The title of this blog post is an old English phrase advising against the alienation, denial, abolishment of those who we depend on, especially those positioned as a guardian or parental role.
Being a proverb that has stuck with me, I think it holds sentimental value due to its literal translation within my vernacular Indian identity's context. In most Indian households, food has been consumed to the body through the 'utensil' of our hands. When I was a child, sometimes my mother would often fill up a sizeable amount of food on a plate, enough for two children- my sister and myself (in latter years my brother too) and use her hand to feed us.
Thus, the English saying, "never bite the hand that feeds" has a particular understanding to me. Biting the hand of my mother, my aunties or my grandmother was obviously avoided because we knew it would hurt them quite literally. Thus the proverb takes on a deeper level of sentiment.
I grew up eating with Western cutlery, vessels used for the transferal of food as opposed to the tactility of using one's hands. I was told to learn to use cutlery because this was the global norm. I would be respected and taken seriously as a person, especially as a coloured. I don't intend to disrespect my parents for what they taught me because they did what they thought was best for us, and in their position, I would have probably done the same. They wanted us to have the upper hand in life, even down to our eating habits and table manners.
My parents were taught this from their parents and so on and so forth. I wonder now where it all started. Of course, the fundamental answer to this query would be that a forceful, imperial, systematic hegemony would have brainwashed my ancestors to disconnect their 'primitive' dining manners and uphold so-called normative dining standards that are conceived as universal.
I think back to the times I was younger and wished with all my life, I was white. I did everything right. I ate with my cutlery, spoke English- not because I was forced to but because it was my mother tongue that extended right back to my great grandparents and I even wore western clothes. Not because I was forced to (so I thought) but because my family only wore western clothes.
Being white is as much my culture as being Indian, right?
When I migrated to Aotearoa, I was faced with a harsh reality. It shattered my white fantasy.
I was told my accent was funny. I was called 'curry-muncher' by both Maori and European Kiwi. Heck, I thought I wasn't Pakeha because I shared brown solidarity with Maori.
I was "eww-ed" at when I opened my lunchbox, filled with the contents of my "ethnic" home-cooked meals as opposed to my peers' white sandwiches and stringy cheese junk food.
I was asked if my dad was a dairy owner and why my knees and toes were so black. It was at this point I tried harder than ever to blend into my surrounding. I mastered the kiwi accent. I led a double life like most migrants. At home, my thick Indian rhythmic accent sounded like a trumpet because home meant no judgement; at school, my accent was 'clean', 'correct' and quiet. It's not wiolin, its violen they laughed. Stress on the E's; the kiwi accent was somewhere between an Australian and Engish accent. But with my shiny new accent and bland ham sandwiches, (mainly due to the fact my mum didn't have enough time to prepare us an Indian meal) came a new persona with toxic western standards and an admonishment against those who couldn't eat with cutlery.
Migrants are like chameleons shifting to new environments; like snakes that shed their old skin.
As I grew older, I found my mother's food too delicious to refuse, I started wearing brighter colours and didn't think twice about being called ethnic (as opposed to my similarly dressed white friends who were called hippies); I even recorrected those who insisted that Kathmandu was pronounced "Cat-man-doo" or Himalaya was pronounced "Him-i-Lay-ah", when in truth it was "Cut-mUN-doo" and "Him-AHL-ee-yah".
After a change of scenario, being part of a healthy brown community who challenged not only my whitewashed facade but toxic Indian traditions which are romanticised by Indians themselves, I now turn to the hands that fed me; hungry for her food.
My mother, grandmother and aunties have been the pillar of support, my defence through my adolescent. I feel terrible for neglecting my culture, for being silent when I should have defended my upbringing, a culture I thought was "western" anyway because of colonialism, it turns out I feed into both western and eastern cultures.
The hands that have fed me are my only touchpoints to remnants of ancestral history, thus my unique culture in the diverse country of India and now my new home Aotearoa. Their stories are now mine. I have never thought I had any history because my family is so distant, disjointed, and most of them dead. It turns out I had ignored those who were alive, present and loved me when I was born.
My relatives used to say, eating with your hands makes your food taste better. I never appreciated or understood this saying, because I distanced myself from a relationship with food with my clanging metal cutlery. I have been thinking about the tactility of eating food with one's own hands as a gracious embodiment of relationship.
By touching the food you eat, you connect to the food on a physical, bodily level, a similar process to the cook making the food, in which cooking is a tactile process. It is touched, smelt, heard, tasted and seen. It refuses disconnection and hierarchy that the use of cutlery may allude to. The physical separation of food from the diner through means of cutlery puts the 'diner' as master over the entire process of food, and food is reduced to its outcome. This superiority includes a perspective that the diner has the 'right' to disregard the food on purely its aestehtic. Thus asserting dominance over the crops, the cattle who gave up their lives, the farmers, the deliverers, the millers etc.
By eating one's hands, one partakes in the laborious and "messy" cycle of food, from its birth to its consumption.
Thus I might extend that biting the hand that feeds you, includes not only my guardians who have raised me up, but the vast community that extends beyond our home. If the entire ecological system has partaken in the parenting and support of the individual's wellbeing, the individual must respect its complexity.
Of course, I am not preaching that everyone must eat with their hands. There are so many more factors to which relationship could be embodied. I use this analogy to draw upon the idea that eating with cutlery could save me from racism has been debunked, because regardless of my habits, be it table manners or my fluctuating accent, I am still brown.
Conceptually, eating with one's hands has helped me retreat to home, to surrender toxic expectation and to learn to live in communion and healthy relationship with the ecology not limited to my family.
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