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Humanimal: A Project for Future Children
In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans--through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs--HUMANIMAL functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil's father. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. "Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed."
71 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 1, 2009
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1341 people want to read
About the author
Bhanu Kapil
30 books232 followersBhanu Kapil is a British-Indian poet who lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Kapil taught for many years at Naropa University and Goddard College. In 2019, she was awarded the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. During this time, she completed her first full-length poetry collection to be published in the United Kingdom, How to Wash a Heart (2020). Kapil received the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
August 26, 2024
Sealey Challenge 2024: 24/31
An interesting collection blending memoir, medical records, and a bizarre fascination with two young women in India who were raised by wolves. I actually wish this had been longer, maybe even a full novel? I don’t think poetry fully did this story justice. Don’t get me wrong, the poet has an interesting prose, yet the structure and stylistic choices made it have a more narrative approach that I think could have been better exploited in a longer format.
An interesting collection blending memoir, medical records, and a bizarre fascination with two young women in India who were raised by wolves. I actually wish this had been longer, maybe even a full novel? I don’t think poetry fully did this story justice. Don’t get me wrong, the poet has an interesting prose, yet the structure and stylistic choices made it have a more narrative approach that I think could have been better exploited in a longer format.
October 31, 2011
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.
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.
September 11, 2009
"I want to make a dark mirror out of writing: one child facing the other, like Dora and little Hans. I want to write, for example, about the violence done to my father's body as a child. In this re-telling, India is blue, green, black and yellow like the actual, reflective surface of a mercury globe. I pour the mercury into a shallow box to see it: my father's right leg, linear and hard as the bone it contains, and silver. There are scooped out places where the flesh is missing, shiny, as they would be regardless of race. A scar is memory. Memory is wrong. The wrong face appears in the wrong memory. A face, for example, condenses on the surface of the mirror in the bathroom when I stop writing to wash my face. Hands on the basin, I look up, and see it: distinct image of an owlgirl. Her eyes protrude, her tongue is sticking out, and she has horns, wings and feet. Talons. I look into her eyes and see his. Writing makes a mirror between the two children who perceive each other. In a physical world, the mirror is a slice of dark space. How do you break a space? No. Tell me a story set in a different time, in a different place. Because I'm scared. I'm scared of the child I'm making."
June 8, 2012
Moving piece of research, cross-genre, metaphor, travel writing, memoir. This writer excels at getting at the extremely strange intersections of power dynamics: how the man who tries to tame a wild girl who has been raised by wolves (based on true accounts) is as much of an animal, possibly more, etc.
June 17, 2025
This was so original and moving! DEF gonna need a re-read to fully take in all the formal inventiveness that’s happening here… can’t wait!
August 28, 2009
"Behind the church is a jungle" - this is what 'non-fiction' or 'documentary poetry' or 'research poetry' or whatever should be like.
October 16, 2017
Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal: A project for Future Children, is an unorthodox narrative that combines many points of view in extremely small clippings of reflection into a relatively close confines. It is not strictly chronological, but includes perspectives arranged together from an Anglo-British filmmaker visiting Bengal to make a documentary about two feral girls who were alleged to have been found in the area decades ago, as well as points of view which seem to originate from these girls themselves, lost and confused amidst the harsh transition between the natural and human-settled worlds.
The three sets of perspectives each experience their own sequence of events in an order which is, if not totally chronological, than, at the very least, thematic. The perspective of the reverend Joseph Singh, who captured and attempted to civilize the girls, details how he found them in a cave, killed the wolf who had raised them, and brought them back to his church-run orphanage. It describes, in detail, how he shaved and cleaned them in a ritual that is, in spite of its simplicity, perceptibly brutal. He attempts to train them to participate in human society, forcing them to eat human foods and speak human language. His attempts to force them to walk upright involve breaking their legs. His efforts prove partially in vain as one of the girls dies relatively soon after they are captured. The other lives a few more years, but never ceases to display her feral nature. The account of her concludes with a failed attempt to escape back into the wild.
There are, however, and more importantly, the perspectives of the girls themselves, and the reflections of the Anglo-Indian filmmaker. The filmmaker arrives in Bengal and is forced to negotiate with a local customs official who warns them of possible dangers of attacks from criminals. She observes a local making clay figurines to display for religious purposes, receives sweetened tea as a gift from local associates, and watches a local Marxist theater troop dramatize the events of the girl’s lives in a manner which demonizes the wild nature of their upbringing. The filmmaker also reflects upon the origin of the girls, imagining a scenario in which a newborn, left outside under a tree for ritual purposes, is stolen away by a wolf before the parents can retrieve it. Eventually, the filmmaker, who’s life story seems to mirror that of Kapil herself, returns to Denver from Bengal with a banana leaf taken as a keepsake, which she holds close to herself.
There is, finally, the perspective of the girls themselves, which displays, rather than a sense of direct perceptible representation, a sense of thematic weight and feeling, in representation of the thoughts and feelings of someone who has no acquired understanding of the boundaries and context of human society. It begins with a reflection of moving through the forest, and of companionship with the wolf who raised the girls, remembered fondly as “mother.” One of the girls is soon captured, and recounts the process of being forced into civilization in gruesome detail, made all the more unnerving by her inability to comprehend what is being done to her. She is fed, and remembers being breastfed by her “mother,” whom she wishes to see again. She remembers her capture with fearfulness, and is eventually made to dress in human clothes and participate in human church-rituals. She masters some very basic rudiments of language or, perhaps, is simply said to have by a preacher who wishes to believe it so. She continues to pine for the wilderness, even though she eventually masters letters well enough to write at the time of her last failed escape.
