Pomegranate

6. The Pomegranate in Modern Literature, Art and Film

Guarded treasure, honeycomb partitions,

Richness of flavour,

Pentagonal architecture.

The rind splits; seeds fall –

Crimson seeds in azure bowls,

Or drops of gold in dishes of enamelled bronze.

André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres, trans. Dorothy Bussy

The use of the pomegranate in modern art can be exemplified in the contrast between two very different paintings depicting the same subject, the goddess Persephone. The first is the work of the nineteenth-century poet-painter and founder of the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this work, Persephone has bitten from the pomegranate and realizes its consequences. In the diagonal centre of the piece is the fateful fruit, whose flesh is the colour of the goddess’s lips. One of her hands supports the other, which holds its weight: that heavy balance of life and death. In contrast, a recent painting by Cha Davis represents Persephone in a most unusual way. It is part of a series in which Davis represents her pet chicken Ester in a number of different guises. The traditional form of a woman is abandoned, Persephone now taking on a new animal form. Rather than being held by her, pomegranates now sprout from the goddess-bird’s head. The fruit, with their tentacle calyces, are identified as literally part of her body. These two artworks show the traditional and diverse ways individuals have approached representing the nature of the pomegranate in the Persephone myth. The fruit, with all its mystery and sensuality, is what makes these unique scenes. It is the pomegranate’s simple yet aesthetically pleasing appearance that appeals and has remained such a seductive icon.

The Armenian Arts

The films of Sergei Parajanov are charged with pomegranate imagery, reflecting his Armenian heritage. In Sayat-Nova (The Colour of Pomegranates), the opening credits include a shot of juice spilling from pomegranates onto fabric, creating a stain in the shape of Armenia itself. Men in black robes are shown biting into pomegranates at a monastery. In the death scene of the poet protagonist we first see an ornamental dagger in the midst of several splattered pomegranates. A dreamlike sequence follows which features the poet having pomegranate juice (or is it blood?) poured on him by a white-faced woman wearing a green robe and a vegetal headdress (Death herself?). This draws on the long history of the pomegranate in Armenian art and architecture. The fruit appears on the thirteenth-century monastery of Geghard. A tympanum at one entrance is decorated with representations of trees from which hang entwined pomegranates and grape bunches. Two doves sit above the trees, looking inward towards the gateway. This pomegranate-grape-dove combination, all three of which represent life, is common in Armenian art. It appears among the mixture of biblical, mythological and rural-life-themed reliefs on the tenth-century Church of the Holy Cross at Akdamar Island. The pomegranate is also found as a column capital decoration at the seventh-century Zvartnots Cathedral. The fruit grows in the borders of pages from the Echmiadzin Gospel, a medieval Armenian illuminated bible from the tenth century. The longstanding fertility connotations of the pomegranate have resulted in the fruit’s association with the Armenian wedding in modern times, pomegranate wine being the drink of choice for newlyweds. Armenians may wear a small dried pomegranate on a cord, known as a taratosik; this talismanic pendant is particularly associated with marriage.

Cha Davis, Ester Persephone, 2012.

In modern times the pomegranate has come to represent the resilience of the Armenian people during the genocide of 1915. There is an Armenian saying that each pomegranate has 365 seeds, and that the people survived by eating one seed per day of their exile. The diaspora that resulted from the genocide saw the Armenian people spread across the world like the seeds of the pomegranate. The national importance of the fruit is honoured at the Armenian Genocide Monument of Larnaca, Cyprus, composed of a bronze sculpture surrounded by pomegranate and cypress trees. Armenian artists often use the pomegranate in their works to symbolize the suffering, hope, rebirth and survival that came with the genocide. Such an artist is the painter Rubik Kocharian, who was born in Armenia in 1940 and now lives in California. The pomegranate features in many of his works: being peeled by putti, split open in front of an Eastern lion relief, sitting next to a tablet inscribed with the Armenian alphabet, growing next to a classical sculpture. Kocharian’s Pomegranate Dance demonstrates very traditional Armenian imagery, illustrating a dance between two women before a pomegranate-bearing statue.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Prosperina (the Roman name for the goddess). Rossetti has represented Persephone in a reflective pose, contemplating the effects of the fruit, 1874.

Church of the Holy Cross, Akdamar Island, 10th century.

A fallen pomegranate at the 7th-century Zvartnots Cathedral.

Illumination from the 10th-century Echmiadzin Gospel, Armenia.

