Is it Time to Give Up National Identities?

Shalom Auslander "Mother for dinner".

Seventh did his best to run away from his family - its traditions, narratives, and even personal connections. However, when Mudd, Seventh’s mother, dies, the time comes for all the siblings to gather one last time.

Mudd, cruel and unbendable as ever, demands one final wish before anyone can receive their inheritance. According to the ancient tradition of the Cannibals, they have to Eat her. Literally.

Mudd, the gatekeeper of all Cannibal traditions and a fiercely proud Cannibal, wants nothing more than to unite her children under the Cannibal flag. She wants them to follow the “old” ways and carry them into the next generation. And, of course, even after her death, she continues to dominate her children: if they want their share of the house, which has conveniently skyrocketed in New York market value, they must comply.

Traditions or What?

So the big family gathering begins. Everyone comes to see their mother through and say their final goodbyes. Not all of them wish her well. Some hate her, some are indifferent, some barely know her at all. When Mudd’s final wish is announced, the group immediately runs into a few problems. For starters, nobody really remembers the actual rules of Consumption. There’s conflicting information everywhere. No one knows how to do it properly, according to the ancient rituals. Even the vocabulary is a mess.

Mudd has prepared her will in detail and has already done the Allocation ... or maybe it’s Apportioning, but Eight insists it’s called Disbursement. Lost in semantics, the siblings begin searching for The Guide - a supposed compendium of Cannibal law.

This grotesque stand-in for a holy book is hilarious: not only they don’t know who wrote it and when, they can't even remember its name or where it is. And yet they place enormous trust in the idea that this book will somehow guide them, reconnect them to their tribe, and keep the chain alive, or, for some, simply help them sell the house.

Eventually, Eight announces that if each of them eats a bite and a half, the duty is fulfilled.

A bit and a half and you won't need another, whether it's your father, your sister or even your mother.

And so the negotiations begin. How do you convince twelve siblings to eat their mother when one of them is vegan, one hates her guts, and one keeps kosher?

Shalom Auslander leads the reader through hysterically funny dialogues and a chain of memories that genuinely make you laugh out loud. Eventually, it seems everyone is convinced to eat their mother. And once again, they hit a wall: no one knows what comes first, how to handle the body, or the correct way to drain, cook, and consume her.

These absurd conversations expose how nonsensical the old traditions really are, how little sense or relevance they hold in today’s world.

The family goes through an increasingly deranged process, only to discover in the end that Eight was wrong. Consumption actually requires half and a bit.

The ridiculousness is complete. Conveniently, Unclish, the only living elderly, who insists he carries the original knowledge of the traditions, dies during the process.

The remaining siblings are left to interpret the rules however they like, and if a bite and a half convinces them, then that’s more than enough to count as fulfilling their mother’s wish and collecting the inheritance.

What we call “tradition” is usually a pile of nonsense created by someone in the past, revised by another, adjusted by a third, and imported by a fourth. Humans have an unhealthy obsession with preserving minor identities they believe they belong to. We are surrounded daily by national myths we think made us who we are, when in reality most of our “traditions” are simply marketing stunts invented in the late 19th or early 20th century.

Italians have an insane number of coffee rules, yet not a single coffee bean has ever been grown in Italy. The Christmas tree, perhaps the most unifying symbol of Christianity, was likely borrowed from pagan societies and rebranded by early Christians. White wedding dresses didn’t exist until Queen Victoria made them fashionable. And the French croissant came from an Austrian baker.

We fanatically cheer for national teams even though the players come from all over the world, train abroad, play for clubs owned by global billionaires, and generate profit mainly through international advertising. Events like Eurovision, sports, art, and theater never were truly “national”. Companies carry no national pride at all - they move wherever it’s cheapest to operate and easiest to dodge taxes.

Yet humans, for some idiotic reason, refuse to give up this artificially constructed sense of identity. We cling desperately to “traditions” that were likely invented within our grandparents’ lifetimes.

Eight, the one no one expects to abandon the rules, finally says:

“I felt I was part of something, preserving something. But now I think... Whose rules? Whose stories?... I've been holding on to this bullshit identity as if it was a ship in a storm that could keep me from drowning. But it was just a plank of old driftwood, Seventh; it only dragged me farther out to sea.”

How about an alternative?

What if we were simply people of the 21-century, chronically online, permanently exhausted. What if we called ourselves what we really are: anxious generation shaped by algorithms, climate worries, and global sameness?

The borders of identity exist only in our heads. We just refuse to erase them.

And Shalom Auslander knows why: because, first and foremost, we’re assholes.