For recent days, we have read through Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the family. What really attracts me is those poems which are mixed into this book. Trough some brief introduction from internet, Ondaatje is also defined as a poetry. He not only wrote poems in this book but also had written some collections of poems, like The Dainty Monsters, Handwriting and The Man with Seven Toes,etc. But today I want to talk about the poem we have discussed in class, The cinnamon peeler.
This is a really interesting poem. The poem is about love between a male and a female. The man, author himself, is a cinnamon peeler and the female is his fiancee. The whole poem has a change of perspective from the cinnamon peeler to fiancee. I divide this poem into two parts with the line “When we swam once/I touched you in the water/and our bodies remained free,/you could hold me and be blind of smell.” In the first part, I think is more like the cinnamon peeler’s monologue. He tries to present his own emotion to his fiancee. Through this line “I could hardly glance at you/before marriage/never touch you/–your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.”, I argue that this couple can’t meet each other before marriage because of the smell of the cinnamon peeler. So in the next line, our leading man use saffron and tar to cover his own smell.
Until here we can find out there is a conflict inside of the cinnamon peeler. He wants his fiancee has his special smell but to have a chance to meet each other he have to give up his smell. With the plot, he finally give up his smell. But here comes the interesting part of this love poem.
In the next part, when fiancee find out that she can’t smell her lover’s smell, she got angry. She took the positive position in this relationship in the line “You touched/your belly to my hands/in the dry air and said/I am the cinnamon/Peeler’s wife. Smell me.” She step out the first step and commit that she is a cinnamon peeler’s wife.
From the whole poem, the smell of cinnamon works a symbol of cinnamon peeler’s identity. And the conflict can be considered as the conflict of identity. The fiancee obviously gets angry when the smell considering as identity has been covered. Dose it give us a hint ? Why fiancee will be so angry since the smell is the identity of her fiance ? We can come back to the lines. All the females are combined with a specific male, like the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter and cinnamon peeler’s wife. In my opinion, that can be the feminism presented by Ondaatje. He has show us that females in Sri Lanka are having a more dependent position in the society. They are always bounded to a male from a girl to a woman. They are also taught to build their identities by depending on a male. That is really similar in China. Chinese women was taught to not to present their own individuality. They are always considered as the appendant of males. Even now some family still think their daughters don’t need to be success on their career. They only need to have a good husband. In China there is an old saying that “ Women without advantage is their virtue.” Those traditional Asian culture are always trying to blot out female’s identity. But as we considered about the identity, we can find out that even in western country females are sometimes being covered by their husbands’ identity. For example, a large number of western females will change their last name after their marriage. If we consider Hillary as an example of the rising feminism, even her has changed last name to Clinton.
So through The Cinnamon Peeler, we may reconsider how females can build their identities. We need to consider about the fairness between male and female from a more basic part. People need to change their views. The marriage shouldn’t be used to cover partners identity. Neither of the male or female should be covered by others identity.
