Genesis isn’t gentle/ Seed by flesh

Like every other girl, my mother, Sylvia Plath and figs, are my Roman empire. So as I sat down to down ideas for a poem to start off my year, these themes were recurring in my mind. I read a lot of Lispector when I write poetry; this is my best attempt to make sense of my stream of consciousness: figs, tormenting boys, pollination of figs, the female fig wasp, birth, my mother, the fig tree analogy. I think my obsession with the fruit started way before I read Plath, in kindergarten actually, my mother used to pack figs with my lunch. They were my favourite part of the meal. You have to split them open before eating them to check for worms, so I would pull them apart with my thumbs. On the outside they were plain; inside they were dark red and densely seeded. The first time the boys in my class saw one, they laughed and asked if I was eating a human organ. That was all the encouragement I needed. I told them it was a heart. I remember chasing them around during lunch, holding the torn figs in my hands, enjoying their horror. Then I thought about something I read about the pollination process of figs: a female wasp enters the fruit knowing she will not leave. She loses her wings inside, lays her eggs, and dies there. The fig absorbs what remains of her. I couldn’t stop thinking about that exchange—how something gives itself over completely so something else can live. It made me think about my mother, and how birth is not a gentle transformation but a consuming one. How parts of her must have ended for me to begin. How maybe I am one of her figs. The villanelle, with its cycles and repetitions, felt like the closest formal equivalent to that kind of fixation. While writing, I kept returning to Clarice Lispector’s line, “All the world began with a yes,” which felt, to me, like another way of thinking about beginnings, and what it costs to agree to them.

Disha Kalyankar