becoming ivy

race riots & Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue

The blatant fascism and race riots in the UK are what prompted me to return to Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue today – a visceral and remarkable account of the Southall race riots in 1979.

When I wrote the essay excerpted below about Ban in 2020, it was originally prompted by the question of why I rarely talked about how my body, a brown woman’s body, was placed in the natural world.

Now, though, that seems to be all I think and talk about. How my body is placed in the natural world.

Over the last 10+ months, my understanding of ‘radical’ decolonial discourse around nature writing has changed. I’m frustrated with myself for relying so heavily on academia in the past, on its fallible models. Universities in the UK resist any meaningful change and traumatise students of colour. They popularise acronyms like EDI that give off merely the illusion of progress. I’ve experienced this as both a past student and present lecturer. Moulding decolonial thought to fit into an institution’s tepid frameworks, where everything is theory or theme in lieu of significant action and solidarity, feels like a dead-end.

This newsletter is and isn’t about that though.

Really, I’m just thinking through how I feel about living here, in the UK, while race riots are breaking out and putting Black and Brown bodies in danger (again). This is undoubtedly related to how institutions, academic and otherwise, have been so reluctant to show solidarity with Palestine. Instead, they have effectively bolstered the Islamophobia and racism we’re seeing on display. To the board of the Society of Authors (SoA): I’m looking directly at you.

Just as an example, as a signatory of the SoA resolution calling for (merely) a statement of solidarity with Palestine, my Muslim name was circulated under posts calling us terrorists. Honestly, this messed with my head. How else to put it except in totally plain language? The impact of this, and other similar instances, will stay with me for a long time. No matter how many times I present an essay at a conference about ‘decolonising nature writing’ or ‘postcolonial ecology’, that’s the real truth. Those are the real markers of my name and my body in this country.

In May, the resolution, such a simple ask of solidarity that several trade unions were already implementing, didn’t pass.

I really entered the industry, the academic world, and thought I was doing something by writing all these essays and poems about my place in nature. My friends are all going to message me and tell me I was, I am. And maybe my work, this work, collectively from all of us is important. But.

The board of our literary “trade union” can’t show solidarity with Palestinian authors and journalists being murdered by the IOF.

These moments snap me out of my delusions that commodification of our writing – prestigious publications, awards, and grants with strings – can lead toward real change. Instead, these become a stronghold, another means of silencing authors who live in precarity and/or seek validation. If you say something, sign something, speak out about something, you might lose your power and your prestige within institutions. Staying under the radar allows one to retain these things, but it also means the bodies who can’t afford to be silent are the ones on the line.

But then I think about Ban, how she as a figure, in the context of the Southhall race riots, was/is so important to me. And it makes me want to share my writing/response to it. And so, I continuously move in this cycle, mulling over what is worth sharing, why I want to share it, and the question of audience.

And there’s the counterpoint too. There’s a bubbling, fierce, desire to show each other love and care where institutions, governments, fail us.

All that said, here are some fragments from ‘Becoming Ivy’, the essay I wrote four years ago in response to Ban en Banlieue and the Southall race riots.

Ban is a brown girl lying down on the ground on 23^rd April 1979.

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What have I internalised about ecology, about human presence in “the natural world?” What did my biology textbooks say about the human footprint?

The human here (at times referred to as “man”) is always unmarked by any specific cultural or historical context.

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 From Allegories of the Anthropocene by Elizabeth DeLoughrey:

There is an unprecedented production of climate change books written by geologists, in which an undifferentiated “man” has a starring role in the history of the planet.

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In Britain, the racialised subject is so often one who simultaneously experiences a history of migration.

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In Threads, Sandeep Parmar asks, how do poets of colour ‘differently embody the ‘I.’ Or how does it come to embody us?’

Parmar’s questions challenge the coded whiteness, the supposed universality, of the lyric subject. I think about the lyric ‘I’ in my own work and I am forced to consider how my poetry is placed in current poetic movements and Western traditions.

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What truths (or more accurately, what limits of ‘the truth’) does my subjectivity reveal? How is the lyric “I” in my work localised, specified, or exoticised in relation to a supposed commonality from which I am excluded.

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I keep asking myself: how do women of colour take up space on British landscapes?

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Bhanu Kapil’s cross-genre collection Ban en Banlieue interacts with a version of the natural world and attends to bodily engagement with the land. From this, I am drawn to thinking about sensations of and on skin.

Not only in the context of racialisation. Also in terms of skin’s contact with the landscape. What are the resulting skin-textures, skin-writings, and skin memories in this work?

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Sara Ahmed’s description of ‘skin memories’ in Strange Encounters:

Migration stories are skin memories: memories of different sensations that are felt on the skin. Migrant bodies stretch and contract, as they move across the borders that mark out familiar and strange places.

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For poets of colour, the lyric ‘I’ is a subjectivity marked by certain social realities, and thus, recognised as unfamiliar. All of this untangles next to Parmar’s question: is the lyric ‘I’ ‘no more than the dead metaphor of our failed universality, of our being other?’

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What came before Ban en Banlieue? I find myself wondering about the interstices. What had to overlap – collide – for this book to come together.

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In my curiosity about process, I am drawn to something Kapil writes in her ‘Notes’ for the collection:

I had made a prior appointment to meet Dr. John Dueber, an innovator in the field of metagenomics, to ask him for a definition of hybridity. He laughed. ‘An organism that shares a membrane with other organisms is a false indicator of hybrid form.’ I wrote afterwards […] you can be a hybrid and not share a body with anything else.

