IN A PREFATORY note, Kapil writes of trying to write an epic on the Partition of India and Pakistan and its "trans-generational effects," including "high incidence of schizophrenia in diaspora Indian and Pakistani communities [...]" (her emphasis). She threw the unfinished epic in her backyard one Christmas Eve, recovered it the following spring, and began to rewrite it, using words or phrases that remained decipherable.
Unusual work methods, certainly, but memorable results. Schizophrene is not on an epic scale so far as length goes--69 pages, some of which bear only a few words--and only in a few passages hints at the terrible events of the Partition. Somehow, it does convey a sense of what this rupture meant to someone not born until 21 years after it had occurred.
Kapil does not make any explicit, sequential argument about how historical trauma can be inherited by those who did not in their own persons experience it, but the text does succeed in testifying to how that inheritance can take place and make itself felt. Accordingly, the ramifications of this very short, fragmentary book are vast--think only of what it suggests about slavery and the United States, for instance.
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