Another student reaction to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading, this time from Alyssa Eckles:
Bhanu Kapil’s reading of her book, Humanimal, was quite the experience, allowing her readers to hear the voices of Kamala and Amala, as well as of the woman searching for humanity within India.
The parts of Humanimal Kapil read from in the reading were very interesting in that they were sections which were very heavy in imagery and color. While Kapil’s work continuously uses color, her reading definitely brought out the significance. Color became even more important after Kapil, in the earlier class discussion, described the village of her mother with a bright blue river and saris for morning and noon and dusk. Her description of her mother’s dreams where the goddess Kali would waggle her red tongue was particularly striking and tied the entire experience of hearing Kapil discuss her book together.
I found it very interesting how Kapil chose to read several, if not all of the sections of her book where her father was discussed. From the earlier discussion with her, Kapil seemed to have a strong connection with her mother, but it was her father which seemed to be the center of her story and, as it seems, her world. Kapil described the scene where her father beats a boy in school, and then describes her father’s mother beating him for eating butter. The violence seems to resonate when read aloud, and it paralleled the violence of Kamala and Amala’s lives.
Kapil even applied different voices to the “voices” in her book. When she described passages from the wolf girls, her voice became harder, louder as if it were a feral tone. Her general eloquence started up again when she read passages from her own experiences, but the character and tone Kapil gave the wolf girls was intriguing.