Student Aaron Diehl reacts to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading:
Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal
I knew nothing about Bhanu Kapil or her book Humanimal before sitting down with it a few days before her scheduled BathHouse event. Being the busy college student I am, my initial reaction after checking it out from the library was relief due to the short length of the book. While this probably gives the impression that I was not interested in reading the literature, it was quite the opposite. On page IX, the reader finds out that this book is based on Amala and Kamala. Feral children have always been a topic of fascination for myself (check out feralchildren.com) and I was already acquainted with the bizarre story of these two girls.
Being that this was assigned for my CRTW 422 class – Lyrics Essay – I had some sort of idea of what kind of writing I was getting into. Kapil’s language was interesting to me because it has the ability of being totally straightforward and understandable, all while being indistinct and multi-dimensional. You know what the smaller-text voice is saying throughout the book, but the narrator itself is left fairly ambiguous – is it Kapil? Is it the Joseph Singh, the Reverend who attempted to ‘save’ the girls? An idea is conveyed through a cloudy lens. I also was interested in how the wolf-girls were narrated in English- or narrated at all, for that matter. The listing style utilized also interested me – why exactly was it there? In my mind, the text would have read largely the same without it. I also noticed that the wolf-girl’s narrative stopped at ‘O’. What was the significance?
I prepared these questions (amongst others) for her pre-reading Q and A session that we were lucky enough to have Christine set up for us. I was expecting for my fellow 422ers and I to be present, but much to my surprise there was 2 – 3 classes worth of students in the room when I arrived. This large audience somewhat hindered my ability to ask her a question (paired with my shyness) but what also slowed the process was the fact that Bhanu liked to elaborate a whole lot on her answers. It was almost humorous at times. She would mainly answer the question, but in a very unorthodox way, and would also go off on tangents that would eventually lead back to the initial idea. She had an interesting way of speaking: she spoke clearly and slowly, with a definite confidence in what she was saying, despite the fact that some of the tangents were possibly unnecessary. One thing I found interesting was that she called herself “technically Indian” at one point. I also liked when she talked about when she realized she wanted to be a writer; it seems like it was never even a realization, just a fact that had always been in the back of her mind. She had been writing since she had the ability to, and she has just never stopped. Like any art, the only way to make a living doing it is by doing it constantly and dedicating your life to it. She emphasized this point.
Fast-forward 3 hours. Her reading was at 5 pm in Sponberg Theater. Christine opened with a respectful introduction to the author, and then Bhanu took the stage. I was assuming that she would read from Humanimal (even though she brought several other of her works with her) and my assumptions were correct. Her reading of the book focused more on the language then my initial reading did; she spoke slowly and deliberately, with a more assertive voice then she had used at the Q and A session. When she would go into the portions of the wolf-girl narrative, her voice would get even louder, bordering on the aggressive side. I enjoyed her reading style; I often find the more performance oriented writers a bit strange and obnoxious (not all, but some) as the performance itself can take away from the literature being read, but Bhanu kept her reading very straight-forward, focusing on the book and not on herself. Something interesting that she kept doing while reading her book was that she would take her bookmarks and toss them all around and in front of her when she would remove them from the pages. I could not even begin to think of what importance this would have within the literature; as I found out the following day in class, the first time she did it was merely an accident, and she continued simply because she felt like it. I loved hearing this, because it made the whole situation funnier in retrospect.
Bhanu went on to read a large portion of her book before epically throwing it in the audience, much like a drummer tossing his sticks into the crowd after a rock concert. This was very cool to me. I found Bhanu’s reading to be one of the more satisfying BathHouse events that I have attended. It lacked a lot of the artistic pretensions that other readings have gotten me held up on. Bhanu seemed interested in portraying her work in a manner that made it accessible to the listener instead of just quirky or shocking, which is refreshing.