When my son, now four, asks me how he grew in my belly, the most emotionally honest answer I can offer is, I really don’t know. I quote science at him, but no fact makes truly legible the way it felt, still feels, like an impossible, magical, creepy, painful, and exciting secret within my body.
Only metaphors have broken through, coming close to something I can recognize. Carribean Fragoza’s atomic description of cells multiplying in her story “Mysterious Bodies” from Eat the Mouth That Feeds You approaches the strangeness:
Angelica felt heavy and petrified, as the walls of her belly slowly began to bubble and blister. She breathed deeply to contain the seething, crackling little boils. But this time their angry hunger could not be appeased and they continued to spread and mount, bursting into voracious mollusks, clams and barnacles that gnawed incessantly at her throbbing meat.
I can say my desired pregnancy was beautiful a million times, but literature about pregnancy resonates most when I see how the process has broken someone’s mind apart, forcing them to reach for poetic images beyond our realm. Here, the cells of a growing fetus are each acting as separate, alien organisms, sea creatures far-flung from humanity. They are still natural, still of this earth, but they are voracious, using their host to multiply themselves. Early in my pregnancy, I craved milk so strongly that I drank pints of it for days, adding to my beige diet of white rice and unseasoned chicken and white grapes and knockoff SunChips. I’d signed up for weekly pregnancy emails by that point (so I could be told when it had transformed from poppy seed to pumpkinseed to cherry), and the week after my milk cravings, a short podcast told me that the fetus would be building its bones soon. It told me to up my calcium intake because if I did not ingest enough, the growing baby would simply siphon whatever calcium it needed out of my own bones, weakening them. Years earlier, I’d confided to my sister that I was not sure I ever wanted to be pregnant. I expected her to counter with some emotional plea about love and unbreakable bonds, but instead, she told me it was just so weird, so weird, and I’d never understand unless I experienced it.
That wild weirdness is layered and woven through Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, often revolving around a theme of consumption. In the title story, which most directly explores the act of consuming, notions of inheritance and cannibalism converge and double back on themselves. On a literal level, a mother calmly observes how motherhood requires sacrifice, and her lack of alarm contrasts with the level of physical violence a more literal interpretation necessitates. But the story considers not only the mother’s experience of her body being eaten by her daughter but also her past history being consumed, when her daughter ingests letters from family. In an emotional twist, the loss of these letters is comforting: “I am relieved that I know now where to find my mother and grandmother. They are inside my daughter.” By the story’s close, the mother has turned this voracious love back on the child, saying, “I’ll eat her all up,” recalling Where the Wild Things Are, which sits on my bedside table. The phrasing is tender, but images of Saturn Devouring His Son also hover in my memory.
While notions of all-consuming love call back to fabulist literary predecessors, what feels most deeply compelling about Fragoza’s particular take is how far she pushes the idea into notions of territory and memory. Consumption is understanding. Consumption reminds her cast of characters that they are no longer physically attached to their homelands. A particularly dreamlike passage in the title story shifts cravings onto even more metaphorical grounds:
They were eating something. It was clay. They were breaking off shards of a small pot and eating it like very fine chocolate. My sister she said to me, It still tastes like the river, you can remember the river like this, you can remember the waters, sweet like milk, do you remember, sister?
In what is a kind of communal nursing on this clay pot, the speaker does remember: “I tasted the earth and I tasted the river.” The act of eating cannot be separated from identity and inheritance in the story’s interior logic, and these lines from Zaina Alsous’s essay “An Ecopoetics for Take Back the Land” echoed in my mind:
In Ramallah there is a humble museum dedicated to the exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Excerpts of Darwish’s writing hang on the wall in thick black letters. One wall reads, “The land is inherited as language.”
Impressions of language acquisition, mother tongues, and hyphenated existence thread through Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, creating a sense of the inevitable sacrifice that comes with creation. Fragoza’s stories are punctuated by italicized Spanish, and her focus is often on families living in the United States who are grappling with what to keep from an earlier homeland. The opening story speaks of “hierbabuena or oregano,” and the family speak lovingly to their tree: “Ay qué bonito limoncito.” Later, the child narrator observes her mother’s features: “I thought for an instant of her strong teeth, large for her small thin-lipped mouth. None of us had inherited teeth like that.” In “The Vicious Ladies,” a character realizes that her mother “could only be helped with the knowledge of prayers and herbs that I had never inherited or perhaps simply didn’t bother to learn among all the other stuff I was hurrying to keep up with.” What’s more, all the world’s textures are languages, spoken for those who would take the time to pause and listen. The patterns and geometries of an “exquisite belt…spoke an ancient language we’d learned in our blood to decipher,” and in another story’s climax, a “fire grew tall and danced like a god’s tongue, speaking a language that no one knew.”
In Fragoza’s world, questions of legibility and language enter characters’ thoughts and appear in their bodies as cravings, sparking desire for understanding and the ability to express clearly and be understood. Returning to “Mysterious Bodies,” even those multiplying cells are stretching toward communication: “Inside of her, a boiling mass of flesh, the thousands of agitated, muscled tongues growled, trying to form a language of their own.” Reading Fragoza is remembering to pause, is remembering what is indescribable.•
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
