Humananimal [Feral children are fatty]
Bhanu Kapil
4. Feral children are fatty, complex and rigid. When you captured the two children, you had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter. Descent and serration. No. I don't want to ask primal questions.
5. Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister and runs, on all fours, towards the complex horizon between Midnapure and its surrounding belt of sal. The humanimal mode is one of pure anxiety attached to the presence of the body. Two panicked children strain against the gelatin envelope of the township, producing, through distension, a frightening shape. The animals see an opaque, milky membrane bulging with life and retreat, as you would, to the inner world. I am speaking for you in January. It is raining. Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls are nevertheless re-absorbed. I imagine them back in their cots illuminated by kerosene lanterns. I illuminate them in the colony—the cluster of residences, including the Home—around St. John's. No. Though I've been there, it’s impossible for me to visualize retrieval. Chronologies only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.
d. I was almost to the gate. I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O. The next day, I woke up with a raw throat. The cook gave me salt in warm water. I waited until she was gone and then I bit it. I bit my own arm and ate it. Here is my belly, frosted with meat. Here are my eyes, bobbling in a tin.
6. It's Palm Sunday and Kamala, with the other orphans in a dark, glittery crocodile, walks from Home to church. Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to extend. Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves.
e. The cook fed us meats of many kinds. I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other's faces.
7. Is this the humanimal question? No, it’s a disc, transferring light from corner to corner of the girl's eye. Like an animal tapetum. The way at night an animal. Animal eyes, glinting, in the room where he kept her, his girl, deep in the Home.
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 grafting: 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."from Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780932716705/default.aspx
I found Kapil's poem earlier this morning on poets.org, and the subject matter drew me in immediately. When I learned Kapil retraced and "reencountered" the two girls living with wolves, well, of course I leaped mentally to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, and thier wolf mother. Being raised by wolves is a metaphor for the wildness, the id lurking beneath our powdered and coiffed exteriors. But what of the actual cases of being raised by wolves or growing up feral?
One of my first jobs was working in a group home, something like current assisted living, for the mentally, phyiscially, emotionally, and socially disabled. I was a respite worker, which means I gave parents of disabled children a break for a day or a few weeks. This was before mainstreaming, and also, right before Reagan cut unding and sent the residents of simliar homes across the country, to the streets,(hmmm, back to the wilderness). At the home, there was a woman who was raised by a dog, or, to be correct, her parents kept her in the doghouse with the family dog until social services were contacted. Although she had been reeducated in human ways: to walk upright, eat with utensils, clothe herself, appropriate social interaction, etc..., whenever she was angered, she barked.
I wonder the fate of the two feral girls of this poem. I'll have to google, and read Kapil's book to discover it.
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