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A review by steveatwaywords
Ban En Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This highly ambitious and complex work demands a great deal of its readers: without investment in the dislocated fragments of narrative/poetry/performance, it will (and apparently has) seemed incoherent.
Kapil offers auto-narrative/textual/performance art, poetry not bound by the confines of literature, and it in part follows her/an artist's struggles with the installations of an artistic program. But this is hardly--not remotely--its goal, merely a means to reach into other spaces.
Maybe try it this way: when we speak of a sympathetic relationship, we speak of connection to another. But how far might this connection extend when that sympathy is to the echoes of victimized women across history or geography? And how might that sympathy realize itself when art is it conduit?
Such as experience is dizzying, sacrificial, (de)humanizing, profoundly illuminating even when it is in shadows and fragments. This, in some part, is Ban en Banlieue. "This," Kapil writes, "is bibliomancy." What childhoods are only our own? What does "radical modernity" demand of us? Even the expected structure of the work we read is under scrutiny; and so what responsibility do readers have in the narrated aesthetic of violence before us? Can we claim none?
Yes, Kapil (and her sympathized victims) demands much of her/their readers. Is it too much to ask? Only if we treat this book as mere . . . poetry.
Kapil offers auto-narrative/textual/performance art, poetry not bound by the confines of literature, and it in part follows her/an artist's struggles with the installations of an artistic program. But this is hardly--not remotely--its goal, merely a means to reach into other spaces.
Maybe try it this way: when we speak of a sympathetic relationship, we speak of connection to another. But how far might this connection extend when that sympathy is to the echoes of victimized women across history or geography? And how might that sympathy realize itself when art is it conduit?
Such as experience is dizzying, sacrificial, (de)humanizing, profoundly illuminating even when it is in shadows and fragments. This, in some part, is Ban en Banlieue. "This," Kapil writes, "is bibliomancy." What childhoods are only our own? What does "radical modernity" demand of us? Even the expected structure of the work we read is under scrutiny; and so what responsibility do readers have in the narrated aesthetic of violence before us? Can we claim none?
Yes, Kapil (and her sympathized victims) demands much of her/their readers. Is it too much to ask? Only if we treat this book as mere . . . poetry.