Yasmeen Abedifard’s When to Pick a Pomegranate is a collection of thought-provoking vignettes from indie publisher Silver Sprocket. With a focus on reflection, interconnectedness, sensuality and the cyclical nature of time, Abedifard’s 80-page comic has already been met with much critical success, with creator Leo Fox (Boy Island, My Body Unspooling, etc) hailing her as “one of the most exciting cartoonists working today”. With elements of traditional Persianate storytelling and taking inspiration from manuscripts in its detailed illustrations, When to Pick a Pomegranate is, much like eating the delicious fruit, an experience to be savoured.
Within the womb, a woman and a pomegranate rest side by side. Upon their birth, both are autonomous, but they are unable to remember who they are or what their purpose is, only having vague memories of an idyllic garden, in an allusion to the Garden of Eden from the Bible. Interestingly, the name of the garden they refer to is missing from the sentences they speak, with an obvious gap symbolising where it should be, like they are unable to remember. Perhaps this blankness is a reference to forbidden knowledge or an allusion to being ‘sinful’ and unable to enter paradise. This would certainly explain the self-loathing we will see throughout the rest of the narrative.
The background is formed of painted leaf prints and faded photographs of nature, giving nothing away of where our protagonists are. As the two begin to get to know each other in this liminal space, a large hand swoops them up, informing them of their names: the pomegranate is Anar, and the woman is Guli. There is no time for questions, and their fate is already decided by “strings outside [their] reach”. Now, the hand tells them, they begin.
When to Pick a Pomegranate immediately shifts tone, emboldened by a more sinister red-hued colour palette. Anar and Guli have been transformed into seeds, which grow into plants, which are plucked, or wither and die. Forced to relive the plant life cycle over and over again, the panels get smaller and more crowded, highlighting their distress as they cry out for the cycle to stop. The narrative surges onwards, moving on to the next stage of a plant life cycle; gory green propagation, in which Guli the gardener mutilates Anar the plant in an attempt to grow “a brand new you!”. We then proceed to ‘Flower’, in which artist Anar tries to mould clay Guli to his liking, in more cartoon-stylised browns and blacks. When to Pick a Pomegranate continues through the plant life cycle, with ‘Ripe’, ‘Rotten’ and so on. All the while, the woman and the pomegranate become more intrinsically entwined, each taking their turn as the role of creator, while they slowly and inexplicably become reflections of each other.
The focus on the mirroring of the self is reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s theory of ‘the Mirror Stage’, in which a child begins to draw rudimentary distinction between the self and the other, as it encounters its image in the mirror for the first time. The image reflected becomes what Lacan coins as the ‘ideal-I’; a stable and autonomous version of the self which the child does not experience. Thus, it yearns to be the other. This dual sense of jealousy but also self-loathing is depicted beautifully in Guli and Anar’s mirroring of each other as almost the same being, growing resentful when they feel one ‘self’ has more autonomy than the other. While they are drawn together as reflections of each other, they are also repelled by each other, a wonderful metaphor for the self-loathing they obviously experience.
When to Pick a Pomegranate is both intimate and meditative, with its flurry of changing formats, styles and tones. Evoking the gravitas of poetry and mythology, Abedifard has created an experience so thought-provoking and visceral that it will stick with readers for a long time to come.
Yasmeen Abedifard (W/A) • Silver Sprocket, $14.99
Review by Lydia Turner
