The Womb Shaped Fruit
The pollination process for a fig does not start with an alluringly structured flower or a vibrant color, but rather, it starts with a smell—sweet and enticing, drifting through the air until it tickles the senses of a female fig wasp, who is zipping around some feet away. This smell will attract her to come closer to the premature fruit with a promised whisper that sounds of the word safety. But the female fig wasp does not follow this smell laced in safety for herself. Instead, she seeks it out for her children, wanting them coddled and cradled in a valley of tiny flowers hidden within the temptress fig—flowers whose petals act like bassinets for growing and rowdy babies. And so, to get to this safe little nursery, the mother wasp must torture herself. She must squeeze through the narrow opening at the bottom of the calling fig and endure the tight space, sacrificing her wings which are ripped off her back, while ignoring her antennae as they get pulled out from her delicate face. Once inside, bruised and battered, the female fig wasp will visit as many tiny flowers as she can. She will give these flowers the pollen they desperately crave, but she will also drop her children inside of them—a goodnight kiss farewell and then down into the bassinets they go. This wasp will die, deep inside the fig, surrounded by her unborn children. She will be satisfied by their safety because this is her life’s work, her one and only mission—to be a mother, and to live and die solely for her offspring’s prosperity.
The male children of this late female fig wasp will hatch first, knowing nothing of her motherly drive and feminine devotion. Her male children will be fixated on only one thing: impregnating their unborn sisters with belligerent motivation. Like the fate that should be bestowed upon all violating men, these male children will tunnel their way out of the fig and die with no memorial, no life, no importance. The female children, now pregnant and left behind, will make their way out of the tunnels crafted by their rapist brothers and fly out into the sunlit world, ready to repeat the same labor as their mother.
Before even truly maturing into the fragrant and juicy fruit that we love, the fig will be labeled as an executioner, a womb, and a coffin.
My mom used to drive a black Nissan 240SX before she was married and had kids. The 240SX—a sports car made for professional women in the late eighties and early nineties—was her everything. It was the greatest companion to her job as an accounts receivable, which she got after being the first daughter in her family to go to college—a degree she paid for all on her own—and the car matched her leather pumps, black briefcase, and fur jacket perfectly. My mom met my dad when she had this car, and it was a piece of their whirlwind romance, like the packet of green apple gum they traded back and forth between offices and cubicles with love notes attached.
When my mom got pregnant in 1997, she sold her black Nissan 240SX because she couldn’t fit a car seat in the back. Every time she tells a story about this sports car, it always ends with a mournful sigh and a proclamation that she misses the car deeply, but she had to put being a mother and the safety of her soon-to-be son first. My mom gave up her car, and the next thing she knew, she was giving up her job, and after that, she was giving up her apartment for a house on Timber Road.
A few months ago, my mom was talking to me and said, “I don’t like my life.” She said that she missed her job, missed wearing her leather pumps, missed having a black briefcase to carry around, and missed shrugging on her fur jacket in the morning. She said that she missed driving her 240SX.
In January 1963, Sylvia Plath published her novel The Bell Jar in the United Kingdom under the pen name Victoria Lucas. The beloved work wouldn’t be published under her own name until 1966—and even later. In 1971, It would finally be published in America after years of upheld family wishes over the sensitive autobiographical content found within its pages. For many readers, one page has always stuck out in particular—a page found in chapter seven which meddles in the metaphorical property of the fig tree.
For Esther Greenwood, the novel’s main character, the fig tree stands as the image of her life, reflecting back to her directly and beckoning with dozens of possibilities. She describes every possibility as being a plump and teeth-rotting fig—so sweet, so full of life, the red center like a beating heart pumping blood into the body of happiness. To one fig, Esther attributes being a famous poet, to another being a successful professor, and to another being a mother: a happy mother, with happy children, and a happy husband. But like all fruit, figs do not stand the test of time, and before Esther can satiate her growing hunger for a sweet life, the figs begin to rot on their branches and fall to her feet.
Esther walks away hungry, never getting to taste a good life, with black fig flesh sticking to the soles of her shoes.
After tucking her two children into bed on February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide through the inhalation of carbon monoxide by sticking her head into a gas oven. She died deep inside her London apartment, one room over from her sleeping son and daughter, doors closed and towels sealing up the gaps where wood met floor, ensuring their safety.
Human beings often attribute the feeling of warmth with love and security. We are created in the warmth of bedsheets, we grow in the warmth of wombs, we love the way sun-warmed grass feels under our bare feet, and the way a warm mug feels between our palms. Is our love for warmth an excuse for the greenhouse we have locked Mother Nature inside of? She is pounding at the glass with fists made of wildfires, and kicking at the metal structure with feet as strong as glaciers collapsing into still, arctic waters. She is watching her children gas the land and life she has built for them, and she is watching as they call it survival, listening as they call it thriving.
