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Humanimal: A Project For Future Children (2009)

by Bhanu Kapil(Favorite Author)

4.38 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0932716709 (ISBN13: 9780932716705)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Kelsey Street Press

review 1: This is a prose-poem hybrid of a novel describing the writer’s journey to India as part of a film crew making a documentary on the true tale of two girls raised by wolves from infancy and recovered, somewhat, into the human fold by a minister who kept them in an orphanage until they died. It is a haunted text, haunted by the lost faces of the girls (apparently never successfully captured in a photograph together, except once, in sleep, entwined in a kind of nest comprised of themselves), the writer haunted by their fleetingness, their unreal realness. The texture of the landscape of India adds a weight that the absence of the girls, the unreliability of memory and record lack.“21. Slow, wet orange sun and such a bright full moon over the jungle’s horizon Looking down... more from the lodge, there are long saffron scratches where the sun has caught a mineral vein. Notes for film: “A girl emerges from a darker space into the upper rooms of the jungle. Blurry photographs/transitions of light.” How does this sentence go into animals? Notes for an animal-human mix: “reaching and touching were the beginning actions.”" Humanimal, Bhanu Kapil.In repetition of colours, yellows, pinks, reds, browns, blues, whites, we have echoes of the bodies of the girls. We have touchstones of familiarity. The attempt is to find out something, not to crudely expose in the manner of a carnival. To probe the experience of being so ‘other’ but human at the same time. Overlap, blurring, membranes. If it sounds unclear, then it is – until the text is read. There is a lot going on, but the words on the page are not deliberately obscure. They are reaching to unite observation, difficult concepts, into art. Details of malnutrition and tangled hair and troubled feeding are not concealed, smoothed away in language, but held up for examination, turned in various directions. In other places, Kapil talks about her childhood, growing up in Britain as an outsider, demarcated by her skin colour, her father’s terrible scars. Humanimal is a short, rich book – one I hope to return to at a later time to re-visit its vivid, yearning nature.
review 2: Was okay. Had two fundamental problems with the text: humans are also animals - it's not Us AND the animals - so the author's distancing the human animal from the other animals is a real problem with what she's trying to do with this narrative. My other problem is that the original story of the wolf girls was faked, and if her premise is that it's real and that she's researching a real story and the expanding, imagining, and creating vision and expanded story around it, then it's a real problem if the story at the core isn't real, since the author is clearly starting from the wolf girls having really existed as such.Second time through - I just really don't like this book. It made me less actively angry this time, but simultaneously the things that are problems stood out as even more problematic an inexcusable than before (now that I've cooled down and had time to think more on them). Also - my students pretty much unilaterally HATE this book. less

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