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A fragmented notebook investigates mental illness and trauma in the South Asian diaspora

Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

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Endorsements:

“Poignant, rich, delicious, a book to return to again and again.”—Gail Scott

From the Book:

A veil. A harness. A rope.

Do psychiatrists register the complex and rich vibrations produced by their dreaming subjects? The indigo or emerald-green crown that coats the hair and shoulders of an interviewee, erasing distinctions between what is outside, the sky, and what’s beneath it? What digs into the head?

“The emanating structures appear in the light that comes from the body, and it is these structures that perform a rudimentary narrative.” A memory or two?

But to write this narrative is not to split it, for which an antidote is commercially produced in quantities that exceed populations. A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can’t be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.

I need a new pen.

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BHANU KAPIL is a British-born writer of Indian origin who lives in Colorado. She is the author of three full-length collections of experimental prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation: a space for monsters, and humanimal [a project for future children].