and Bhanu explains:

The novel begins at 4 p.m. – just as Ban – a brown [black] girl – is walking home from school. She orients to the sound of breaking glass, and understands the coming violence has begun. Is it coming from the far-off street or is it coming from her home? Knowing that either way she’s done for – she lies down to die. (20)

This excerpt already touches upon the different aspects Bhanu is connecting with in order to describe Ban’s ‘unlived time’ – not only through the emerging race riot – but also through domestic violence, the giving up as suicide, the immigrant girl on the asphalt of a London suburb too scared to prevent anything from happening to her, whether it be on the streets or at home. And all of this is illuminated and explained by a novel-shaped book. The ‘brown [black] girl’ lies down on the asphalt ‘to die’ stands for all the other characters in this book who have found their deaths on the cold surface of the asphalt. Like Blair Peach; other immigrants during the race riot; Jyoti Pandey Singh; and Cha. Each of these characters will be explained at length in the following sections of this thesis.

Bhanu Kapil records how she herself ”lie[s] down next to her [Ban] and extend my own tongue to the ivy that curls down to the sidewalk with its medicine and salt: so close to my own mouth. Lick it and you could die” (Ban En Banlieue 21). This illustrates the physical part of Bhanu’s interpretation of Ban the character. Bhanu Kapil “do[es] all these things, but Ban does not die.” Ban does not give up completely and disappear. Instead, Ban “with every rainfall, she‘s washed off the street but by morning, a stain rises up through the asphalt and

by 4 p.m. the next day, she’s ready to go again” (21). Ban is a stain forever washed off and raised up, repeatedly on the same day, waiting for the same way of dying at 4 p.m. to remind the others that her story needs to be told.

Bhanu describes how her “childhood nickname was Ban” (Interview by Megan Marz), and how she became Ban at a young age when she is slapped across the face by her father (55). That moment of violence shifts Bhanu into Ban and their journey together starts. Ban’s return to India and the way she lies down on the border with Pakistan and marks the outline of her body, stitches her to Bhanu (Ban En Banlieue 57). Bhanu Kapil further clarifies her relationship with Ban and writes:

Then she [Ban] sat down next to this body and placed a hand on the place where its chest would be, and another upon on her own. I began to write on Ban. It was this writing that led me further in, to the place I did not want to be, Ban’s soul. ‘Mother of my soul,’ she [Ban] wrote in an early notebook…But Ban, in a sense, was waiting for me, in the darkness of the border, no longer proximal but centered, arms waving in a blur, waiting with everything that was wrong. (57)

Bhanu and Ban become one. Their beginnings and endings are intertwined and Bhanu succeeds in entering Ban’s soul, even though she ‘did not want to be’ in Ban’s soul. Ban is waiting for Bhanu to discharge her and write the horrific events that shaped her, in order to expose her identity. Bhanu Kapil mentions the quietness before “a book begins. So quit that when my nervous system hurts, so does the sentence, because that’s all we have: each other. The sentence and I. we cope” (61). The sentences are all they have, because that is their coping mechanism.

In the next few lines, Bhanu Kapil starts explaining the start of Ban’s existence. The date of her birth and what she is. Bhanu writes:

Ban… who lies outside of time. Precisely because – as a black person or child born to immigrants in the U.K. of 1971 – her birth broke something. It inserted something, like when you start to hate yourself or when you lose something. “What is born in England but is never English?” what grew a tail? What leaned over and rested its hands on its knees? An immigrant has a set of complex origins, is from elsewhere; the monster is made, on the other hand, from local mixtures of organic and inorganic materials, repurposed teeth, selenium, lungs, pink lightning, public health concerns. (21)

Ban’s entire existence is felt to be aggressive, as even her birth broke something. She is not English and will never be. Ban is a girl, she was born in 1971 to immigrant parents in the UK. That’s all we know about her at this point. Her character is made up out of facts and

observations and any information to what she feels and thinks is absent. Because Ban is born in England, she is a mixture of all the organic supplements found in England: which make up the interior of a human body. At the same time she is of immigrant parents, which makes her a monster: because she does not show the same attributes an English person from English parents would show, namely the exterior traits like, skin color. Ban’s internal identity is mostly like anyone else’s, she has thoughts, feelings, fears and passions: but the exteriority of Ban is fearful. It is aggressive as to whom is observing her: because she is a monster born of immigrant parents who will never be accepted as English. Ban will never belong to England as a white person from English parents would belong.

