What we eat often defines and shapes us. And food finds its way into literature in many ways.
Hence, food poetry, I felt, was the perfect genre to savour this week as the world marked Chocolate Day on July 7.
Food poems slip into our palate, offering us vistas of the social and cultural conditions around us. Chris Abani, for instance, offers a wider lens on the predicament of a mother in his poem ‘In the Middle of the Dinner’:
my mother put down her knife and fork,
pulled her wedding ring from its groove,
placing it contemplatively on her middle
finger
The poet shows how a normal dinner can hold intense emotions in the act of a woman who is in pain:
So natural was the move,
so tender, I almost didn’t notice.
She had been writing to her husband for five years and had not received any reply.
On a dining table, the movements are natural and tender — the lifting and laying down of spoons and forks — but this night was different. The mother waited for her husband's letters until "time was like ash on my tongue".
The mood shifts as she smiles, naturally, as if the act of smiling can ease the burden. "This prime rib is really tender, isn't it?" she asks.
The allusion to the Bible, where Eve was made from Adam's rib, is clear. Thus ends the poem, with the reader cozily dining with the incomplete, yet accommodating, family.
Equally delectable is Margaret Atwood's ‘They Eat Out’. A couple argue over who would pay for the funeral. The persona then plunges a "magic knife" into her partner's heart over a plate of beef fried rice. The magic knife lifts the partner mid-air:
the ceiling opens
a voice sings Love Is a Many-Splendoured Thing
you hang suspended above the city
in blue tights and a red cape,
your eyes flashing in unison
Quite interesting is the next stanza, where the persona says that the other diners cannot decide what to make of the suspended body. She is quite indifferent to the answer, since it comes with her lover's ambitious yearning for immortality:
As for me, I continue eating;
I liked you better the way you were,
but you were always ambitious.
The writer is a poet, translator and assistant professor of English at BCM College (Autonomous), Kottayam