It surprises me that a shared membrane is a false indicator of hybridity.

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What does the hybrid subject feel/write on the skin? What memories are triggered in response to this sensation, even without the involvement of touch?

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Ban en Banlieue opens with earthiness, with the outdoors: a photograph of ivy in Middlesex, taken in 2012.

What I know of context: this book balances on a point. That point is an April night in 1979, the night of the Southall riots – what began as a peaceful protest against far-right political party, the National Front. At the time, Southall was home to many immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. And, on 23rd April 1979, Blair Peach, the protestor to whom this book is dedicated, was hit on the head by a member of the Metropolitan Police and later died from his injuries. All of this comes before the flowers in Middlesex, 2012.

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The image that opens this collection captures an atemporal space – or an everlasting space. Just as that night in Southall left its mark on human life and memory, it also marked the landscape.

Can the ivy in Middlesex remember the 1979 riots? I think of the poet Pratyusha’s ecological poem “if still forest (winter)” from bulbul calling: ‘sap remembers everything.’

Do the Southall riots, as they live in this collection, still also live in the leaves, in the roots, in the ivy’s imprint of the figure of Ban? I think of the soles that have pact the soil; the shoulders that have grazed more unwieldy growths.

Anyway, I know they live in body after body after body.

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If the landscape, imaginary or otherwise, is marked by the riots, the landscape is also marked by everything before them.

Avtar Brah writes that ‘analyses of South Asian cultural formations in Britain must be informed by an understanding of the colonial history.’

The non-human, the land, grew amongst the post-war migration of South Asians in 1950; the poverty of Britain’s ex-colonies; and, before that, Partition. The network surrounding Ban continually extends with the passage of time.

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In Ban, the written and visual landscape comes to embody the history that led to cultural formations in Britain, and thus, the subsequent Southall riots.

This embodiment occurs through the subject herself – her metaphorical skin that both experiences and remembers. It is through the skin that she becomes the land.

Again, it is through this very specific action. It bears repeating: Ban, a brown girl lies down on the ground on 23^rd April 1979.

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From ‘Auto-scarifice (Notes)’ by Bhanu Kapil:

‘Pink lightning fills the borough like a graph. All day, I graph the bandages, race passion and chunks of dirt to Ban—plant-like, she’s stretching then contracting on the ground.’

Ban stretches and contracts on the ground, just as Ahmed’s migrant skins stretch and contract as they move between familiar and strange spaces.

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Originally, in the novel Kapil set out to write, Ban was an immigrant. In this hybrid poetry collection, Kapil comes to the realisation that Ban is not an immigrant, but a ‘monster.’ I am pulled into the realm of Donna Haraway; I think of how the figure of the cyborg and the monster come together: ‘The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.’

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There are suggestions of familiarity and unfamiliarity across these figures; a perceived otherness, a statement against the binary.

At the start of the poetic sequence, Ban is also plant-like. I flip back to the photograph of the ivy.

Through decay, through the breakdown of organic skin-materials, the subject becomes the soil which nourishes the ivy.

‘Ban fulfills the first criterium of monstrosity simply by degrading: by emitting bars of light from her teeth and nails, when the rain sweeps over her then back again.’

Skin breaks down and the body leaks.

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What does Ban’s skin physically touch as she ‘folds to the ground?’ On that evening of 23^rd April, when it rains, before Ban begins to degrade, what does her skin feel? In one strand of the story, the ‘roar’ of the race riot dims, and ‘Ban is crumpled like a tulip.’ I imagine her skin feels the vibrations of the roar, of its sounds, ‘groans, murmurs, and shouts,’ as she crumples.

That same night, there is a late April storm. The rain, writes Kapil, is ‘why the dark green, glossy leaves of the ivy are so green: multiple kinds of green.’

What memories are nourished, turned green, by the rain; what memories are dislodged by vibration?

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Throughout the collection, the girl, Ban’s, skin unfolds on the ground on the specific date and time of the riots – an action reiterated again and again – that bridges landscape and subjective memory. There is the parallel turn toward a subtle (perceived) skin autobiography, where the lyric ‘I’ too lies down on the land in the present.

This movement, where skin metaphorically and literally grazes bitumen, dirt, and ivy, revitalises a historical narrative – it is a way for two narratives to hybridise across time and space. Ban and author.

Ban and Blair Peach. Past, present, and future immigrant – or monster.

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Ban is a brown girl. This is emphasised; crucial. Southall in 1979 was a suburb housing many South Asian immigrants. The riots were a product of racial tension. That skin matters – matters ‘viscerally’ – is unavoidable and deeply felt in this text.

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I end up (as I often do) looking in the metaphorical mirror. I turn to my richest source of memory, history, ancestry, and racial understanding. Over the phone, my father tells me that he, himself, visited family in Southall in 1977 and 1978. Though he has never lived there himself, having immigrated instead to Canada, he has vibrant memories of the cinema, the markets, the bus rides, staying with his relatives that lived there, their own migration patterns slightly different to his. Before I mentioned this piece to him, I did not know about this strand of his (my) history.

Now I am in the UK and somehow feel a strange closeness to this loose end.

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Notes: These are fragments (rather than the full essay) from a piece I wrote in 2020. Thanks to Dave Coates for first commissioning this work and Versopolis for first publishing it in its entirety, though I think it’s no longer available online. Please consider making a donation to https://gazafunds.com/.