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disclaimer: this essay addresses cannibalism as a metaphor and how this crosses abstract, historical, cultural and political boundaries. Reader discretion is advised.

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“I think presenting cannibalism as a metaphor for intimacy was perhaps, one of the greatest things we ever did as a society. Like you’re telling me you want to eat me, make me a part of you, consume me? that’s so romantic, tell me more, i love you.”

—Unknown.

It’s nighttime and my mother has just arrived from work. She detests eating food very late even though cooking was the greatest form in which she showed love. It was just too late. As a result she bought suya; some sort of meat smoked over open fire. I haven’t had it in a while. We sat and ate together.

It was currently October and a lazy downpour had drenched the earth, letting cold air breathe through the concrete walls of my home and sending bumps across my flesh. The weather was perfect as the heat from the meat cracked my tongue. I ate. I consumed it whole. Took what was offered, even though there was once a time I thought I would never stomach it.

You see, as a little girl easily prone to fear, a tale always kept me up at night and made my heart spike at any prospect of consuming dried or smoked meat, because the adults had told me they were made out of human flesh. That the inviting aroma coming from the end of the street might have just been a full fledged being like I was; with a heart that thrummed and a mouth that told stories and a soul that was now forlorn, remains touched on coal fire and seasoned to perfection.

The fact that I might have, or could still be, consuming another human being seemed like an erasure of what had been; even though I might not be aware of it. It seemed unholy and inhuman, like the greatest form of evil even beyond murder and torture. To put the flesh of another, swallowing their grief, and pain and joy and suffering, in my mouth. To once starve for it, then consume it, and making them mine. Nourishing me, being one with me.

Yet, as the time goes by and I have other things to worry about, canceling the whole thing as superstition, I wonder if this isn’t what we all do when we love . Not literally, of course. When we see someone and desire them for their presence and have them consume the corners of our mind, taking whatever suffering and making it ours. To hunger for their love, starve for their touch, and immerse themselves in us once it happens. To give all you have till you’re nothing but flesh and bone, and find ways to grant that onto them, too.

For as Dam the narrator in Choi Jin-young’s Hunger says as she consumes her lover, “I ate a person. Is that a sin?”

Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823); sorry for the jump scare uwu :3.

Cannibalism seems like quite the disturbing reality to talk about. Often attributed to things of greater evil, it finds its origins from the Spanish word “Caribal” which were the Carib people of the Caribbean (couldn’t be less obvious). Contacted by Columbus who reported that they eat human flesh to rather impose an image of savagery in indigenous people that soon helped fuel colonial narratives. For as we are to find out, there is no archaeological evidence the Caribs ever engaged in such acts.

Since then the word had stuck. It showed up in myths and folklore like Cronus devouring his children to prevent them from overthrowing him. In the Odyssey as the Cyclops consumes Odysseus’s men. In the Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus where the queen eats a pie made up of her sons. It represents something sinister, a taboo in all forms, stripping someone of their dignity and self and rendering them to nothing but a slab of meat.

Acts of cannibalism, in metaphysical forms, still exist beyond the literal. For example, growing up Catholic, every Sunday we were to “drink the blood” and “eat the flesh” of Christ so as to be one with him. To have His spirit guide me for His “flesh is my flesh” and his “blood is my blood.” Us eating the bread and drinking the wine meant Christ was forever within. Cannibalism is then made sacred, holy.

Back to historical and colonial depictions of cannibalism, it was used in itself to describe the horrors of slavery. First employed as a weapon to justify and “civilize” native peoples, it becomes counterintuitive when the colonizers began to carry out acts one would allude to cannibalism. Dehumanizing people to nothing but muscles for labor, as meat to work on farms and pluck cotton. Vincent Woodward describes this in The Delectable Negro; “The black slaves body was edible, it was a delectable object for lust and hunger, an object to be whipped, worked enjoyed and consumed.”

Beyond that, the Western imperialists syphoned upon the lands of colonial entities, consuming from their resources and leaving the colonies dry with bones of poverty, infrastructure and suffering as remnants. Absorbing them whole until nothing was left.

This motif still occurs in various parts of political and cultural narratives like Karl Marx describing capitalism as “vampiric” to systems of oppression, civil war, debt, exploitation, various traditional practices and so on.

What what I find most interesting that we can also very much allude such a dangerous taboo—to love. In which it seems rather oxymoronic that a soft, tender feeling that two people share, can be also be a metaphor to the devouring of human flesh. To immerse another into yourself and call it intimacy, the way the sound of their voice lingers in your mind or the scent of their skin catches in your lungs.

Using words like “You’re mine”, “I can’t get enough of you”, “You’re all I can think about”, sounds heavy and romantic at first glance but sheds light on something deeper, and darker. That the truest form of love is to devour.

Salvador Dali’s Autumnal Cannibalism, 1936.

love as a metaphor for cannibalism

I recently read Hunger by Choi-Jin-young, a book that blurs love with consumption, wanting to ingest that significant other into yourself by literally eating them. It narrates the story of Dam and Gu, two people who love each other so abundantly that eating the other might be the only way to conserve their desire. When Gu dies and Dam could not afford losing him, wanting him to be apart of her, she eats him, slowly consuming his hair, his fingernails and dead skin.

It was such an encompassing desire and obsession much more bigger than love but “love was the closest thing to it.”

They say a kiss is the beginning of cannibalism; they couldn’t be more right. Your mouth on theirs; as if trying to merge their soul into yours to dissolve boundaries and be one with the other. It is delicate, and soft, with an urge to get closer and closer until there’s nothing left.

To love is to put your heart on a plate, with forks and knives resting at the side, ready to be devoured by the other. To have them sink their teeth into you and see all that is laid bare. To lick their wounds and grief and pain and wish it were yours. To be envious of the sun that kisses their face in the mornings, the cups that graze their lips, the person to whom they direct their first smile. To have them in a way that no one else should.

Love is such a gentle cannibal. It does not eat your flesh nor does it kill you completely but it still makes a delicate meal out of you; each kiss, every touch, canceling space and everything else around until you’re both empty yet somehow full.

That’s why, even knowing the smoked meat might be human, I ate it anyway. I had hungered for it, desired it. And when it came, I consumed it until there was nothing left even though the spice scorched my tongue, and the flesh fought against my teeth. I swallowed—for I knew I would do the same if ever I loved someone.