One major theme of the work appears to be the recurring commonality between the surviving child, Kamala, and the filmmaker, Kapil who, in spite of their separation by time and culture, appear to share a similar capacity for feelings and perspective. One notable example of this is the totem of the banana leaf. On page 49, Kamala recounts “I took a leaf from the home to dry it, to make a piece of paper with three raised seams.” Kapil retrieves a similar trinket on page 65, “As the plane descended to Denver, I took a dry leaf, a banana leaf with three raised seams, from its place in my book and crumpled it, crushed it really, onto my leg through my skirt.”
These matching symbols can indicate a shared desire, between one person raised in the colonial metropole and another raised in the wild, to find truth of self in their expression. Kamala, for example, recounts, “I’ve exhausted the alphabet. But I’m not writing this for you” on page 63. Here, she has finally chosen to use human language, but not for the purposes of her captors but for herself. Kapil recognizes this on page 64, recounting “I cannot speak for her now.” This reflects a desire for authentic reflection that Kapil expressed earlier on page 31 as she wondered, “What stopped my hand?” when she tried to write after one of Kamala’s reflections on being captured. The commonalities seem to suggest that regardless of upbringing, civilization or nature, a human being will desire to express the truth, and to express their own truth, rather than allow somebody else to express it for them. This would be, in the parlance of the text, the “humanimal” drive.
Overall, I found this text to be difficult, but not without its enjoyable aspects. The juxtaposition between the raw natural innocence of Kamala, the earnest curiosity and introspection of Kapil, and the presumptuous brutality of reverend Singh to be strikingly effective. The choice of text to enter the mind of a person hailing from outside of society was oddly beautiful in its poetic cant, and I found the thematic narrative of the struggle between Kamala and reverend Singh to be emotionally relatable in spite of the utter unrelatability of the actual circumstances themselves.
Nonetheless, the style is jarringly non-direct, using surprising word choices which might baffle perception until one has the chance to acclimate to them, and the lack of explicit points of view is likely to confound one’s sense of perspective on first reading. It may take time to accept the text on its own terms, and I would only recommend it to those who enjoy this kind of reading. If you do enjoy this kind of reading, I would recommend giving it more than once-over, since a work this short may not give your mind time to acclimate otherwise.
The three sets of perspectives each experience their own sequence of events in an order which is, if not totally chronological, than, at the very least, thematic. The perspective of the reverend Joseph Singh, who captured and attempted to civilize the girls, details how he found them in a cave, killed the wolf who had raised them, and brought them back to his church-run orphanage. It describes, in detail, how he shaved and cleaned them in a ritual that is, in spite of its simplicity, perceptibly brutal. He attempts to train them to participate in human society, forcing them to eat human foods and speak human language. His attempts to force them to walk upright involve breaking their legs. His efforts prove partially in vain as one of the girls dies relatively soon after they are captured. The other lives a few more years, but never ceases to display her feral nature. The account of her concludes with a failed attempt to escape back into the wild.
There are, however, and more importantly, the perspectives of the girls themselves, and the reflections of the Anglo-Indian filmmaker. The filmmaker arrives in Bengal and is forced to negotiate with a local customs official who warns them of possible dangers of attacks from criminals. She observes a local making clay figurines to display for religious purposes, receives sweetened tea as a gift from local associates, and watches a local Marxist theater troop dramatize the events of the girl’s lives in a manner which demonizes the wild nature of their upbringing. The filmmaker also reflects upon the origin of the girls, imagining a scenario in which a newborn, left outside under a tree for ritual purposes, is stolen away by a wolf before the parents can retrieve it. Eventually, the filmmaker, who’s life story seems to mirror that of Kapil herself, returns to Denver from Bengal with a banana leaf taken as a keepsake, which she holds close to herself.
There is, finally, the perspective of the girls themselves, which displays, rather than a sense of direct perceptible representation, a sense of thematic weight and feeling, in representation of the thoughts and feelings of someone who has no acquired understanding of the boundaries and context of human society. It begins with a reflection of moving through the forest, and of companionship with the wolf who raised the girls, remembered fondly as “mother.” One of the girls is soon captured, and recounts the process of being forced into civilization in gruesome detail, made all the more unnerving by her inability to comprehend what is being done to her. She is fed, and remembers being breastfed by her “mother,” whom she wishes to see again. She remembers her capture with fearfulness, and is eventually made to dress in human clothes and participate in human church-rituals. She masters some very basic rudiments of language or, perhaps, is simply said to have by a preacher who wishes to believe it so. She continues to pine for the wilderness, even though she eventually masters letters well enough to write at the time of her last failed escape.
One major theme of the work appears to be the recurring commonality between the surviving child, Kamala, and the filmmaker, Kapil who, in spite of their separation by time and culture, appear to share a similar capacity for feelings and perspective. One notable example of this is the totem of the banana leaf. On page 49, Kamala recounts “I took a leaf from the home to dry it, to make a piece of paper with three raised seams.” Kapil retrieves a similar trinket on page 65, “As the plane descended to Denver, I took a dry leaf, a banana leaf with three raised seams, from its place in my book and crumpled it, crushed it really, onto my leg through my skirt.”
