Yasmeen Abedifard’s When To Pick a Pomegranate arrived––fittingly––right at the beginning of pomegranate season. When my copy came in the mail, our neighbors had just started to pick their own tree’s fruit, which looked like cheerful, Halloween-y ghosts in squirrel-proof draping. A few pomegranates have stayed on the tree since then, getting progressively lonelier as their peers ripened and got picked off. There’s a whole silly micro-tragedy to be witnessed, just in walking by. 

Either the season primed my reading of When To Pick a Pomegranate, or the other way around; either way, the book felt marked by a similar collapse between the scales of feeling, between our serious and unserious moods. Like are we being real right now, or are we joking? Am I laughing at myself for crying, and, if so, what’s that about––greeting or avoiding the weepy impulse? It’s crept up on me in the rereads, this sense of being newly unfamiliar with the tone and weight of feeling.

When To Pick a Pomegranate (Silver Sprocket, 2024) is a Riso-printed collection of comics whose only two characters are a pomegranate named Anar and a woman named Guli. More accurately, it’s a cycle of short comics that rotate the paired figures through multiple roles, relationships, and acts of violation or digestion. We meet Guli and Anar over and over: as amnesiac strangers, as hostage and tormentor, muse and artist, two-headed body. 

Each of the seven pieces that make up the book stages a hateful encounter between woman and fruit, related to a phase of pomegranate plant life (Seed, Sprout, Propagation, Flower, Ripe, Rot, Ferment). In the loose, scribbly lines of “Propagation,” Guli is a smiling sadist who holds the miniature Anar captive in the palm of her hand, murmuring reassurances as she prepares to tear off a piece of him––which she’ll use to start a propagated copy. Anar’s terror is genuine and also (disturbingly) cute. In the aerosol midtones and dotty textures of the comic that immediately follows, “Flower,” Anar is a dopey male artist, a Pygmalion type whose sculpture of Guli comes miraculously to life. He’s stoked to fill her in on what she means, both as a piece of art and as a piece of him (“you represent all my desires, hopes and dreams / my guts…my insides…my heart…”). But Guli is unimpressed––then repulsed––then ruthless, as she interprets him right back.

Even just with this adjoining pair of comics, we can see the signs of sabotage to what Arlie Hochschild, in her classic 1983 work The Managed Heart, calls “feeling rules”: the latent social codes that guide our efforts to “try to feel.” Though we often think of emotion as spontaneous, involuntary, and distinctly unmanageable, Hochschild suggests that the process of managing emotion is inseparable from the process of creating it.

This is why people might talk about “getting in touch with” feelings and “trying to” feel something. We attempt to account for what and how we feel by referencing a standard of reasonable, expected, or desirable emotional responses to situations––what a person is obligated or entitled to feel, given a specific role or relation; then, as Hochschild writes in a suggestively economic conceit, we “pay, overpay, underpay, play with paying, acknowledge our dues, pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due.” Such managing acts govern how we “make our try at sincere civility”––acknowledging to each other and ourselves that some feelings are expected within a relationship, even if we don’t or can’t deliver them.

When To Pick a Pomegranate takes breakneck turns through the intensities of grand negative emotion (rage, terror, disgust, heartbreak, shame). But its own forms of narrative instability and ambiguity also unmoor the expectations we might use as benchmarks for the scale, proportion, or seriousness of those emotions. No role or relation stays constant in the collection’s cyclical, multi-story frame, which repeatedly shuffles Anar and Guli into alternate, and always fantastical, relationships with one another, sometimes implying that the two exist only as aspects or avatars of the same person. What kind of feeling could be owed or owing, reasonable and rightly aimed, between these two characters? Despite the apparent symmetry of having two characters who exist as reflections of each other, there’s no proportional aggression or affection to be found in Abedifard’s collection. Instead, this book plays dramatically with scale in more than one sense: bodies, time, mood, actions and reactions, storytelling. 

One example of this playful instability happens in the question of how a reader might decide which/whose pain to take seriously: what’s pathos and what’s a pathetic male artist? Taken on its own, Guli’s verbal cruelty to Anar the sculptor in “Flower” feels merely delicious, and artist-Anar’s tears pretty unserious. The comic ends lightly, with a slightly metafictional punchline: as pitiful revenge, Anar draws himself a melodramatic cartoon of Anar and Guli sharing one body, giving cartoon Guli demonic horns and teeth, himself a woeful weepy innocence. But this comic comes just after “Propagation,” the story which puts Anar in exactly this position of innocence, and that gives Guli’s cruelty and Guli herself on an outsized scale––without apparent irony. The reader who returns to “Propagation” after reading the other sections might find their sympathies destabilized; and really, even on the first read, the comic seems to savor the cute, miniature Anar and his Ghibiliesque tears of horror. 

In messing with the rules of scale and obligation, Abedifard makes it that much harder to narrate any of the collection’s hostile acts or injuries through a stable frame of reference. Her exploration of violence as having an ethically and emotionally undecidable status picks up on an enduring challenge within feminist theory––namely, how to treat injury and harm as events that are full of uncertainty, ambivalence, and interpretation, when political action almost always requires that we make a decision about an act of violence and what it means. Barbara Johnson gives one of the most famous formulations of this question in her landmark essay on the rhetoric and poetry of abortion. “It is often said, in literary-theoretical circles, that to focus on undecidability is to be apolitical. … [Yet] the undecidable is the political. There is politics precisely because there is undecidability.” 

