Kapil's Humanimal Analysis

Denise Bateman

Joseph Cooper

CRWR 212 Y

April 21, 2014

 

Analysis of Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal

 

Kapil’s Humanimal is a work of fiction written to recount the story of two young girls, Kamala and Amala, found living with wolves in India in 1921. The girls were captured by a missionary, Joseph Singh, who brought the girls back to his church ran orphanage and attempted to civilize the wild girls.

Kapil’s piece is written in an unusual style. She alternates the story in numeric and alphabetic sections, the first speaking from the narrator’s voice as she describes the capture and attempt at taming the girls, while the second alphabetic sections are spoken from one of the girls’ perspective on events.

Imagery is abundant in this work. Kapil describes on page sixteen of her work how the limbs of a newborn baby left on a blanket to sun flail upward “four legs in the air like pink, elongated stars”. On page twenty-five, the author describes a scene in the garden where “the sky hung down in violet sections like a torn net”. Kapil uses lots of color in her writing. There are several other examples throughout the book where she infuses vivid color – there are crimson azaleas, a giant pink moon rising over a brown curve of fields, blood red oranges, pink underground tunnels, green air. I thought Kapil’s description of writing while being bounced around in a Jeep was very effective on page 43 where she says “I put my knib on the page and let motion wreck the line. My notes were a page of arrhythmias, a record of travel.”

I felt that perhaps part of Kapil’s reasoning for using so many images of vivid color in work was a way to contrast physical beauty with the ugliness of the brutality of what humans can do to each other in the attempt at conformity.  The theme of the piece seems to speak to society’s need to tame that which is wild or different from the norm. The underlying question is whether doing so is right, regardless of good intent. And as a society, do we try to shape each other into what we consider normal because we feel we are doing what is right and of best service to the thing we are trying to change – in Kapil’s book the taming of the wild children – or do we try to change things in our world to what we consider normal because we are so afraid of those things that are different and unfamiliar? And, what is normal? Obviously human children being raised by wolves is not normal, but I feel that Kapil’s retelling of the capture and attempt at civilizing the two girls is symbolic of society’s need to have control and order. Was the breaking of the girls’ limbs to have them reset to grown into proper alignment justified because it would allow them to properly walk upright? Was kicking Amala for howling at a bird flying over while having a group picture taken appropriate? She was simply doing what she was accustomed to doing at the sight of the bird. In what we know today as civilized treatment, we would be outraged at this type of physical force being used on a child. So again, what is normal, and how to we determine this?

Interesting and sad that both of the girls died in the care of their rescuer. Again symbolically, is that the risk we take each time we try to force something to be something it is not? Is it okay to change something so much from its original design that it becomes unrecognizable from its true form? Do we let one thing “die” in attempt to create a better version? Is a risk worth taking? That is what Kapil’s book made me consider.