“Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.”[1]
E
|
avan Boland, the Irish poet most famous for the
depiction of Irish methodology and womanhood, raw truths, strong imagery of
emotions, and the feminist view of history in her work; had “Anorexic” written
as part of “her fifth book, In Her Own Image
(1980)”[2] which received a universal
literary applause for the stoutness and bold themes it brought to a dusty
table.
The first stripes she lines up in
the poem and the title in the flesh -in 1980 more than now, but up till today-
create a certain stir besides irritation that keeps you swinging along the sides
of each line carefully.
Irish literature and culture have
been throughout the history ones of the most drastic in the depiction of the
woman and her roles conclusively. Boland along with authors and poets at the
time, came to blows and staged a legitimate strife with this stereotype,
exerting themselves to achieve the noblest goal of poetry and literature; change
a belief, alter a stereotype; hence a whole cooperative communital modification.
Tracing the allusions made in the poem is a gripping process; an
allusion to Adam and Eve was made in:
“Thin as a
rib
I turn in
sleep.
My dreams
probe”.
This
quotation explores the profoundness of her starvation as a woman, her
inclination to return back to Adam’s rib. Being criticized, or her physicality
is never an issue in the poem; she is powerful and vividly willing to let her
body buckle down to ash, unsettled with her body with her soul in the air. She
is Eve here, and returning to Adam’s rib is her way to righteousness.
Repetition of the most sensitive
while solemn parts of the body in a disfigured way brings us to think that a strong link was made,
between the body and the soul, repentance and sin, corpus and conscience. In this poem the
woman reunites, her body is a witness of her strength and willingness, her
genitals are searching confession, and her soul is on its way to freedom and
peace. Surprisingly enough, fighting her body’s needs and natural desires;
redeems her.
I heard many different voices throughout the
poem, sometimes it seems as if this corpus itself is the speaker, torturing the
woman; “the bitch is burning”, “I vomited her hungers” and much more.
This adds up to the texture of the poem, and forces us to ask again, do our
bodies speak for us? Do our bodies torture us? And this is an important theme
of Biological Anthropology in the main. Our desires and tendencies, our needs
and feelings; are sometimes absolute, sometimes they neither rhyme with our
mentalities nor make peace with our spirit in its essence. This gives rise to
the topic of Alterity and the exiles we have in us, for example when the
speaker refers to her own body as a ‘witch’. A witch is the ostracized, never
passable in any community type of character. Nobody has a soft spot for a witch;
we’re alarmed and petrified of the witch. Nevertheless, a witch is invincible,
able to reach the impossible, bearing an inner power that can defeat the
greatest powers and curse them into dust.
Anxiety; a seriously prevailing fraction of an
anorexic’s life, suspense is dominant, there’s an expectation, freedom and
conciliation are anticipated. Torn between the body and the soul, she is
nervous looking forward to her ‘rebirth’. Identity is lost and the desire to
change her own self is taking over. This reminds me of “The Danish Girl” and
the emotional revolution against her birth body en route to her very own intrinsic
image of herself.
The female poet is exposed at the middle of the
poem, as the themes and the imagery of many female authors tend to have the
same sense of enclosure, escape, physical discomfort and the obsessive
depiction of diseases as claustrophobia and anxiety, representing a
renouncement of the patriarchal society at most and sneering at the long tradition
of manipulation of a woman both physically and emotionally in Irish literature,
depicted as a sex-driven yet desirable tool.
Temptation is weighed against the search for a
sexual identity, but strength is the most absolute theme of the poem occupying
even the most fragile lines, against this self-imposed yet hated illness. Her
anorexia is her strength, and it will unleash her from the horrors of the
painful self-contempt explicitly contemplated.
Sweat, fat, greed; she mingles what is tangible
with the intangible, crewing herself out of this internalized damnation, she is
restless, physically and psychologically. Even after the poem ends, despite the
affirmations that the whole lot will be blue-ribboned again, that the renaissance
will take place by and by, that the vanishing of the body will turn into a
godly celebration and an emancipation of the soul; the reader finishes the poem
with a lump in the throat, aware that the soul could never be unleashed with
the termination of the body.
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