Own Fruits
Pomegranate
By Arin Alycia Fong
Four years ago, I wrote a story about a modern-day virgin birth called “Madonna of the Pomegranate.” The story follows a teenaged Catholic girl who is mysteriously impregnated and forced to reckon with the materiality of her body and her repressed sexuality. She is both haunted and empowered by the Virgin Mary—a conflicting symbol of purity and fertility.
“Madonna of the Pomegranate” takes its name from Sandro Botticelli’s painting from the Renaissance period, in which Mary, surrounded by angels offering her lilies and roses, stares lifelessly at the viewer while carrying her infant son. In her left palm, she cradles a pomegranate that has been sliced into, revealing arils that glisten like rubies. She holds the fruit to the infant Jesus’ chest, the red seeds symbolizing the passion of Christ, the abundance of his suffering, the blood that would spill from his hands and feet.
I think about Mother Mary still—with more fascination than faith. After all, my time at a convent girls’ school and much of my youth was marked by her persistent presence. Towering over us in the grotto, in the chapel, her name on our tongues as we recited the Hail Mary. She was also the figure of rumours—did you see Mother Mary crying blood in the chapel? Don’t go to the upstairs toilet, wait you see Mother Mary crying blood.
When we think of the virgin mother, what we often do not see or acknowledge is the blood of Mary, the woman. The blood of her first period. The blood that would have smeared the grounds of the stable where she had given birth to her son. Her unbroken hymen miraculously intact. I probably was not conscious of it then, but I was incredulously puzzled by the bloody imagery that suffused the cult of her image.
Now that I think of labor and (re)production, is there anything more confusing about a woman’s assumed role to continue her bloodline (and supposedly the bloodline of man) than to be faced with the image of her own shame, her own body? When the church treats sex outside of marriage as sinful, and when the female body is policed by its scrutiny, it is a wonder that women give birth at all.
***
I have never felt so seen until I read Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex, where she talks about the impossible twin ideal the Virgin Mary represents: “The effect the myth has on the mind of a Catholic girl cannot but be disturbing, and if it does not provoke revolt (as it often does) it deepens the need for religion’s consolation, for the screen of rushes against the perpetual frost of being carnal and female. By setting up an impossible ideal the cult of the Virgin does drive the adherent into a position of acknowledged and hopeless yearning and inferiority … The process is self-perpetuating: if the Virgin were not venerated, the dangers of sex, the fear of corruption, the sense of sin would not be woven together in this particular misogynist web.”
If there is any modern-day tradition that encompasses the disturbing irony of the Virgin myth, it is how pre-teen girls are chosen to play Mother Mary in the Nativity pageant at Christmas. Thankfully, I have never been subjected to this confusing predicament. But I still find myself imagining, years after my confirmation and leaving the church, what it must have been like for girls on the cusp of adolescence to have the symbol of motherhood, via a plastic baby doll, thrust into their arms, to be so aware of their womanhood and their body before an audience so hellbent on seeing them as pure, untainted.
***
Mia was eleven when Aunty Carol the catechist chose her to play Mother Mary in the Nativity pageant. The other girls laughed at how awkward she looked carrying a plastic baby doll and drowning in a crisp, white robe that swallowed her skinny arms along with a baby-blue shawl that flattened her hair.
Two minutes to showtime. Couched in a makeshift cardboard stable, Mia sat cross-legged with plastic baby Jesus swaddled in her lap, fiddling with the raffia straw that pricked her thighs through her dress.
Aunty Carol, after confiscating lighters from the three boys who attempted to set their wise men beards on fire, was not in the mood for any more blunders that could ruin her perfect pageant.
“When Angel Gabriel says, ‘For with God nothing shall be impossible,’ what must you say?”
Mia jerked her head up, the straw still tangled around her fingers.
“Behold the handmaid of the Lord?” Aunty Carol prompted, tapping her feet.
“Be it done to me according to Your word,” Mia mumbled.
She noticed her parents sitting in the front pew taking pictures of her. She gripped little Toys“R”Us Jesus, its eyes flickering as she cradled it back and forth.
Just as the church bells rang, an involuntary warmth crept between Mia’s legs. She wriggled around in her bristly seat, but it did not alleviate the discomfort of sitting in damp underwear.
The chapel doors swung open. The choir of angels began to sing. The congregation rose from their seats in a lethargic wave. So did Angel Gabriel, Joseph, and the three wise men. Aunty Carol glared from the front pew. Her eyes narrowed as she jerked her chin up.
Mia shot up straight. The Angel Gabriel leapt away. The wise men in their fake beards sniggered. Joseph, with his wooden staff, pointed to the stable straw, which looked smudged with a dark, squashed cherry.
