Adi Magazine

rehumanizing

policy

  • home
  • About
    • About ADI
    • Our team
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
Share on Facebook
Tweet about it
Share on LinkedIn
Pinterest

Poem For Three Voices

You can’t survive here.

  • Bhanu Kapil
  • Spring 2020
Illustration: Osheen Siva
  • Poem
  • Intervention

Instruction: Find two other people willing to read this poem aloud with you in a public place. Where will you read this poem aloud? This depends upon the country or region in which you are reading this poem, and how dissent is regulated within this country or region. Perhaps you shout this poem. Perhaps you whisper it. Perhaps the performance lasts five minutes. Perhaps the performance happens every day and lasts for many years. 

You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here.  You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here.  You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here.  You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here.  You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here. You can’t survive here.


Note: This poem was written in response to On Venus, artist Patrick Staff’s installation at the Serpentine Galleries in London in early 2020. Reading the instructions, I realize it is no longer possible to gather with those two other people in a public place. Dissent, vulnerability: who gets to survive? There’s no performance, but there is a country and there is a region. Days, but also months. 

Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil is the author of several full-length works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001); Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006/Kelsey Street Press, 2020); humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009); Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011); Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2016); and How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry, 2020). Bhanu will receive a Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry in September 2020. Since 2008, she has maintained a blog, The Vortex of Formidable Sparkles. Currently, she is the Judith E. Wilson poetry fellow at the University of Cambridge, England.

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Essay
Stranger Kinships

Fathima Cader

Moving between Sri Lanka and New York, the shadow-presence of war and the dead, known and unknown, that we carry within us.

  • Violence
  • Essay, Opinion
Hybrid Regime

Nazish Brohi

In Pakistan, democracy requires a suspension of disbelief.

  • Intervention
  • Essay
Listening Through the Silence

Ather Zia

In Kashmir, accustomed to lockdown, resistance emanates from within.

  • Protest
  • Interview
Rana Ayyub: Reclaiming India from the Fascists

Meara Sharma

The investigative journalist on the rise of Hindu nationalism, anti-Muslim carnage, and rewriting history.

  • Violence
  • Poem, Video
The Cost of Resistance

Anushani

The interior lives of Tamil activists in the wake of war.

  • Violence
  • Essay, Reportage
Precarity and Violence: Unpublished Conversations with Indian Student Protestors

Suchitra Vijayan

In Hindu nationalist India, how a refusal to speak is an act of defiance.

  • Protest
  • Poem
The Vortex Of Formidable Sparkles: Six Poems

Bhanu Kapil

Today was about everything rotting and exploding.

  • Protest
  • Poem
Poem For Three Voices

Bhanu Kapil

You can’t survive here.

  • Intervention
  • Playlist
A Soundtrack to Issue 3

We asked each contributor to Adi’s Spring issue to select a song that resonates with their piece.

  • Intervention

Adi Magazine rehumanizing
policy

  • home
  • About
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
© Copyright 2025
  • Site Credits