Eat Me By Agbabi Flashcards
What is the overarching message of the poem?
-explores themes of power dynamics, desire + control within relationships
-complexities of dominance + submission
What does the poem challenge?
-challenges traditional notions of authority + obedience
-inviting readers reflect on nuances of power + consent in intimate relationships
‘When I hit thirty, he bought me a cake’
-starts with international ambiguity - adverb ‘when’ = sense of inevitability + concrete sense of time juxtaposes the ambiguity
-birthday - encapsulates theme of aging, relationships + passage of time
-seems like a celebratory poem but takes sinister turn
‘3 layers of icing, home-made’ S1
-tercets + no. 3 signify bound to him + food
-Ancient Greece no. 3 symbolises harmony, understanding + wisdom — ironic as poem delves into feederism which is est immediately
-irony ‘home-made’ domesticity v grotesque — cake homemade as well as her
‘A candle for each stone in weight’ S1
-revelatory final line breaks anticipation of celebrations = incongruous, macabre, sinister
-AAA half-rhyme scheme through assonance to show dependence of co-dependence or trapped sense of woman with controlling man
-all endings consonant + harsh building sense aggression to penultimate S
‘The icing was white but the letters were pink’ S2
-colour imagery ‘white” associated with innocence, fragility, purity - innocence deprived + contrast to female speaker who negates herself, celebrates herself as an object
-continues feederism/fetishism dependency
-pink symbolises love + nurture - he loves her for her size + she is blinded by her love for him
‘they said, eat me. And I ate,/did what I was told. Didn’t even taste it’ S2
-pronoun ‘they’ removes make from coercion perhaps female speaker defending him - blinded by norms of patriarchal society
-caesura adds emph to ‘eat me’ — is food her oppressor or is it the man
-‘…told’ - allusion to fairytale becomes incongruous to macabre fetish
-conjunctions, elliptic sentence, listing become routine/automatic — devoid of feeling, suggestive of passivity - almost robotic/forced/complicit + tolerant
‘Then he asked me to get up and walk…so he could watch’ S3
-male persona intrudes
-conjunction charts control of male - pronoun reintroduces male into coercion through male gaze
-but ‘asked’ hints at question - perhaps she had a choice but chose to comply with what he desired her to do - objectification + male gaze
-perhaps female wanted his validation in male dominated society
‘So he could watch my broad/belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut’ S3
-plosive ‘b’ signify male power - he desired this + won = female removed from process, devoid of feeling
-simile + sound are aggressive + predatory
-contradictions of ‘judder’ (frailty) + ‘juggernaut’ (power) - suggestive her latent inner potential + power - foreshadowing ending when takes control
-‘my’ - hints at her own perception of herself —lack of connection to own body
How is sexual power presented in the third stanza?
-sexual power dynamic of systemic social degradation of women through the male gaze
-objectification
-complicity + coercion more explicit = reader concern v sense of detachment
‘He’d say, I like/big girls, girls I can burrow inside’S4
-heteroglossia - intrusion of male voice
-repetition ‘girls’ - belittles her to a weak + vulnerable child (infantilisation) - predatory
-little girls are passive + lack confidence/shy - takes adv heightening her passivity + objectification
-plosives + sibilance - increasing sinister male power = self gratification of male
-plurality of ‘girls’ - could be anyone - doesn’t value just her
‘With multiple chins, masses of cellulite’ S4
-make persona - structurally most dominant - objectifying, grotesque + disturbing
-contradiction ‘multiple…masses’ suggest her power, compared to ‘girl’ status - foreshadowing ending
-she’s bigger than him physically + mentally - capable of overpowering his both ways
‘I was his jacuzzi. But he was my cook’ S5
-water + nautical metaphors begin to est gratification of male
-more decisive declarative sentence to open = power
-‘jacuzzi’ - relaxing + desired
-hints at codependency - he is there to cook for her + she is there for him to relax on
-past tense - is she now free
-‘but’ signifies her sense of power in balancing of relationship
‘Watch me swell like forbidden fruit’ S4
-she participates in this pleasure - part of complicit relationship
-shift sense of vulnerability in female personal to challenge passive role - self objectifying to conform to his standards
-simile - suggests her growing power - foreshadowing end + introducing Edenic sense of temptation + desire before hell - his hell for giving in to temptation (her)
-fricatives - increasing sense of sensory pleasure = self gratification of male + her increasing compliance
‘Beached wale on a king-size bed/craving a wave’ S6
-nautical metaphors continue to est gratification of male + isolation of female
-foreshadow increasingly destructive power that lies inside female
-her autonomy + own sense of power increasing by labelling herself as these huge objects with immense power due to their weight
-enjambment - surge if her emotions catalyses her change - frustration + rage on going
‘Too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk’ S7
-anaphora of ‘too fat’ chant like + emblematic of her growing size + her growing frustration in powerlessness + desire for change
-absent pronouns reflecting chasm between two speakers + growth in autonomy
-successful declaratives are decisive + self-critical - fuelled by voyeuistic male gaze
-fricatives + consonance for increasing sense of self-loathing + frustration in female speaker = self-gratification of male as catalyst for her transformation
‘Too fat to use fat as an emotional shield’ S7
-growing size of idioms reflect her growing size/power or dissatisfaction - foreshadowing ending
What is the inner conflict in stanza 7?
-inner conflict between the vulnerable + strong woman
-this a reflection of a history violently + dangerously navigated un many different forms by many women
‘The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke/my globe of a cheek’ S8
-shift to first person - gained autonomy + power
-she now has the power + instructs him - her weight has provided her a sense of strength + power + now she has the ability to decide for herself regarding him
-metaphor ‘globe’ - extent of value + power - she is material that matters
‘His flesh, my flesh flowed’ S8
-fricatives = equality ‘flow’ = water
-male limited speech compared to earlier suggests his demise inevitable = self gratification of male as catalyst for her transformation now ironic
‘He whispered’ S9
-his weakened voice - his power shrinking
-heteroglossia here is weakened in ellipsis through shift from ‘say’ to ‘whispered’
-ironic how his feederism + abuse has shifted + allowed her to gain power + use her size to adv in dominating him for a change
‘How/could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned/in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out’ S8
-shift in ownership of active voice (role reversal) + 1st person pronoun reflecting growth in autonomy
-internal rhyme masks sinister nature of act as innocent - female defending herself
-extended metaphor of water - extent of value + power - water misleading as looks light but very heavy like her action here was misleading — man thinks act of sexual intercourse/love but in reality act of murder/revenge
-end stopped line - controls the actions + show of her power/change
‘His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed.’ S9
-irony of macabre metaphor of death + greed = fitting punishment or reminder of the flaws in both personae
-eyes + mouth symbolic of feederism + greed she has experienced yet also of his gratification
-end stopped line connote finality of death - realisation of reality/power + slows lace before revelation of last line
‘There was nothing else left in the house to eat’ S9
-returns to internal ambiguity of start that leaves female speaker debating cannibalism + further transgression or isolation
-body images of death - metaphor of greed + glutton - desire — his glutinous actions led to his death + demise
Is the ending a triumph for female speaker?
-yes — freedom + no longer oppressed, not objectification by make gaze anymore
-no — descended into further transgression, escape through iron ice oppression of oppressor