These matching symbols can indicate a shared desire, between one person raised in the colonial metropole and another raised in the wild, to find truth of self in their expression. Kamala, for example, recounts, “I’ve exhausted the alphabet. But I’m not writing this for you” on page 63. Here, she has finally chosen to use human language, but not for the purposes of her captors but for herself. Kapil recognizes this on page 64, recounting “I cannot speak for her now.” This reflects a desire for authentic reflection that Kapil expressed earlier on page 31 as she wondered, “What stopped my hand?” when she tried to write after one of Kamala’s reflections on being captured. The commonalities seem to suggest that regardless of upbringing, civilization or nature, a human being will desire to express the truth, and to express their own truth, rather than allow somebody else to express it for them. This would be, in the parlance of the text, the “humanimal” drive.
Overall, I found this text to be difficult, but not without its enjoyable aspects. The juxtaposition between the raw natural innocence of Kamala, the earnest curiosity and introspection of Kapil, and the presumptuous brutality of reverend Singh to be strikingly effective. The choice of text to enter the mind of a person hailing from outside of society was oddly beautiful in its poetic cant, and I found the thematic narrative of the struggle between Kamala and reverend Singh to be emotionally relatable in spite of the utter unrelatability of the actual circumstances themselves.
Nonetheless, the style is jarringly non-direct, using surprising word choices which might baffle perception until one has the chance to acclimate to them, and the lack of explicit points of view is likely to confound one’s sense of perspective on first reading. It may take time to accept the text on its own terms, and I would only recommend it to those who enjoy this kind of reading. If you do enjoy this kind of reading, I would recommend giving it more than once-over, since a work this short may not give your mind time to acclimate otherwise.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 19, 2022
Beautiful moments, amazing imagery and ofc a stunning story she is working with but falls into cliches (a lot of diaspora poetry stuff) and ended up being more focused on the speaker than I would have chosen
Read
December 7, 2017A treat.
April 12, 2016
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 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.
“21. Slow, wet orange sun and such a bright full moon over the jungle’s horizon Looking down 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.
March 15, 2010
Bhanu Kapil's creation, "Humanimal," was enthralling from a creative writing perspective, but also from an anthropological and sociological standpoint. What truly drives this book, however, is the incredible story behind it...the "Bengali wolf girls" Kamala and Amala. Kapil takes this intrinsically fascinating concept of humans in the wild and turns it into a fast-paced, clear narrative described from multiple standpoints and in multiple styles. This seamless transition of form was very impressive. I also enjoyed her use of diction when narrating from the view of the wolf girls: for example, on page 23, "The nest is brown. Best is brown next to yellow. Best is blue then brown. Best yellow. Where will the sun go when it is finished?" She elegantly captures a simplistic thought without losing the reader in the process. Overall, I think the effect of these transitions amplified the story by covering it from so many angles, and I think this style truly set it apart from many other poetry and creative writing pieces. A very dynamic and unusual book!
March 24, 2010
"Pulling her back from her unique pattern"
At the outset, I didn't enjoy Khapil's strategy, which seemed to induce with directness and then suddenly got clunky and alien. She didn't seem wild or animal, just foreign to me. I think this happened because she was mixing in a post-modern, self-conscious journalistic ethos that feels very compelled to illustrate and also tempted to remain aloof. I was annoyed by this throughout the book. However, the language grows more and more dominating, and one feels the immersion as the little book progresses. I ended up enjoying the book and respecting Khapil's control and taste, but I was not fully enthralled by her economy with sounds and words with respect to meanings--there are times when she gets caught up in writing her "alphabet to O." Ultimately, I liked it, the gesture had a good shape, the ending like a minor chord with a major sixth: ordering, closing, and yet unsettled.
At the outset, I didn't enjoy Khapil's strategy, which seemed to induce with directness and then suddenly got clunky and alien. She didn't seem wild or animal, just foreign to me. I think this happened because she was mixing in a post-modern, self-conscious journalistic ethos that feels very compelled to illustrate and also tempted to remain aloof. I was annoyed by this throughout the book. However, the language grows more and more dominating, and one feels the immersion as the little book progresses. I ended up enjoying the book and respecting Khapil's control and taste, but I was not fully enthralled by her economy with sounds and words with respect to meanings--there are times when she gets caught up in writing her "alphabet to O." Ultimately, I liked it, the gesture had a good shape, the ending like a minor chord with a major sixth: ordering, closing, and yet unsettled.
Read
August 17, 2009embodied, animaled, engrossing, yet brief--blunt acknowledgment of the fragmentary remains of a fascinating tale of two feral children taken from their den by a missionary in 1920s India.
February 7, 2016
Exquisite and unique. The conjuncture of language, image, myth, and dream. The feral scrawlings of the girl, of the outcast, of the outsider.
December 16, 2022
Humanimal is a prose poem so I’m glad Kai and I read it together. The author accompanies a documentary crew as they make a film about a pair of feral children who were found by a missionary in West Bengal in 1921. The girls, Kamala and Amala, had been raised by wolves. Their forced return to society (by white missionaries no less) is a distillation of every colonial project, which is to tame the unruly subjects. Unsurprisingly, the taming results in death for Amala. You can’t get more of a perfect allegorical situation than this. Raised by wolves? Kamala and Amala? Romulus and Remus? Comeee onnnnn
The whole thing is presented as fact. Khapil had access to the missionary’s journal of observations about the girls. She’s with a documentary crew, not a normal film crew. It’s an excellent story for its symbolism, almost… toooo perfect. I made the mistake of looking up whether it’s real before we finished, and turns out it was a hoax! The Missionary faked the journals. The photos were just kids posing. When he had observers round to see Kamala, he just beat a disabled child to get her to act like a wolf. I don’t think the work would’ve been lessened by revealing that it was a hoax. It possibly would have enhanced it. In the beginning there is a sequence to explain how the girls came under the care of a wolf pack. People set (often disabled) babies outside their homes to discard them, and the wolves scooped them up. If the real Singh just took some disabled children and beat them for show, that ties into the discarding of the imperfect body and the goal of shaping a body into the “proper” shape that is all over this book, from Khapil’s excerpts about her fathers poverty-ravaged body to the original story of the girls taming.
