A woman (Guli) and a pomegranate (Anar) meet in an unfocused liminal space, tinged in hazy green. Have they been asleep forever or for just a second? Is this some heavenly plane, a common garden, or a vague purgatory? Are they old as time or newly created? They awake, confused. They ask each other with suspicion, “who are you?” but it’s clear that they already recognize each other. They speak of the stories of people and of pomegranates, but before the terms of their relationship can be defined, they are smashed together into a cycle of life and death where both are always connected, but always changing.
This is Yasmeen Abedifard’s When to Pick a Pomegranate, published by Silver Sprocket in September 2024. It follows the two characters Guli and Anar through seven chapters, each chapter an interconnected story representing a part of the lifecycle of the pomegranate. These stories are intimate, sensual, and violent, while Abedifard’s line is looping and playful, the culmination of which calls to mind the work of cartoonists like Disa Wallander and Michael DeForge.
The first thing I sense reading When to Pick a Pomegranate is a deep yearning. Anar screams out in pain in “Seed” and “Propagation,” begging for relief and never receiving it. In “Ripe,” Guli rips Anar in half, his juice dripping down her face and body, but his face is a mask of pleasure. “Flower” shows Anar as an artist with Guli as his muse, and his desire for her as his inspiration is staunchly refuted – in the end, he draws her with two heads, the second a twisted monster (clearly a self-depiction). In “Rotten,” Anar’s desperate carnal desire for Guli becomes a thought so self-loathed that it rots inside of him, causing Anar and Guli’s mutual destruction. In all of the stories in this book, desire and need battle against violence and self-harm. The dyadic nature of Guli and Anar in When to Pick a Pomegranate adds additional context to this yearning in the sense that we are to recognize the two characters as completely entwined, the two faces of Janus; in “Rotten,” we aren’t seeing a person pine away for another person, but rather a person trying to accept themselves. For me, it’s easy to read this from a queer lens, to see this as the battle between accepting your personal desire or identity while simultaneously containing the self-hatred taught by the culture at large. I recognize this yearning, I know it well. But I suspect there are layers to When to Pick a Pomegranate, and the text has even greater personal meaning for Abedifard, addressing a multitude of identities.
The relationship between Guli and Anar, often shown rooted together with two heads connected to one core, feels like a commentary on the relationship one has with selfhood. Communicated between the two characters is a desire to grow or change and a desire to destroy, a desire to give pleasure and to be pleasured, the need for connection and isolation, the power of self-love and self-loathing. There is hunger here, hunger for something outside of the self, but also intrinsic to the self. Giving into pleasure and avoiding pleasure is a clear friction in the book and a place where Abedifard’s writing is strongest. Eroticism is a central concern of the work, but it’s the combination of lust and fear that gives individual stories their allure and their sharp edge.
Another layer… or maybe I should say aril, of When to Pick a Pomegranate is Abedifard’s Iranian heritage. Whether it is the text in Farsi used sparingly throughout the book or the references to Persian medieval art in the interstitial pages of the book, it is clear that familial history is just as important a consideration as the personal for readers looking to deeply engage with Abedifard’s work. Images used to show the combination of Guli and Anar before and after “Ferment” have a distinctly medicinal and ritualistic bent, emphasizing the ways in which our bodies work, and, sometimes, how they work against us. Hazy background images in the indicia and end pages look like photographs of Persian relief sculpture. Rooted in these choices is, I think, a sort of spiritual seeking, as Abedifard explores themes of cyclical life and death and the nonchalant Divine in a search for alignment within layers upon layers of allegory.
These thematic concerns are addressed with a cartooning that is loose and gestural, juxtaposed with a theory of page composition and color that borders on the formalistic. In “Seed,” multiplying panels on a series of pages are made in a dizzying red and pink, but then immediately jump to “Propagation”’s deep green and an image of a severed arm with black roots growing out of it. The cumulative effect is one of sheer, queasy intensity. This is a book you jump into only to find out half-way through that it will only let you out of itself by its own accord.
Comics that truly challenge their readers are few and far between, but Abedifard’s work in When to Pick a Pomegranate, with its dense symbology and multilayered storytelling, certainly qualifies to stand with that particular crowd. With vertiginous narrative, effortless cartooning, and dense color, When to Pick a Pomegranate is nothing less than enthralling, and an introduction to an artist whose work seems to effortlessly blend the ancient and the modern.
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[…] SOLRAD also ran Alex Hoffman’s review of When To Pick a Pomegranate on October 30, […]