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
