The Poetry Project

Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space For Monsters immediately reminds the reader that agency is a dialectic process: the subject both acts and is acted upon. From the very first instance, the reader is confronted with a narrative voice that is hyper-aware of its own subjectivity, that extends itself into plurality and claims ownership of more than one pronoun. In the first chapter, entitled “Handwritten Preface To Reverse The Book and Notes On Monsters (1-3),” Kapil writes:

3. She lives in a house with others, including animals, creating individual spaces of companionship and ardor. What happens when this domestic life grows suspect? When the glass reverts in its granular drag to the subject of architecture: the failure of a house to believe in its occupants? (3)

The passage above demonstrates the narrator’s awareness of herself as subject, as a body in relation to a world that is continuously mutating and expelling its occupants. Even the “house,” symbolic seedbed of family and community, is portrayed as capable of relapsing to the “subject of architecture,” rejecting its inhabitants in the process. Nevertheless, in Incubation, the narrative voice does not shrink. On the contrary, it gains momentum against the possibility of its own expulsion: immediately, the narrator turns on herself and demands of her own person to fully and forcefully inhabit a space, to enter into relation with it:

4. Mate with surfaces. Okay. Hitchhike. Okay. Make a cup of Darjeeling tea and start walking down a sidewalk in America. (3)

The mutation of pronouns, from the “she” in the former paragraph to the “I” that multiplies in the act of commanding itself, foregrounds a body that evades singularities, that refuses to be obliterated from lack of continuity or community. Throughout Incubation, notions of subjectivity and the body are constantly shifting and expanding, until the reach is far enough to include the narrator’s own ‘otherness.’ In other words, until a space is made for monsters:

I don’t know what that means, the biological definition of a cyborg, except that I have to decide who you are, little pink/fluorescing shrimp, little Laloo, before I write you out of the sea and onto the shore. (6)

There is something about a monster that is formulated in these hours or days just after birth; a crossed or normal birth deep in the routines of transference. (…) Gradually, you pink up, because all touch is good, even for Laloo, who went home with cyborgs. (…) Laloo means red. (11)

Something hurts. It’s 7 p.m. when she heads for the highway. These are things I feel about cyborgs from a distance as if they are happening to me. I feel, for example, Laloo’s scarlatina, the dark red color flooding her attachment sites. (26)

At the same time that Laloo/Cyborg-Monster is an extension of the narrator’s body, her appearance on the page absorbs the narrative “I.” In the process of writing Laloo “out of the sea and onto the shore” the narrator’s corporeality fades and all exploration of feeling and body is transmitted through Laloo. It is in this sense that the text insists upon a subject whose body splits and multiplies, open to acquiring and dispensing value in relation to its ever-changing internal, social and linguistic context.

In “Enforcing Normalcy,” Lennard J. Davis writes:

Normalcy (…) is more accurately a location of bio-power, as Foucault would use the term. The ‘normal’ person (clinging to that title) has a network of traditional ablest assumptions and social supports that empowers the gaze and interaction. The person with disabilities, until fairly recently, has only his or her own individual force or will.

In Incubation, Kapil performs an inversion of the de-eroticized ‘ab or sub-normal’ body that Davis writes about. Laloo acquires enough linguistic and bodily momentum to (albeit temporarily) expel the narrative “I” from the page. As a result, Laloo/Cyborg-Monster, enters the narrative discourse with multiple networks of power: Laloo makes available to herself not only her own “individual force” but also that of the narrators’. It is precisely in this way that she reclaims her right to eroticism: the cyborg/monster uses the narrator’s voice to analyze herself as a “disruption in the visual field” of the observer (Davis), and by doing so renders interruption as an intellectually sensual experience.

In a section titled “Hallucinating Childhood (3),” Kapil writes:

In horror films, you can’t always tell if it is a cyborg or if it is a person, whereas monsters are always identifiable as such by their long black hair and multiple arms, retracted into the torso during lovemaking and hitchhiking, because even monsters fall in love, want to make a go of it. (12)

The continuous references to hitchhiking, “which is the future” (11), hint at an eventual continuity between the narrative “I” and Laloo, who is both the other and the deepest, most damaged “I”:

I could not go home and so, (…), I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay. (35)

Laloo, written “out of the sea and onto the shore,” results in the narrator’s own return to dry land, a place above the surface where pressure isn’t a constant presence. Having written herself out of expulsion, Laloo is now able to share the page, and therefore language, in an equitable manner. As a result, an autobiographical continuity emerges between the narrative “I” and Laloo, who throughout the rest of the text hitchhike together and separately until enough will power is accumulated between the two of them to write “The Ten Essential Rules To Hitchhiking.” (71)

Here, the narrator advises the reader to “keep a notebook,” “to go farther each time,” and essentially to be “tougher than your father, blanker and crazier than your mother,” and to always “insist upon the window opened a crack.” (71-2)

In Incubation: A Space For Monsters, Bhanu Kapil makes the ultimate move towards multiplicity: through a recognition of subjectivity as dialectical process, Kapil opens up a space for otherness within oneself. The bravery here is both physical and linguistic: as the body multiplies and divides to include its own ‘otherness,’ so does the subject’s relation to language, enabling the simultaneous use of more than one pronoun to describe the self. Without a doubt, there is insistence here for the window to be left open.

MINE: The One That Enters The Stories is out now from Leroy Books.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a fiction, poetry and prose writer. She
lives in Manhattan, and is the Assistant Director at Small Press Center:
The New York Center for Independent Publishing, a non-profit organization
that serves a national constituency of independent publishers.
(03/07)