Amy De'Ath's Essay on the Visceral 'L(a)ying Down' of Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue
At Mute Magazine, poet and critic Amy De'Ath explores at length the aesthetics and complications of laying and lying (down) in Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). Ban’s "l(a)ying-down," as De'Ath calls it, "signal[s] a desire to be close to the world, or get to know it, both in the matteral sense of land and landscape – the solid earth and its historicity – and in terms of the real abstractions of global capital that emerge from and determine this physical landscape."
De'Ath's larger questions concern the overlaps between feminist poetry and Marxist feminism, as exposed by/found in writing such as Ban en Banlieue, "the necessarily hidden – often racialised and gendered – remainders of the class relation which otherwise useful Marxist feminist categories cannot articulate fully?" More from this essay:
Because it can be all these things at once, l(a)ying down is a refusal and more: it is a powerful gesture of solidarity with the horizontal figures of racialised dead women, with Blair Peach, with the child known as Ban, and with all those who bear the weight of (to quote another pointed metaphor) ‘the strength of the British Pound’.16 The gesture is only made more meaningful at the moment it is symbolically inverted, when ‘to lie down’ becomes a euphemism for sex and the speaker asserts, ‘These are notes, so I don’t have to go there. I don’t have to lie down with you. And I don’t’.17 However plural its connotative powers, l(a)ying down is not so much a sit-in, more an emotional blockade.
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There is much more to be said about Ban en Banlieue. But in the limited space I have here, I want to point out that because Kapil situates the intimacies of patriarchal violence on a global scale, and because rage in her work is both rooted in a subject and directed at a structure, configured through the act of l(a)ying down and the scene of the banlieue, the aesthetic experience of reading it – in Adornian terms, the mimetic process whereby the subject is drawn into the poem’s internal dynamics, in a ‘“silent internal tracing of the work’s articulations”, assimilating herself to the object’s form’18 – might engender new, de-individualised ways of conceiving of patriarchal violence as intrinsic to the logic or history of capital,19 without losing sight of the very visceral and urgent points at which racialised and feminised people experience this physical and mental violence.
But more to the point: if we accept some version of the aesthetic concept of interpretive understanding that Adorno puts forward, is it possible that this poetry can help to delineate more clearly what it is that Marxist-feminism has recently ventured to describe as ‘the abject’? Before I try to answer that question, it seems relevant to note that Ban en Banlieue (and Kapil’s writing more broadly) does not suggest an immediate affinity with Marxist analysis. On the contrary, among the theorists named and pointedly scattered throughout the book – Henri Bergson, Elizabeth Grosz, and Melanie Klein appear prominently – Adorno is the only Marxist referenced, and then only by allusion to his work at its most abstractly philosophical, where he expounds upon ethical systems, domination, consciousness, and ontology through the trope of animals. As Kapil writes: ‘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].’ Indeed...
Read it all at Mute.