When my 15 year old daughter came from school one day very excited about a new poem they were analysing, I knew it was going to be something special. I had only seen her this excited once, when she was reading Macbeth. Instead of explaining what the poem was about she decided to read it. She read it while she looked at my face and she must have seen in my expression that I also thought it was a piece written by a genius.
The genius in question is Patience Agbabi, a British author born in London to Nigerian parents. She lived and studied in various places in the UK including Oxford university. She first published “Eat Me” in her 2008 collection Bloodshot Monocrome.
“When I turned thirty, my partner brought me a cake. It had three layers of frosting and was home-made—but the candles were there to mark each stone (14 lbs) of my weight, not my age.
The cake had white frosting with pink lettering that spelled out: “eat me.” I did what the lettering said and ate the whole cake, without even tasting it.
Then my partner asked me to get up and walk around the bed. He wanted to watch my belly shaking, and my hips quaking, big as a truck.
He used to tell me that he liked girls to be as big as possible. I like big girls with soft flesh, he’d say, girls that I can tunnel into, girls with many chins and loads of fat.
I was like his warm, comforting bathtub, but he was my feeder, and my only brief joy was gobbling down fast food; his joy was to watch me get fatter, as if I were some kind of ripening, tempting fruit.
I was his tropical breadfruit, or a desert island for him to land on after a shipwreck. Or I was a whale washed up on the king-size bed, longing for a wave to come and take me away. Or I was a tidal wave, but made of flesh rather than water.
I was too fat to escape, or even to buy fatty milk from the shops; I was too fat to use my fatness as protection, and I was beyond the size that could be euphemistically called “chubby” or “big-boned.”
When I turned thirty-nine, I let my partner stroke my huge, round cheek. Our flesh merged together. He told me to open my mouth, and made me drink straight olive oil.
He whispered in my ear: “Soon you’ll be forty.” When I heard that, how could I resist rolling over on top of him? He suffocated under my weight. My body muffled his dying words.
I let him lie there dead for six hours, which felt more like a week to me. His mouth was ajar, and his eyes bulged with frozen desire. There was nothing to eat left in the house.”
Although it is a poem that has been well analysed by students and experts multiple times, It is impossible not to think about our everyday lives and the themes that arise from it.
My first impression was how women or men can be manipulated in such way that they loose themselves in the process. In the poem, the narrator is a woman who is abused and manipulated by her husband. In her search for love and acceptance she succumbs to her husband’s wishes of overfeeding her to stay and grow as big as he wants her to be and her only pleasure is to overeat fast food, but the main theme is present in our daily routines much more than we probably feel comfortable with.
How many times have we been manipulated by the standards of society? Social media? Or your family and friends?
Have you ever gone out for dinner or to a friend’s house determined not to drink alcohol or not to have any sugary foods and have given up after your best friend or your sister or mother or cousin has asked you for the fifth time to have a glass of wine or to eat the desert they have been cooking for the past two hours with a lot of love and effort?
Have you agreed to those demands in an effort to fit in, to not be different, to be loved….?
Have you looked at yourself in the mirror and seen only a body…too thin, too fat, too soft, too tall…for society to love, for your lover to love,….for you to love!
The poem shows us very skilfully how unfair and absurd it is for women or men to conform to any ideas imposed by another person or by society. In the poem, the woman is treated like an object, she becomes hollow, unable to enjoy her life apart from the times when she binges on fast food. Although in this case the abuser is the partner, in my clinical practice I have seen many people who are somehow “abusing themselves”, the pressure some people put on themselves, the feeling that they need to fit with the standards society imposes, it can make a person lose themselves. How the woman in the poem stops being a woman and just an object for her partner but also for herself is something that has stricken me as frightening but also very true in the society we live in now.
The ending can also be interpreted as freedom or as the empty desperation of someone who doesn’t know who she is or who she has become. “There was nothing to eat left in the house.” Her emptiness is only filled with food.
A beautiful and terrifying poem at the same time. I loved it. Thank you Patience Agbabi.
