ORALITY...

1. How does food become the center of power relations between master and slaves?

The slaveholders—the white people, treat their slaves as food. Don’t take that literally, because what the slaveholders do, though not as bloody as cannibalism, is also not entirely humane. The masters use their slaves to feed their hunger for sexual pleasures. For one thing, the master could consume the breast milk of the slave without any permission from the owner of the breasts—the slave. Even the wife of that Dr. Flint also harassed the slave, although not sexually. She would spit on the leftover food that the slaves would probably eat. These things actually prove that food has become the power relations between the master and the slaves. Sadly, these relations aren’t good.

2. How is food associated with a mother?

A woman is more than just a woman when she becomes a mother—whether she’s a slave or not. For 9 months, a baby gets all of the nutrition from whatever it is that the mother takes into her system. From the very moment that a baby is inside a mother’s womb, their connection is also an association of food. And when the baby comes out, the baby then feeds on the mother’s breast milk. As the baby gets older (and doesn’t get called baby anymore), the mother is still there to provide food for her child. All throughout our lives and all the other babies lives, from the moment we existed, we were already associated with our mother with a single strand of connection: food.