23 | Bhanu Kapil | entre-Ban

ENTRE-BAN
VALLUM CHAPBOOK SERIES NO. 23
BHANU KAPIL

entre-Ban is a collection of notes taken by Bhanu Kapil during the writing of her 2015 book, Ban en Banlieue. Inside are deletions, dedications, invitations, the smell of burnt hair, caves, violence. The fragmented text oscillates between the global and the hyper-local, the past and the present, the institutional and the personal, in its steady unfolding of experience and history. entre-Ban was written, in Kapil’s own words: “…for anyone who is oily, overly present, or existing beneath a dominant gaze.” entre-Ban is a “feeling” of that which has been excluded. It refers to immigrants, the children of immigrants, and to all those who have been diminished and rendered invisible by the so-called dominant class, gender or race. It speaks in the voice of a female, inaudible while it screams. Can the terms rendered in entre-Ban ever be reconciled? Will the dominant remain dominant? Is there only a recourse to a final shame, when reality misses the point and one is left haunted and alone? Will those in power ever be held accountable for their crimes?

“A stain blooms on the sidewalk, in city after city, for example. A pavonine sheen in its slick. We gasp to see it, the rainbow, then retrain our feelings on the spot. We look away.”

Author’s Bio

Bhanu Kapil  is the author of five books, most recently Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015) and the re-issue of Incubation: a space for monsters (Kelsey Street Press, 2017). Born in the U.K. to Indian parents, she now lives and works in Colorado. Her current long-term projects include a re-writing [emptying out] of “Ban”— of which a succession of mutations and deletions are included in this chapbook. She is also writing a novel on yellow paper, a re-telling of the childhood classic, The Secret Garden.