Further down the same page Bhanu Kapil writes “I thought I was writing about an immigrant. I was writing about a monster. Monsters don’t incarnate. They regress” (21). Bhanu Kapil perceives – while writing a book about an immigrant and race riots – that immigrants do not progress into citizen that belong to the country in which they are living or

are even born. ‘They regress:’ they go backward and find themselves belonging to nowhere. Bhanu Kapil said in an interview for Tinge Magazine:

My memories take place partly/wholly in a place (England) that, at the same time as I inhabited it, was in the process of expelling me. When we moved to a new neighborhood in northwest London, every day, for a long period of two or three years, my mother was spat on the train. And the enormity of that indignity — the indignity of being nonwhite in a mostly white place, (what else does an immigrant do except move up, somehow, in the world?) bore down upon my own mind.

Bhanu explains in the interview that she felt the indignity of being non-white, of not

belonging to the only place she had ever known and lived in. Bhanu touches upon the notion of immigration and not belonging through writing Ban, and in doing so she exposes the impressions left on the skin of an immigrant by not belonging. Bhanu Kapil symbolically strips “down…because nudity, to be effective, to be frightening, should be that. I read it like this – the description. Of the person who was exposed: to light” (Ban En Banlieue 17). Bhanu Kapil strips down to expose the residue of being marked as an immigrant, of not belonging. In this way, Bhanu writes this fragment of Ban by writing about herself.

Via Bhanu’s memories of her youth in England, light is being shed on Ban’s youth and why she’s numb once she finds herself at the beginning of a race riot. In the interview for Tinge magazine, Bhanu Kapil said that “[she] felt the anxiety or imperative to begin a new book: to write myself out of the numbness I felt”. Bhanu Kapil was trying to write about the numbness any immigrant might feel when feeling unwelcome in the host country.

Bhanu Kapil explains further down the interview that she was interested in expressing through the genre of a novel the numbness her body feels when asked “where I am from” and answering “England. No, where are you from?” [emphasis added by Bhanu]. This numbness

caused by being a non-white English person is exposed through Ban En Banlieue. Bhanu Kapil embodies and puzzles out this fragment of Ban’s identity.

Bhanu Kapil explained in her interview with Laynie Browne, that this writing – or, rather, non-writing – of a poet’s novel, is due to the changing of the “poet’s brain…Perhaps the poet moves from one part of the country to another. The poet turns to the sentences as the place where questions of magnetism, gravity and light – the forces that bind a person to the earth and then release them, abruptly – might most fully be worked out” (Jacket2.org). Through the physical movement of the poet to another country, in Bhanu Kapil’s case to the USA, this part of the poet is revealed, the part that binds them to their birthplace. For Bhanu Kapil, in this piece for Ban, all that binds her to England are memories of an aggressive, and humiliating life. Through writing these memories, Bhanu Kapil is able to discharge them, and in discharging them make space for another part of Ban, who is more than just an immigrant.

