Student Stacy Lorne reacts to Bhanu Kapil’s recent BathHouse reading:
On Tuesday, November 3rd I attended a reading of Humanimal-A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil. One of the most fascinating things I took from this reading/discussion was how Kapil looks at writing and literature. Kapil said that writing finds her. She even wrote about this in Humanimal when she describes how she was first introduced to Kamala and Amala by simply choosing a book at random in the anthropology section in a library in Colorado. It amazes me that she found such a perfect topic at random to tie together the strings of all the ideas in the Humanimal. I couldn’t think of a better way to mirror the story of her father and the influence of Britain in India. The locations are the same and they all share the same theme of institulization.
Kapil refers to Humanimal as a document, not a book. I was told this before the reading and couldn’t understand why. A document holds information, not a story. A document is not like a book because it is straightforward and factual. A book or novel can lead the reader in any direction. It can say so much in many ways and even tell you things it never actually said. This is what I felt Kapil did, but she describes it as a document because she is writing in response to something. Kamala and Amala were found over 80 years ago and her father has passed, so now she is writing in reaction to these events. She even talked about a piece she is working now where she is writing in response to schizophrenia. Kapil’s responsive style is one of the reasons why she is considered an experimental writer.
After hearing Kapil read I gained a different appreciation of Humanimal. When I read the document I gave the speakers different tones. It also sounded more sincere. (I don’t know if that’s the right word to describe this.) When the author read it sounded like the documentary that was being filmed while she was writing/researching in India. I was surprised how emotionless some parts sounded to me, but the tone she kept through the reading made me believe the concept of it being a document and not a book. The only slight variations were between her readings of herself and Kamala and Amala. When she spoke for herself it felt more real, but when she spoke for the girls her voice grew louder. When I read the text I put more emotion into the reading, probably because what her father and the girls suffered through was horrific. Kapil could have read this way to take the emotion out of the document, or maybe she feels it is more powerful.