Eat Me Flashcards
1
Q
Sexism, objectification, dehumanisation
A
- In Patience Agbabi’s “Eat Me,” the female speaker’s partner objectifies, devalues, and abuses her, fattening her up to satisfy his own sexual appetite. Her partner can only see the speaker as a sexual object rather than a real person; he treats her as though she’s food that exists solely for his consumption. Through this, the poem suggests that men’s sexist objectification of women is an act of violence, dehumanizing women and eating away at their sense of self.
- The speaker’s partner doesn’t really care about her health or happiness: he just cares about making her look a certain way in order to conform to his own desires. He likes “big girls, soft girls,” the speaker says, and wants to “burrow inside” their “masses of cellulite.” He doesn’t value his partner as an individual, but just sees her as a means to an end—like a goose to fatten up for a feast. He wants to watch her “broad / belly wobble” and see her wide hips jiggle, essentially forcing her to perform for his own gratification.
- Though women often feel societal pressure to be thin rather than fat, the specific desire here doesn’t really matter: the poem is about the absurdity and unfairness of demanding that women conform to any ideals imposed on them by a man. The point is that through expecting the speaker to look a certain way, her partner strips her of her individuality; what matters is her body, not her.
- This objectification eats away at the speaker’s sense of self: she becomes passive and hollow, unable to enjoy her own life. She eats the cake he brings her without even tasting it, for instance—implying that the situation is grinding her down and making her numb. She also calls herself her partner’s “Jacuzzi,” “forbidden fruit,” “desert island,” and other surreal comparisons—all of which show that she has come to understand herself as an object, too. She even becomes “too fat to leave” and calls her own body “his flesh,” showing that the way his attitude “eats away” at her ability to act in her own interest. Objectification, the poem ultimately implies, is a kind of violence that robs objectified people of their humanity.
2
Q
Power, abuse and control
A
- “Eat Me” explores the complicated dynamics of coercion, power, and abuse. The speaker’s partner dominates her by controlling her body, ultimately making her so fat and powerless that she becomes dependent on him. In this way, the poem can perhaps be read as an extended metaphor for the way in which domestic abuse wears victims down until it’s nearly impossible for them to escape.
- The poem suggests that abuse depends in part on coercion and manipulation. There are elements of the man’s behavior that, on the surface, make it seem like he values the speaker—when in actual fact, he is merely trying to transform her into the ultimate object of his desires. The man buys the speaker a birthday cake at the start of the poem, for instance, and he lavishes attention on her throughout. But this all to serve his own aim: to make her as fat as possible.
- This objectification, in turn, is inextricable from the desire to hold power over another person. Because the speaker doesn’t really see his partner as someone with wants, needs, and desires of her own, he feels entitled to tell her what to do. And the speaker, her own sense of self whittled down to nearly nothing by abuse, acquiesces.
- In fact, the man’s behavior erodes the speaker’s identity to the point that she can hardly imagine herself outside of this situation, let alone actually escape. She becomes passive and helpless, seemingly resigned to her fate as she declares herself “too fat to late, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk.” Her partner seems to hold all the cards, making the speaker more and more dependent on him.
- The speaker has thus become imprisoned by her abuser and his behavior. And when, at the end of the poem, the speaker smothers her boyfriend with her body, it’s not clear if this is a genuine liberation. Much irreversible violence, both bodily and psychological, has already taken place. And there’s nothing “left to eat”—an ambiguous final line that might represent the speaker’s new start, but just as likely might represent how emotionally hungry and empty she feels despite having “escaped” her abuser.
3
Q
When I hit …
… stone in weight.
A
- The speaker starts by remembering the day she turned 30, which should have been a joyful milestone in her life. And, right on cue, her partner seems to have thoughtfully made her a birthday cake, complete with “three layers of icing.” How thoughtful!
- Except, this is not a birthday cake. This is a weight-gain cake, celebrating the fact that the speaker is getting fatter and fatter, just as her partner wants her to. Of course, the huge, sugary cake itself is part of this plan. The candles mark, not the speaker’s life in years, but her weight in stone (a unit of measure equal to 14 pounds).
