Anna Boyer
Cooper
CRWR212
April 22, 2013
Analysis: Humanimal
Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal is a
story written in poetic prose form and is based on the story of two girls who
were found dwelling with wolves in the city of Bengal, India in 1920 (Kapil IX).
While these girls still had their human form physically, they were in another,
non-human space mentally. Through living amongst wild creatures, the girls are
essentially dehumanized and live outside any written system of law. Kapil’s
work, through historical account and first-hand experience as a filmmaker,
explores what exactly it means to be human and what it means to be an animal
and just how blurred the lines are between those two realms.
One of the main themes woven
throughout the tale is that of dehumanization. The two girls who were living
with the pack of wolves, Kamala and Amala, wear white dresses as their only
clothing, as the author observes from a photograph. This seems to be one of the
factors that distinguishes them as members of the human species apart from
their physical bodies. At the Home, others watch in fascination as these beings
are taught to eat and speak as humans do. The action of the staring
automatically gives them an animal-like designation, since such a situation is
eerily similar to what happens on either side of zoo enclosures. The narrator
describes the scene in which she first discovers the girls living amongst
wolves: “Her elbow as thick as a knot. I said it was cartilage-the body
incubating a curved space, an animal self. Instead of hands, she had four
streaks of light. An imprimatur, she saw me and flinched” (Kapil 6). A being
that fits this description is not viewed as fully human in the context of
society, and “domestication” is the order of the day. Kamala and Amala cannot
speak the way that humans can when raised and socialized amongst other humans,
and that lack of speech is a sharp dividing line between the human realm and
the animal realm. The girls are dehumanized and are forced to conform to what
the society expects, essentially spinning a tale comparable to those of
colonized nations that were forced to adopt the ways of the invading culture.
The second theme that runs through
Kapil’s work is that of animals living outside a world governed by systems of
law. Animals live outside the structures of human law and order, not because
they are stupid or ignorant, but because they are not expected to. Although the
mental space that Kamala and Amala occupy is questionable and a cause for
concern in the minds of many people, it is their physical form that assigns
them to the difficult task of learning the ways of “civilized” life and the
laws, written and unwritten. This, in part, is what makes Kapil’s descriptions
of the girls being roughly shoved into human society so brutal: they do not
know how to function as humans, but only as wolves without a thick coat of fur.
When Amala tragically passes away during the process of these domestication
efforts, Kapil writes: “Red worms came out of their bodies and the younger girl
died. Kamala mourned the death of her sister with, as Joseph wrote, ‘an
affection’” (Kapil 55). The law, in a social sense, not a legal sense, killed
Amala and eventually Kamala as they try to cross the thin border that separates
humans from other animals, which includes the display of emotion. Social
constructions ultimately brought around the deaths of these two girls in
society’s demand for human conformity.
Kapil also uses several poetic
devices in her work to describe this emotionally and intellectually challenging
tale, even though it is written in narrative prose. One of the devices she uses
most powerfully is that of imagery, particularly in descriptions of the jungle.
The following passage is simply one example of an image built through language:
“At the edge of the jungle was a seam, a dense shedding of light green ribbons
of bark. A place where things previously separate moved together in a wet pivot”
(Kapil 6). Even though the description is abstract, one can still construct the
scene mentally. A second device that Kapil uses is a foil. Dr. Joseph Singh
serves as a foil to Kamala and Amala as the head of the Home and eventual
officiator of their burials. He is not necessarily an antagonist but he does
take the girls from their environment and is present for the difficult journey.
This piece, as a whole, is a narrative poem, in that is uses poetic language
and form to tell a compelling and very complex story of the thin veil between
human society and the animal world.
The point of view of the narrator in this
work is quite interesting because it is Kapil herself as a filmmaker tracing
the steps of a journey that happened in the past. The narrator tells the story
based on knowledge from primary and secondary sources as well as what she has
observed herself, blending to create a story rich in emotion and sensory
details. The use of symbolism is also quite heavy in this work, especially
within the jungle itself. The jungle represents the unknown and is a concealer
of things not present in modern human society. The fact that Kamala and Amala
emerge from the forest adds even more to society’s need to domesticate them.
Another device that Kapil uses is that of syntax. She orders her words in a
very poetic way, giving them meaning that goes well beyond the surface,
creating both mystery and empathy for the historic figures and the author.
Works Cited
Kapil,
Bhanu. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children. Berkeley: Kelsey Street
Press, 2009.
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