There are some really lovely moments. Khapil does a great job of setting the mood and establishing a sense of place. I have only been to West Bengal for a few days at a time, but based on that limited experience I felt she captured a feeling about that place that I’ve never been able to describe. There’s a lot going on with color that would get picked apart if we were in English class. Khapil’s father is described (with a lot of contempt and disgust I have to say) as having a condition that sounds like something out of Helpmeet, similar to leprosy, but it’s always described with the color silver. Is that the prosthetics? Bc I was imagining crazy cyborg disease but I guess prosthetics still count as a hybrid between man and machine.
There were portions that devolved into cliches of diaspora poetry. “My mother, the papayas” etc. This was a bit eyeroll inducing and we wished it had stayed with the very strong and meaningful story of the girls and focusing less on her personal trip and feelings. Khapil knows that it’s a little annoying though: “My blood let out a deep sigh. Is it wrong to feel immediately at home in India, where, if its citizens knew you felt that way, would laugh you out of the house? But I felt it” (59). And this was written in 2009. I’m not sure what the state of poetry was like in 2009, but perhaps this type of thing was not as cliche as it is now.
The copy we had was heavily underlined and annotated and we had a good deal of fun at the previous owner’s expense. I can’t tell how old they were so if they were just a kid I’m sorry, but the comments were soooooo funny. They would frequently write “Whaa??” spelled exactly like that. They took things so literally and would write stuff like “how is this possible?????” during a metaphor or some shit. Some of the notes used words like “ontological” so I felt we were justified in giggling a little bit. To be honest I found the notes a bit helpful. I’ve never been a great poetry reader because I’m too literal minded, so the notes were kindof a how-not-to-read guide.
Humanimal was basically a summary of the intellectual pursuits I had in college. There was so much identity stuff, and then my fixation on human/animal/machine dissolution etc. Everything I ever cared about/read was either about colonization, identity, or the Cyborg Manifesto. On one hand it’s difficult to revisit bc I’m like, I’ve so moved on from this, and then I start overthinking about myself in college and just cringe. Of course I don’t mean I’ve “finished the study of colonization” like it’s a video game level that I’ve completed. This feeling is about a very particular form of navel gazing that I engaged with in college that I feel was limiting because I spent so much time thinking about myself when I could’ve been learning. But it is also nice to go back, because just because something has been done to death/ I’ve read too much of it doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy topic of study. It’s nice to see how my interests have changed.
The whole thing is presented as fact. Khapil had access to the missionary’s journal of observations about the girls. She’s with a documentary crew, not a normal film crew. It’s an excellent story for its symbolism, almost… toooo perfect. I made the mistake of looking up whether it’s real before we finished, and turns out it was a hoax! The Missionary faked the journals. The photos were just kids posing. When he had observers round to see Kamala, he just beat a disabled child to get her to act like a wolf. I don’t think the work would’ve been lessened by revealing that it was a hoax. It possibly would have enhanced it. In the beginning there is a sequence to explain how the girls came under the care of a wolf pack. People set (often disabled) babies outside their homes to discard them, and the wolves scooped them up. If the real Singh just took some disabled children and beat them for show, that ties into the discarding of the imperfect body and the goal of shaping a body into the “proper” shape that is all over this book, from Khapil’s excerpts about her fathers poverty-ravaged body to the original story of the girls taming.
There are some really lovely moments. Khapil does a great job of setting the mood and establishing a sense of place. I have only been to West Bengal for a few days at a time, but based on that limited experience I felt she captured a feeling about that place that I’ve never been able to describe. There’s a lot going on with color that would get picked apart if we were in English class. Khapil’s father is described (with a lot of contempt and disgust I have to say) as having a condition that sounds like something out of Helpmeet, similar to leprosy, but it’s always described with the color silver. Is that the prosthetics? Bc I was imagining crazy cyborg disease but I guess prosthetics still count as a hybrid between man and machine.
There were portions that devolved into cliches of diaspora poetry. “My mother, the papayas” etc. This was a bit eyeroll inducing and we wished it had stayed with the very strong and meaningful story of the girls and focusing less on her personal trip and feelings. Khapil knows that it’s a little annoying though: “My blood let out a deep sigh. Is it wrong to feel immediately at home in India, where, if its citizens knew you felt that way, would laugh you out of the house? But I felt it” (59). And this was written in 2009. I’m not sure what the state of poetry was like in 2009, but perhaps this type of thing was not as cliche as it is now.
The copy we had was heavily underlined and annotated and we had a good deal of fun at the previous owner’s expense. I can’t tell how old they were so if they were just a kid I’m sorry, but the comments were soooooo funny. They would frequently write “Whaa??” spelled exactly like that. They took things so literally and would write stuff like “how is this possible?????” during a metaphor or some shit. Some of the notes used words like “ontological” so I felt we were justified in giggling a little bit. To be honest I found the notes a bit helpful. I’ve never been a great poetry reader because I’m too literal minded, so the notes were kindof a how-not-to-read guide.
