The unanswerable questions of life—what makes it meaningful, what comes after it—animate the beauty of human existence but also induce existential terror. In her 2021 debut story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Carribean Fragoza grapples with the sticky questions of living by troubling the very distinction between life and death. In fact, the two are figured as merely similar states of being, wherein aliveness isn’t necessarily predicated on being alive or living but rather on the ties a person has to a community; on numerous occasions, their mother; and, obliquely, their father.
In Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, parents are the foundation of a child’s worldview, the platform from which they absorb and engage with their culture. However, the 10 stories in the collection feature, as their central narrative tension, the instability of the family unit and the intergenerational impact of such precarity. In the first story, “Lumberjack Mom,” a young girl recounts a period of her childhood when her mother takes to vicious and vigorous gardening, then to lumbering, which leads to the chopping down of the sinewy lime tree the girl’s parents had planted when they’d first immigrated to the United States. We learn that the father has abandoned the family. The lime tree represents not only the past love shared by the narrator’s parents but also the cultural inheritance that has been bestowed on the narrator and her siblings. Thus, when the mother finally chops down the tree—the scene of which is rendered with startling and haunting language, brutal verbs and delicate adjectives—a double bind occurs. While the first story showcases a mother figure as an ever-shifting force, reclaiming her power following the absence of her partner, this act produces a stark vacancy for the children, a severed connection, marking the fall of innocence into experience.
The double-edged relationship between a mother and a child creates narrative friction that does not necessarily reach a denouement or resolution. In the titular story, a mother surrenders to her child’s insatiable desire to eat her, choosing to waste away toward nonbeing so that her child may live. “I let her eat me,” the narrator says. “And I will go in there even though I’m afraid, but she’s already eaten my mother and my grandmother. But she didn’t eat them like she eats me. They’re already dead.” The daughter has poor memory; she cannot even remember the fact that she has previously taken bites of her mother’s flesh. Similarly, the mother also has a failing memory with regard to her familial history. “It’s because I don’t have answers to her questions. I don’t know what to say, I never have the words or I don’t understand her questions.” The daughter’s consumption of her mother, then, might arguably be considered a method for recuperating her personal history and, thus, making sense of her place in the world. The turn in the story hinges on the mother’s gradual awakening to her daughter’s desire and then her surrender to her inevitable fate. The story is suffused with blood, with decaying bodies, with living matter. And yet, the relationship at the center of the story is tender, merciful, and loving.
Conversely, just as the collection is animated by the matriarch, the figure of the patriarch frequently looms as an elusive specter, present only through his absence. In “Lumberjack Mom,” the father has left. In “Tortillas Burning,” the father is violent toward the mother of his child, and the story’s arc rests on her escape, as told in the retrospective. In “Ini y Fati,” a central character, who strikes up an unusual friendship, walks as a ghost, unable to make sense of why her father killed her. In “New Fire Songs,” an act of resistance depends on a penis-shaped balloon. By way of the father’s absence, Fragoza depicts women who must negotiate their survival (and that of their children) in harsh and alienating conditions. Here, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You discovers the pockets of possibility in the power of womanness and in remapping the domain of female power in a patriarchal world.
Nevertheless, the collection resists depicting women who face marginalization as perfect victims and men as unrepentant monsters. Consider, for instance, the story “The Vicious Ladies,” which casts an unflinching eye at women who enact small and petty violences on one another. Or consider “Sábado Gigante.” In that story, a young man builds a new life as a performer while negotiating his father’s absence and holding on to his mother’s love. With these stories, Fragoza veers into different and surprising narrative territory by showcasing characters who wield and are affected by power prominently via the axis of class. Fragoza seems interested in the ways in which patriarchy and its attendant oppressive systems are harmful to everyone, even as her characters attempt to forge imperfect ways of relating to one another and being in the world.
In the tradition of the surreal, the gothic, and the fable, Fragoza writes with striking and embodied language, sentences that glow with deep personal history, revealing wells of uncanny depth. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You distinguishes itself with its haunting vision, its ability to plumb the abyss and emerge with incisive insights about what it means to live, what it means to die, what it means to be.•
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.
MULTIPLYING CELLS
Poet and critic Layla Benitez-James explores the “wild weirdness” of Carribean Fragoza’s short story collection. —Alta
HOUSE AS PROTAGONIST
California Book Club editor Anita Felicelli talks to Daniel Mason, author of the “incandescent novel-in-stories” North Woods, about the unusual methods and layers of meaning that went into the book. —Alta
UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCES
Martin J. Smith writes a humorous piece on nine awkward writing group moments. —Alta
DECEMBER BOOKS
Here are 10 new books by authors of the West that are being published this month. —Alta
AHEAD OF THE CURVE
CBC contributor and critic Chris Vognar reviews Judith Tick’s Becoming Ella Fitzgerald, calling it a story of “epic adaptability.” —Los Angeles Times
WRITER OF PURPLE SAGE
John Nichols, author of the political allegory The Milagro Beanfield War, died in Taos, New Mexico. —New York Times
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