In the always-excellent Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrea Quaid offers much-needed, intelligent analysis of Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene.
Titled “After Separation: The Poetry of India’s Partition,” Quaid’s review examines the alleged geo-political and religious Partition of India into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, which traded British rule for “civil, ethnic, and religious conflict and inaugurated years of homelessness, riots, and war,” and examines the traumas at the heart of Schizophrene (and much of Kapil’s work).
Writes Quaid,
Rejecting the ideological fantasy of separation, Kapil pronounces it “psychotic to draw a line between two places” and illuminates how a historical trauma, like a personal one, can have lasting effects that refuse to be contained in a singular time and place. As the literary scholar Lauren Berlant claims in Cruel Optimism, her most recent work on affect and attachment, an initial traumatic event “is at once enigmatic and overpresent.” It is the shock of a violence experienced yet obscured, immediate and still enduring, often repressed and returned to at later, unexpected dates. Prolonged consequence replaces any quick clasp between cause and effect with results surfacing and taking shape belatedly, often in displaced and transformed ways….
Formally, Schizophrene refuses any definitive division between sections for, as Kapil warns, “to write this narrative is not to split it.” Instead, paragraphs, sentences and phrases, distanced by generous white space, create a circuit of intensities. Compiled fragments resonate in a tension of separation and attraction, emphasizing relation over disjunction and association over asymmetry…
Also:
Read an issue of Tarpaulin Sky edited by Bhanu Kapil (and featuring the Rohini Kapil photo that would become the cover of Schizophrene).
Visit Bhanu Kapil’s blog.
Read an excellent interview with Kapil, from last year, at BOMB.