About The Pomegranate | Viva Obscura Press

Author Izi Stoll explains the title of her memoir, The Pomegranate

Viva Obscura Press: Why did you title your book ‘The Pomegranate’?

Author Izi Stoll: It’s an image whose symbolism sort of grew over time. After finishing my memoir, the imagery that stuck with me most was of pomegranates, overripe and bursting in the hot October sun, falling from trees that carpeted quiet acres of countryside across the Balkan states. And that mental image was indelibly paired with the knowledge that those fruits would never be picked and eaten, their sweetness never savored, their sustenance never passed forward into the cycle of life. All that work to grow something nutritious and bountiful, and it was all being left to rot.

After everything I had built in England fell apart, and I was left to drift, I felt a sort of kinship with those pomegranates. I also had so much to give, and so much going to waste. The fruits of my own labor were rotting on the vine.

And that’s when I realized – every woman is a pomegranate. We are filled with seeds, not just literally, the eggs we hold inside us, but also our ideas and our efforts to translate ideas into reality. These seeds – whether physical or intellectual – are our children, what we pass onto the next generation. And it is a terrible waste for these fruits to be left forgotten on the branches.

Viva Obscura Press: Did this imagery make you think of the legend of Persephone?

Author Izi Stoll: Yes, definitely! In fact, the only story my mother would recite during my childhood was the ancient Greek story of Persephone. Every year she bought a pomegranate from the store, as a special treat to prepare for Christmas dinner, and she would tell this tale – reciting it as she taught me to cut open the fruit and pick the seeds for a midwinter salad. My hands would become stained and I grew to resent that story, a woman who is torn between her mother and her husband.

And so, with that memory in mind, I searched online to read the experiences of others who found parallels between this story and their own. I found a piece called 'The Pomegranate' by Eavan Boland, an Irish poet, which seemed particularly apropos. First, it summarizes the myth as:

The story of a daughter lost in hell.

And found and rescued there.

Love and blackmail are the gist of it.

The poet sees herself in Demeter and her daughter in Persephone. And then, she grows to understand that her daughter will one day become Demeter too:

But what else

can a mother give her daughter but such

beautiful rifts in time?

These words are followed by one of the greatest truths ever spoken:

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

Viva Obscura Press: That's a powerful line. And one that really resonates with the book, about inter-generational trauma and the idea of having to go through a process of grief to learn from the past.

Author Izi Stoll: Yes, this personal journey is so central to the book. And it did happen in parallel with the #metoo movement. The question, to me, is: How do we move past this trauma to own our bodies, our minds, our futures, and our paths through life?

Related to that point, I found another poem using the symbol of the pomegranate, called Pro-Femina, by Carolyn Kizer. The line that caught me, the line that entangled me in this woman’s web of words, means something different upon closer reading:

Forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you

I had thought it was sarcastic line, about forgetting to care for yourself.... But no, it’s strong advice: Forget yourself, girl. Get lost in your thoughts. Ignore what you look like to others and immerse yourself in your own world, without regard to your assigned place in the world. Do that, and see where it gets you. The poet goes on:

Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?

What pomegranate raised you from the dead,

Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?

Yes! This is a great question. What pomegranate can you grow, when you set your mind to it, Athena? What pomegranate will you produce, that will provide sustenance for the next generation of little girls and boys, setting them on their own adventures? I like that birth is given here as the birth of an idea.

Viva Obscura Press: I had no idea Athena was also linked with the symbol of the pomegranate!

Author Izi Stoll: Yes, how many goddesses have we counted so far!? Athena, bursting from the head of Zeus, giving birth to the pomegranate, the fruit of knowledge; Demeter, the mother goddess, who guards the cycles of life and death; Persephone, her daughter, who plucks the pomegranate and sets the seasons in motion.

As if that weren’t symbolic enough, the lineage continues. The mother of Demeter – also the mother of Zeus – was Rhea. Her name, in the original Greek, is ῥόα, the word for pomegranate.

And Rhea’s mother, Gaia, was the personification of creation itself. She is the mother of all gods of the ancient pantheon.

All these goddesses are tied to the pomegranate, tied to the earth and its cycles. And in fact, all women are pomegranates. We are filled with seeds, and we have this overwhelming urge to nourish the next generation in whatever way we can.

Viva Obscura Press: It's such a wonderful metaphor, the pomegranate as the fruit of knowledge.

Author Izi Stoll: It probably was the original fruit of knowledge! And the pomegranate has stood as a powerful symbol of knowledge in every organized religion since the ancient Greeks. In Christianity and Judaism, the pomegranate is considered the fruit of wisdom - it decorated the trim of priests’ robes and the base of Solomon’s temple. The idea is that it was given to us by God for us to savour - to know what is right and what is wrong. I can think of no other reaction to this symbol than an intense feeling of gratitude, and a feeling of responsibility to do what is right and good in this world.

Viva Obscura Press: That does seem like the best image to summarize the book.

Author Izi Stoll: Yes, I think so. The search for knowledge was the very reason I became a scientist in the first place, and that sentiment is perfectly symbolized by the pomegranate. But once I finished writing this memoir, I realized that same journey had led me to faith. And so, the book is about all of this – my observations of the world, my relationship with my mother and my husband, the role of women in our society, my deep love for the truth, and my journey of faith.

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