Bhanu’s limitations in writing a novel actually expose more because she is able to unleash herself from the rules that are bound to be followed when writing a novel. Writing poetry, especially the fragmentation ability which poetry provides for the poet, gives Bhanu Kapil the method and medium through which her identity can be merged together with Ban’s, in order to discharge more of the harsh events that shaped both their lives, as immigrants’ offspring. Davy Knittle shares this opinion in his review of Ban En Banlieue and states that “in Ban Kapil is Ban but also isn’t; she uses her writing, protest, and performance art to expose the ambient violence she has experienced and carried since childhood”

(Bostonreview.net). Thus, Ban En Banlieue, becomes a therapeutic work of art. Ban becomes the therapeutic persona Bhanu needs in order to discharge her violent childhood experiences. In a critical essay about Ban En Banlieue, Sueyeun Juliette Lee writes that “Kapil makes it clear she’s responding to other internal parameters…she isn’t here to tell us stories, but to ‘discharge’ this psycho-emotional mass that Ban has become inside her body, inside the

cultural body” (constantcritic.com). Through Ban, Bhanu tried to “burst out of my own skin” (htmlgiant.org), since the whole story is situated within one body: a body shared by many different characters who share similar impressions as Ban. Ban becomes the ‘cultural body’ who includes and excludes all the characters.

In her interview with Roland Saifi for htmlgiant.org Bhanu Kapil describes her own narrative of England, as she perceives it. Bhanu explains that:

I [Bhanu] want, in my own narrative of British life, to write it’s non-being, it’s there-on-the-floor: the body’s abnegated stance. Which body? Whose body? This isn’t something I can always work out in narrative, or through images. Increasingly, the bodies I am trying to write about – emigrant and pre-emigrant: black-brown — are the ones that don’t appear, very often, in experimental fiction written in the U.S.

The England Bhanu writes about is through the immigrant’s gaze, which is through the non-being and not-belonging, even if born there. Bhanu Kapil makes intelligible that “in order to write a girl who stops walking and lies down on a street in the opening scene of a riot that is a real riot — an historical riot — I had to stop trying to make a literature out of what I was doing” (htmlgiant.org), and use the riot as a charnel ground through which Ban digs a path. This path acknowledges and makes visible, through Ban’s own suicidal position, all the other decomposing bodies that have tried to make a difference through a peaceful protest, which turned into a violent riot that left behind many innocent black and brown bodies as stains on the asphalt.

BAN THE IMMIGRANT

Many writers of color have written poetry and prose on immigration and not belonging. They have written many books on the cultural fields of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and

nationality which are of great importance in shaping migrants’ sense of self. According to Stuart Hall identity is formed during the “interaction of the self and society” (cited in Lygoyra 142).The interaction of the self with its surrounding forms identity. Bhanu Kapil said in her interview with Tinge Magazine that Ban “never was because she was never allowed to be”. Ban wasn’t allowed to be because ‘her [immigrant] birth broke something.’ Ban En Banlieue focusses on the destructive conflicts established in race and immigration that ensures the fragmental composition of migrant identities. Bhanu Kapil states in her interview with Rowland Saifi that the race riot part of Ban is “my [Bhanu’s] first attempt at an anti-colonial literature – that still continues” (htmlgiant.org). On Page 48 of Ban En Banlieue, Bhanu writes: “I think about low-levels of racism, the very parts of a social system or institution that are hard to address, precisely because they are non-verbal:” like the girl lying on the sidewalk awaiting the violence of the race riot. Her act of surrender to the white protestors is the non-verbal aspect of racism.

Racism and miss-treatment of immigrants has been a significant part of European and, especially, English history. At the end of the Second World War, many colonies were

granted their sovereignty, and the inhabitants could choose to either stay in the ex-colony or move to England. Many of these subjects were English citizens by name, but never felt like they belonged to England or seen as ‘real’ English citizens. Ross Bond explains that “even those who enjoy full formal citizenship may still, in the eyes of the majority, be excluded from belonging to the nation in which they reside” (610). Ross Bond further explains that at the time of “British imperial heyday”, many subjects of the overseas colonies believed themselves to be British citizens (612), but their reception by the host society stood far from recognizing them as true British citizens or as equals.