Murmurs from the congregation grew louder. Aunty Carol hid her head in her hands. Her parents clapped their palms over their mouths. Nobody could erase the sight of Mother Mary’s pure white gown smeared scarlet like pomegranate pulp, in the most sacred of spaces.
The deep rosy stain burned bright in Mia’s dark eyes. She felt herself unfurl, like petals unhinging. Finally, she unfolded her arms, sending plastic baby Jesus tumbling down the steps of the altar.
***
At thirteen, I told my mother that I never want to have kids. She said, okay then go be a nun, with an edge in her voice. That finality in her instruction terrified me; for a moment I feared I only had two options—chastity or motherhood—both of which felt to me like just two sides of the same coin, the currency with which the church mints and spends to keep young Catholic girls pure and women productive.
My mother used to remind me that I could have not been born. That even then, I had no control over whether I would exist.
It is the early 1990s. My mother is pregnant with me and her gynecologist tells her she has detected an anomaly in the ultrasound. Something about possessing a certain chromosome, suggesting a lifetime of disability. The only way to be sure is to go through an invasive test to determine if this is true.
The moral of the story is always this—that she chooses to endure the anxiety of not knowing if her child would be "normal" until the day of birth, that she chooses to carry me to term despite the risks. That if god intends for life to happen, it will happen, regardless of circumstance or consequence. That this is the kind of choice that she would expect of me too.
Years later, my mother tells me the story again.
A year after I’m born, my mother’s good friend A visits the same gynecologist, pregnant with her first child. She is told she has the same problem, an anomaly, an invasive procedure is required. My mother comforts a sobbing A, advises her to seek a second opinion.
A couple of years later the gynecologist loses her license. A’s daughter and I are in her room playing doctor and patient, where I have stuffed a pillow under my shirt and she holds a makeshift stethoscope made of string to my “belly.” Our mothers catch up outside in the living room. When they walk in on us, my mother’s face is pale. She urges me to remove the pillow and snatches it away when I do.
Young girls shouldn’t be playing like this, she says. I’m confused. Every Christmas, I see girls just a few years older than me masquerade as Mary in white and blue oversized robes. They fake-waddle down the aisle with their Josephs, holding their soft cushion bellies, and a few scenes later they swaddle their plastic baby Jesuses in their makeshift stables.
My mother sees me thinking, about to open my mouth. She holds out a finger to my face and says, when you’re a mother you’ll understand.
***
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer—member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a Native American people originally from the Great Lakes—compares the mother of her people, Skywoman, to the mother of the Anglophone Western world: Eve.
Skywoman is an ancestral gardener, cocreator of a green world, who filled the land with abundance and life through her reciprocal relationships with nonhuman kin, who created a world for the flourishing of all life. On the other hand, Eve is a woman banished from a garden for tasting forbidden fruit. Kimmerer writes, “Mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.”
As if it is not enough that Eve is denied the gifts of the land, she has been replaced by a purer, yet paradoxically more fertile mother—the Virgin Mary, giving birth to her son who would redeem the sins of Eve, and by extension, the sins of humankind.
Like Eve, we have become exiles passing through a world shaped by lack, by endless labor, by extraction. Capitalism has disconnected us from the land and from ourselves. It has conditioned us to think we are never enough. If Skywoman had met Eve, would she have shown her the other fruits? Maybe they could have shared a pomegranate. Maybe then, Eve would have brushed her fingers against its flower crown, popped the seeds in her mouth, and thanked the earth for its abundant gifts.
***
Standing in the grotto by a stone statue of the Virgin Mother, Mia wonders if Mary ever loved her husband. Not in the way she loves Jesus, or God. Was she ever allowed to love him that way?
The snake screams in silence, permanently crushed under Mary’s feet. Did she ever resent her fate? Did she not want to be just a girl, like any other girl?
Life imitates pageant. Mia hears the other girls sniggering. Aunty Carol sighing. Plastic baby Jesus tumbling. The bright red stain seeping through her stiff white gown, wrapped around her like an impregnable cocoon.
Finally, she sees herself for the first time—a girl in robes too heavy for her. A character in a play she never got to write.
Standing on her tippy toes, Mia tries to peer into the Virgin’s teardrop eyes. She cups a hand around the side of her mouth and whispers to Mary, a gentle, daring probe. Why did you say yes?
A soft breeze grazes her cheek. What if I don’t want to say yes?
Mary continues to gaze at Heaven. That is how she was fashioned—chiseled and sandpapered—a role model of trained devotion.
If only Eve had seen the other fruits.
Mia reaches into her shopping bag and pulls out a pineapple by its stalk. With precision, like a sculptor, she balances the spiky fruit between Mary’s bosom and prayerful palms. How warm and bountiful she looks cradling the pineapple doll.