- Already, then, the speaker is being devalued and objectified—treated like livestock being fattened up for slaughter. Her partner celebrates, not an important moment in her life, but his own selfish glee that her body is meeting his standards.
- These first three lines—which establish the poem’s tercet stanza form—also put in place the poem’s unusual rhyme scheme. Each stanza effectively has three of the same rhyme sound: AAA, BBB, and so on. But these are not full rhymes, but assonant rhymes: that is, they share the same vowel. In the first stanza, for instance, “cake,” “made,” and “weight” all use a long /ay/ sound.
4
Q
The icing was …
… even taste it.
A
- This line uses back-loaded metrical feet, starting with an iamb (da-DUM) and moving into anapests (da-da-DUM). This rhythm gives the poem a waltzy, giddy feeling, almost like a nursery rhyme, as though the cake is trying to hypnotize the speaker into eating it.
- The lettering on the cake doesn’t spell the speaker’s name or a birthday message, but the words “eat me.” This is an allusion to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the famous story in which Alice, a little girl wandering through a magical underground world, eats a cake labeled “Eat Me” and suddenly grows to the size of a giant. That’s exactly what the speaker’s partner wants to happen to the speaker! This allusion gives the poem a sinister, surreal feeling: it’s as if the speaker has herself stumbled into a world where her own body is out of her control.
- And as the poem goes on, it feels more and more as if the speaker is under a dangerous spell. When the speaker does what the lettering tells her and eats the cake, she is as much following her partner’s commands as she is the cake’s: he gave her the cake, after all. This is not some innocent fantasy world, but the inner workings of an abusive relationship.
- Though the speaker eats the cake, she says she doesn’t even “taste it.” This implies a kind of emotional numbness that could well be the result of her partner’s abusive and controlling behavior. What is meant to be fun, sensuous, and a little bit joyful—the eating of a cake—becomes mechanical. He gives her the cake, she eats it, and that’s that.
5
Q
Then he asked …
… like a juggernaut.
A
- In stanza 3, the speaker describes being objectified by her partner. As the partner demands that the speaker walk around the room so he can admire her body from bed, the reader understands that he is fattening the speaker up in order to make her conform to his idea of what is attractive.
- Here, the poem subverts the more typical modern demand on women’s bodies: that women have to be thin to meet men’s sexual standards. By playing with the opposite idea, the speaker makes it clear that it doesn’t matter whether men expect women to be fat or thin: the process of objectification works just the same. The woman has to change herself according to externally imposed standards, and the agency and power here are both in the hands of the partner.
- The blunt, round /b/, /d/, and /j/ sounds gives these lines a “judder[ing]” quality, mimicking the movements they describe. The words “belly wobble,” for instance, feel onomatopoiec, evoking the movement of the speaker’s body with their sounds as well as their meaning.
- The alliterative “judder like a juggernaut” is a simile, suggesting that the speaker has become as huge as a truck (“juggernaut” is sometimes used to mean “truck” in British English). Or perhaps she’s like something even bigger: “juggernaut” can also mean a massive, unstoppable force, or even, originally, a huge wagon on which an image of a Hindu god would be displayed. Though now the word tends to just mean something really big and heavy, this background hints at how the man is turning the speaker into a kind of divine power—an object he can worship sexually, rather than treat as a complete human being.
6
Q
The bigger the …
… masses of cellulite.
A
- These three lines consist of short little phrases broken up by caesura. These rushed, broken lines make it sound like the man is getting carried away, almost panting at the thought of the speaker becoming increasingly big and soft as he feeds her.
- He likes “big girls, soft girls, girls [he] can burrow inside,” he says, showing that his objectification of the speaker is also his general attitude towards the opposite sex. He’s not interested in who any one woman is: he just wants a series of “girls” who fit his sexual tastes. (Note, too, that he wants “girls,” not women: he sees women as children, not grown, independent people.) His insistent diacope on the world “girls” makes him sound obsessive.