With the arrival of the Black and Asian workers in 1948, “a pervasive belief was shared across all social classes, that the white British had economic, moral, and intellectual

superiority over arrivals from colonial countries, and indeed over most foreigners”

(Tomlinson 66). This conception of superiority was felt by many white people and it was the result of decades of teachings about British imperial legacy and the inferiority of the Black and Asian subjects of the colonies (Tomlinson 68). Bhanu Kapil recollects a racist event and writes “subtle race pride – eye rolling when the woman in the fuchsia pink and chocolate silk sari entered the Wimpy Bar” (Ban En Banlieue 69). Caroline Brettell explains the feeling this trigger might cause in her article “Introduction: Migration, Identity, and Citizenship:

Anthropological Perspectives” and states that “tensions of exclusion and inclusion

characterize migrant efforts to situate themselves in the local community and create stable identities” (5). The host society can either make or break an immigrant’s attachment to its society. The sense of belonging is of great importance to immigrants. It is widely known that “immigrants are often viewed in negative or derogatory ways by the larger society and may take a variety of positions in the face of devaluation of their group” (Liebkind cited in Phinney et all. 501). The immigrant’s sense of belonging can cause them to feel welcome or unwelcome, and thus to feel like being recognized in their identities or not. Nicole Wood and Louise Wait explain this in their editorial “Scales of Belonging” by affirming that “belonging is a dynamic emotional attachment that relates individuals to the material and social worlds that they inhabit and experience. It is about feeling ‘at home’ and ‘secure’, but it is equally about being recognized and understood” (sciencedirect.com).

Racialization and othering of migrants can culminate in their introverted personalities and “inflict a deep psychological wound” (Dummett 114). Racism and othering contribute to the lack of belonging and attachment which is felt by many immigrant groups who feel unwelcome in their host societies, and which is described by Bhanu Kapil in Ban En

Banlieue. Nira YUVAL-DAVIS argues that “belonging can be an act of self-identification or identification by others, in a stable, contested or transient way…Belonging is always a

dynamic process, not a reified fixity” (199), it can shift and change according to the standards of the host society at any given place and time.

Moreover, racism ensures the exclusion of immigrant groups and reifies the immigrant’s sense of not belonging. James Procter sheds light on Stuart Hall’s notions of Racism in his book Stuart Hall, and states that:

racism expresses itself through displacement, through denial, through the capacity to say [I am not racist because I love Indian Food] two contradictory things at the same time, the surface imagery speaking of an unspeakable content, the repressed content of a culture…Racism, [Stuart Hall] argues works through a ‘profound historical forgetfulness…a kind of historical amnesia, a decisive mental repression’ involving the displacement of its colonial history (Hall cited in Procter 81-82).

Stating an opinion about not being a racist because you love Indian food, does not negate your perception of race or your ability to act in a racist way. Indian food does not stand for the identity of Indian people and how they are perceived . The food does not represent the group: it’s a part of the group’s identity. Therefore accepting their food does not mean one accepts the group itself. It only implies that a part of the group’s identity is liked. The Indian minority group in England is therefore reduced to their food. This reduction of one’s identity to one single trait is problematic and racist. One’s black or brown skin color does not

attribute to the personal traits a person may possess or to their identity: it is a part of them, a part of the whole being. Stuart Hall’s explanation relates to the repression of a group of people by marking them as others. It’s Ban’s skin color that marks her as other, and not Ban’s identity. Ban is not a monster, because she possesses a dark skin color. Ban is made into a monster by how the white English citizens perceive her. Bhanu Kapil writes that:

Ban is not an immigrant; she is a shape or bodily outline that’s familiar: yet inaccurate: to what the things is. How to look good on Skype. A vaginal opening. By 2011, she’s a blob of meat on the sidewalk. I progress her to meat – a monstrous form – but here she pauses, is inhibited, and this takes a long time. (20)

Ban the monster is a side effect of the colonial past which is denied by most colonizers. Stuart Hall’s comment of ‘historical amnesia’ is best shown when looking at the colonizer’s history. Many western nations have forgotten the terrors caused by their colonial past, they have forgotten the occupation of grounds not their own; and they have forgotten that their riches nowadays was built, in the past, by trading in wealth not their own. Therefore, the notion of white superiority causes many problems once the superior society finds itself inhabited by inferior subjects and this is one of the root causes of social inequality and racism. Appadurai points out that:

The ‘savage’ is no longer out ‘there’ but has invaded the ‘home’ here and has fissured it in the process…The presence of the ‘savage’ not only de-homogenizes and racializes ‘home’s’ whiteness, but also reveals its homogeneity to be a mythology sustainable only through control over the global political economy, which is thereby seemingly fissured as well. (cited in Lavie & Swedenburg 2)

The savage becomes Ban the monster. The savage is the immigrant and their own perception of themselves and how their host society perceives them.

