Drafting "Fishbone"

In the oldest version of my chapbook manuscript, there weren’t any poems that describe the narrator’s mother deriving any pleasure out of food. There were quite a few poems on food as women’s labor, the kitchen space and the trauma of being enclosed in that space. I mean, that's what the chapbook is about. On the other hand, there are poems where the narrator (the daughter) clearly writes about enjoying food, where she sees food as conduit to something bigger -- traveling, exploring the world beyond home, and even leaving home. At some point during the Spring Semester of 2013, that’s why, I tried to write a poem on the mother figure enjoying food. Somehow, I had this image of a woman sucking fishbones stuck in my head.  Macher knata or fishbones is a Bong delicacy. A strange kind of delicacy. Something that reveals your Bengaliness, yet there is a danger in enjoying something that can clearly choke you and even kill you. Bengali cuisine has numerous dishes where fishbones are scattered amongst vegetables. There are some dishes-- like jhuri-bhaja-- which are made solely out of the leftover bones. Kids are habitually warned about the bones before they begin to dig into such dishes. Yet, mastering those bones are what make one typically Bengali, and even Bangal. That strange "diasporic" identity, that's also the result of a forced displacement. As a writer, what intrigues me about this fishbone-love is the fact how there is this aspect of danger involved. Danger and domestication are rolled into this one act of eating. Being able to eat and enjoy a fishbone means you have taught your tongue and teeth to domesticate the sharpness of bones. You've literally transformed danger into pleasure, the wilderness into culinary taste. And I wanted to explore that within the boundaries of the chapbook. 

I mean, there isn’t anything new in what I was doing, in a way. Sanjukta Bandopadhayay has written about a woman’s visions of  devouring fishbones in her poems, Aparna Sen‘s film Paromitar Ekdin had that great moment where the mother-in-law, once she hears about her husband’s death, gives the fishbone a last lick before putting it down. In both Sanjukta and Aparna’s works, fish and fishbones are somehow associated with female sexuality. In Sanjukta’s one, more directly. In Aparna’s, more obliquely. Of course, in Aparna’s film, there is also the specter of widowhood, and the symbolic role fish-eating plays in “traditional” Bengali understandings of widowhood, what with widows being traditionally banned from eating fish, meat or anything non-vegetarian. So, Aparna constructs that moment as a moment of disobedience, a moment of transgression-- the mother-in-law knows her husband has died, the news has just reached her family. Technically, she is a widow now and should not be touching the fish. Yet, she does. She gives the fishbone one last touch of her tongue, her face expressionless. And as she licks the fishbone, as spectators, we are left to wonder, what will she grieve about more now? The death of her husband or the fact that her widowhood has taken away from her the right to enjoy non-vegetarian food? That's why, too, this is a moment of transgression. Yet, it is so small that it's invisible to the members of her family. It's visible to us, the spectators, precisely because the filmmaker makes a big deal out of it.  However, I wasn’t interested in exploring sexuality in this poem ( if someone still finds sexuality in this poem, that's fine!). It is not that there is anything wrong in thinking of women’s fish/meat eating as a symbol of sexual desire, but for this poem, I am more interested in exploring fish and fish-eating in the literal sense of the term. How does one write about a fully grown woman, a mother at that, enjoying food for its own sake? I  labored with this poem for a week or so, working on it a little bit every day. But still, I couldn’t really find that space within the lines I was writing where the lines could breathe and relax.

But then, I found what’s going to be the central fulcrum of the poem:

“The fishbone snaps into two 

and my motherpoints it out to me — a sunset lavender and orange,

hidden inside the joints. My mother collects skeletons

of fish in the way boys collect marbles : with precision,

concentration and attention that teaches her to see the differencein every single one of them. When she holds them up like a fork,

she sees relationships. Eight tines, twelve, fourteen : family.”

I was also reading poems by Sarah Gorham during this phase. So, I am sure, I was influenced by her work too. Eventually, I decided to make this into a prose-poem. I also fashioned two poems (one called Fishbone, and the other Fishbone: Ilish) from my initial notes. The "Fishbone" poem, right now, is the last one in my chapbook, and I like how this poem enables me to end the manuscript with a slightly more complicated message on middle-class Hindu Bengali women's agency, pleasure and history as it is lived through the acts of cooking and eating.