- Indeed, the speaker’s partner is so obsessed that he wants to lose himself inside girls “with multiple chins, masses of cellulite.” This line is packed full of consonance, almost to the extent that it reads like a tongue-teaser. These dense, packed-in sounds evoke the overflowing fatness the partner fetishizes.
- This stanza also uses asyndeton, jamming clause after clause together with no “and” in sight. This makes these lines feel as though they are being packed full of as much “mass” as possible, as though there is no space for superfluous word like “and.” All the language here evokes the partner’s obsessive, objectifying lust for fat women.
7
Q
I was his …
… like forbidden fruit.
A
- These similarly-constructed clauses suggest that the speaker was something to the partner, and, even though he treated her terribly, he was something to her—not something good, but something integral to her life. There is something ironically—and unsettlingly—romantic about the sentence construction.
- But the metaphors the speaker chooses here have very little to do with the clichés of romance. The speaker remembers being her partner’s “Jacuzzi”—a warm, comforting bath for him to sink into, a vessel for him to fill. This has obvious sexual connotations, but also speaks to the way the partner redefined who the speaker was—hollowing out her sense of self and replacing it with an identity linked solely to her ballooning size (and his own pleasure).
- In turn, the partner plays the role of “cook”: the insistent provider of food. His assault on the speaker’s personality in this role, she remembers, was so successful that her one “pleasure” in life became the hit of sugars and salts that came with “fast food.” He, in turn, got to watch her swell like “forbidden fruit.”
- “Forbidden fruit,” of course, is an allusion to the biblical Eden story, in which the first people, Adam and Eve, eat the alluring fruit from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and are cast out of paradise. There’s a pretty sharp contrast between “fast food” and “forbidden fruit”: the one cheap and unhealthy, the other the most luscious tempting thing one can possibly imagine. Alliteration makes that contrast even clearer: the speaker’s one, sad pleasure, “fast food,” is nothing compared to the “forbidden fruit” of her body in the partner’s eyes.
7
Q
His breadfruit. His …
… craving a wave.
A
- The emphasis here is on the speaker’s immobility. On the surface, that’s because she has become too big and heavy to move, like a whale stranded on the beach. But that bigness is really just a symptom of the way in which the man imprisons her through his abuse and coercion.
- The assonance here evokes her suffering. The long /ay/ sound in “whale” and “craving a wave” sounds like a cry of pain. And a caesura in the middle of line 18 (“craving a […] flesh”) slows the poem almost to a complete stop, evoking how trapped the speaker feels in her own body (and her abusive relationship).
7
Q
I was a …
… chubby, cuddly, big-built.
A
- From the caesura in line 18 up to the end of line 21, the speaker summarizes the effects that her partner’s incessant feeding had on her life.
- She offers one more metaphor to describe her size: “I was a tidal wave of flesh.” Here, the hyperbolic hugeness of a tidal wave suggests the speaker’s own vastness.
- But tidal waves also have great power as they crash to shore. This aspect of the metaphor might foreshadow the fact that the partner’s incessant abuse will bring about his own destruction. Enjambment evokes the momentum and power of this metaphorical wave, making the idea “spill over” from one line to the next.
- In other words: the problem here isn’t just that the speaker’s partner is an objectifying abuser (though that is certainly a major problem). It’s that the whole world has abusive standards for women’s bodies. The speaker is trapped in her partner’s abuse, not just because he’s worn away at her sense of self, but because his abuse has made her body unacceptable to a judgmental and sexist culture. Whatever she does, inside her relationship or out, she’ll find herself reduced to just an object, just a body.
7
Q
Soon you’ll be …
… dying sentence out.
A
- Though this might at first seem like a victory for the speaker, it isn’t a simple, neat resolution. The damage has already been done. The speaker has lost nearly ten years of life to this toxic relationship and those years aren’t coming back. The poem’s closing lines will explore the new trap the speaker finds herself in.
7
Q
The day I …
… down my throat.
