"Eat Me" - Patience Agbabi (POD)

overall meaning

in “Eat me”, Patience Agbabi explores domestic abuse. the speaker’s partner is a ‘feeder’, a person who gets sexual pleasure from forcibly making someone gain weight. the poem is a critique of this, as well as a response to contemporary beauty standards. at the end of the poem, the female speaker repurposes her oppression into a means of resistance by killing the male abuser with her bodyweight, meaning the poem ends on a positive tone

themes

• love, relationships and domestic abuse

• power

• women

• food

• resistance

“when i hit thirty, he brought me a cake”

• Agbabi evokes the positive image of a birthday in the first line of the poem, which she harshly and abruptly undercuts in the third line by adding the noun ‘stone’, prompting the realisation that the ‘thirty’ being celebrated is a weight rather than age

• this highlights the absurdity of the speaker’s relationship to the reader, encouraging us to question and criticise this

“they said eat me. and i ate/what i was told”

• speaker’s submission is clearly highlighted here, as she submits without question to the words written on the cake. her powerlessness in relation to an inanimate object hyperbolises the extent to which she has submitted totally to the abuse of her partner

• both the caesura and enjambment in this quote put emphasis on this, causing the reader to pause and question this

“so he could watch my broad/belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut”

• the reasoning behind this action (‘so he could watch’) reinforces the focus of this poem on ‘feeder’ fetishism and the fact that this is being done for her partner’s sexual pleasure

• the plosive alliteration of ‘broad belly wobble’ ensures a sinister tone to what otherwise could be interpreted as a comical image

• the simile ‘like a juggernaut’ foreshadows the speaker’s repurposing of the site of abuse (her body) into a powerful tool of resistance, suggesting a latent power beneath the surface of the abuse. a ‘juggernaut’ is an unstoppable, destructive force

“i was his jacuzzi”

• through the imagery of warm water, Agbabi may criticise contemporary ideas about gender roles, in which the woman is expected to provide comfort and warmth to her male partner, simultaneously undermining this through the objectification suggested by the noun ‘Jacuzzi’

“three layers of icing” “the bigger the better” “i like big girls, soft girls, girls i can burrow inside” “multipe chins, masses of cellulite”

• the repetition and imagery of size creates an image of excess, reflecting the theme of the poem

• the image of penetration here again reinforces the male sexual desire that underscores the abuse

“he was my cook/ my only pleasure the rush of fast food. his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit”

• ‘he was my cook’ expresses the speaker’s dependence on her partner, and her reliance on him for ‘my only pleasure’. you may consider the irony, though, that the speaker does not gain pleasure from her partner himself: only his role in providing food for her. this is a clear subversion of conventional romantic poetry

• the simile ‘like forbidden fruit’ invokes the Fall of Man. however, here, Agbabi reverses the gender roles: the speaker’s male partner is tempted by the ‘forbidden fruit’ and is therefore comparable to Eve, while the speaker herself is hyperbolically objectified as she positions herself as the fruit. we can close read an assertion of female power here: by presenting man as Eve-like, she associated sin, temptation and the destruction of mankind with the male partner, while the female speaker may be seen as quasi-godlike through her comparison to the Tree of Knowledge

“a beached whale on a king-size bed/craving a wave”

• the metaphor of the beached whale and the half-rhyme of ‘craving a wave’ suggests a frustration with stasis, and a desire both to be able to move her body and move beyond the relationship. this image of abuse is presented against a backdrop of male power: ‘a king-size bed’

“i allowed him to stroke/my globe of a cheek”

• Agbabi expresses her speaker’s size through hyperbole through the metaphor of the ‘globe’ but this may also hyperbolise her power

“his flesh, my flesh flowed”

• the repetition and alliteration here suggests the merging of identity and loss of agency that comes with domestic abuse

“he said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat”

• the instruction ‘open wide’ is infantilising, associated with feeding a young child

• Agbabi deliberately uses excessive, repulsive imagery to encourage the reader to question the power dynamic in the relationship

“i rolled and he drowned/in my flesh. i drowned his dying sentence out”

• Agbabi returns to the imagery of water, used previously in this poem to suggest stagnation and oppression, to express the speaker’s physical power

• speaker directly repurposes her oppression into resistance

“his mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed”

• image suggests the male speaker’s passivity and submission in death, marking a reversal in the power dynamic

“there was nothing else left in the house to eat”

• this final line suggests a hunger for change

• polysemic ending - 1. devouring partner can no longer ‘eat’ the speaker, 2. speaker herself is left with nothing to eat

how does Agbabi structure the poem

in rigid tercets to visually articulate the rigid control placed upon the speaker by her partner

how are the final words of each line connected

by half rhyme, contained within each stanza. this suggests claustrophobia, mimicking the speaker’s relationship. Agbabi’s decision to use half rhyme rather than full rhyme also creates the sense that something is not quite right or incomplete, which contributes to the sinister tone of the poem

what does the consistent use of caesura suggest

fracture and abruptness, again contributing to Agbabi’s fractured portrayal of the relationship

what might the anaphoric lines “too fat to..” in stanza may reflect

the all-consuming, overt obsession with thinness in the early 2000s

all the lines in the final stanza are end-stopped, what does this create

a sense of finality and thus optimism that the abuse has finally ended