“Eat Me” – Patience Agbabi

Poetry is excessive. That is, the meaning of poetry always overspills the words on the page. Poems are open to new and innovative readings no matter how many times they have been read before. Poems exploit and amplify a fundamental feature of language; that words refer to other words in an endless chain of semantic connection.

 

So as a poem, “Eat Me” is already excessive. But more than this, it is a poem about excess. At the most obvious level, it is a poem about excessive consumption. About the oversized consequences of a decade of massive overeating. About the homicidal fallout of following the instructions “EAT ME,” written in icing on a cake.

 

But more sensitive readers will have appreciated the poem’s excess even before the fateful birthday cake is presented. The title, right at the start of the poem (before the start of the poem?), is itself excessive as it means more than it says. Of course, it references the “very small cake” which Alice consumes in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Readers will know that the cake has a dramatic effect on Alice’s proportions, causing her to “open[...] out like the largest telescope that ever was.” So we are already primed for the effects that eating is to have on the poem’s narrator. In addition, the title of the poem gives us a clue about how to read the poem. Just like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its dream narrative, we are not to take the poem literally although this is not to imply that we are not to take it seriously.

 

As we noted above, the poem presents excess. The narrator is fed to excess, becomes excessively fat, and commits two excessive acts; homicide and cannibalism. Excess is encapsulated in the words of the feeder at the start of the fourth stanza: “the bigger the better.” On one level, this is language at its most banal. The phrase indicates the lack of imagination of the speaker who can only express himself in a series of cliches. On the other hand, the phrase is made to signify on a number of levels. It literally means that the bigger the narrator becomes, the better she is (at least in his eyes), where this “better” is overlaid with connotations of sexual attraction and objectification. In addition, there is an interesting inversion here since this phrase is more commonly applied to the male anatomy. More broadly, the phrase points to a key element of the late capitalist mindset where bigger (think car, house, TV screen) is always better. Clearly, all of this is ironic. Bigger is not better in this poem, neither for the abused and exploited speaker nor for her partner, who perhaps gets his just deserts.

 

And yet, what is difficult to take in is the way in which the size of the narrator is both massively excessive, and utterly realistic. The poem deploys a series of colossal metaphors to describe the narrator – a juggernaut, jacuzzi, breadfruit, a desert island, a whale, a tidal wave etc. – and yet there is a reality which underlies this narrative of feeding. The line “too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk” indicates that the narrator is literally too fat to leave the house. Too fat, perhaps to leave the bed. And this is the case in relationships of this sort, as recorded in the documentary Fat Girls and Feeders.

 

So are we in the make-believe dream world of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or are we in the real world? The answer, of course, is both. The poem has its cake and eats it 💀. There are a couple of interesting consequences to this. The first is that although the poem depicts the real size of real women, the reader is never quite permitted to accept this as real and therefore as somehow normal or acceptable. It is as if the poem refuses to affirm that such madness can be real.

 

The other consequence concerns the ending of the poem which is an extraordinarily audacious piece of writing and manages to do something which is quite rare in poetry; to shock the reader. Casting about for a suitable way to describe the response of a reader, students frequently claim that the audience is shocked by whatever it is they happen to be discussing. In truth, this is rarely the case. Most of the time, sensitive readers are reasonably well prepared for the events of a work of literature through foreshadowing or genre expectations.

 

But “Eat Me” does seem to supply a moment of genuine shock by violating the near universal taboo on cannibalism. This is the final stanza of the poem:

 

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.

​

The first line builds tension as we are given a sense of the narrator’s struggles. Presumably, she is holding herself back from consuming her freshly murdered partner as she grows increasingly hungry. Remember, she is too fat to leave the house at this point. The word “else” in the final line strongly suggests that her next move will be to eat the corpse. The fact that the act of cannibalism is only hinted at adds to the sense of violation. The act is so extreme that it cannot even be named.

 

And so readers are left to imagine what comes next. Will she cut up the corpse? Cook it? Or take bites directly from it? These are probably not the right questions to be asking, however. This is an excessive ending to an excessive poem. The excessive nature of everything we have encountered so far has primed us to swallow and even to enjoy this ending. If the poem is like a dream, then we don’t need to judge the narrator for her acts and nor do we need to tut at the breaking of the taboo of cannibalism. 

 

The wild excesses of the poem have brought us to a place where, as the Cheshire cat says “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” The madness of the relationship leads to a doubly mad response, first in smothering and secondly in consuming the feeder. And yet, there is a kind of logic to both acts, governed as they both are by an excessive dose of irony. Readers will not miss the irony of the narrator’s body becoming a murder weapon. Each act of feeding was, in the end, taking the feeder closer to his own demise. And of course the richest irony of all is in the all too literal reading of the message on the cake. The “me” of “EAT ME” will  ultimately turn out to refer to the feeder and not to the cake. His error will have been to fail to take into account the excessive nature of language and the unstable way in which pronouns point to objects in the world. He will have been ordering his killing and eating all along.