Another reaction to Bhanu Kapil’s BathHouse reading, this time from student Alex Haber:
On the subject of writing, Bhanu Kapil is charmingly enthusiastic, often overflowing with personal anecdotes, both humorous and hauntingly symbolic. She speaks of her own work with a confident tone, but in an ever-conscious mindset, making spontaneous insights seem like long-labored conclusions.
Similarly, her poetic documentation of two historic feral children in India, Humanimal, is wonderfully recorded in a way that divides thoughts and story elements into nonlinear fragments, allowing the reader to wander between the past and present, sure their tour guide knows exactly what she’s doing, even while the next turn may be wholly unexpected.
In the beginning of Humanimal, Kapil explains the duality of emotional responses that arise in the event of a feral child’s capture: the first she describes as a “blue sky fiction,” or rather, the overly optimistic hope that the converted child’s future will be organic and fertile, and the second, a frightening, perhaps more real, expectation that the path to a successful future may be dark and treacherous instead. True to the actual pasts of the abducted Kamala and Amala, Kapil’s focus is much larger on the second response, on the difficult, unsuccessful and at times scary transformations the Indian locals imposed upon the wolf girls.
As Kapil read through and revisited these different, often chilling, selections from Humanimal, it seemed as if she was herself transported back to India, and was experiencing these strange and beautiful emotions at the same time she was reading them. Her clear, careful voice brought a sense of enhanced reality to the already charged words, enlivening the text more fully by backing the selections with an audio as heartfelt as the visual imagery.
Speaking on the Humanimal experience, Kapil explained how vastly the book had changed throughout its conception. Originally almost 300 pages long (Kapil described the original manuscript as containing more complex elaborations on the fictional thoughts and futures of the feral children – a version that was originally rejected), a lengthy amount of editing was done before the text arrived at its concise, finished form. And of the experience of writing the book on location after initial planning, Kapil admitted, “Once I was in India, it became a whole other book.”
Quite thankful for her initial failure with the manuscript, Kapil focused on getting to the soul of her experience. Every word of Humanimal feels perfectly placed and thought over, creating a reading experience that long outlives its relatively short page length. Each passage, whether from her perspective or through the fictional eyes of the real life girls, is lyrically layered with insight and revelation that flows with a natural movement, seemingly born from the jungle itself. “To write this, the memoir of your body,” Kapil writes, “I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”
Drawing a similarity to contemporary poet and author Annie Dillard, Kapil often focuses attention on the vibrant colors of the world around her, in order to portray a very organic, often uncontrollable environment. The constant emphasis on the surrounding colors of the jungle creates an intense atmosphere of foreign isolation and helplessness, surely both key experiences of the captured feral children, as well as Kapil herself, drawing a comparison between the writer and her subject.
Through Humanimal, Kapil doesn’t just examine the historic events of the two feral girls’ capture and attempted assimilation, but swims deep into their fragile minds, and exposes both the fears and effects of “humanizing,” as well as the sometimes overzealousness and miscalculation that goes into it. By relating the experience so personally with herself and her own family’s past, Kapil draws a strong connection between past, present and future, and portrays the vulnerability of being in a foreign land. The reading of her text empowered Kapil’s words with even more fragility, making for a charged and emotionally evocative reading experience.