autocannibalism
survival, destruction and identity
I often wonder what it means to consume oneself, not just in the literal sense but in a deep, metaphysical way that strips away layers of self, culture, identity, and history. I eat, therefore I am, but what am I eating? What am I feasting on my plate? What parts of myself have I devoured in the name of survival, adaptation and acceptance?
I was born in Ile-Ife, the land of the Oyo Empire, the place where my roots are buried deep in Yoruba soil. Ijesha dialect, warm akara, and tales of the mischievous tortoise, everything was home, even when I was too young to understand what home meant fully. Yet, it was a place I was never meant to stay in. When I was still little, we moved to South Africa, and with that, the first bite was taken. I began to skin parts of my Nigerian self, learning how to mesh in with a culture that was not mine. South Africa was beautiful. It was full of contradictions, just like me. I became fluent in Afrikaans, danced to the rhythm of Zulu, and learned the nuanced art of navigating spaces where apartheid’s shadow still loomed. But in becoming South African, slowly, I lost the fluency of my Yoruba tongue, a part of me that used to sing, now swallowed in silence.
Then, when I was eleven, New Zealand called. A land even further away, a new set of rules and cultural codes to decipher. Here, I often think about cannibalism, not in the sensationalised, Western sense, but in the way I’ve had to consume pieces of myself to survive in this place. In Nigeria, I’m a whitewashed girl whose tongue is coloured by English grammar. In South Africa, I’m a foreigner wanting to steal their jobs. In New Zealand, I’m Nigerian and South African, and none of these things at once. I’m a montage. I’ve been called “the African girl,” as if the entire continent were one homogenous identity. In this melting pot of cultures, I wonder—where do I belong?
There is something about living in New Zealand that has forced me to confront what it means to love oneself, especially when bits of myself have been consumed by the cultures I’ve had to live in. In Nigeria, self-love was taught through the community. You loved yourself because you belonged; your worth was tied to the stories of the people, your ancestors. I was the daughter of the Ijeshas. South Africa, on the other hand, taught me resistance. Loving myself in South Africa was an act of defiance. In a country still haunted by xenophobia, loving my flesh was a rejection of the lingering belief that my identity was inferior and weak. But here in New Zealand, self-love has become a more solitary endeavour. I’ve had to define it for myself. I’ve had to search. Often, I do it in isolation, because the community here does not always know how to hold space for people like me. Here, I am not just Yoruba. I am also the girl whose name has different sounds, who wears her hair in braids and is met with curious stares. I am the girl who knows both the taste of egusi soup and pavlova, but still feels the need to explain herself whenever someone asks, “Where are you really from?”
In this place, I’ve learned to practice the most difficult form of self-love—acceptance. In a land far from where my roots began, I’ve learned to accept all parts of myself, the Nigerian, South African, and now, the Kiwi. In accepting myself, I’ve realised self-love is not about being whole. It is about loving the fragments, the pieces that do not always fit neatly together. I am a messy jigsaw puzzle of places, histories, languages and identities. I am an Ijesha, South African, and a Kiwi in progress. Still, acceptance is not always easy. There are days when I’ve eaten too much of myself, too much of this scalding flesh. The version of me born in Nigeria is now just a faint memory, replaced by a person constantly chewing, digesting and adapting to survive in new cultural landscapes. I eat, therefore I am. I consume, therefore I exist. But what am I consuming? Am I eating the parts of my soul that feel too foreign for New Zealand? Have I torn the Ijesha apart and devoured a Yoruba girl who used to dance to the sound of the talking drum because the world here does not understand its rhythm?
In New Zealand, I’ve learned that culture is a living thing. It shifts, grows, and sometimes shrinks, depending on the space it occupies. The Māori culture here is rich, beautiful, and ever-present. I have seen how the Māori people hold onto their language and culture with a tenacity that reminds me of the Yoruba pride once instilled in me. There is power in knowing where you come from, and there is even more power in holding onto it. Sometimes, I wonder if I have lost that grip. In my quest to assimilate and be accepted in this new land, I’ve swallowed bits of myself that are forever lost. Yet, there is a strange beauty in being a cultural cannibal. It is satisfying to chew the lungs of the past softly and digest them. The ribs of culture lie on the bones of history. In consuming the old versions of myself, I am also creating someone entirely new. I am not just Yoruba, South African, or a New Zealander; I am the sum of all these experiences. I am a girl who drinks malt with pies for dessert. I am a woman who switches between languages, navigating the flags of identity like a chameleon.
Self-love is not about maintaining an untainted version of oneself. It is about loving the flawed parts of yourself that have been eaten, digested and transformed. It is about accepting the contradictions and messiness of being a third-culture kid who does not quite belong anywhere but has found a way to belong everywhere. So, I eat. I grab a fork and feast on the parts of me that no longer fit, and in doing so, I create space for the new. I drink up the shame of not being fluent in Yoruba, harbouring both hate and love towards South Africa, and not being a “real New Zealander.” I bite down hard, digesting it into something I can live with forever. I eat, therefore I am. In this act of self-cannibalism, I am learning to love myself, not just the person I was born as, but the person I’ve become, and the person I will continue to evolve into. To thrive and live in this world, I keep eating. I must keep consuming the parts of my soul that I have outgrown while holding onto the essence of who I am. In the end, self-love is not static. It is fluid, like culture and identity. The act of consuming oneself is not about destruction but rather deconstruction and metamorphosis. I eat, therefore I am.
And in eating, I am becoming.
“Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal.” — Hélène Cixous
i love the topic of cannibalism and this here is a new perspective on it at least for me, thank you!
Worded beautifully