Mia chews half a cherry and gingerly glides the bitten fruit over Mary’s pale, delicate lips, now a luscious shade of scarlet.
Next—the flower crown pomegranate brimming with ruby arils. Standing on her toes, full of grace, she poises her bony arms over Mary’s head, crowning her: Madonna of the Pomegranate.
The street lamps yawn and flicker awake as dusk gives way to the deep navy sky. Mia climbs down from the pedestal to take one last look at her work.
She cannot rewrite the past, but she smiles as she slips out of the grotto, knowing she has buried the seeds of a new story.
The evening breeze grows stronger. The Virgin’s pomegranate crown wobbles before finally tumbling, bouncing off the steps, hitting the ground, cracking just enough for a bright, juicy stream to seep through the slit in its skin.
***
A common story of the pomegranate is the ancient Greek myth of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the goddess of harvest and fertility. In one version of the myth, Persephone is abducted by Hades and brought to his underground dominion. The god of the underworld offers her twelve pomegranate seeds, of which she eats six. She has been tricked. Hades says she now belongs to him, for she has eaten fruit from his kingdom and is bound to him forever. Demeter is so distraught that her grief bans the earth from bearing fruit until her daughter is returned to her. Because Persephone has only eaten six out of the twelve pomegranate seeds, she is now fated to spend half the year with her mother on earth, and the other half with Hades in the underworld. As such, the return of Persephone to earth is associated with the arrival of Spring, of the land being restored after a period of desolation.
Whenever I see a pomegranate in a supermarket, I am tempted by the thought of its juicy red seeds. But whenever I buy one and break into its husk, scoop out the arils and pop them into my mouth, they are often too sour, too tart for my taste. Perhaps I am too caught up in its signification. Or perhaps the commodification of the fruit has soured its gifts of abundance. All its associations with fertility and marriage aside, I have always loved the idea of the pomegranate being a symbol of seasonal change, how things can always be made anew despite so much destruction and death. How the pomegranate of the Greek myth holds so many dualities within itself—dark and light, loss and gain, death and rejuvenation.
My mother and I no longer speak about issues of maternity or reproduction. When most things are colored by religiosity, there is just too much distance to cross.
But like Persephone’s pomegranate, I am slowly learning to hold space for conflicting ideas. When I was younger, my fruitless retort to my mother whenever she reminded me that she had given me life was: but I didn’t ask to be born! The root of this expression, I realize, comes from my inner child—the child that so innocently stuffed a pillow under her shirt; because that’s all it was at the time, playing dress-up—wanting to take ownership of my body. It is a response that, though valid in its anxieties, settles into easy dichotomies of pro-life and pro-choice, optimist and cynic, abundance and lack.
Abundance. At the very core of our desire, at the core of society’s insistence on reproduction, is that not what we truly want? To feel like we have enough, that we are enough? That life will undoubtedly sustain itself?
I have felt the restorative abundance of the pomegranate in unexpected ways. In 2018, I was invited by my friends N and V to read my story “Madonna of the Pomegranate” as an activation of their exhibition, Mother and Son. In one portrait, N dresses up as the Virgin Mother in blue and red robes. In another, they repurpose the same pieces of fabric into the cloaks of Jesus Christ, dotting their jawline with hair. Side by side, Mother and Son are stripped of gender markers and are allowed to exist as they are, whether they be divine icons, or vessels for personal manifestations of desire. As I read my story before the two portraits, N and V were kneeling on the floor, gently laying the ground with rose petals bought from a market stall in Little India, forming a yonic triangle as a way to draw from its divine feminine, life-giving energy. This simple ceremonial act, with its roots in Hinduism, had created a space where the Virgin Mother was allowed to be born again, empowered by kinship, queerness, and artmaking.
It’s been four years and my story has never been published anywhere, only in fragments, within the walls of this essay. I had submitted the first thousand words to the inaugural First Pages Prize organized by Stockholm Writers Festival, a prize dedicated to discovering new writers. Miraculously, it made the longlist and I was chuffed for a while, thinking this could go somewhere. It came close to finding two potential homes, but sometimes—serendipitously—the fruits of your labor never quite come to fruition. Or at least not in the way that is expected of it.
Perhaps the purpose of incubating “Madonna of the Pomegranate” has simply been about finding new ways to hold space for the body, for desire, especially in a world that values birth, completion, reproduction, exploitation. Perhaps it is to practice a kind of labor that is not conventionally maternal or productive in an extractive sense, but restorative, centered around care and communion with the world around us.
We plant our own seeds. We tend our own gardens. We are our own fruits. And that is enough.
Arin Alycia Fong is a writer and editor from Singapore. Her work has appeared in Jacket2, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore; Southeast Asian Review of English; and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of To Gather Your Leaving: Asian diaspora poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe (Ethos Books, 2019).