Somatic Syntax: Ban en Banlieue, Filmic Prose, and the Representation of Trauma

Abstract

In her “failed” novel Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil claims that the text is a “novel-shaped space” that not only resists narrative but investigates the dangers of literature related to stories of trauma. In traditional, linear books that include trauma, violence is inevitable and often portrayed as a spectacle, easily leaning toward objectification. Instead, Kapil’s work suggests that fragmented, non-linear narratives can be more representative of the cognitive and physical impacts of trauma while also deferring the violence to avoid trauma porn and imagine new narrative possibilities. This is especially relevant in the case of sexual trauma to female bodies. Through interrupted narration, grammar, naming, and auto-sacrifice, Ban en Banlieue develops a somatic syntax based on images and felt in the body. The intermedial book can be read as filmic prose: a collection of film strips from a bloody cutting room floor, visual fragments in text that embody PTSD symptoms, simultaneity, and memory patterns not usually present in literature. Yet despite the imagistic nature, the text asserts subjecthood for its characters, rather than objectification, offering a new syntax of storytelling that questions the safety of literature and asserts the necessity of new literary forms when representing trauma.