Humanimal was basically a summary of the intellectual pursuits I had in college. There was so much identity stuff, and then my fixation on human/animal/machine dissolution etc. Everything I ever cared about/read was either about colonization, identity, or the Cyborg Manifesto. On one hand it’s difficult to revisit bc I’m like, I’ve so moved on from this, and then I start overthinking about myself in college and just cringe. Of course I don’t mean I’ve “finished the study of colonization” like it’s a video game level that I’ve completed. This feeling is about a very particular form of navel gazing that I engaged with in college that I feel was limiting because I spent so much time thinking about myself when I could’ve been learning. But it is also nice to go back, because just because something has been done to death/ I’ve read too much of it doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy topic of study. It’s nice to see how my interests have changed.
October 16, 2017
Humanimal, much like Bhanu Kapil's catalog as a whole, is a text that defies categorization and challenges the reader to move past preconceptions of narrative, style, and form. It is simultaneously personal and distant, speculative and reflective. The centerpiece of the book is her journey to India with a film crew as they make a film on human-wolf contacts. There, Kapil began work on this book, which focuses on the story of Kamala and Amala, two girls who were supposedly raised by wolves. Their story is complicated by the fact that the only source was the diary of a doctor who supposedly took them from the wolf that was raising them. The general consensus is that the story was a massive hoax. That doesn't stop Kapil from creating a compelling piece of speculative and highly lyrical nonfiction.
It's important to understand, when journeying into Kapil's prose, that the style is not in line with Western literary norms. It moves back and forth, traversing time and space, and challenges the reader to put aside their preconceptions of how we read. The book can be hard to follow because of this. It isn't a comforting reading experience, but it is valuable because we as readers must accept that we don't own the text. In this way, it represents the type of postcolonial writing that Spivak championed. Even the sentence structure is challenging. For example, Kapil writes, "Wet, wet, green, green. I mix with them and prosper. Sticky then my mother licks me clean. The nest is brown. Best is brown next to yellow. Best is blue then brown. Best yellow. Where will the sun go when it is finished?" While the prose itself challenges the limits of understanding, it is evocative in its attempt to understand what might have gone on in the minds of these feral children (even though, as mentioned, it was most likely a hoax on the part of Joseph Singh).
The main difficulty I had with this book is its organization and brevity. Though it would be difficult to pull off a larger text without bogging down the reader, I feel like this needed a little more. For example, there is a thread in the book that discusses her father and his childhood in India. This could have both been connected slightly more to the main thread and expanded. I understood that it was a discussion of the comparison between the East and the West, but I felt that Kapil did not integrate it in enough quantity. The same applies to the film crew - they had to be in the book because of their role in the journey, but it seemed like a distraction. I think it was intended to serve as a commentary on exploitation, but I wanted it to be slightly more overt.
All in all, this book is a valuable addition to the genre of speculative nonfiction and postcolonial writing. The density is challenging but necessary. The writing is lyrical, which was paramount to any attempt to understand the psychology of a feral child. Ultimately, the title itself is one of the greatest illustrations - it is a commentary on divisiveness, on understanding, and on exploitation.
It's important to understand, when journeying into Kapil's prose, that the style is not in line with Western literary norms. It moves back and forth, traversing time and space, and challenges the reader to put aside their preconceptions of how we read. The book can be hard to follow because of this. It isn't a comforting reading experience, but it is valuable because we as readers must accept that we don't own the text. In this way, it represents the type of postcolonial writing that Spivak championed. Even the sentence structure is challenging. For example, Kapil writes, "Wet, wet, green, green. I mix with them and prosper. Sticky then my mother licks me clean. The nest is brown. Best is brown next to yellow. Best is blue then brown. Best yellow. Where will the sun go when it is finished?" While the prose itself challenges the limits of understanding, it is evocative in its attempt to understand what might have gone on in the minds of these feral children (even though, as mentioned, it was most likely a hoax on the part of Joseph Singh).
The main difficulty I had with this book is its organization and brevity. Though it would be difficult to pull off a larger text without bogging down the reader, I feel like this needed a little more. For example, there is a thread in the book that discusses her father and his childhood in India. This could have both been connected slightly more to the main thread and expanded. I understood that it was a discussion of the comparison between the East and the West, but I felt that Kapil did not integrate it in enough quantity. The same applies to the film crew - they had to be in the book because of their role in the journey, but it seemed like a distraction. I think it was intended to serve as a commentary on exploitation, but I wanted it to be slightly more overt.
All in all, this book is a valuable addition to the genre of speculative nonfiction and postcolonial writing. The density is challenging but necessary. The writing is lyrical, which was paramount to any attempt to understand the psychology of a feral child. Ultimately, the title itself is one of the greatest illustrations - it is a commentary on divisiveness, on understanding, and on exploitation.
June 14, 2023
A brief but stunning work about the long scars of colonialism in India. Kapil uses the imagery of the "humanimal" and the case of the "Bengali wolf girls" to ruminate on the colonial practice of "domesticating" children to become "proper citizens" (ie christians who behaved like white colonizers), often ripping them away from their families and customs and environment in the process. The speaker intersects throughout, showcasing how the act of reconstruction is itself a form of silencing. Kamala and Amala will never be able to tell their own stories, and the speaker cannot either, not really. She can only take the pieces left behind and find her own scars reflected within them, and try to build something out of it.
