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Auto-sacrifice (Notes) 

1. Pink Lightning for Ban

“The day of the riot dawns bright and lazy with a giant silky cloud sloughing off above the rooves.” 

“The mouth of the riot is a stretch of road.”  

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. 

Three streets over, a mixed group nears a house. Their faces are pressed to the blood-flecked window, banging their forehead on the glass. Inside the house, a woman arranges the meat on a tarp. She tucks and pins the shroud behind its ears with quick-moving hands, looking up from time to time at the crowd that’s gathered to spit on the window and call. 

That night, I dreamed of exiting the subway at the interface a car would make with the M25. The commuters were processing around a semi-rural roundabout, their hands on imaginary steering wheels, their wing-backed loafers shuffling on the tarmac, the black road, like wheels. Evening Standards tucked sharply beneath their arms.  

The dream requires something of me.  

It requires me to acknowledge that my creature (Ban) is over-written by a psychic history that is lucid, astringent, witty. No longer purely mine.  

2. Meat forest: 1979

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. 

I like how the rain is indigo, like a tint that reveals the disease process in its inception. 

Above her, the pink lightning is branched—forked—in five places. 

A brown ankle sparkles on the ground. 

Genital life gives way to bubbles, the notebook of a body’s two eyes.  

Like a person in an ancient pose, I lean in a L-shaped posture over the counter: flat back, rump displayed to any passer-by, blood dripping down the backs of my thighs. They don’t see me. I clean the street until all that’s left is a ring of oily foam, the formal barrier of a bad snow. Are you sick and tired of running away? 

Then lie down. 

Invert yourself above a ditch or stream beneath a bright blue sky. 

Then pull yourself up from your knees to clean. 

Clean the street until all that’s left is a ring of oily foam, the formal barrier of a bad snow.  

It snows that April for a few minutes, early in the day. Children walking on the Southall Broadway open their mouths to receive the aluminium snowflakes. In their bright pink and chocolate brown dresses, tucked beneath the heavy blue coats, these immigrant children are dazzled by the snow, even though they were born here, a train-ride from a city tilted to receive the light, its sprig bending over in the window of the pretty bank. 

Many years later, I return. To place a daffodil on the Uxbridge Road. 

Is zinc an element? It’s a sheen. Spread it on the ankle of Ban.  

Is there a copper wire? Is there a groin? Make a mask for Ban. 

3. What is Ban?

Ban is a mixture of dog shit and bitumen (ash) scraped off the soles of running shoes: Puma, Reebok, Adidas.  

Looping the city, Ban is a warp of smoke.  

To summarize, she is the parts of something re-mixed as air: integral, rigid air, circa 1972–1979. She’s a girl. A black girl in an era when, in solidarity, Caribbean and Asian Brits self-defined as black. A black (brown) girl encountered in the earliest hour of a race riot, or what will become one by nightfall.  

April 23rd, 1979: by morning, anti-Nazi campaigner, Blair Peach, will be dead.  

It is, in this sense, a real day: though Ban is unreal. She’s both dead and never living: the part, that is, of life that is never given: an existence. What, for example, is born in England, but is never, not even on a cloudy day, English?  

Under what conditions is a birth not recognized as a birth?  

Answer: Ban.  

And from Ban: “banlieues.” 

(The former hunting grounds of King Henry VIII. Earth-mounds. Oaks split into several parts by a late-century lightning storm.) These suburbs are, in places, leafy and industrial; the Nestle factory spools a milky, lilac effluent into the Grand Union canal that runs between Hayes and Southall. Ban is nine. Ban is seven. Ban is ten. Ban is a girl walking home from school just as a protest starts to escalate. Pausing at the corner of the Uxbridge Road, she hears something: the far-off sound of breaking glass. Is it coming from her home or is it coming from the street’s distant clamor? Faced with these two sources of a sound she instinctively links to violence, the potential of violent acts, Ban lies down. She folds to the ground. This is syntax.  

Psychotic, fecal, neural, wild: the auto-sacrifice begins, endures the night: never stops: goes on. 

As even more time passes, as the image or instinct to form this image desiccates, I prop a mirror, then another, on the ground for Ban. 

A cyclical and artificial light falls upon her in turn: pink, gold, amber then pink again. Do the mirrors deflect evil? Perhaps they protect her from a horde of boys with shaved heads or perhaps they illuminate—in strings of weak light—the part of the scene when these boys, finally, arrive.  

The left hand covered in a light blue ash. The ash is analgesic, data, soot, though when it rains, Ban becomes leucine, a bulk, a network of dirty lines that channel starlight, presence, boots. Someone walks towards her, for example, then around her, then away. 

I want to lie down in the place I am from: on the street I am from.  

In the rain. Next to the ivy. As I did, on the border of Pakistan and India: the two Punjabs. Nobody sees someone do this. I want to feel it in my body—the root cause. 

4. Cobra Notes for Ban

I want a literature that is not made from literature. A girl walks home in the first minutes of a race riot, before it might even be called that—the sound of breaking glass as equidistant, as happening/coming from the street and from her home.  

What loops the ivy-asphalt/glass-girl combinations? Abraded as it goes? I think, too, of the curved, passing sound that has no fixed source. In a literature, what would happen to the girl? I write, instead, the increment of her failure to orient, to take another step. And understand. She is collapsing to her knees then to her side in a sovereign position.  

Notes for Ban, 2012: a year of sacrifice and rupture, murderous roses blossoming in the gardens of immigrant families with money problems, citizens with a stash: and so on. Eat a petal and die. Die if you have to. See: end-date, serpent-gate. Hole. I myself swivel around and crouch at the slightest unexpected sound. 

When she turned her face to the ivy, I saw a cube of foil propped between the vines. Posture made a circuit from the ivy to her face. The London Street a tiny jungle: dark blue, slick and shimmering a bit, from the gold/brown tights she was wearing beneath her skirt. A girl stops walking and lies down on a street in the opening scene of a riot. Why? At points it rains. In a novel that no one writes or thinks of writing, the rain falls in lines and dots upon her. In the loose genetics of what makes this street real, the freezing cold, vibrating weather sweeping through South-east England at 4 p.m. on an April afternoon is very painful. Sometimes there is a day and sometimes there is a day reduced to its symbolic elements: a cup of broken glass; the Queen’s portrait on a thin bronze coin; dosage; rain. 

This is why a raindrop indents the concrete with atomic intensity. This is why the dark green, glossy leaves of the ivy are so green: multiple kinds of green: as night falls on the “skirt.” The outskirts of London: les banlieues.