BackEssay | Meat, thy maker
The second volume of 'The Obliterary Journal' pays tribute to the joys of flesh-eating
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Eating, like going hungry, means something a whole lot different for most of us than it does for many others now or did in the past. Stripped of its alchemic properties, the act of eating is treated as a necessary luxury that provides only pleasure rather than also sustenance. Turning the kitchen table on the avalanche of food writing, all those effing master cheffing and cooking shows, this collection, bubbling with subversion and garnished with wickedness, brings the taboo of eating back into eating. And the chief ingredient used to unsettle our genteel views on eating is the flesh-made food, “non-veg".
The craziness starts right at the beginning in Leg Piece, where we encounter the stop-motion photo-strip of a tandoori chicken leg crossing the harsh terrain of a (phul-Gobi?) desert to deliver a secret package to one of those “brave small bookstores" struggling “for survival in the desolate wilderness". The text-image combo is hilarious as our hero encounters the ruthless Space Idlis whose mission is to wipe all non-veg items off the universe’s menu. Quentin Tarantino couldn’t have come up with a better storyboard.
The “We eat animals" trope is repeated well in Madhurya Balan’s Livestock. Its crawling artwork mirrors this story marinated in an urban sadness. A zebra-headed woman wakes up alone in her apartment with a sigh. She proceeds to undergo an operation that seems to be a mix of organ donation and mastectomy procedures. A double-page frame of other anthropomorphic figures with missing body parts buying limbs and organs in a meat bazaar destroys that line of thinking. But it’s at the dining table in the last three pages that we get truly unsettled to discover what the zebra-woman has utilized the “livestock" bought from the market for.
To turn these few pages with Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit—the singer’s searing take on the lynching of African-Americans—playing, as I did, can be quite disturbing. The story reads almost as Hannibal Lecter’s backstory.
For a more traditional and comic “strange food" routine, we encounter Nazir Akbarabadi (the pseudonym of 18th century poet-satirist Wali Muhammad) and his poem Mouse Pickle. Translated from Urdu by Michelle and Musharraf Ali Farooqi and illustrated by B. Anitha and Anil Kumar, the rhyming poem has a mirthful narrator describe, Pied Piper style, his unusual dishes all made from rodent meat: “For those who like mice in a veggie stir-fry/I’ve strung up in garlands the chewy and dry/ Mice pickled in water, or mice soused in oil,/ And have on the ready mouse preserve on the boil."
A few of the entries in this collection are openly didactic. Somdutt Sarkar’s This Is One Chicken and This Is One Goat graphics diptych, with information culled from various sources including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, simply “re-statisticizes" animal holocausts for us. The brief interlude showcasing People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) activists is even more jarring to the general tone and project of the book.
The Obliterary Journal first appeared two years ago to “obliterate literature" as it railed against “passages of unadorned text" to bring about a Jacobin uprising of “comics and picture books and graffiti and wacky art". In this second volume, it has taken the revolutionary zeal to the next level: that of subverting stock ideas. In this case, that eating animals is normal, as normal as eating anything can be.
Indrajit Hazra is a writer and journalist. His latest book is Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata.
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