The structure of the work is also very clever, miming a very long-form outline or set of notes for a research project. Kapil makes a few allusions throughout to the colonial practices of classification and taxonomic research, which often seek to separate humans from other animals and/or create Others among ourselves; and another reminder that postcolonialism is still an academic field that exists within colonial institutions, and can never truly be deconstructive or representative of real people's voices and stories.
I'm not sure how much this was intentional (I'm assuming it was since religion frequently comes up as a colonial tool throughout), but I also thought it was interesting how Kapil finds parallels between the story of the girls & the story of the Garden of Eden. There's the more obvious parallel to the Roman story of Romulus and Remus (and it's worth noting that in that myth, being raised by wolves made them strong warriors and leaders, not half-human Others to be domesticated) but the way Kapil describes the jungle and the final capture of the girls seems intentionally Eden-y. This Eve was ripped away from her Eden through no fault of her own, though, and she's the reflective midpoint between the girls and Kapil, past and present folding in on each other to create the feral little girl that has been taken from all of us, in some fashion, in turn. There's some wild stuff in here alright I'll shut up now
The structure of the work is also very clever, miming a very long-form outline or set of notes for a research project. Kapil makes a few allusions throughout to the colonial practices of classification and taxonomic research, which often seek to separate humans from other animals and/or create Others among ourselves; and another reminder that postcolonialism is still an academic field that exists within colonial institutions, and can never truly be deconstructive or representative of real people's voices and stories.
I'm not sure how much this was intentional (I'm assuming it was since religion frequently comes up as a colonial tool throughout), but I also thought it was interesting how Kapil finds parallels between the story of the girls & the story of the Garden of Eden. There's the more obvious parallel to the Roman story of Romulus and Remus (and it's worth noting that in that myth, being raised by wolves made them strong warriors and leaders, not half-human Others to be domesticated) but the way Kapil describes the jungle and the final capture of the girls seems intentionally Eden-y. This Eve was ripped away from her Eden through no fault of her own, though, and she's the reflective midpoint between the girls and Kapil, past and present folding in on each other to create the feral little girl that has been taken from all of us, in some fashion, in turn. There's some wild stuff in here alright I'll shut up now
October 17, 2017
Humanimal mixes genres and perspectives in an unexpected manner, taking the reader through a range of emotions. Perhaps it is debatable, but I thought that this perfectly mixed poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. The bigger text on the page felt mostly as if it were Kamala or Amala's point of view, and it was very poetic in nature. Not traditional line-break/white space/caesura poetry, but a sort of prose poetry that had multiple meanings in each word and phrase. Reading those parts in a non-linear voice allowed the reader to really immerse themselves into that "other," that space where we feel uncomfortable and alienated, much like the girls in the story. I also loved the subtle commentary on religion, race, and colonialism; the girls being a symbol of a culture forced into something they're completely foreign to. Something that feels unnatural, and leads to an ultimate demise. The story of the girls represent a perfect metaphor for larger aspects of colonialism and missionary work.
The story, as I've stated previously, does not follow a linear pattern that you would normally find in stories, so it would be hard to summarize the novel in that way. We know from the very beginning that the girls die soon after being captured, so this is hardly a spoiler or climax to the story - but it is the journey of their "conversion" and the fictional poetic prose from their perspective that makes the story visceral and worthwhile.
Even though I'm a traditional-type of person, I really adored this book. I loved the constant challenges I faced as a reader, yet I didn't find it to be so "out there" that I didn't fully understand what was going on. To me, this was a very successful genre-mix and social commentary.
The story, as I've stated previously, does not follow a linear pattern that you would normally find in stories, so it would be hard to summarize the novel in that way. We know from the very beginning that the girls die soon after being captured, so this is hardly a spoiler or climax to the story - but it is the journey of their "conversion" and the fictional poetic prose from their perspective that makes the story visceral and worthwhile.
Even though I'm a traditional-type of person, I really adored this book. I loved the constant challenges I faced as a reader, yet I didn't find it to be so "out there" that I didn't fully understand what was going on. To me, this was a very successful genre-mix and social commentary.
October 17, 2017
Humanimal is a hybrid work the considers two feral children discovered in the 20's by a missionary in India. The girls had been living with wolves; when they were discovered, the girls were taken to an orphanage and the wolf pack was killed. In a mixture of different points of view, Bhanu Kapil analyzes the girls' "reformation" through the lens of the diary of the missionary and reimagines what their experiences would have been like in the first person from their point of view in very poetic prose. Other topics that come into play are various notes and thoughts that Kapil formed while on the search for the girls' story as well as parallels to their stories that Kapil found in her father's interactions with colonial issues in India.
This book is similar to other works by Kapil, especially in its focus on the body and in it's poetic prose. Kapil tends to take really beautiful descriptions of things and then twist them into grotesque images with no transition, which I think leaves a deep impression on the reader. When she was describing the way the girls were treated by the doctors, lush descriptions of their perception of the world were intermingled with images of body horror that are meant to describe the girls' fear to the reader.
Personally, I always have mixed feelings about Kapil because I think her prose is beautiful, but I'm not a poet so I find it frustrating at times when meaning is sacrificed for the sake of lyricism. I think that the most important thing to consider about this book is that it's meant to be read slowly, or perhaps to be read several times, if the goal of the reader is to determine the meaning behind all of Kapil's choices. However, if the goal of the reader is to discover some amazing prose, this is where you'll find it.
This book is similar to other works by Kapil, especially in its focus on the body and in it's poetic prose. Kapil tends to take really beautiful descriptions of things and then twist them into grotesque images with no transition, which I think leaves a deep impression on the reader. When she was describing the way the girls were treated by the doctors, lush descriptions of their perception of the world were intermingled with images of body horror that are meant to describe the girls' fear to the reader.
