It’s a defining aspect of her character, and indeed, her love of words and stories is one of the resources she has to draw on in her recovery and healing it’s also thematic. I talked to a book club this week, and somebody noted the way Ranita loves words - her mother made that a mark of measuring up - and another person at the book club mentioned that she does that too, and it made her relate to Ranita. I wanted Ranita to ring true in all kinds of ways. And also, a complex character is a character whom readers care about. As a Black woman, that’s how you survive, seeing things with that sort of multiple lens. But this is also a reflection of how I experience the world. How intent were you on trying to create a character this fully complex?Ī: As I teach creative writing at MIT, I’m always pushing students toward depth and complexity in characterization. Q: Another striking thing for a reader is the sheer complexity of Ranita’s life, and by extension, our own lives - she’s curious, intellectual, a recovering addict, reconnecting with her family, grappling with a violent past, and much more. So, what are the possibilities for us to draw on, to find power within us, around us, and between us? That’s what Black literature is often fundamentally about: the power exerted by institutions and systems of control and by the “Master Narrative,” to use Toni Morrison’s phrase, which describes the ideological script imposed by those with social, economic, and political power on the rest of us, and our resistance and defiance of those definitions and limitations. The language you used makes me recall that when I taught the MIT class Black Matters for the first time with two colleagues, back in 2009, our thematic framework for the course was power from without and power from within. But isn’t part of the journey for Ranita to discover the sources of her own power, whether rooted in friends, nature, or community?Ī: Absolutely, I think that is a core thing that I’m examining. Q: Since you mentioned power: Reading the book made me think about how society exerts power on people in different ways, legal and informal. I am telling a lot of painful stories, but I believe in the power of community, nature, love, wonder, and storytelling to renew and heal. What is the toll of that? And what are the possibilities of reclaiming our bodies and voices and stories? I’m interested in the power of love, and how love is a practice, what it means to belong, and what our responsibilities are to our people. I’m probing what it means to be looked at but not really seen: the ways that women, particularly Black women, are scrutinized, eroticized, exoticized, and judged. Within the framework of incarceration and Ranita’s journey, I also wanted to think about the body and what women endure, and how politics are always played out on women’s bodies, and Black women’s bodies in particular. I also wanted to illuminate resistance and liberation. For Black people who are incarcerated, that’s also connected very much to the history of enslavement, convict-leasing laws, Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and unpaid and low-wage work. What is wounding and what is healing? I wanted to illuminate the devastating emotional and psychological toll of our retributive carceral system - the dehumanization, the trauma of being warehoused and rendered invisible and thrown away like trash. The overarching things I’m interested in are loss and possibility. And accepting and owning her full and complex story. She is grappling with embracing her queer identity and figuring out what that means to her. And also, it’s Ranita’s journey to own her love for the woman on the inside, Maxine, who has helped to inspire her. It’s about a Black woman getting out of prison and trying to stay clean and repair relationships with her kids and family and the aunts who have been taking care of the kids. To you, what is the essence of the book?Ī: I think of it as a journey of healing and self-acceptance and autonomy. Q: Broadly, “Pomegranate” follows the story of Ranita, who is trying to rebuild her life after four years in prison for drug possession, as she tries to redefine her own sense of humanity. Lee, a professor of comparative media studies/writing at MIT, recently talked with MIT News about the book. A lively, intense, intricately structured book - the title is from a gift Ranita’s father gives her in the story - “Pomegranate” has earned wide praise. The story tracks the journey of Ranita Atwater, a queer Black woman redefining her life after four years in prison, as she digs into her tumultuous past and rebuilds connections with her children and family. That’s a motif of Helen Elaine Lee’s new novel, “Pomegranate,” published by Simon and Schuster this spring. A pomegranate might seem a bit mundane on the outside, but, like many things in the world, it contains a wondrous richness inside.
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