Food and Beverage: “You Don’t Need to Leave a Country to Be in Exile” by Flávia Monteiro

 You Don’t Need to Leave a Country to Be in Exile

The hairy leg of a crab sticking out from the broth, little cilantro leaf clung to it, is at once a lure and an alert. The crab is in a pot is on a table is on the sand is on the beach is in a steamy region on the coast of Brazil known as the Northeast. Known, to me, as the place where my parents were born. 

Born, and raised, and married, before they moved to a landlocked state, had me, and told me how much better I’d be if I was from the Northeast. I visit their home state one summer or the other, and am suddenly surrounded by strangers called aunts and cousins. We gather around a table to talk about memories I can’t claim. And we eat from a boiling pot of crabs. 

The right way to eat crab is to hit its shell with a mallet so as to create one single line, thin yet definitive, that cuts across the crab’s leg in an almost invisible slit. Then, using the fingers, peel off the shell carefully, as if helping the crab undress a pair of silk stockings.  

While they from the Northeast work their mallets on the red rocky shell, I work my mallet too, but I am too green, too hasty, and I shatter the shell, smashing it into the meat, forcing together two things that didn’t want to blend. 

The mallet is a tool meant to divide, not unite. It’s meant to separate meat from shell, inside from outside, insider from outsider.  

I look at the smashed crab leg on my wooden board, then look up to see my aunts laughing, my cousins laughing. My mother laughing. 

Then, neither talking nor mocking, my father reaches into the pot and grabs a crab for him, one for me. He cracks mine first, and gives it to me leg by leg, nice crab popsicles ready for me to slurp its meat, and coat my wrists in grease and relief.

Each piece of shell my father lifts, lifts the shame from my shoulders. Hairy leg after hairy leg, my father hoists the weight of all the decisions I didn’t make but which make me who I am.

About Flávia Monteiro

Flávia Monteiro is a Brazilian writer based in Miami, FL, where stone crab claws are sold already cracked. Her writing has been or will be published in HAD, Bodega, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. You can sometimes find her instagramming @flavia_monteiro.