Bhanu Kapil: Blood in the line
“I
want 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.