1. Eat Me - Patience Agbabi

Question 1

Summary

Answer 1

Woman is forcefed by her partner for his sexual satisfaction. She initially finds happiness in his investment for her, until stanza 7 which marks a change in tone as she comes to terms with the reality of her entrapment. Morbid ending - she sufforcates him to death.

Question 2

Structure

Answer 2

• Brevity of verses: Presents series of vignettes
• Rhyme: Heightens sense of entrapment
• Language: Enacts movements + contours of body
• Dramatic monologue
• Tercets changing length: Breaking free
• Regular structure: Routine

Question 3

‘they said ‘Eat Me’. And I ate. Did

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

Answer 3

• Alice in Wonderland: Infantilisation, trapped in a world controlled by outsider
• Biblical register of syntax ‘and I ate’: Omnipotent power, ‘His’ 3rd person possessive pronoun
• ‘Did what I was told’: Infantilises her, dominant parent/child relationship
• Ambiguity of cake/sexual act: Power and submission imagery
• Physical fullness/emotional emptiness

Question 4

‘He asked me to get up and walk round the bed so he could watch my broad belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut’

Answer 4

• ‘So he could watch’: Personal satisfaction, objectifying, male gaze, voyeur
• ‘Broad/belly’ and ‘judder/juggernaut’: Onomatopoeic, alliteration alludes to wobbling = jelly (Infantilisation)
• ‘He’: Lack of identity, only ‘he’ and ‘I’, no one outside their morbid world vs. no togetherness
• ‘Broad/juggernaut’: Half-rhyme - uncomfortable movement

Question 5

‘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’

Answer 5

• ‘Jacuzzi’: water being tamed for pleasure. Seems comfortable until he drowns in her flesh.
• Caesura ‘but’: Justifies her vested interest, pause, mutualistic relationship
• ‘Rush’: Addiction
• ‘his pleasure’: Line below/non-caring
• ‘Forbidden fruit’ Garden of Eden: Alludes to paradise yet dominion

Question 6

‘I was a tidal wave of flesh’

‘I allowed him’

Answer 6

• Evident shift in power/ shift in subject
• No longer centred on ‘he’ but ‘I’: Speaker now concedes to access her body
• Control: Beginning to backfire, tidal wave prefigures speakers eventual actions

Question 7

‘And how/
could I not roll over on top. Rolled and he drowned
in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out’.

‘Nothing left in the house to eat’

Answer 7

• ‘How could I not roll over on top’: Metaphor for fighting back vs. Erotic vs. Rage. Enjambment enacts process of rolling over.
• Horror of murder undermined by morally compromising nature of relationship
• Final stanza: Epilogue
• Reveals poets sense of humour: Feeder gets the ultimate comeuppance
• Reccurent water imagery: He is now a fish out of water, drowning, removes his ability to speak, seeking power

Question 8

Themes, Attitudes & Values

Answer 8

• Intrapersonal/wider relationships
• Post-colonial: Exoticism ‘forbidden fruit’ - speaker subverts to becoming a ‘tidal wave’ that engulfs and subsumes him.
• Alliteation and assonace: Sensory description of body - tongue-in-cheek critique of Western consumerism.

Question 9

Comparison to ‘The Gun’

Answer 9

• Life’s taboos: Death, Sex, Addiction, Excess

* Death & loss: Foreboding build up to death, control gained from death and loss, effect of death

Question 10

Comparison to ‘Giuseppe’

Answer 10

Ambiguous Relationships

• Ambiguous sense of who the criminal is
• Ambiguous response to death
• Ambiguous involvement of speaker in relationship (Eat Me (Lovers? Relationship pre-existing - Giuseppe, sidelined, relationship marked by action.)