Woman, Eat Me Whole

Ama Asantewa Diaka

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063092938
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie africaine

A bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures

Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose work leaves a lasting impact.

Touching on themes from perceptions of beauty to the betrayals of the body, from what it means to give consent to how we grapple with demons internal and external, Woman, Eat Me Whole is an entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world. Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries' ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body—and a mind—so often restless or ill at ease.

Vivid and bodily while also deeply cerebral, Woman, Eat Me Whole is a searing debut collection from a poet with an inimitable voice and vision.

Woman

Ama Nkrumah

Act 1; Scene 1

Enter woman:

we do not know what she looked like—

how stretched her flesh was laid out in the husk of her being,

how charred her eyes may have been,

how clickety her laughter may have sounded

the elasticity of the jiggle in her behind when her feet landed on ground.

We do not know which tribe she came from, who her mother was

what language she may have spoken and which name she bore.

we only know that, if there was a palette of colors she would have fallen

anywhere between the darkest shade of black to the palest hue of brown.

we only know that she was woman.

woman at a political rally.

who claimed space on a soapbox, renamed herself in show of solidarity,

slashed her cheeks with blade, smeared blood over her body

and dared all the men present to follow suit to demonstrate that

their collective freedom was worthy of skin-deep sacrifice.

Ama Nkrumah.

a name that did not belong to her.

a voluntary erasure, but an erasure nonetheless,

for what’s a name to freedom?

what’s breaking of skin to claiming of self?

what’s spilling of blood to a wholesome bond?

what’s a chance of being shamed to a people saved?

you haven’t been loved well enough until you’ve been loved like a man.

Christ didn’t come in the body of a woman because even he knew he wouldn’t have lasted all 33 years with a mouth so holy and a tongue that sharp.

when love stretched wide it was only to make space for the redemption of men.

when love starved it was only because she dreamt of fed mouths.

when love bled handfuls of pain it damn sure was because there was no escaping it.

when love offered dangling breasts at the temple of protests it was only because she believed in a kinder tomorrow hard enough to be shamed for it.

when love choked on apologies it was only because peace was the greater offering.

you haven’t been loved well enough until you’ve been loved like a man

Scene rolling on a never-ending roll

SHOOT

(After an altercation with a tutor, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Yi-Fei Chen created a brass tear gun that fires water collected as tears, as a visual metaphor for her personal struggle with speaking her mind.)

A design student created a brass gun that fires tears she’s collected in three stages

1. The user first puts on a mask with a silicone cup that catches the tears.

*MASKS-ON-DISPLAY

:Fake smile 2.1

:Broken but makeup game strong

:Facsimile of generational pain

:Hiding in plain sight

:Mouth stuffed with merry-go-round pain

:Hand-me-down stress

:The atom of a scream

:The square root of a fresh wound

:Neo-spiritual songs

2. The tears are frozen in a bottle.

*SHELVED-FEELINGS

:Pickled anxiety

:Silence heavily spiced with an atrophied tongue

:Ingrown rage

:Skins—burnt umber-cocoa brown-desert sand-charcoal black-leather jacket black-midnight black

:Body-type—not photoshopped enough

:A collection of I’m fines in response to a million how are yous

:Less suspicious-looking heartache

3. Which is then loaded into the gun—allowing the frozen tears to be fired.

*TEARS

:Angry black woman

:Too loud for a woman

:Diary of a mad woman

:A hashtag movement

:A voice that sounds like someone left a fuck you in your throat

:The lifecycle of a scream

:Tears, plain old tears

What does it say of a country

if its women need tear guns before they can cry?

Still woman?

What if I woke up in a different body next Monday?

without a uterus, but still a woman

No longer a hemorrhaging warehouse for eggs

What if I woke up in a different body

next Thursday of the coming week?

A well-soaped nut sack

cushioning a reasonably sized penis,

an innate entitlement for the world’s offerings

and pre-installed knowledge

of having inhabited a feminine body?

What if I woke up as the phantom pregnancy

of a woman who’d miscarried?

Living a life of pretense unknown only to me

Bloating and bleeding and puking

my way through a revolution

Will I be woman still?

Will I be woman still, with my outliers forming new identities?

Calling into existence other forms of living

and toe-tagging it to the body of womanhood?

Will I be woman still, leaving a litany of unpardonable mistakes,

forcibly paraded as the masthead for unreal women

Will I be woman still?

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