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    Bhopal Dance: A Novel
    Bhopal Dance: A Novel
    Bhopal Dance: A Novel
    Ebook163 pages2 hours

    Bhopal Dance: A Novel

    By Jennifer Natalya Fink and Mary Caponegro

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    About this ebook

    Winner of FC2's Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize
     
    An imaginative, erotic rethinking of Bhopal’s disaster—and perhaps our own

    On the night of December 2, in the midst of the Reaganomic era, an explosion at an American-owned factory in Bhopal, India, released untold amounts of toxic gas on uncounted numbers of people, creating a human and environmental disaster of insurmountable proportions. Known as the Bhopal disaster, it once dominated international headlines, and is now barely remembered.
     
    Yet Bhopal remains emblematic of all the many quickly forgotten disasters that followed, and of the permanent state of globalized disaster in which we now dwell. What does it mean when corporations instead of states control not only the means to create environmental disasters, but also the tools to bury them? How does one revolt against these unelected entities? How do our most private desires get shaped by this stateless horror? Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance is an epic and epochal tale of such a horror and its buried consequences.
     
    At the center of the novel is Cordelia, an owlish woman with a ménage of lovers, who leads a revolutionary Canadian political movement catalyzed by the Bhopal disaster, only to end up imprisoned with just a toilet to talk to. Who she hallucinates is her father. Who is her father. Who is the State. Who may be her mother. Or her twin/lover. Cordelia is a remarkable bird in her own right, and ‘owlishness’ is a feathery conceit deployed in both the book’s form and content, a way of exploring queer possibilities for altering the terms of one’s imprisonment. For setting corporatized corporeality alight. Ablaze. Pets and punk rock, dentists and dyslexia, Shakespeare and salsa: they all dance together here.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateMar 6, 2018
    ISBN9781573668750
    Bhopal Dance: A Novel

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      Book preview

      Bhopal Dance - Jennifer Natalya Fink

      audacity.

      I

      PETTING ZOO

      I HATE ALL PETS. And even more their owners. Scooping poop, talking ootsie-wootsie, fawning and foofing over hoofs and teeth that would, will, should devour said owner the moment she dies. You pets: you’re pashas, scamming evolution. Hey, look what I got: free eats, free shelter, free noncopulatary affection. Why, you’d trade it all for three hots and a cot. Not even hots: dry food, wet food, Beggin’ Strips, premasticated and eons removed from blood from veins from glorious hunt. Willing woolly prisoners.

      You pets are fools, but you owners are worse:

      Hi! I’m incapable of love.

      Hi! I can only respond to those who cannot speak.

      Hi! I need to own—literally own! That’s their word for it, not mine—

      And you know how I feel about ownership, personal prepositions. Mine, yours.

      So possessive, so owny.

      All of it—the puppy-training courses more rigorous than Oxford, the fur-lined pet beds and doggy daycare, and oh yeah, feline past-life regression therapy: all a grand and tacky lie, a claim far beyond mere anthropomorphizing, beyond projection, beyond even the first-world privilege of dogs who can’t breathe properly through their overbred noses eating better than three fourths of the human world, yes, even beyond some drifting humanism lapping into the lurv of them animals: the unspoken, unspeakable claim: this is my child.

      Ian had a dog, his childhood buddy, a willing foil. Caren of course had cats, a brother-sister pair, many-toed, incestuous, named Jean-Paul and Simone. Well, you know what Adorno said about pets and fascism. Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen. Pardon my French. Yup, it’s the dreaded Hitler analogy. No right life in the wrong life. Translate: no good Nazis. Now, you know you lose automatically if you invoke the big H: Hitler. Hierarchy. Harvard. I could never figure out a way to comment (tactfully of course) on their pet love, Ian hey budding his bitch (named Bitch), the resistance to public goopiness masking a world of private effusions. I caught him mid-effusion once when he didn’t hear me come in, hey Bitchy-witchy arwent you my tookie-wookie bitchmobile. Whereas Caren was one big furball of catlove, oh Veal, oh my dearest chop, oh Squealie Vealie, tempered with maternal reprimands: Veal Q. Chop, how dare you pee on the carpet! Mummy is MOST disappointed, all of it in a slightly East Ontario-via-North Québec clip. And I would look away, embarrassed: For her? For Veal? Bitch?

      Your pet hates you, is (worse) indifferent to you, is absolutely not your flesh, your blood, your best fucking friend. You are its next meal. You are inert. You smell bad. At best you are a food delivery system, a sort of limp dildo facilitating its pleasure. Mmmrowoof. Pet away, Ian, Caren.

      I want to tell you next about my favorite sweater. I loved them all: they were my children. They smelled like children. It’s okay for things to take time; we’ll get back to sex and pets and revolution. Eventually. But like all mothers, I harbored a favorite—turquoise, tight, thin light wool. A Protestant Jesus, who loved my particular self. Her red hair clung to it. I could hardly look. I couldn’t see, I wouldn’t stop. Staring.

      I need help, I thought. This is . . . crazy. Sick. A, what do they call it? Fetish. I pronounced it the French Canadian way, the way Caren did. Fetîsh. And filed it among my other admissions deep in some sullen drawer.

      Sullen, let’s follow that word. You know definition 1:

      Gloomy, bad tempered.

      But this sullen was closer to definition 2:

      Especially of water: slow moving, rivers in sullen flood.

      Love that tension between the manic rush of flood and the dogged bad temper of the river. Time stopped even as it is propelled. Forward?

      Prey rustles, oblivious; owl freezes. Everything still and then—

      and so I waited below your crate of folded sweaters. Sullen.

      Caren had seven cats, one of which, she’d discovered in a past-life regression, had been a German industrialist before the First World War. We renamed him Karl (né Thumper).

      Karl was a castrated tabby, but he certainly performed his ablutions with a pre-war German industrialist’s passion. I had a German watch, a silver Breitling from my father’s conquest. I renamed it Karl. Caren was renaming and past-life regressing everything that month: cats and people and scarves. Soon Ian followed suit. But he had bigger fish to fry than ball-less tabbies. Let’s call us the Equality Avengers. No—let’s call us the Purple Russians. In a past life, we were all White Russians. In a past life, I didn’t love your sweaters. Not even the turquoise

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