Student Brad Wozniak reacts to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading at EMU:
The Michigan starfish is a bright red thing that I have never seen before. Though I had noticed them for the better part of my twenty-two years, I never have seen a leaf as a starfish. This is the ability that language has for Bhanu Kapil: to recreate what is seen but never acknowledged, to change the perception of what we see as ordinary and simple to something maybe equally simple, yet subversive and vibrant. Sitting just a few rows from the front of Bhanu Kapil, the listener is able to hear the way her London tongue charismatically enunciates her latest work, Humanimal.
The story is a difficult one, three narrative paths that intertwine and create layered meaning. What is evident in Kapil, is that this book—and perhaps all of her writing—is something that she is a part of. Her nearly flawless delivery of the words create a womb for the participant where it is clear that Kapil is the gentle and nursing mother of her language of truth, of color, and of a hybrid life. The latter, her most notable theme in the book, dwells in Amala and Kamala, two feral children in the 1920s that were raised by wolves. Though Bhanu Kapil considers much of this work to be a “document”, it is also a prompt to discuss the roots behind the human and the animal.
So often, the two are considered to maintain separate and divided quarters. However, Kapil is able to bend these rules and force the audience to feel their self as perhaps neither one nor the other. The idea of the hybrid finds its authority in reflecting categorization. In humanity’s method, these categories are defined by the differences between humans and animals. Kapil resist the differences and pushes out the similarities. The instinct. The survival. The pain felt. All of Kapils words were carefully chosen and carefully spoken so that the hybrid is moved to the foreground where it is unavoidable. Her speech was slow and concise, like the hunt of an animal; it was lyrical and documented like the quest of a human.
Though sometimes difficult to focus on the narrative lines, Kapil’s reading of her latest work seemed to resemble her description of a red Michigan leaf. Simple. Careful. Vibrant. Intimate. Humanimal holds experimental language that aims to peel away the common and known ways of living and seeing and hearing. What is perhaps most remarkable is that she exudes this from her form when she speaks, making whole; the book, the banana leaf, the Michigan leaf, the reader, the audience, the human, the animal.