Caroline Brettell further explains that “immigrants are often defined – as legal or illegal, citizen or alien – largely by the state, an institution that plays an important role in the political and cultural production of migrant identities in the public sphere” (4). The

identities in reaction to the force of external identification placed on them by their host societies. The fluidity of their identity and its transformational capacity immigrants show when negotiating their space within a host society is best seen through their history in the host society. Bhanu Kapil writes on page 27 of Ban En Banlieue that it “requires me to acknowledge that my creature (Ban) is over-written by a psychic history that is lucid, astringent, witty. No longer purely mine”. The history of Ban is filled with twitches and shocks that change their pace and shape – which transform according to the external forces. They become sharp and unclear, like twitches of Ban’s body which is “stretching then contracting on the ground” (Ban En Banlieue 27).

Ban the immigrant is being perceived as an alien because she “fulfills the first criterium of monstrosity simply by degrading: by emitting bars of light from her teeth and nails, when the rain sweeps over her then back again [sic]” (28), Ban is “looping the city, Ban is a warp of smoke” (30). Ban is “unreal. She’s both dead and never living: the part , that is, of life that is never given: an existence” (30). Ban is never given an existence because she will never belong to England. “What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English?” (30) the answer is a non-white citizen, an immigrant. “Under what conditions is a birth not recognized as a birth? Answer: Ban” (30). Ban is not recognized and this feeling is accompanying her through her entire childhood. Ban is part of an England not her own. Ban’s outskirts, her banlieues, are the ash on the street: “the ash is analgesic, data, soot, though when it rains, Ban becomes leucine, a bulk, a network of dirty lines that channel starlight, presence, boots” (31). Ban’s fragments are like ash and dirt on the ground, which can be washed away by the rain but never completely removed. They leave their mark on the sidewalk like writings on a palimpsest. The unlived life of Ban is written about but never gone, never forgotten. Bhanu wants to “feel it in my body – the root cause” (31) of her not belonging, and to enable herself from preventing the deadly outcome of the riot. All because

she is still a child, and because of the negativity of her surroundings. In the article “Ethnic Identity, Immigration, and Well-Being: An Interactional Perspective,” Phinney et all state that children who are “exposed to negative stereotypes about their own group may hold conflicting or negative feelings about their ethnicity” (501), and also hold negative feelings towards the host society. Therefore, these children will never truly feel like they belong – even though they know no other nation , language or country – they are still perceived as second class citizen, who will never fully become English. In this sense different identities of immigrants never touch, they co-exist in different aspects of their daily lives. Therefore their identity exists side by side – ‘they do not touch’.

Ban En Banlieue is the “story of a girl on the floor of the world” (24) because her mere existence represents many different things. The immigrant aspect is described through the race riot that caused her death. Bhanu Kapil describes in chapter “7. DEDICATION”, on page 14. Blair Peach is one identification of Ban, through whom Bhanu Kapil tries to explain this violent and alien aspects of Ban’s life and identity. Bhanu Kapil dedicates the book to the fallen Blair Peach “a teacher from New Zealand who protested a gathering of the National Front in the town hall of Southall, Middlesex (U.K.) – an immigrant suburb of West London – the banlieue of the title – on April 23rd, 1979”. Bhanu further writes that Blair Peach is the “martyr of my novel although he does not appear in it. He appears here. He appears now. He appears before the novel begins" (4).

