Poem 1: Eat Me

Patience Agbabi, “Eat Me”

When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake,

thre layers of icing, home-made,

a candle for each stone in weight.

 

The icing was white but the letters were pink,

they said, EAT ME. And I ate, did

what I was told. Didn’t even taste it.

 

Then he asked me to get up and walk

round the bed so he could watch my broad

belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut.

 

The bigger the better, he’d say, I like

big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside

with multiple chins, masses of cellulite.

 

I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook,

my only pleasure the rush of fast food,

his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit.

 

His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck.

Or a beached whale on a king-sized bed

craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh.

 

too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk,

too fat to use fat as an emotional shield,

too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-built.

 

 

The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke

my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed.

He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat.

 

Soon you’ll be forty… he whispered, and how

could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned

in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.

 

I left him there for six hours that felt like a week.

His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed.

There was nothing else left in the house to eat.

 

Key features/themes

 

‘Eat Me’ is an audacious dramatic monologue which examines an extreme kind of unhealthy relationship. Agbabi uses the relationship between ‘feeder’ and ‘feedee’ to explore issues of gender and power. That the concerns of the poem are not confined solely to sexual politics is hinted at through some of the language used to describe the woman’s body: ‘forbidden fruit’, ‘breadfruit’, ‘desert island’, ‘globe’, ‘tidal wave’. These suggest a post-colonial viewpoint in which the colonial authority – identified with the male protagonist – is ultimately overwhelmed by the power of the former colony.

 

However, this dimension is hinted at subtly. The power of the poem lies in the voice of the narrator and the vividness with which her situation is described: patterns of alliteration, assonance and repetition combine to convey a cloying sensuousness which mirrors the excess described. Read aloud, the reader can’t help but be sensitised to the mouth and tongue. The rhyme/half rhyme scheme of aba further increases the sense of claustrophobia in the poem. In these ways the subject’s physicality is enacted at the level of language.

The ending of the poem is quite shocking and worth thinking about in terms of the poet’s attitude towards consumption – and where this eventually might lead.

 

Links to other poems

Reading Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘The Map Woman’ alongside ‘Eat Me’ could open up discussions about representations of the female body.

Further resources

There is a useful overview of Patience Agbabi’s career on the British Council literature website: http://literature.britishcouncil.org/patience-agbabi