More recently, Elizabeth Wilson revisited this problem in Gut Feminism, proposing that in “important, unavoidable ways, feminist politics attack and damage the things they love.” We should be wary, she tells us, of attempting to contain this destructiveness within certain narratives––for example, by trying to split something’s reparative effects off from its destructive ones. “Feminist politics are most effective,” Wilson writes, “not when they transform the destructive into the productive, but when they are able to tolerate their own capacity for harm.”

Abedifard refracts the destructive and the reparative through the cycle structure and conceit. Anar is almost always hapless or helpless, but not harmless; Guli’s variously vicious acts are often satisfying, but not always righteous or even explicable. In “Rot,” Anar becomes a desolate lover who admires Guli with a violent intensity (in the vein of so much romantic poetry): “i want to tear these / thoughts / out of my flesh.” As the comic progresses, it becomes less and less clear whether we should read the fleshy and intestinal imagery of Anar’s narration as metaphor, and the violent transformation that begins to affect both their bodies is ambiguously mutual. 

One thing that has stayed on my mind in the rereads of Abedifard’s When To Pick a Pomegranate is this use of the visceral. Lately, I’ve been writing about the intense, long-standing, and load-bearing relationship that alternative comics have to “the visceral,” as both a visual idiom and a common description of the comics-reading experience. In referencing the visceral as a visual idiom of comics, I’m thinking here of all the fleshy openings, abrasions, and fluids that comics have used as the material sign of spilled-out interiority––a somatic shorthand for confessional psychic purge. It functions as a useful (if also always risky) assertion of the unmanaged, uncompromised, and uncensored inner life, as well as a self-evident abjection from commercial or institutional striving. (Paradoxically, of course, comics being uniquely “visceral” is also one of the common claims we make on behalf of the medium’s commercial and institutional value.) 

Abedifard undeniably draws on the kind of fleshy immediacy and confessional truth that viscera’s guts and wounds tend to promise; the point of picking a pomegranate is, after all, that you get to split open and eat the fruit’s abundant, gem-like flesh. For me, these comics are an opportunity to consider the visceral in terms of the literal gut––a figure of consumption, digestion, and emotion set apart from the bursting body or open wound. (If never that far off, either.) Here, viscera’s emphasis falls on the cycles and processes of violent regeneration—creating/consuming, propagating/amputating, loving/rotting––some of which involve extended spans of digestion and interpretation. As Wilson tells us, “the gut is an organ of mind: it ruminates, deliberates, comprehends”;  Visceral feeling is not always instant or decisive. Even then, there’s no guarantee of clarified meaning on the other side; the collection’s final comic, “Ferment,” seems to winkingly acknowledge this. 

Along with “Seed,” “Ferment” gives us the book’s only appearances of an arguable third character––a pair of enormous hands that hold, manipulate, and crush Anar and Guli together (much like Guli holds the miniature Anar in “Propagation”). By the beginning of “Ferment,” Anar and Guli have deteriorated into one shared two-headed body; they clump together in the palm of a giant hand, while a godlike, all-caps voice prompts them to provide a moral takeaway for the book. Anar-Guli delivers one in a series of visceral metaphors: “we’re interlinked, almost like a dense connective tissue” ; “you can try to chew and gnaw yourself free […] split every bit of you, or you can lie down, rest, and digest […] and you will feel yourself soften.” They’ve learned, they say, that there’s no need to keep agitating the wound. But the giant hands destabilize even this ostensibly clear-cut lesson with a final act of violence that will begin the cycle anew. 

There’s a palpable earnestness to these comics. Which is usually a patronizing euphemism for something effortful but not exactly good, but here I mean it as a literal (and admiring) description. The collection doesn’t shy away from the potential embarrassments of sincerity, and neither does Abedifard couch her subject in self-protective postures (wholesomeness, for example). She gives ample breathing room to each narrative beat, and sheepish mortification is notably absent from the text. Particularly (and appropriately) in “Ripe” and “Rot,” Abedifard goes all-in on an indulgent lyric voice that verges on mysticism: “you are paradise ! / filling every edge and pit of my stomach.” 

I haven’t done justice here to Abedifard’s visual storytelling, especially her compositions and her use of texture and color. There’s enough consistency to bring the collection together, but each piece also has its own palette and texture. (I especially adore the shock of the giant hands being xeroxed photos in “Ferment.”) In her explorations of rage, terror, disgust, heartbreak, and shame, Abedifard leaves each feeling open to being or becoming unreasonable, unserious, and outsized. She’s not alone in undermining the usual rules, scales, and stable contexts of emotion––this move feels relatively more common in comics than in other media forms. What makes this version of it especially interesting is that When To Pick a Pomegranate foregoes the emotional insulation and evasiveness that irony often provides. Abedifard is willing to commit to feeling––in all its unknowable, injurious forms. 

Note: SOLRAD also ran Alex Hoffman’s review of When To Pick a Pomegranate on October 30, 2024