Blair peach’s appearance is of great value to understanding Ban and the book Bhanu is trying to write. He becomes the physical martyr of the race riots, on which Ban the young girl gives up and lies on the asphalt awaiting her death. Blair Peach symbolizes the martyr part of Ban. He becomes Ban who is trying to protest against the unfair treatment of

immigrants. Blair Peach was “knocked unconscious by a member of the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group, Peach died the next day in Ealing Hospital. Reports acknowledging the

cause of his death were made public by the Metropolitan Police on April 27th, 2010” (Ban En Banlieue 14). It took the police department 31 years to acknowledge their mistake and

publically announce that their actions caused Blair Peach’s violent and unnecessary death. It takes Bhanu Kapil writing a book to acknowledge Ban’s non-existence and death. Thus, just like Blair Peach, Ban is unable to protest and finds herself surrendering to the looming riot, and her death becomes as unnecessary as Peach’s death.

Bhanu Kapil chose 23rd of April, 1979 to be the date on which the novel is set, a date on which a real riot took place. In this way the novel becomes “an account of a person who has already died, in advance of the death they are powerless. To prevent…what will it take to shed off, to be rendered, to incarnate, to never be there in the same way again?” (20) April the 23rd had left many impressions on Ban, Bhanu and the streets of Southall. Bhanu Kapil wanted “a literature that is not made from literature” (32) but from memories of a violent past. This past is remembered through the “curved, passing sound [of breaking glass] that has no fixed source” (32); it is remembered through a girl “collapsing to her knees then to her side in a sovereign position”; it is remembered through the “murderous roses blossoming in the gardens of immigrant families with money problems”; it is remembered by the impression left on her tights by the London street that looked like a “tiny jungle: dark blue, slick and shimmering a bit” (32). This violent past is remembered:

In a novel that no one wants to write or thinks of writing, the rain falls in lines an dots upon her. In the loose genetics of what makes this street real, the freezing cold, vibrating weather sweeping through south-east England at 4 p.m. on an April afternoon is very painful. Sometimes there is a day and sometimes there is a day reduced to its symbolic elements: a cup of broken glass; the Queen’s portrait on a thin bronze coin; dosage; rain. (32-33)

The way a day is remembered is often reduced to the part of the day that left the most significant impression on a person’s experience. Their memory tends to memorize different aspects of the day, like the weather, the time, the occasion, the event itself, the color of the asphalt. Bhanu Kapil explains in her interview with Tinge Magazine that the way she memorizes events is visual:

I have a very visual memory, like staring hard at things, or the wrong things, toward a different reality or a way out of the one I was in. I think of the slate walls and the graveyards and the elms and the sky filled with rain the color of irises. My memories are about surfaces more than events…I write about the asphalt or street, the sidewalk that a girl lies down upon, again and again…[Bhanu writes] a sound the book makes, a muffled sound, a roar below the level of speech.

April 23rd, 1979 is remembered for the violent race riots and the segregation of the

community, where Bhanu Kapil is no longer “prepared to charter or re-organize the cosmic symbols of Sikhism, Anglican Christianity and the Hindu faith:” (Ban En Banlieue 34) She is no longer prepared to stitch all the different aspects that compose her identity and her

surrounding neighbors in London.

Bhanu Kapil is trying to write about immigration and violence against immigrants by writing about:

A women (girl) so black she radiates a limited consciousness. In this scene without depth, she is supine, lifting her arms very carefully then setting them down; an image that is never exhausted, though I write it again and again. With a careful hand. (34-35)

Bhanu Kapil tries to write Ban ‘again and again with a careful hand’ in order to reunite all the aspects that compose this Ban creature into one book. Bhanu describes how this young

woman is unable to act in protest against the upcoming riot. Thus, Ban gives up and lays down on the ground and awaits the rioters.

