Tag Archives: week 10

11/9/23

Food As Love, Food as Struggle

Hola a todes,

This week’s poems have been thrilling reads. Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Making Tortillas was a vivid introduction to the relationship between queer (lesbian) love and tortillas. Today, though, I would like to discuss Caridad Moro-Gronlier’s Tortillera Poems, specifically Entry and Compulsion: A Chronology. 

While there is a lot I would like to discuss about these poems, the main theme I would like to center around today is the role of food as comfort and food as resistance within these poems. In Compulsion: A Chronology, Moro-Gronlier says “She is mean, but I taste her love in the steam that rises from rose-studded porcelain bowls she collected one dish a time…Así comen las niñas buenas, she says, approval thick as stew in my spoon.” This passage (stanza 2, lines 4-5, 9-10) was, to me, reminiscent of Tuesday’s reading, The Mystery of Survival, when the narrator was offered elote by her mother, but decided to eat coconut instead. I know that in my own life growing up in El Salvador, families don’t always comfortably speak love to one another, especially the men in our families. But they will give us food: we share food, we go out and bring food home, we bring food when we visit friends, we never show up con las manos vacías (empty handed). As shown by this poem, it is the same for our Cuban writer, as was the same from Gaspar de Alba’s Chicano perspective.

I also really enjoyed how, in Compulsion: Chronology, we can see how a specific food/edible items are used by Moro-Gronlier to represent specific points in her life and in her struggle with her sexuality, body-image, self-control and family dynamics. This reminded me of a poem that I wrote as a part of our midterm project. For my midterm project, I created a poemario, a collection of poems. The poem that reminded me the most of Compulsion is my poem, Tortilla Con Huevo. Overall, reading Tortillera reminded me of why I have been loving food studies so much, and why I am now so in love with poetry about food: specific food items carry so much history, cultural context, family history, self-image, self-control, and as we see so poignanty, food items represent love, and as maíz tells us, it represents resistance… All in a simple food item! Que vivan las gastronomic interjections! Here  are my poems. Poem 1: Tortilla Con Huevo is written chronologically and also ties in specific food items to specific chapters of my life.

Nos vemos pronto mis querides!!!

 

(Posted 9:33 AM Nov 9th)

11/9/23

Kneading Poetry

This weeks poems present how the act of food and intimacy can be used by queer Latin American women as a way to use traditional spaces and acts, such as making food, as a way to express themselves within and contrary to heterosexual expectations and prejudice. The poem that stood out the most to me, was Moro-Gronlier’s Compulsion: A Chronology, as the structure has a very specific syntactic structure, with each final line ending in a determiner phrase. The first six stanzas end in a first person singular pronoun (I, My) while the eighth and ninth stanzas end in a third person singular pronoun (He), with the final tenth stanza regaining the first person singular pronoun (I). The way that Moro-Gronlier structures this poem with the determiner phrases switching between a first person and then third person and finally first person again, gives the interpretation that the male heterosexual relationships that Moro-Gronlier describes takes away the joy and freedom that she experienced in her childhood and with feminine relationships, with food and intimacy and only when she takes back that intimacy with food and sexuality does she partly regain that freedom, but not completely.

I find the terminology that Moreno-Gronlier provides in the preface to her collection to be useful when analyzing the relationship between queerness and food within Latin American patriarchal societies. While the origins of the word “tortillera” may originally have been used as a a means to attack lesbian women, within Latino/Latinx communities, the imagery behind the word is also why it has been reclaimed by queer women. Since the space of making tortillas in the Latin American household was occupied by women, and is a space for women to gather, it is easy to see why the idea of a space and occupation created for women, could be used as a way for self-expression by queer and lesbian women. In Gaspar de Alba’s poem Making Tortillas, she uses the description of making tortillas to show  how intimacy can be created through shared touch. The descriptions of soaking and grinding the maize are woven between the act of spreading our the maize over the metate, which requires the use of the tortillera’s strength and entire body to create the tortilla, which could represent how Latin American queer and lesbian women show strength against societal prejudice, or how commitment to the lengthy process of making tortillas is similar to the creation and sustaining queer relationships.

11/6/23

The Mystery of Survival

This reading was one that I found very difficult to read. I understand that there were other “cuentos” within the book, but the first one really struck me. The perspective of it being a child made the horrors of what had happened to the little girl even more disgusting and horrific. I sat down to read it and immediately was in shock. The usage of the child’s perspective here made the feelings I would have and did have even stronger. The descriptions were explicit, but enough that I was so heartbroken. I don’t even think heart broken is a strong enough word.

I found it very interesting that in this text, the narrator never was called by name. Lucia had a name, mama was mama, but the narrator was just a girl. This to me made it so that it could have been anyone’s child, anyone’s daughter, anyone’s memories. It made it more personal in a sense as when I was reading it I could place whomever as the girl.

The role of food here was subtle for me. Elote was mentioned once, and the girl had wanted coconut instead. I looked into it and was discussing with my partner, and we think that the coconut could maybe be a symbol for survival or durability. A coconut has a rough outside that protects the soft inside. A mystery of survival. Coconuts follow no rules, though. They will fall from the tree when they want, on who they want when they are ready. There is no obedience here. It contradicts what mama was saying is the key to survival. There was also a mention of the chicken broth. I think food was in essence a comfort. And the lack of food was a response to a trauma. Lack of food, not eating, is a trauma response. When an individual is dealing with trauma, it is hard to put the basic necessities of your body first. This small detail shows how much trauma this little girl has already gone through.