Another reaction to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading, this time from student Dan Hall:
Bhanu Kapil’s reading of Humanimal
When I first encountered Bhanu Kapil in the Carillon Room of Halle Library, she was light and soft. She spoke with a flowing and eloquent voice like that of Mary Poppins. She laughed and made jokes about the weather. When I next saw Kapil, at her reading in the Sponberg Theater, I was expecting much of the same. And at the beginning, when she first stepped on stage, she was very much the same, confident yet unassuming, witty and jovial. However after a few minutes, past the water break, an entirely new animal emerged.
Once Kapil hit her stride, she became completely immersed in her own writing, utterly possessed. She became the Humanimal. Her tone turned very dark as she barked out a single, consistent tone comprised of anger, frustration, fear, loss and sexuality. Her reading was so monotonous; it was almost mechanical. But that one tone was so fluid and complex that I spent the whole hour exploring it, feeling out its every shape and curve in my head.
Though it was not her voice, nor even her sultry appearance which truly grabbed me. It was the way in which she chose to pause between each selection that got me. Kapil had marked each selection of reading with a torn scrap of paper. And upon finishing each selection, she tossed each torn marker from the podium, leaving them to twist and swoop as they fell. It was if the whole time she had been reading she was working at a piece of her own flesh, which she finally tore out and tossed to the side with a cruel indifference. This may have seemed like a cheap gimmick to some. But to me it was a powerful extension of her writing. Humanimal was written in fractal snapshots, pieces of memories, of people, of places, of times that can never be recovered or restored to their full images. As we read, we experience the ruins of these memories, the few remains of an empire scattered among the dust and ash. For me, Kapil’s seemingly small gestures brought this effect off of the page and into the theater. It was if a year’s worth of pain and beauty was confined into a single piece of shredded paper, and there it went, onto the floor to be forgotten, lost from human consciousness once more. And as soon as she was finished, Kapil stepped from the podium and flung her book into the crowd, as if setting a bird free from a windowsill.
I found the entire experience to be truly enjoyable and well done all around. Kapil certainly creates a rich presence, both in her writing and in person. I was glad to have experienced it firsthand.