MAR - Traveling With Pomegranates

March review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009. [Travel category]

This month was Travel month in the great world of Caty Reading-dom, and I've had this book on my shelf for a while. It had all the hallmarks of things that strike my fancy: female solidarity, travel narratives, pomegranates, imagery and mythos, a clever cover...anyway. Sue Monk Kidd has been a name I've toyed with for years; I'm pretty sure I own both her novels, but I had never read them before this. I bought them in high school, when they came out, book guzzler that I am, but it took me until now, until this book, to sink my teeth into her. (And Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which she talks a lot about in this book, is already ordered and on my desk expectantly.) Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France is the story of Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, taking a number of trips in the formative stages of a new epoch in their respective lives, attempting to find their ways back to themselves and each other, each battling through different feelings of loss and uncertainty.

I could tell from the first pages that I was going to like the book, I could feel the way each woman's sentences mirrored those thoughts that I kept in my own mind, but rarely gave voice to. They thought so deeply about everything, which is clearly the point of a memoir, especially a travel memoir--to go back over the things that have happened and lay on top of them a film of greater meaning--but I still liked to think about these women in the moment, accessing such deep parts of themselves and putting them down on paper. I liked to read passages where one woman wrote about another who had separated herself to go and write, and the book would then revisit the separate woman and I would get to go inside.

This dual nature of the book was intensely poetic to me, the two halves that make up the whole. There is one point where the women go to Eleusis and visit the well where the goddess Demeter is said to have wept for her daughter Persephone when she was swallowed into the underworld by Hades. At different points in the narrative, we get to hear both women, young and old, at this well, as well as watching from the other's external perspective. As a young woman, I identified with Ann, having recently graduated college and felt at a sort of loss for my next step. This was a clear parallel that I sort of expected to take away from their story. What I did not expect, however, was the sort of eye-opening I got reading the Sue chapters. Each time I finished one, I would take a moment and sift over the memories I have of my own mother in the past years and I was startled to see the different shape of those memories after reading. I am planning on passing my copy along to her soon, and I am interested to see what she identifies with, or to what extent, rather.

A striking moment early on comes in the pair's first trip, where Sue buys the two of them small pomegranate charms at a shop in Greece. The pomegranate comes to symbolize so much for these two women: the stories of Demeter and Persephone, the female mysteries of womb and woe, the first experience and the re-experience. I too have a connection to the pomegranate, but mine comes from a different realm. I bought my charm (seen in the above photo) at a hole-in-the-wall jewelry stand in Israel when I was 16. The charm reminds me of the first time I visited the country, the first time I started to connect to my Judaism on my own terms, rather than those meted out by whatever religious program I had been a part of, synagogue or Young Judea or what have you. Pomegranates play a big part in Judaism as well as Greek culture, steeped in theology from the Old Testament as "God's Fruit," the fruit some scholars believe to be the forbidden fruit of Eden. The seeds are said to number some 613, coincidentally the number of mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah, and are meant to represent a sort of righteousness, as well as learning. I knew a little of Demeter and her pomegranates, but it was interesting to see a different side of the symbol I have come to love over the years.

I haven't really even touched on the feminine aspect of this book, and I don't know if I have the words for it right now. Plus I wouldn't feel right pasting it onto the end of a post like this, just for the sake of having it. Suffice it to say that Ann's struggle to find and keep herself throughout her impending marriage, her Yellow Wallpaper dream, and her rewriting the ceremony with her mother all resonated with me on a level that I am looking forward to exploring more. I will flesh that out better another night. For now, adieu.