Mother Nature visibly mourns the beauty that has been destroyed at the hands of her human children, destroyed by her act of being a mother who gives it all up for her small ones, who gives them everything as they take, take, and take.
Eighty million years ago, somewhere in West Asia, a group of primates—who would eventually evolve into the complex human beings we are today—were picking figs off trees for consumption. I imagine these creatures lying out on their bellies, under the warm sun, savoring the fruit one bite at a time, or using a finger to spoon some of its mushy flesh into the mouths of their children. They must have enjoyed the fruit all year round, for figs thrive in warm conditions—tiny spheres of life, not particularly fond of the cold.
Yet the humble fig is a fruit that endures, meaning today, gardeners all around the world grow and harvest them, even in places that face harsh winter months. The key to such endurance is survival through dormancy, especially for fig trees living solitary lives in large pots. When the first winter chill drifts through the dry air, fig tree owners are urged to expose their trees to it, letting the cold take hold, and haul the fruit bearer off into a deep, dormant slumber. The trees should then be stored in a cool, dark place until the time for growth comes around, once again.
I was hauled off into a winter of dormancy when I witnessed my mother cry in front of me, openly, for the first time in my life. Her tears were the first exposure of icy winds that blew and commanded my soul into a space of cool, grief-stricken darkness that would last for the rest of winter. I remember these moments of exposure so well, yet I don’t remember all the time I spent dormant. But then again, isn’t that the whole point? Dormancy is a survival strategy, a way in which living things can endure the coldest of periods, the bleakest of days, and the harshest of feelings.
It started in the haze of sleep and the pounding of wind and rain upon the glass of my window, in the room I used to share with my sister. The woman in me now, who studies literature, can’t help but look back on that awful rainstorm and note the perfect symbolism to reflect the ruin about to come. It was around three in the morning on Christmas day, when my mother unexpectedly came into our room and sat down on the edge of my sister’s bed, directly across from me. I awoke in a fog to my mother saying, “Girls, girls wake up.” And I knew from the fragility of her voice that she was crying and when I gazed up at her from my pillow, I could confirm this from the makeup—which she shamelessly sleeps in—that was rubbed off her face and streaky with fresh, salty tears. In the mixture of Christmas excitement, sleepy confusion, and noisy rain, my mother told us that our grandfather had passed away only an hour earlier. A day celebrated for holy birth now curdled into an endless stretch of years marked by death.
Although my grandfather’s death would come to disturb me later—with horrible memories of his funeral and tears of grief mixed with shower water—what disturbed me most in the moment of hearing this news was my mother crying. I had never seen her cry before and I was puzzled by these tears she shed over her father, because most of my life had been defined by her disliking her father, who wasn’t just the man she called “dad,” but also her abuser.
I realized that night—the night which conjured up my very own winter of dormancy—that our love for people can also become dormant. The physical abuse that my mother experienced at the hands of her father, pushed her love for him into a dormant space, dark and cool, only to be broken open when death came knocking and announced that the love no longer needed to survive, because it no longer had a place to go.
When I enjoyed a cracker with leftover cheese from our Christmas charcuterie platter that year and slathered a helping of Dalmatia fig jam on top, I could barely register the sweetness—could barely get the image of my mother crying, out from behind my eyes.
I think the difficult task of coming face to face with your mother’s fragility has caused human beings to turn their backs on the land that has nursed them through it all. We wish to turn a blind eye to the pain ravaging the woman whose motherhood has labeled her as resilient. Maybe this blind eye has given us the courage to be the ones to cause the ravaging pain…
Demeter wandered Greece in hopes of finding her daughter, Persephone, alive and safe. Persephone, who was cherishing the beauty of a spring meadow, picking flowers among nymphs, was suddenly torn out of youthful peace and abducted by Hades, getting hauled off into the Underworld without a trace.
Her mother, goddess of Earth, goddess of harvest, giver of fertility, plunged the world into barren despair with tears of wicked pain dropping to the green landscape, turning it brown and cold. She searched for her daughter far and wide, being let into the homes of many Greeks. One home was tended by the king of Attica, noble Phytalus. Phytalus could not give Demeter her daughter back, for he was no Orpheus or Odysseus—men wily enough to descend into Hades’ realm, with only prayers to return them above ground safely, once again—but Phytalus could give something else, and that was kindness to this hurting mother; this king was a giver of grand hospitality.
To show her appreciation to Phytalus’ warm embrace, Demeter gifted him a fig tree, which would bear sacred fruit that would be honored by many people.
