Savage Materiality

Page 5 September–October 2009 Savage Materiality Christine Hume Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, a Project for Future Children does not yield first impressions.As in most of Kapil’s work, immersion is both technique and kinetic effect. Immediately intimate, the book explores cultural identity formation through mirroring and alterizing several main characters—a wolfgirl, the author’s father, and the Kapil herself—in three narratives magnetized by the force of relation. In the foreground is the story of two human girls found living with wolves—as wolves—in the Bengal region of India in 1920. Based on the diary of Reverend Joseph Singh, the missionary who took them into his orphanage , Kapil’s account roughens up her source text in order to dramatize the book’s ultimate subject: the body. Meanwhile, a companion memoir—responsive to and contextualized within the wolfgirls’ story— fastens on Kapil’s father’s transformation from illiterate goatherd to the firstAsian headmaster in the UK. Readers confront his epistemological shift largely through uncanny physical descriptions.Triangulating with these “retellings,” Kapil also relates the story of her research of the wolfgirls and her travels with a French filmmaking company documenting humanwolf contact. In just sixty-five pages, we also find a ghost manifesto on aesthetics. Narrative internests with theoretical riffs and interbreeds with document, while never surrendering the brutal adumbrations of a shared captivity narrative. Though the hybrid ethos is fashionable in experimental writing—Nortonized and commodified unto near meaninglessness—Humanimal sets new stakes by permeating subject, form, and approach with an empathy that illuminates drastic human configurations and conversions. Though based on true stories, Kapil’s work functions more like myth, with its orchestration of infinitely corruptible parts. For instance, Kapil alters Singh’s representation of the wolfgirls’ lives significantly; this simultaneous reveling in and resistance to historic sources will raise a few eyebrows for those curious and industrious enough to track down the source of Kapil’s quotations. Yet the interval between fact and fiction, between research and intuition, percolates powerful mythologies. Kapil reconstitutes given stories by subjecting their facts to the same kind of intense conversions Kapil’s characters undergo. All of Kapil’s subject-strands form and de/reform in the service of deeply relational aesthetics , each translating the other to maximum advantage in a rapture of complementary passions. Humanimal questions liminal identities and territories of all kinds by indirection more often than by direct address. How is the story of the wolfgirls a female story? How is the story of the wolfgirls a human story? How does our umwelt—our subjective environment—physically shape us? How does it determine what we sense, digest, and understand? Does our umwelt determine our species? In what ways do the jungle and garden act on us, as haven, as machine, as projection? Does domestication inaugurate violence and oppression? How is the story of the wolfgirls an Indian story? How does the story of abandonment lend anyone feral, possessed , or outside another way to be found? What might it be like to occupy a caesura between human and animal? What unprecedented pulse—thought, sensation, politics—might come of it? Though these quandaries are impossible not to fathom while reading Humanimal, Kapil insists, “I don’t want to ask primal questions.” She instead provides an antidote to what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), the “anthropological machine,” or thinking that creates an absolute divide between animal and “man.” In our efforts to define ourselves, we have deformed ourselves. This chilling capacity for adaptability has led our species, Agamben claims, to “the total management of biological life,” a global economy, and “humanitarian ideology ”—three concentric faces looking toward posthistorical humanity. Kapil’s work unites its hybrid faces against this troubled physiology. The book is not as much concerned with transmission of ideas as it is with the creation of an atmosphere where our automatic naturalization of sentience into sapience slows down or shuts off. She does so by refusing to betray—that is, control—the senses: “We are here to cull an atmosphere; to scrape color and sound and light into jars.” To really enjoy reading Humaninal, best to have a taste for amniotic atmospheres...