Bhanu Kapil explains on page 88 that she, on the day of the riot, “was safe beneath the blankets on the floor of my bedroom in Hayes. I made a novel from those muffled sounds” (Ban En Banlieue). Those muffled sounds are very artistically imagined by Bhanu Kapil. Her own personal record, ‘the muffled sounds’, is turned into a fictional

reinterpretation of an actual event which took place on April 23rd. Bhanu Kapil describes how “a long black hair is carried to Yeading High Street on the sole of a shoe” and how “that hair is shed off at “a skinhead pub”. At that moment, “like a delicate clock, the difficult music of another century, the riot begins – a distant roar…a strobe” (35). The page reads: “Ban turns her head to the wall. Imagine a cloud of milk as it dissipates, spilled on a London street in an act of protest” (35). Bhanu Kapil is asking the reader to imagine, to picture, a large group of white people consuming a London street, where a young black girl is lying on the asphalt. Bhanu draws a horrific image in the mind by describing the scene as she does. The reader thinks of these things and imagines how the young, small, and black body is set on the ground in contrast to the emerging aggressive white faces from afar.

On page 37, Blair Peach is re-introduced as the “emigrant from New Zealand, who will die before this day is out” who is in the beginning of this story still alive, unaware of the arrival of his death. Bhanu Kapil again urges the reader to “think about a cyborg to get to the immigrant. Think of a colony” (37), to be able to envision what she is trying to convey through her words and the repetition of this April day in 1979. Bhanu is trying to invoke the meaning and the vision of an immigrant as is seen by the Far Right party. The immigrant is an alien, he is a cyborg, different than the host society. Bhanu writes how nauseating it is to “see a white face…in a London suburb. An immigrant suburb: a banlieue” (37). The

in those London suburbs and how “everyone knows to board the glass up, draw the curtains and lie down. Lie down between the had-sewn quilts shipped from India” (37-38), as Bhanu did: in the house where an immigrant might still feel safe and secure in a part of a country where they feel unwelcome. The immigrants other choice is to “move away. As would you” (38); if you were living in those violent parts of the city. Emigrating the banlieue in order to find Ban, the center, and casting the immigrant mark off of one’s skin.

Particularly, this discharge of one’s mark of immigrant also stands for the discharging of one’s painful memories and secrets. Even if it is not seen on the outside, it can still be felt: “the girl’s body emitting a solar heat, absorbed in the course of a lifetime but now

discharging, pushing off” (40). The body is emitting all the disclosures it carried for a long time and now it will be discharged before it erupts and evaporates, leaving no mark. Bhanu Kapil wanted to write a book about the race riots and, by doing so, discharge the “inverted, corrupted” events and “expose them to view” (42).

Bhanu Kapil explains her own struggle with being an immigrant and how she perceived herself and her parents to be seen, as English, and writes:

I wanted to write a book about lying on the floor of England. I wanted to return to England. I went to England. I was born in England. I lived in a house in England until I was thirty years old. My parents were English. I was English. After 1984, we all shared the same nationality, but by 2006 or 7, this was no longer true. Between September 2010 and late December 2012, I studied a piece of the earth, no longer or wider than a girl’s body prone upon it. The asphalt. As dusk fell: violet/amber – and filled – with the reflected lights coming from the discs, the tiny mirrors, positioned in the ivy as she ‘slept.’ (42)

In studying the piece of earth that represents Ban, Bhanu tried to expose the notion of being not English. The English she thought she could call her own, but was never fully granted to her because of who she was, ‘born from immigrant parents.’ Bhanu “wanted to write a book that was like lying down. That took some time to write, that kept forgetting something, that took a diversion: from which it never returned” (42). Bhanu Kapil wanted to write about everything that represented her struggle as an immigrant through the struggles of her

surroundings: like how her neighbor emptied their milk bottles an filled it with his urine (59), or writing “a memory of public events that supersedes, perhaps, the grid of touch” (62).

Ban becomes the immigrant and the emigrant, who leaves this world in which she never truly lived. Ban is a therapeutic character, used to expose the banlieues – the outskirts – of a person’s identity. She can sometimes be perceived “in the dirt of the place she is from…lying down on a sidewalk in London. Without resistance. Beneath the ivy. At night. Like bones before they are bones. Like eyes in the time that follows talking” (45-46). Ban becomes “a fundamentalist, if Ban converts, at some point, to the radical ideal of the body as somehow untouchable, the very thing you cannot reach” (45), and could disappear into the nothingness of her existence. The fluid mixture of Ban’s identity is present in the whole book.

