Pomegranate Seeds

Stories have been the transformative thread through my life. 

Growing up, I sat with my mother while she read to me, and as I listened the world magically widened and came alive.  She showed me the communion and challenges offered by literature and instilled in me an ethic of venturing.  “He wanted Sonny to strike out for deep water,” she read from Baldwin’s “Sonny's Blues,” and we talked about what the differences might be for us, between deep water and drowning.  We discussed the role of the witness and the need to raise one's voice.  

My mother gave me stories and poems to see by, and my father, a criminal defense attorney, taught me that everyone has a complex and important story, that many people grow up without love or opportunity or choices, and that justice is a fiction for some of us.  

I stand on my parents’ shoulders, on the shoulders of my people.  Those who have had a measure of access and privilege.  Those whose lives have been constricted by poverty, scant resources, state sanctioned brutality, exclusion.  Those who have struggled with captivity and addiction. 

Much has been written about incarceration from an academic distance, but fiction has the potential to move readers past fear and indifference. Indeed, fiction can be revolutionary, by asking us to examine our lives and imagine the world differently.  With Pomegranate I wanted readers to feel the lived and emotional truths of addiction, imprisonment, and recovery.  

Although my father’s work meant that those caught in the “criminal justice system” were not distant or invisible, I knew I needed to try to earn the story I wanted to tell.  So I began, twenty years ago, to volunteer leading creative writing workshops for people locked up in a county house of correction, and then in a medium security prison and a pre-release facility through a program I helped to establish with PEN New England. 

In those workshops, I was transformed by what people had endured, by the survival of dignity, by the practice of divining what has mattered in our lives.  I was moved by the self-interrogation and generosity I witnessed.  For those writers behind the walls, telling their stories was an assertion of visibility, of meaning, of their humanity.  Writing is an act of recovery and power, and in those workshops, we all brought forward our best selves.  I am indebted to those participants, and to others whose lives were touched by incarceration, for the stories they shared.

I also drew on the personal to write Pomegranate.  Loved ones pained by addiction and abuse.  My own story of mothering, and daughtering, and family.  My understanding of the ongoing roles and intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in our lives.  My experience of queerness and queer communities.  What I know about the tensions between fierceness and sensitivity, belonging and marginality, the struggle and recompense of speaking out.  I drew on my experience with the mandate to carry on.  The healing forces of narrative and nature.  The ways in which the present is burdened by the past.

I wanted to explore how Black women’s bodies are contended territory through which control, personal and societal, is exercised.  I wanted to examine how the struggle between freedom and domination continues to play out through our bodies.  How social and cultural conceptions of our bodies shape our experiences.  How our bodies keep records of our lives. 

I wanted to ask how we are shamed and silenced by being looked at, but not seen.  How we are shaped by being scrutinized, desired, measured, feared, stereotyped, eroticized, mythologized, reduced.  And how we can reclaim our bodies and our vision and our voices. 

Through this novel, I wanted to name what has been wounding, and ask what sustains and heals.  Informing Ranita’s addiction are the ravages of her experience and inheritance.  Yet the generative resources around and within her can be claimed and retrieved.  

In the preface, as Ranita grieves the death of the mother who has pained her, she peels back the plain rind of the pomegranate her father has given her to find: There was a whole world, strange and crazy-beautiful, underneath the skin. Layer on crooked layer of ruby crystals. And chambers, like inside a heart. 

I want to provoke readers to strike out for deep water and be inspired by Ranita as she wrestles with the past and tries to raise her voice in story and song. 

We are all left to grapple with the echoing losses of our lives.  Yet the beauty around us and the gifts we have been given also belong to us, and we may find our hands filled, perhaps through memory and imagination, with what we need.  It may be something seemingly small or ordinary on the outside, and wondrous within.