Summary: Exploring The Crude Language Behind Animal's People

“If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it”: Exploring the Crude Language Behind Animal’s People

Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People does not whisk you away into a fairy tale world full of rainbows and butterflies but instead jolts you into a world of crude, hard edges. Through the stories of one seventeen-year-old boy named Animal, we are shown what life is like years after an industrial disaster. On the very first page of the book we get a glimpse of the journey ahead when Animal talks about his past and his caregiver, Ma Franci, “never did it sink into that fucked-up brain of hers.” A much different approach to the traditional documentary set up, but why? In “Ode to a Four-Letter Word” by Kathryn Schulz she writes, “…pleasures

of literature… urge us into unfamiliar terrain, through both the stories it tells and the language it uses to tell them.” To tell the story of the town of Khafpur with crude language sets us up for a real life setting, although it is fictional, it mirrors the tragedies of Bhopal and tells the tales of what can be assumed to be real life emotions. Personally, I feel that by using such harsh language it wakes the reader up and reminds them to pay attention. It can be so easy to shut your feelings off for the ads we see all over the media, begging us to pay for a goat in Africa or pay for little Jimmy to go to school, but having crude language forces the reader to be engaged. Profanities and the like can be hard for some readers to swallow, especially for people with strong religious or cultural beliefs, but that is what makes the piece so great. We are forced into unfamiliar territory. If we want to find out Animal’s story we must step over that speed bump and fully engage with what he tells us.
Animal does not just swear through out his story, he describes vulgar sexual feelings and references different bodily fluids.

Making the reader witness such inappropriate behaviour degrades the reader to Animal’s level. In “The Science of Swearing: A Look into the Human MIND and Other Less Socially Acceptable Four-Letter Words” by Michelle Drews she points out that, “these make swear words powerful… descriptors of things we may not want to think about.” We can no longer experience his stories from a comfortable developed world pedestal but instead must get down and see what Animal is experiencing. His grotesque language breaks the barrier when it engages our emotions of horror, laughter, anger and even heartache. If Animal always talked with perfect grammar and never spoke of obscene behaviour or swore I don’t believe that we would be able to identify with him. A victim, whether they want to be viewed as such or not, will have strong emotions to the incident that made them a victim. We can’t begin to understand the person if we don’t see any emotions. Without emotions it is easier to separate us from the unwanted. Drews goes on to say, “… to break a cultural taboo in front of others creates a … sense of community.” By having Animal use such grotesque language allows us as readers to connect with him on a basic human level. We no longer need to view him as a World Vision commercial, we can see and hear the genuine Animal and truly listen to what he has to say. We may not

understand how Animal and the others deal with the misfortunate against them but we can understand pure raw emotions as everyone has felt a form of it before. It closes the gap between the world for whom the book was written and the world which it is written upon.
Benjamin Bergen wrote, “These are the words people use to express the strongest human emotions – in moments of anger, of fear, and of passion.

They’re the words with the greatest capacity to inflict emotional pain and incite violent disagreement,” in his book What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. Having vulgar profanities sprinkled throughout the book keep connecting our emotions to the story in order to keep us engaged. We begin to feel for Animal, start to hope for the future, or get upset in the moment. Once the barrier has been broken then we can experience the story in its full potential. This thought can be opposed, however, many believe that adding profanities into literature only cheapen the material. They argue that only lazy conversationalists use such grotesque language, which is why the debate whether or not using such language in literature is appropriate or not. I simply disagree, as I believe that adding in the words one may not want to see adds in a sense of mortality. It awakens our raw emotions and lets us feel again. Emotions are key to producing an extraordinary effect. Maya Angelou famously said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Feelings whether they be positive, negative, or even both will have a lasting impression and profanities seem to shortcut straight to those feelings. They do not dance around the

subject; they get straight to the point no holds bar and is exactly how Indra Sinha delivered his story in Animal’s People.
Furthermore, I believe that Sinha did a wonderful job on finding balance. He didn’t have every character swear every second sentence. He left the profanity up to Animal. The odd character would slip up here or there when filled with strong emotions, but in all everyone around Animal was conservative when it came to their language. This helped keep the main point of the story alive and in the front. If every character had acted and was written to be like Animal, I believe the story would have gotten lost. We get to learn about life in Khafpur and really get to know Animal and the people in his life. Creating a connection and bond to the story itself. The book may be fictional but it sheds light on a very real topic. I found myself curious about the mishap in Bhopal, wanting to Google it, wanting to see if the real people got any justice or if they too were experiencing the same grief that the people of Khafpur were experiencing. In “The Use of Profanity in Writing” by Azhar Lorgat he says something really beautiful, “sometimes a poorly written or spoken message can still hold great meaning.” This is exactly what I believe Sinha did with Animal’s People. He didn’t try to wow us by using scientific talk to bring light to a real world tragedy. He used basic communication to speak to basic humanity about a very elaborate topic.