Literature

The pomegranate has been used by many authors to emphasize an Eastern setting. This is the case for the pomegranate tree that plays a vital role in Khaled Hosseini’s novel of sin and redemption, The Kite Runner (2003). The changes in the relationship between childhood friends Amir and Hassan are reflected in changes in the appearance of the pomegranate tree. The tree is introduced as their shelter, isolated from the rest of Kabul and the rest of the world. It is there that they climb, play, carve their names on its trunk and eat of its fruit. Most importantly, the plant becomes a kind of tree of knowledge, under which Amir reads and teaches the illiterate Hassan. Although Amir and Hassan are from different social classes, they become equal at the pomegranate tree. This is not to last. An atrocity happens. Hassan is raped, and although Amir witnesses the act, he lacks the courage to intervene. When they return later to the pomegranate tree it is not the same. Their paradise has been lost. Amir begins pelting pomegranates at Hassan, attempting to provoke him to fight back. The bloody imagery recalls the earlier rape scene:

Rubik Kocharian, Pomegranate Dance, 2010.

I hurled a pomegranate at him. It struck him in the chest, exploding in a spray of red pulp … I don’t know how many times I hit him. All I know is that when I finally stopped, exhausted and panting, Hassan was smeared in red like he’d been shot by a firing squad.[1]

Amir wants to have his guilt lessened by being openly accused and punished for being the silent bystander. Instead, Hassan simply breaks a pomegranate over his own head. Throughout the rest of the novel Amir struggles for redemption. The pomegranate tree appears one more time, when Amir returns to Kabul much later as an adult. The tree no longer bears fruit. It has died, like his childhood friendship. All that remains is the memory of an idyllic time, embodied in those carvings made in the trunk long ago: ‘Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.’[2]

The Armenian-American writer William Saroyan wrote a short story called ‘The Pomegranate Trees’ in which a certain Uncle Melik buys a plot of land in the desert and attempts to grow an oasis of pomegranates on it. The sceptical nephew narrator remarks: ‘He was too imaginative and poetic for his own good. What he wanted was beauty. He wanted to plant it and see it grow … It was pure aesthetics, not agriculture.’[3] The trees are in constant battle with their environment, and get such little water they yield few fruit: ‘My uncle harvested three small pomegranates. I ate one, he ate one, and we kept the other one up in his office.’[4] A year later two hundred pomegranates are harvested, which are packed into eleven boxes and sent to a produce man for selling. The fruit won’t even sell at $1 a box, and are thus sent back to Melik and his nephew, who eat them. Melik, from lack of profit, is forced to sell the desert land back, but pleas that the trees still need to be looked after. He and his nephew come back to the spot three years later to find all the trees dead. The tale concludes with the poignant statement: ‘we didn’t say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.’[5] The pomegranate is instructional, functioning here as a symbol of the unattainable and unrealistic dream that will ultimately fail. It is the image of beauty, but not productivity. A similar perception is also found in Khalil Gibran’s poem about the fruit, in which the author cannot bear the competing voices of the many seeds inside the pomegranate that he lives in, each expressing their hopes for the future. The parliament of seeds begin shouting their views simultaneously, becoming an indistinguishable noise. The author thus decides to move residence, to the quieter heart of a quince.

Painting and Sculpture

As we have seen, mankind has enthusiastically included the pomegranate in its portrayal of the world, both physical and transcendent, since the beginning of history. The modern era sees a continuation of this pattern, often in new ways. It is common to find Graeco-Roman and Renaissance sculptures holding the pomegranate. True innovation comes with Alexander Calder, pioneer of the hanging mobile, who in the 1940s created an abstract kinetic sculpture from aluminium sheeting, inspired by the pomegranate tree. A single suspended sheet-cut pomegranate gives meaning to the rest of the piece, allowing us to identify the freeform shapes that hang around it as leaves that form the tree. Through Calder, the classical pomegranate-bearing sculpture was resurrected and reimagined. Likewise, in modern still-life paintings of the pomegranate, popularly used in such compositions, we again see tribute paid to the fruit’s symbolic position in ancient art. With its antique notions of death, the fruit often features as a vanitas symbol in still-life arrangements, reminding the viewer of his or her own mortality and the brevity of life (sometimes appearing alongside a skull or being cut by a knife).