On page 48, the riot comes to its end, and Bhanu writes:

The roar of the race riot dims. Ban is crumpled like a tulip: there. A wetness, that is, with limbs. There are subtle movements: ventral and dorsal (muscular) twitches. This is the sensorimotor sequence. This is voltage: the body routed through its sounds: groans, murmurs, shouts.

Bhanu further writes “let me tell you before you extend yourself that Ban is disgusting. Let me tell you that Ban is a difficult person to love, full of transience” (53). Ban is a blend of

many things and persons, her capacity to be multi-shaped makes her bring the past to the present and unravel the secrets, the pain migrants feel when excluded from their host society.

Bhanu writes on page 65 that:

Perhaps Ban will be dark, but also crystalline, like a high school vampire. Like blending something in a pan.

The paper that lines the pan. For cookies.

“I hate cookies almost as much as I hate white people.” Says Ban, to begin,

To write a sentence with content more volatile that what contains it. So that the page is shiny, wet and hard.

So that sentences are indents not records; the soulful presence of a vibrant man or girl rather than persistence.

Their capacity to touch you in the present time.

For Ban to hate cookies as much as she would white people is a statement that explains the constant making of an identity. The constant shifting and blending of someone who feels included and excluded at the same time. Silvey and Lawson “suggest that migrant identities in particular are constructed through the process of mobility ‘in ways that incorporate and blend experiences of multiple places simultaneously’” (cited in Brettell 3). The multiplicity of their identities is schizophrenic and a person of immigrant descent will “attempt to maintain a level of psychic intensity at all costs” (Ban En Banlieue 68), even if it means conforming to the force of the ruling host society. Bhanu Kapil explains that this is the reason why “immigrants don’t write many novels” (68), because events unfold so rapidly and it involves them that they will only be able to write it once they emigrate, once they leave the emotional place. The therapy only begins when the traumatic space is left behind.

ERROS SHAPE(D) BAN

Ban En Banlieue opens with Bhanu Kapil stating that this work is “A re-telling – tiny

movements – of a scene from Ban” (7). This ‘re-telling’ of scenes from Ban’s life is the echo of those past and present characters and events who are trying to tell their tiny stories through the writer of Ban En Banlieue. The writer, Bhanu Kapil, can be seen as a limb, a tool, through which the characters of the book communicate their personal stories. This could be seen as a dictation by the characters and events which make the writer the medium through which their stories is being shared, re-told. Eric Hayot explains in his article that “the writer’s body in this sense is designed to be neutral pass-through for a [character’s] voice, with high marks given for faithful reproduction – for reproduction faithful, that is, to the disappearance of the writer as medium “(607). The miniscule space in which Bhanu Kapil disappears and the characters appear is Ban En Banlieue’s diversion from Ban and it’s journey towards exposing the impressions left on Ban’s identity. The book Ban En Banlieue plays with the notion of multiple characters and historical events speaking, and dictating their stories through the same mediator, Bhanu Kapil.

The second line of ‘1. [13 Errors for Ban]:’, cites a line used by Laura Ann: “The weight of my head pushing down on the floor opens my mouth,…It’s not the mouth that wants to open, necessarily. It’s the gravity, the pressure, the force…” (7). The weight of all that one knows and all that hurts a person can be immense and can literally push someone’s mouth open to make them speak out about their issues and hurtful memories. Those

memories can also be from a near past, a past painfully described through riots, rapes and murder. This line sets in the readers mind the notion of forcefully opening a mouth, not because the person wants it but because the gravity is pulling and the pressure is pushing at the same time: a person’s violent past that is forcing the person to finally speak out and let go of the pain. It does this via other media than the speaking itself. It accomplishes the eruption