By Grace Atkinson

Manchester Metropolitan University presented an evening of creative and critical discussion on the notion of food and the body this week. Titled ‘A Body of Words: Desire & Eating Bodies’, the event was hosted by poet and lecturer Helen Mort and held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

Helen Mort, author of poetry collections including No Map Could Show Them (2016) and Division Street (2013), introduced the themes of the event. She said: “I’m interested in writing about bodily image in different ways, but also in writing as a physical thing, which is partly where the idea for this series combining critical and creative perspectives on writing about bodies came from.”

The evening was split between three speakers, beginning with Manchester Met student Kelsie Silverstone. After spending a month in hospital battling a struggle with anorexia, Silverstone is now raising awareness and donations for Beat, a UK charity supporting individuals and their families affected by eating disorders. As part of her fundraising efforts, Silverstone will be undergoing a sponsored head shave in March.

Silverstone took the stage and discussed a poetry collection she wrote while in hospital, which are set to be published later on in the year. She said, “Tonight, I wanted to do some poems from my hospital admission, because I am a person who has struggled with anorexia nervosa.” She continued, “But reading over them, I didn’t feel I would be able to read those, so I’ve re-written some of them from my perspective now.”

Silverstone went on to read two startling and raw poems, both unnamed. Silverstone’s words disarmed the audience with a striking honesty and bareness: “‘I measure my worth in pounds”. Her second poem, an elegy to the “fallen angels” and ‘the secret world of starvelings, angels with shoulder blade wings, paper thin skin, blue veins dancing across wrists’. Her poems were an incredibly moving insight into the struggles of those with an eating disorder, and created a powerful framework for the evening ahead.

Next to speak was Dr Angelica Michelis, Senior Lecturer at Manchester Met, whose work specialising in gender studies, gothic fiction food and culture, and psychoanalytical studies.

Mort introduced Michelis, saying, “Dr Angelica Michelis is going to look at the relationship between eating and non-eating bodies, and how food, consumption, digestion, and rejection tell a story about desire and abjection; fear and pleasure. So in short, tell stories about ourselves.”

Michelis went on to discuss theacademic and theoretic work that revolves around the notion of food and the body, and of food as a type of language that speaks to the body and speaks to an identity or culture. She said, “I think one of the things about food, cookery and eating, is they are always very close to us, to our culture, our identity.”

She added, “In the last 20 years, food has really become a major research subject, and a major interest in academic publication. This fascination with food has to do with the fact that what we put in our mouth never really disappears completely. Food is always much more than just sustenance.”

Michelis revealed the complication nature of power roles associated with food and identity and how “food challenges our agency”. Looking particularly at the role of a mother and baby, Michelis brought attention to the balance between feeding someone, and feeding on someone.

The notion of power and the relationship we have to food as a culture was particularly intersting in light of Silverstone’s earlier discussion of eating disorders. “I want to focus on this relationship between eating but also non-eating as an act of eating”, said Michelis. “Non-eating is not ‘not eating’, it is also a kind of eating, in my opinion.”

Malika Booker was next to approach the stage. Booker is a poet, theatre maker and multi-disceplenary artist, her book Pepper Seed (2013) published by Peepal Tree Press, and has previously worked with Helen Mort at the University of Leeds.

Booker began by explaining the culture difference she found between funerals in the UK compared to funerals in the Caribbean. She said, “In the Caribbean people are flinging themselves and the body. Grief makes us fall to the floor, it makes you attack the preacher. It’s very visceral, but here, everybody was sitting down and reading, calm. I’m interested in that.”

Booker read from her latest work, where the language and geography of the Caribbean was placed into a biblical landscape, and further turned traditional stories on their head. Booker re-told the myth of creationism from the point of Eve: ‘That night our bodies uttered whale songs, gutted grunts for my misunderstood pussy.’ In The Mother’s Reaction, Booker re-invents the virgin Mary’s mothers reaction to her pregnancy, asking: ‘If Mary is coming home to a Caribbean mum then what  is going to happen?’, as her ‘her hand leaped over the table to clench Mary’s shirt collar in her fist and yank her over the table top, she wanted to mane the baby out of that belly’.

Booker’s reading was a re-working of the creation of mankind, of the resurrected body, and of the traditional story of existence, read with a beautifully musical rhythm.

Mort the invited the audience to join the active discussion, with each speaker joining a panel to answer the audience’s many questions on their work, their own relationship with the body and food, and on the matters brought up in their presentations.

The next event in the series returns with A Body of Words: Selfie-aware: Dr Anne Burns, Dr Nikolai Duffy & Andrew McMillan on Wednesday 14th March.

For more information on Kelsie Silverstone’s campaign for Beat, visit her JustGiving page.