In the end, Phytalus harvested a fig, and Demeter walked away, still with no daughter.
Scientists believe that hundreds of thousands of wildlife species have gone extinct at the hands of human beings. Do you think Mother Nature is wandering her land in the hopes of finding them alive and safe?
When I was eight years old, I had a really bad accident on the playground during recess. A few kids playing tag ran into my back, causing my face to smash into a pole that was holding up the bars of the jungle gym. It happened so fast that I didn’t even register that I was hurt, not until I looked down and saw blood dripping all over my purple shirt, down onto the wood chips that were softening the hard earth. Another student nearby must have seen the gore and my tears bursting, because she quickly ran to me, looped an arm around my back, took hold of my hand, and led me off to the nurse’s office. Stuck in my brain is this awful image of my crimson blood lining the hallway floor in tiny droplets, a map from the main entrance to the baby blue nurse’s quarters.
After the nurse assessed the damage and placed an ice pack on my battered face, my teacher showed up and informed me that my mother had been called about the situation, and that she was driving over right away. I needed my mother so badly. I needed her comfort and her soothing words, but all I could think about was her seeing my blood lining the hallway floor, and walking into the nurse’s office, overwhelmed with horror at the sight of her child hurt.
A lot of people I know are woefully aware that my biggest fear is blood, and I think this accident is the origin of that queasy fear. Yet in a lot of ways, I think I fear blood because it means that this body, for which my mother gave up her whole life, has been damaged. It means that I have given my mother another image of her child in pain to keep her up at night worrying.
Mother Nature is on her knees begging her human children to stop hurting the Earth, for she cannot watch their bodies and homes endure any more damage at the hands of these harmful inflictions. The images of her children choking on smoke, dropping dead in extreme heat or seizing up in extreme cold, of their belongings getting consumed by floods, and of infectious diseases taking hold, each one a new worry line added to her skin; each is a new cross Mother Nature is forced to bear.
My father is sitting in our family den nursing his crippling anxiety and depression with a bottle of Xanax and a package of Nabisco Fig Newtons, while the green Genoa figs in his garden go from ripe to rotten, dead before their owner can muster up the courage to go outside and harvest them.
My mother is on the couch next to me, whispering while pointing in the direction of the den: “When is it my turn to hurt? When is it my turn to be in pain and lie down?”
I fight the urge to look at her and whisper, Mommy, don’t you know that you traded in your life of comfort for a family? Don’t you know that in this unfair world, mothers do not get to rest?
When we feminize the land and call it our mother, are we saying that it is perfectly acceptable to hurt a woman? In our feminization, have we accepted the fact that our land is weak and fragile and overly emotional, that she can probably handle all of the ruin raining down on top of her, with no rest, even if she acts dramatic about it?
We call the land our mother because we need her. We drink her water like milk from the breasts, and we lay down on her solid ground like babies in need of skin to skin. Yet we have forced the land to be our housewife, in charge of raising ungrateful children, in charge of pleasing the family, even as she yawns with exhaustion.
Within a life marked by motherhood—a life devoted to the safety and prosperity of her kin—the female fig wasp only finds a moment of rest amid the act of dying.
I cannot let my mother, or our land, be the female fig wasp.
Works Cited
Cordova, Justin C. and Young, James B. “Lady Lazarus: An Insight into the Sui-cidality of Sylvia Plath.” Methodist DeBakey Cardiovascular Journal, https://journal.houstonmethodist.org/articles/10.14797/mdcvj.1481.
Higgins, Susan. “Pollinating Figs: the Inside Story — Fig Wasps.” Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, https://www.lewisginter.org/fig-wasps/.
North, Allison. “10 Fascinating Facts about Figs.” Roots Plants, https://www.rootsplants.co.uk/blogs/features/10-fascinating-facts-about-figs.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London, William Heinemann Limited, 1963.
Scott, Ian. “Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” was originally published under a pen name.” National Library of Scotland, https://blog.nls.uk/sylvia-plaths-the-bell-jar-was-originally-published-under-a-pen-name/.
“Winter Care Tips for Fig Trees.” Lazy Dog Farm, https://lazydogfarm.com/blogs/growing-figs/fig-tree-winter-care?srsltid=AfmBOoq80KCmC4jX-zKVhFm-LSJzfLkmRtO9ZDnaOkgN8q-mSuF7WVBtY.
“Phytalus.” My Eleusis, https://myeleusis.com/en-us/the-myth/parallel-myths/phy-talus/.
Lori Yamond is a junior at SUNY Old Westbury, where she is studying multicultural English literature and foundations of creative writing. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, crocheting and managing the Little Free Library she owns in her hometown.