Personally, I always have mixed feelings about Kapil because I think her prose is beautiful, but I'm not a poet so I find it frustrating at times when meaning is sacrificed for the sake of lyricism. I think that the most important thing to consider about this book is that it's meant to be read slowly, or perhaps to be read several times, if the goal of the reader is to determine the meaning behind all of Kapil's choices. However, if the goal of the reader is to discover some amazing prose, this is where you'll find it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 16, 2017
Having only read it once, there's not a ton I can say about Humanimal, besides the fact that its gorgeous defamiliarizing/mechanizing language drew me in from the beginning. This is a self-consciously experimental journalistic project tells several stories -- Kapil's trip with a French film group doing a documentary on the subject matter -- strange/funny joke about the cameraperson of this Marxist crew being unhappy that the project leaves no room for 'chance' (the nouvelle vague would be proud).
To brass-tack it, instead of Kapil reporting the subject matter in straight-ahead fashion, she takes a cubist/impressionist approach. At first, you're not sure whose POV the books's many microchapters are written from. Then there it the impressionist element, where the world is blurred through the author's words.
I'm going with a lot of visuality here, because Kapil's writing is highly visual (she writes in the acknowledgements about her engagement with architecture in writing this -- not something that's evident, but Kapil makes it appear that some spatializing grid going on with the narrative that I'm sure further reads would elucidate.)
So, lines like this: "Like automata, the trees rise up in rows, mechanically." Besides the notions of Cartesian mechanism that aut0mata will elicit -- and which can be mapped on two the wolf-risen children as they are "humanized," the reader also goes "Trees can't be automata. What a curious idea. Neat."
To brass-tack it, instead of Kapil reporting the subject matter in straight-ahead fashion, she takes a cubist/impressionist approach. At first, you're not sure whose POV the books's many microchapters are written from. Then there it the impressionist element, where the world is blurred through the author's words.
I'm going with a lot of visuality here, because Kapil's writing is highly visual (she writes in the acknowledgements about her engagement with architecture in writing this -- not something that's evident, but Kapil makes it appear that some spatializing grid going on with the narrative that I'm sure further reads would elucidate.)
So, lines like this: "Like automata, the trees rise up in rows, mechanically." Besides the notions of Cartesian mechanism that aut0mata will elicit -- and which can be mapped on two the wolf-risen children as they are "humanized," the reader also goes "Trees can't be automata. What a curious idea. Neat."
October 16, 2017
This book is where speculative fiction meets reality for Kapil. This book opened up a lot of questions for me. I had studied about feral children in linguistics classes, particularly in the fact that most feral children are unable to learn language. While younger children might pick up some words, but they will never be able to get the formative structure of language. However, that was all I knew. This book made me seriously question the treatment of feral children after their "rescue." So I did some research.
For one, it appears Kamala was often beaten by Singh, truly. The book describes some horrific abuses perpetrated against her, but it is just a sickening to know that some of those things could have actually been done. Not to mention the speculation that Kamala and Amala were not raised by wolves, but instead could have been Autistic, it makes my heart sink.
I think what Kapil is trying to do with this book, is connect with the wildness of these girls, forced to be something else and eventually dying because of it. It is inherently interesting trying to get into the mindset of a feral child, which Kapil does with due diligence while braiding in second person accounts of the girls with sections from Singh's own journal. Kapil also brings in their own father's experience growing up.
Over all, I think this is a really thought provoking book.
For one, it appears Kamala was often beaten by Singh, truly. The book describes some horrific abuses perpetrated against her, but it is just a sickening to know that some of those things could have actually been done. Not to mention the speculation that Kamala and Amala were not raised by wolves, but instead could have been Autistic, it makes my heart sink.
I think what Kapil is trying to do with this book, is connect with the wildness of these girls, forced to be something else and eventually dying because of it. It is inherently interesting trying to get into the mindset of a feral child, which Kapil does with due diligence while braiding in second person accounts of the girls with sections from Singh's own journal. Kapil also brings in their own father's experience growing up.
Over all, I think this is a really thought provoking book.
October 16, 2017
Annotations
On page 63 Khapil writes "These are the wrong questions but they pass the time. They make a body real. This is a text to do that. Vivify." These lines encapsulate what Humanimal did for me. They made the human body come up before me like I was examining someone else's skin and sometimes the body turned into a wolf. The body was vivid and often broke.
When Amala dies I want to know how the missionaries feel about this event. If she was healthy living in the jungle then dies when she is brought under human care, this seems like God might be saying not to interfere. But this is only what I want them to think.
Not only does Kamala retain her wolf-like traits, but they are transferred to people at the orphanage. For example, when the doctor is brought a plate of buttered chicken and chilies, he eats it "quickly and sloppily, like a dog," (25).
Is it the many translations, Bengali to Hindi to English, that causes Khapil to write "beak" instead of "muzzle"?
"Red worms came out of their bodies and the younger girl died," (55). What was the yellow powder (sulphites?) and what did it do to the kidneys?
On page 63 Khapil writes "These are the wrong questions but they pass the time. They make a body real. This is a text to do that. Vivify." These lines encapsulate what Humanimal did for me. They made the human body come up before me like I was examining someone else's skin and sometimes the body turned into a wolf. The body was vivid and often broke.
When Amala dies I want to know how the missionaries feel about this event. If she was healthy living in the jungle then dies when she is brought under human care, this seems like God might be saying not to interfere. But this is only what I want them to think.
