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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteBhanu Kapil’s “Twelve Questions” is a poem drawn from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, her book-length project built around interviews with Indian women. Its twelve prompts ask about identity, migration, the body, inherited suffering, memory, violence, fear, death and speech. The questions give many voices a shared frame; the book’s collage form keeps their answers from collapsing into a single account.
What is “Twelve Questions”?
Scroll published the poem on January 1, 2024, as a selection from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, with permission from Kelsey Street Press. The title refers to the twelve central prompts used in the larger work—not to a separate book or an unrelated set of questions. Read the poem on Scroll.
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What are the twelve questions?
The poem presents these prompts:
- Who are you and whom do you love?
- Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
- How will you begin?
- How will you live now?
- What is the shape of your body?
- Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
- What do you remember about the earth?
- What are the consequences of silence?
- Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
- Describe a morning you woke without fear.
- How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
- And what would you say if you could?
Read together, the prompts move from identity and love toward arrival and survival, then into embodiment, family suffering, memory, silence, violence, fear, mortality and the possibility of speaking. That grouping is one way to follow their movement; it is not a set of categories Kapil labels in the poem.
How does the poem connect to the larger book?
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers grew out of interviews with Indian women living in India, England and the United States. The Poetry Foundation describes the project as running from January 12, 1992, to June 4, 1996, and characterizes the book as a “choral collage” of respondents’ answers. The Poetry Foundation’s account of the project places the questions within that longer process rather than treating them as a conventional questionnaire with one definitive respondent.
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In a 2011 BOMB interview, Kapil explained that she combined interview material with her own writing, collaging responses, sections and fragments. She said: “I invented questions as I went, centering upon these core twelve when I put the book together.” Read Kapil’s BOMB interview.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What do the questions do?
The repeated question form makes the project recognizable across different speakers: each person is invited to respond to the same prompts. But a shared frame does not make the answers interchangeable. Because the book combines respondents’ words with Kapil’s own writing, its collective voice is made through juxtaposition and collage, not by claiming that one speaker can stand for every woman.
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The prompts also shift sharply in scale and emotional pressure. “Who are you and whom do you love?” opens a space for self-definition and intimacy; “What is the shape of your body?” turns attention to embodiment. Questions about a mother’s suffering, dismemberment and waking without fear place personal testimony beside harm and its aftermath. The final question—“And what would you say if you could?”—leaves room for speech while making the conditions around speaking part of the inquiry.
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Where can you read or hear it?
- Read the selection: Scroll’s publication of “Twelve Questions” includes the twelve prompts.
- Continue with the book: The poem is a selection from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, the collection that develops the interview-and-collage project.
- Listen to an archived reading: PennSound lists an item titled “Twelve Questions” among recordings from a 2006 reading from the collection. Find the recording in PennSound’s Bhanu Kapil archive.
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