Incubation is a state between being born and being unborn, or un-alive, or not. It is a way of hitchhiking, which is a way of being between where you are and where you want to go. An immigrant is someone who is in between two countries—the country of origin and the country of destination. And “Incubation for Space Monsters” occupies a space in the murky expanse between poem and novel, poetry and prose—a liminal space for a hybrid main character, Laloo, who is light and dark, mother and child, human and machine.
Even as the book begins, Kapil keeps us on the precipice of it, not yet in it, paging through prefaces and numbered notes. From the start, she complicates the notion of what it means to be a girl, “Then I can say to visitors: what comes next for a red girl? They don’t care. They just want the tea or coffee and are happy to exchange elaborate stories of girlhood. Exhausted, we lean our heads on the kitchen table in turn, sucking on a piece of chocolate or black Panda licorice, listening to the obvious words at the end of a girl. What a girl is.” Kapil also interrogates what it means to be human, or that which we consider inhuman—cyborg or monster: “Exhausted, you lay your head on the kitchen table and said: “But what’s the difference between a monster and a cyborg?” She will circle back to these definitions throughout the book, and each time the reader will find that nothing fits inside a neat binary.
As if in rebuke to the black and white paperwork confines in which we are meant to fit our lives, “Incubation for Space Monsters” is rife with color. Laloo is red, a red girl, who walks in a green world populated with citron-yellow flowers, purple latex gloves, and amber streetlights. The text rebels against the framework of category, the labels society applies to make sense of itself and to exert control, “Technically, at the age of twenty, I was not an adult female yet.” What is an adult, then? “Adults drink beer to excess, with lemon wedges in it,” Kapil tells us, cleverly encapsulating the absurdity of arbitrary laws that nonetheless wield so much power over our lives.
By the time we wade through the prefaces, 30 pages have passed. “Sex is always monstrous,” the book begins, if you don’t count the prefaces as beginnings. In this first chapter, “Text to Complete a Text,” sex and movement are intertwined with expectations. The narrator is expected to experience sex a certain way, in accordance with the era she inhabits, “In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car for-
ever.” She is expected not to drive and to marry a dentist. Others expect her to be from India, a country that is not expected to have scones, but is expected to have tea, lots of it. She expects that hitchhiking in America will help her “complete a thing I began in another place.”
But hitchhiking reveals itself to be yet another American myth of freedom; our narrator is still dogged by the tags of colonization and control, “My aliennumberis A#7 86334901. My social security number is 102-70-5846. My phone number is 970-290-6292. Please call me and tell me what the difference is between a monster and a cyborg. I need to know. Also, you can e-mail me at beatricehastogo@yahoo.com. It is a bit better for me if you e-mail as 1 am at heart a hitchhiker and sometimes out of range for cell reception.” Though she is a hitchhiker “at heart” she is still findable, traceable, reachable—out of range of cell reception, sure, sometimes, but never out of range of civilization.
But Laloo keeps driving, pushing herself further into the margins of society, into the liminal spaces between wild and civilized, the road and the forest. There is a cost. It is difficult to return. Laloo is both in danger, but also a danger, she is “darkness in a dress.” Here, the speculative elements of the text, which up until this point had meandered through scifi, horror, and religious and cultural myth take a turn toward fairytale as Laloo, “a red girl goes into this yes and is never seen again.” She disappears back into some in-between, some liminal space, “before touch there in the darkness which is real.”
Laura Linart 