Not only does Kamala retain her wolf-like traits, but they are transferred to people at the orphanage. For example, when the doctor is brought a plate of buttered chicken and chilies, he eats it "quickly and sloppily, like a dog," (25).
Is it the many translations, Bengali to Hindi to English, that causes Khapil to write "beak" instead of "muzzle"?
"Red worms came out of their bodies and the younger girl died," (55). What was the yellow powder (sulphites?) and what did it do to the kidneys?
October 12, 2017
I can appreciate what Kapil attempts to do with this novel. It is experimentally written with several different writing styles put together which makes it engaging to read because you have to be paying close attention to be able to follow what is going on. I finished the novel feeling like I was stuck in a paradox because Kamala and Amala do not seem like they are actually wild children to me, they came off more like children who just did not understand society because they were not exposed to it. But I can also understand how identifying someone as not understanding society can be seen as being wild. This might be because I have read other novels that cover people being "introduced" into society like Susan Schaller's "A Man Without Words," in which the main character is seen as a brute until it becomes clear that he never was formally taught a language recognized by society and was never taught that sign language existed until adulthood. Regardless, I think what is unique and makes the novel worth reading is the format of the novel.
October 16, 2017
I thoroughly enjoyed this tangled, speculative and memoir-esque piece. In this work, it's clear that Kapil is thinking about structure and about human and animal as a societal binary that does not usually allow for the two to exist at once. Her nonlinear and experimental structure does the work of breaking down structural conformity in a way that made me think she was making a case for wildness, railing against the standards and expectations of humanness.
Her use of color throughout is startlingly beautiful, but strikes me as an exploration of the natural, wild, and animal world through the lens of human experience. These passages and descriptions about colors, of the children, of the jungle, of the moon, of animals infuse the piece with a lyrical artistry that seems more human than animal. Ultimately, Kapil has achieved a transcendence of the binary, represented by her portmanteau of humanimal to show that there can be an existence that operates in the liminal space between the binaries.
Her use of color throughout is startlingly beautiful, but strikes me as an exploration of the natural, wild, and animal world through the lens of human experience. These passages and descriptions about colors, of the children, of the jungle, of the moon, of animals infuse the piece with a lyrical artistry that seems more human than animal. Ultimately, Kapil has achieved a transcendence of the binary, represented by her portmanteau of humanimal to show that there can be an existence that operates in the liminal space between the binaries.
October 15, 2017
This book a bit confusing, but with the confusion I think it works. I feel like if one where to go from not being/growing up in civilization and then going into civilization it would be much like this book is written.
When reading it I felt a bit disoriented at time, because a lot of the sections/paragraphs I read I felt could just stand alone (and they do in a way) and it was hard at times to make myself stop trying to make connections. I think going even further with this it mimics kind of a liminal state in which you find yourself at times in life. I think that was why I enjoyed this book so much.
I don't think or believe stories need to be linear in order to be told. Life is not linear. I think in the stories and narrations being told in this it mimics that really well in that not everything is in order just like doesn't go linearly or smoothly.
When reading it I felt a bit disoriented at time, because a lot of the sections/paragraphs I read I felt could just stand alone (and they do in a way) and it was hard at times to make myself stop trying to make connections. I think going even further with this it mimics kind of a liminal state in which you find yourself at times in life. I think that was why I enjoyed this book so much.
I don't think or believe stories need to be linear in order to be told. Life is not linear. I think in the stories and narrations being told in this it mimics that really well in that not everything is in order just like doesn't go linearly or smoothly.
April 25, 2025
Picked this up from my local goodwill before going in for my car inspection. Started and finished in an hour. Not my usual pick but I was pleasantly challenged by this read. Kapil intertwines traditional narrative with unique prose that took me a while to break down, but once I understood that there were 3 different perspectives, I grew quite fond of the story and intersecting timelines across generations. Aside from the unique literary elements, the content of this quick read is fascinating, and forces you to consider IF and HOW FAR you would go in attempting to rehabilitate two children raised by wolves back into human society
Read
January 25, 2024an experimental novel/long poem (memoir?) best described as a hybrid, feral text, non-conforming to genre.
this is quite a strange book, just like the story it digs into of two girls raised by wolves. in that way, the disjointed form and narration almost mimics the original story and perhaps, the author’s research process, too.
requires work to read/understand. does little handholding for readers.
intriguing, nonetheless. read at the recommendation of Canisia.
this is quite a strange book, just like the story it digs into of two girls raised by wolves. in that way, the disjointed form and narration almost mimics the original story and perhaps, the author’s research process, too.
requires work to read/understand. does little handholding for readers.
intriguing, nonetheless. read at the recommendation of Canisia.
March 5, 2023
Stunning and strange, I liked it even more than Ban. Hard to describe—super lyric, a fixation with borders and boundaries: girl/wolf/human/animal, jungle/civilization, cultivation/colonialism as scars on the land. Brutal treatment of two feral girls. And the form was like an appendix, perhaps, of the film project. I never totally know what Bhanu Kapil is doing but I’m hypnotized by it anyway.
July 30, 2017
I loved this prose/poetry. One frustration: the story of the wolf-girls is so compelling in its bare facts that I wanted more bare facts, rather than weeding through the poetry to fish out what might be facts.
September 30, 2017
I've been wanting to read a Kapil book for ages, and I devoured this. It's vicious and expansive; I felt like I was there with her the entire time. I, obviously, cried when she talked about her father.
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