EMU student Lindsay Anderson reacts to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading:
Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal World
Listening to Bhanu Kapil read from Humanimal made me feel like an uninvited eavesdropper. Despite her visible nervousness at the public forum of the reading, there was an unmistakable intimacy apparent between Kapil and her work, a familiarity that left me even more intrigued with both her and with Humanimal. Having read the book several times, prior to the reading I felt secure in my understanding of the “document.” Yet the attitude she displayed for the text, one of intimate, secret knowledge, made me want to enter straight back into Humanimal – to somehow achieve this total immersion she reflected through voice and mannerism. This compulsion was made even stronger in the deliberate way she handled the white slips of paper holding place between the pages of her book, dropping them one by one in a silent arc around her feet. The deliberateness of this action left me completely entranced, but with no explanation given, I was placed firmly on the outside of the experience. It was as though Kapil and Humanimal were communicating through each other, to each other, and I – as the audience – was simply there to watch.
During the Q and A Kapil generously attended prior to the BathHouse performance, the distinction of the three separate narrative threads present in Humanimal was discussed. During this, it was brought to my mind one of the first impressions that came to me after my first reading of the work. Instead of focusing on this separation of the narratives, I found my mind blurring the threads, both textually and visually. There are so many words that seem to overflow from one to another, and along with this images that stamp themselves invariably into the three worlds. The legs, the bones, the arms, all the scars – by the end of the document these bodies and their parts become indistinguishable, blurring into a physical mosaic of parts forming a larger body that can only be called Humanimal. The colors seem to bleed through as well – the blues, the browns, the reds, even the ghostly whiteness in which wolfgirls are first represented. There is both a natural and unnatural element to all this blurring, as though Kapil began to mix the elements herself, yet at some point this process took on its own life and will to create this thing, this humanimal, that virtually pulsates on the page.
The Q and A with Kapil provided answers to all the questions I carried into the room with me, but afterward, I found myself carrying an entirely new set of questions, and here I think is the brilliance of Kapil’s writing and her speech. She does not attempt, either with this document or with her own voice, to answer the questions that have been posed about the story of Amala and Kamala. Instead, Kapil attempts to ask the questions these wolfgirls carried, the ones they had no words to form, questions we forget must be asked. What is it to be human? What is this animal inside of us that we so violently reject, yet cannot seem to fully escape, no matter how far we burrow into our caves of high-rise buildings and high speed vehicles? What is home, if no matter how hard we try, we can never truly go back? The wolfgirls embody these questions, and through Humanimal and her reading, Kapil reflects the relevance these questions have in the life of every reader or listener that dares to enter into her Humanimal world.