Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil

Author:Bhanu Kapil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

14. Paranoia and the body

“People are looking at you.” “Animals are looking at you.”

I’m reading Adorno in the middle of the night on April 23rd, 2013: Ban’s night, as it is, I realized, somewhere between all the Shakespeare references; the anniversary of the riot I am writing upon. About. 10:33 p.m. Ban is almost there now—a sheer frost on her skirt and eyebrows. “Your eyebrows are so ugly. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

I want to think about the body becoming a kind of food for the street. Irreducible.

“I put out your light.” “I put you in the garbage.”

It’s weird to gather these statements. For years now, I’ve been thinking about schizophrenia and disgust. How the capacity of a schizophrenic to recognize disgust in another person’s face, the person looking at them, is actually the thing that’s workable. You can train the schizophrenic to recognize other facial expressions based on their ability to respond to that one. Anhedonia, for example, the negative symptom of schizophrenia, is “the abyss between sentences,” as Gail Scott writes. Decontextualized.

I wrote about this subject for many years.

I had no sense of being seen or observed by anyone as I wrote. Perhaps this was a problem too.

My family lived in an end terrace with a coal chute in the garden and a rusted out, abandoned Morris Minor with a shattered windscreen propped against the back fence. Next door lived Stephen Whitby, a member of the National Front’s youth league. With regularity, he’d empty out the milk bottles of our Gujrati and Kenyan neighbors, filling them with an unrelenting supply of urine before putting them back on the step. He must have woken before dawn to do this. Red top for cream, silver for lowfat. Is he on Facebook?

Once, a man was beating his wife. Stephen Whitby climbed over the wall and banged his head on the window. He spat at the window then thumped it with his hand, screaming: “You fucking Paki!” He screamed: “Go back home, you bleeding animal!” The man stopped beating his wife, then resumed.

Adorno substituted people for animals; I feel cautious and sad reading his words in the middle of the night, studying the body for Ban.

Why?

To “reduce the living body.” [E. Grosz].

To reach the point at which: “life rubs up against matter, its inner core.” And thus to analyze nudity, in a text, as friction, the sacrifice gone wrong: but also: the normalizing contact with membranes of all kinds—plant, brush, nettles, ivy, asphalt, skin. What is the function of a non-genital nudity in a work of narrative? How can the body perform something in a new way—something that belongs neither to the scene nor to history? Note from the labyrinth: 2.b.

On the second day, pre-sky. Thinking, also, of bodies without shelter. How I woke up in India and looked down; we’d arrived at night. I looked down from the window of a third floor flat to see body outlines, stirring, uncovering, shifting—beneath the soft/hard cardboard and aluminum layers.

In this way, I want swarming movements mixed with static forms.

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