Poem written for a possible reader in another country
Bhanu Kapil
- What is the zero of your work?
- Is literature a craving? Do you crave to read, or do you crave to write?
- At what point does your work stop? What stopped it? What stopped you? What did you stop?
- Are there any limits to what you will make your art out of? How will you respond to critics who raise their hand to ask if, in writing about colonial vio- lence, you are replicating that violence? Are you a colonizer?*
- How will you deflect whiteness from enacting its proprietorial methods, or exerting them, upon your art?**
- High contrasts release dopamine in the eyes of the observer/reader. Do you agree? How might you edit your work to emphasize high contrasts?
- Does your work respond to the present emergencies of your society?
- Are you a citizen, a resident, or are you someone without documents, or with documents that evanesce, that bring anxiety whenever your gaze passes over them?
- Do you have enough?
- Who are you writing for?***
* ‘I am not stupid,’ I replied. Here, the comma’s tucked inside, a non-British choice or groove.
** ‘You can be invited to reproduce what you do not inherit.’ Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
*** This poem is made from questions and memories I stored on my blog. Because the person who reads is also a writer. Are you a poet too? What will it take to write something that will return to you your life? That’s not what I expected to say, and I don’t have the words to ask it. If you’re reading this poem, perhaps you can continue to write it in your own notebook, a kind of private writing that radi- ates an ultraviolet light.
Bhanu Kapil is the author of six books and an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College in Cambridge. Her recent works include How To Wash A Heart, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and two editions of Incubation: a space for monsters. Kapil has also received the Windham Campbell Prize, a Cholmondeley Award, and a Fellowship from the Royal Society of Literature.
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