Many notable modern artists have utilized the pomegranate in their own particular style: in Pablo Picasso’s Cubism; in Henri Matisse’s cut-outs; in the wallpapers of William Morris; in the glass lampshades of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The fruit plays a crucial role in the composition of Salvador Dalí’s 1944 oil painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. It illustrates a dream that was described to the artist by his wife Gala. This Surreal scene depicts two pomegranates. Gala’s dream begins with a large broken-open pomegranate, two of its arils spilling out. From the fruit emerges a fish, from the fish emerges a tiger, and a second tiger emerges from the first. A rifle follows the tigers, the bayonet of which is about to pierce the naked body of Dalí’s wife, which glows white in the centre of the scene. The pomegranate emphasizes the central theme of sexuality, the fruit being the original procreative force. Everything else emerges from its seeds in this Surrealist illustration of the Theory of Evolution. A second smaller pomegranate with a bee hovering around it gives the work its title. It casts a shadow in the shape of a heart. The fruit floats near Gala in recognition of the power of her female fertility. The pomegranate would also appear in later jewellery designed by Dalí. Rubies crafted to look like arils spill from his gold pomegranate heart brooch, with diamonds being used to represent the inner pith. In the ancient world, the pomegranate was a popular jewellery bead shape and, as Dalí’s work demonstrates, it is still a fashionable ornament adorning brooches, necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings today. The frequent use of garnet to represent the arils is appropriate in such jewellery, as this stone’s name is derived from the Latin granatum, because of its similarity of colour to the pomegranate aril.

Silver pomegranate necklace with garnet crafted arils by Natalia Moroz and Sergey Zhiboedov of WingedLion. The naked figure evokes qualities of sensuality and femininity attributed to the pomegranate since ancient times.

Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, 1944.

Ilya Zomb, Fragment of Nightfall: Glimmer, 2001.

Ilya Zomb, Mutual Admiration to Pomegranates, 2005.

Surrealist painters of today, following Dalí’s example, continue to utilize the pomegranate in creating phantasmagorical worlds. Such an artist is Ilya Zomb, who has used the fruit in many of his works, particularly in association with ballerina figures who dance upon the giant fruits. Other paintings feature pomegranate seeds being pecked at by birds, or being strung together and formed into a necklace. Particularly potent in their representation of fertility are his works Fragment of Nightfall: Glimmer and Mutual Admiration to Pomegranates. In the former, two naked women recline against a giant pomegranate. Arils spill out, illuminating what is otherwise a dark and barren landscape (comparable to the underworld). Each of the women is holding and gazing into the large and luminous, jewel-like pomegranate seeds. Mutual Admiration, in contrast, features several regular-sized pomegranates. One pomegranate is being balanced on a ballerina’s head, while another is impaled before her on the horn of a rhinoceros. Seeds drip down from the penetrated fruit. Four more pomegranates rest on a bench in the foreground.

One final artwork, a true masterpiece, brings together the recurring key themes of beauty, mystery and femaleness that we have seen accompany the fruit throughout this book. This is William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s 1875 painting L’Orientale à la grenade, which features a young girl decked in oriental garb peeling a pomegranate with her hands. The girl, like the fruit she holds, represents Eastern beauty. The blood-red jewels of her earrings replicate the arils that she picks from her pomegranate. There is no contextual detail, the painting focusing solely on the desirable girl whose eyes gaze out of the right-hand side of the frame. The painting has a twin, Marchande de grenades. It depicts the same girl in the same outfit, only this time Bouguereau reveals her to be a pomegranate seller on the streets of Cairo (the medieval gate of Bab Zuweila visible in the background), sitting in the dust beside her basket of fruit. Her straight and piercing stare beseeches the viewer to purchase her pomegranates. As the pomegranate is so strongly linked with fertility, the vending of the fruit may represent a loss of virtue, making us question what she is really selling on the street.

Willem Kalf, Still-life featuring Vanitas Motifs including a Pomegranate, 1640s.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Girl with a Pomegranate, 1875.

Throughout this work I have illustrated, using the example of one food item, how people of the past made sense of what they were eating. Food is a language; its consumption makes a statement about who we are. In both the East and the West, gesture and story evolved around the pomegranate, adding to the experience of its consumption. The fruit was even imagined to accompany an individual’s journey beyond the grave. It’s not just the pomegranate’s wonderful taste and health benefits that appeal to us today, but this ancient aesthetic that has stimulated the imagination since people partook of the pomegranate’s delights for the first time.

Now it’s time to take all that theory and put it into practice in the kitchen.