Bhanu Kapil: Blood in the line
“Iwant to write a sentence that shakes. I want there to be blood in the line, and on the floor beneath it,” writes BritishIndian poet Bhanu Kapil, winner of the 2020 TS Eliot Prize for How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion), in a note to her collaborative performance, along with her artist sister Rohini Kapil for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts Theatre in 2019. The performance gave the collection its title.
Last year, the book won the Windham Campbell Prize. Its citation read: “Through transgressive, lyrical language Bhanu Kapil undoes multiple genres to excavate crucial questions of trauma, healing, immigration, and embodiment at the outskirts of performance and process.”
The collection heaves with the weight of the world migrants carry on their shoulders. The poems are deeply-felt reflections on the lived experiences of a brown guest in the house of her middle class, liberal, white host. Attuned to the anxieties and humiliations of an immigrant life, the poems explore how hospitality can border on hostility. The guest is an artist, who is constantly trying to readjust to the ways of her host, and yet seen by the latter as the Other. The poems, told in the voice of the guest, flit between past and present. They are laced with memory and nostalgia for the life left behind. Each poem is an episode that chronicles the migrant’s emotional response to a transgression of her host.
The first poem begins with a simple question: “Like this?” What do we make of this question? We soon know. It’s “inkyearly” and the artist-narrator, wearing a knitted scarf, who likes to “go outside straight away” and bask in the brisk air, just like John Betjeman (19061984) — Britain’s best-loved poet — finds herself awakened to a “fleeting sense of possibility”. And, also, filled with gratitude to her host: “You made a space for me in your home, for my books and clothes/and I’ll/Never forget that.” She also remembers how her host had introduced her adopted daughter to the guest as an “Asian refugee”.
For Bhanu, these poems are an attempt to “work out” the relationship between the immigrant guest and the citizen. The poems across five sections weave in the artist’s backstory, memories of home, her fragile quests for love, her refuge in art and literature, her broken sense of self, and the great betrayal by her host.
The collection drips with the guest’s anguish, her response to violence of different hues, her visceral shame, her vulnerability: “It’s exhausting to be a guest/ In somebody else’s house/Forever.” In one poem, she begins by stating how she doesn’t want to “beautify our collective trauma”. And then succumbs: “As your guest, I trained myself/ To beautify/Our collective trauma.” Elsewhere, she sees her host as “a wolf capable of devouring/My internal organs/If I exposed them to view.” When she had left home, though she had “lost all our possessions”, she had felt a “strange relief” to see her home “explode in the rearview mirror”. Her current reality in a foreign land seems to explode, too, albeit in a different fashion. The line of questioning, introduced in the opening sentence, continues elsewhere too: “Is a poet/An imperial dissident, or just/An outline/Of pale blue chalk?” In another poem, she asks: “How do you live when the link/Between creativity/And survival/Can’t easily Be discerned?”
There is a reference to the work of Aurora Levins Morales, the Puerto Rican Jewish writer whose work explores identity and social justice. Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter bestknown for The Scream finds a mention too — “An artist in transit/Between loves, colors, afternoons.” Perhaps Bhanu is hinting that an immigrant’s life is a quiet scream. By displacing the heart from its context in the title, she seems to be trying to foreground the incongruity and unease of uprootedness, an experience central to a migrant’s journey.
“Blood” drips off the poet’s sentences in How to Wash a Heart; the bad blood between the migrant guest and the citizen host.
NEW DELHI: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commended the Indian government’s decision to opt for dialogue to address the farmers’ protest during a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the external affairs ministry said on Friday.
During their phone call on Wednesday, the two leaders had discussed “Canada and
India’s commitment to democratic principles, recent protests, and the importance of resolving issues through dialogue”, according to a readout from Trudeau’s office.
The statement issued by the external affairs ministry on the conversation was silent on this issue.
Asked about the matter at a news briefing on Friday, external affairs minister spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said: “On the farmers’ protests, Prime Minister Trudeau commended efforts of the government of India to choose the path of dialogue as befitting in democracy.”
Ties between India and Canada took a hit in December when Trudeau extended support to farmers protesting against three farm laws. India pushed back against his comments, describing the protest as an internal matter.
Wednesday’s phone call between Modi and Trudeau is being seen as an effort by both sides to mend fences.
A company catering to women and led by women has made its 31-year-old female founder a billionaire.
Shares of Bumble Inc., the owner of the dating app where women make the first move, soared 67% in its trading debut to $72 at 1pm on Thursday in New York, valuing chief executive officer Whitney Wolfe Herd’s stake at $1.5 billion.
The listing caps a saga that’s both inspiration and cautionary tale for women tech founders. Wolfe Herd capitalized on an underserved market and built a multibillion-dollar company that was in a sense born from one of the most vexing obstacles to women entrepreneurs: sexual harassment.
“Hopefully this will not be a rare headline,” Wolfe Herd said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television, referring
to the uniqueness of Bumble’s women-led management. “Hopefully this will be the norm. It’s the right thing to do, it’s a priority for us and it should be a priority for everyone else.”
Bumble’s IPO launches Wolfe Herd into a rarefied club of selfmade female billionaires. While women make up about half of the global population, self-made women—mostly from Asia— account for less than 5% of the world’s 500 biggest fortunes, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Self-made men comprise almost two-thirds of the wealth index.
Of the 559 companies that have gone public in the US over the past 12 months, only two, aside from Bumble, were founded by women. It’s the same with blank-check firms, Wall Street’s favoured wealth-boosting vehicle of the moment. Women-sponsored SPACs totalled fewer than a dozen, a fraction of the 349 that listed in the past year.
That means women are largely being left behind in what’s likely the fastest wealthcreation boom in history. Last year the world’s 500 richest people gained $1.8 trillion, yet 91% of that windfall went to men, according to the Bloomberg index.
Among the numerous impediments to women and other underrepresented groups in the startup world, including people of colour, harassment is one of the most pervasive. A Women Who Tech survey last year found that 44% of female founders polled reported they’d experienced harassment on the job, with more than a third of that group facing sexual harassment.
It was harassment in fact that spurred the creation of Bumble. Wolfe Herd founded the Austin, Texas-based firm in 2014 following her departure from Tinder, the rival dating app she helped found. The split was acrimonious, marked by a sexual harassment lawsuit Wolfe Herd filed against the firm, alleging among other things that she was repeatedly called derogatory names by executives and stripped of her co-founder role since having a “girl” with that title “makes the company seem like a joke”. The suit was later settled.