Book Review: “Pomegranate” by Helen Elaine Lee
A Heavy Novel
Usually, I spend the first paragraph of my reviews coming up with something clever. I think about what I’m going to write as I read the book I’m about to review. However, when it came to Helen Elain Lee’s breathtaking novel Pomegranate, I felt that I was at a bit of a loss. This is a deathly serious book, and doing anything but playing it straight would only seem to diminish its power. Thus, I feel that I must simply just say what this book is about without much in the way of cleverness or literary flourishes. And there isn’t too much plot in the novel, per se, as the text is more concerned with making poetry as much as it tries to make sense of its main character’s motivations. But what is Pomegranate about? This is just one woman’s story of redemption and rehabilitation. It concerns a thirtysomething queer Black woman named Ranita Atwater, who has just been released from prison. She had to serve a four-year sentence for possession of opioids, but she moves to put that past behind her as she struggles to stay sober and clean, and get custody of her two children — the father has passed on, so they’re living with one of her aunts. Her lover, Maxine, is still incarcerated, and Ranita must now move forward without a partner in her life. She attends recovery meetings and therapy and gradually comes to tell her story and all of the hurts in her life as she tries to reintegrate back into society.
Helen Elaine Lee, the author, uses an interesting narrative trick in coming to tell this tale. She lets Ranita narrate her own story in the first person singular upon being released from prison and what happens in her life afterward, but from her time inside the joint and everything that happened before (as told in flashback sequences) is clinically told through the third person viewpoint. Thus, it seems as though Ranita isn’t allowed to tell her side of the story and live her life as a sentient being until she has earned her freedom. But, as this book makes clear, earning one’s freedom isn’t the end of the story — it is merely the beginning. Ranita has to come to terms with her past, which includes being abused by a leader of her community and also having to deal with an overbearing, burdensome mother who seemingly never appreciated Ranita for whatever reasons. The difficulty in Ranita’s life is that her parents are now dead — her father having most recently died while she was still in incarceration, her mother sometime before that — so she has to find a way to make amends to them that doesn’t lead to having a direct one-on-one conversation with them.
As one can tell, Pomegranate is not an easy novel to digest. It is the opposite of the sticky sweet fruit that is offered in its title, but refers to a sweetness for life that Ranita must discover with help from others — and that process isn’t anything but effortless. Readers may want to take this one rather slowly and savour over the novel’s intricate details and flashbacks to Ranita’s youth and time in prison. The prose sometimes reads like jazz and, interestingly, this novel is being released by the same publisher on the same day as Jeff Boyd’s The Weight as the former can be seen as the flip-side to the latter — which is from the perspective of a Black man invested in modern rock music, instead. Still, the pain of Ranita’s life can feel unbearable to the reader, and the insights she earns can feel searing. However, this is a mostly happy tale of Ranita coming to understand what it means to be a good mother and parent when the role models that she had may have been less than ideal. It is also a damning account of what it is like to be Black in America: a country seemingly where slavery may have been outlawed, but still exists in the form of sending as many Black people as possible to prison so the white majority merely doesn’t have to deal with them in the public.
Thus, Pomegranate is a novel about burdens, not only on other people but also on oneself. It is also a novel about letting go and forgiving yourself. It is a novel that demands the reader come to an understanding of the lives of the marginalized and one more than one count. This isn’t just a book about the trials one must endure on skin colour alone: this is a novel that also tries to look at what it also means to be bisexual and also someone who was an ex-con. This is a powerful novel about what it means for those with “a past” to reintegrate into society in a meaningful way. All of this adds up to the fact that Pomegranate doesn’t feel much like entertainment: this is a story with a Message. While some of it can feel a little melodramatic at times and Ranita’s storytelling feels a little like motivational platitudes, too, what Helen Elaine Lee is trying to do here is make Important Art and speak to the way that society needs to come to terms with those who are Others. All in all, while Pomegranate may not hit the same narrative highs as the work of Toni Morrison, this is still a worthwhile and demanding effort that explores serious topicality and should be read by anyone who has white privilege and trouble accepting people who are vastly different from themselves, as it may open their eyes. This is a book that asks readers to think and reflect and wonder about their prejudices and come to understand that some people may be who they are based on past traumas they have experienced. Pomegranate is a book that resounds with clarity on the topic of identity, and the changes one person is asked to make for the betterment of others. This is an appealing effort by a skilled wordsmith and should be cherished by those who are brave enough to endure its painfulness. It’s, at the very least, interesting.
Helen Elaine Lee’s Pomegranate will be published by Simon & Schuster / Atria on April 11, 2023.
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