A
- At the end of the poem, nearly a decade has passed since the first lines, and everything is about to change. Initially, the relationship between the speaker and her partner appears the same: she is his object for consumption, fattened as much as possible to satisfy his desires. But notice the subtle shift in language in the first sentence of the stanza:
- The speaker “allow[s]” the man to touch her cheek: a verb that suggests she has a little more agency now. Perhaps this hints at confidence growing within the speaker, an inner strength drawn from desperation that will allow her to save herself from her partner’s controlling grasp.
- Nevertheless, the man is still enthralled by the speaker’s fatness, and the speaker is still at his mercy, for the moment. Their “flesh flow[s]” together, which is a metaphor for sex and hints at how the speaker feels objectified by her partner: he’s taken so much control over her that it’s almost as if he possesses her body, like a demon. He instructs her to “open wide” so he can pour “olive oil” down her throat, a grotesque image that suggests just how far his abuse has gone.
7
Q
Form
A
- “Eat Me” is built from ten brief tercets (three-line stanzas). This tight form gives the poem a tense and restrictive atmosphere—as though the poem, like the speaker, is being controlled.
- The poem is a dramatic monologue, a kind of poem in which the poet behaves like an actor, taking on the first-person voice of a vivid character. (In Agbabi’s book Bloodshot Monochrome, “Eat Me” appears in a whole section of “Monologues” in different voices.) Like a lot of dramatic monologues, this one tells a startling story, moving from the speaker’s constrained, static life with her abusive partner to the climactic breaking point when she finally fights back.
7
Q
The Cake
A
- The cake the partner gives the speaker at the beginning of the poem is a symbol of objectification and cruelty.
- In the poem’s opening, it’s the speaker’s birthday. Her partner gives her a cake—but that cake has nothing to do with the speaker turning thirty. In fact, it celebrates her weight gain, with a candle for each stone (or 14 pounds) of her weight, rather than for each of her years on the planet!
- To understand the symbolism here, think about what a birthday cake usually symbolizes. It represents people taking the time to celebrate someone that they love. It shows somebody that people are thinking of them, and that they are worth celebrating. But by giving the speaker a weight-gain cake, the speaker’s partner isn’t celebrating her: he’s serving his own desires. His cake symbolizes how much he objectifies her—how, in his eyes, she only exists in order to fulfill his sexual desires.
7
Q
I left him …
… house to eat.
A
- The poem’s final stanza describes the aftermath of the killing. The speaker’s partner is now dead, and the speaker is no longer under his control. But she’s also not free. She leaves him lying there for “six hours that felt like a week,” perhaps indicating that she is pumped full of adrenalin, not sure what to do with the dead body she has on her hands now. End-stopped lines slow the poem down to a near halt, mirroring the way that time has changed for the speaker.
- The partner’s body seems to behave in death much the way it behaved in life: its devouring mouth hangs open, and its eyes “bulge with greed.” This ironic moment reveals what’s been true all along. The partner may have been fattening the speaker up, but really, he’s been serving his own rapacious “greed” for her body. She may have gotten fat, but he’s the one who’s really been “eating” her up.
- Either way, the ending is deeply unsettling. It’s certainly not a clear-cut victory, a story tied up with a neat bow at the end: the reader doesn’t know what happens after those “six hours,” but it doesn’t seem likely to be anything good.
- The speaker has lived through a drawn-out nightmare of violence—and that violence doesn’t stop at just this one abusive partner. This poem gestures to the wider horrors of sexism and abuse: objectification, this poem suggests, is a disease that eats at the souls of both the women who suffer it and the men who perpetrate it.
8
Q
Meter
A
- “Eat Me” doesn’t have a strict meter, an effect that makes the poem feel deceptively calm. Because the poem’s rhythms feel natural and conversational rather than formal and poetic, the speaker sounds matter-of-fact as she describes the horrors of her abusive relationship. It’s as if years of suffering have numbed her. This unassuming tone makes the poem’s darkly ironic ending feel all the more striking.
- While the poem doesn’t have a regular meter, it does use rhythm and sound to make meaning. For instance, the lines get steadily, subtly longer as the poem goes on: the poem slowly swells, just as the speaker does under her partner’s abusive diet regime.
