Tala Khanmalek
Seeds of the Future Impossible
non-fiction
Baba eats pomegranate arils with golpar while watching Judge Judy. He sits cross-legged on the floor over a pillow in plaid pajama pants. At his feet lies a plastic tray from the 99-cent store on Pico Boulevard, one of several he keeps on top of the fridge. Underneath, a brown-paper grocery bag cut open to protect the rug.
His setup is always the same. On the left, napkins and whole pomegranates of different shades, proportions, and degrees of rot. Some from El Camaguey Meat Market. Some, to everyone’s surprise, from the front yard. In the middle, salt, golpar, a plastic bowl of arils and a paring knife with a neon-green handle, also from the 99-cent store. On the right, a pile of rinds and another of aril clusters that Baba calls “ghooghoosi” after rooster combs.
In the same living room that was once the site of fury, we now eat anar, bought and grown by Baba’s hand. A fruit, not just native to his homeland but specifically to the province where Baba is from. He is alive despite two heart attacks, many surgeries, and a pacemaker. Our hearts and mouths inextricably linked beyond understanding. Still, we try not to give up on words and make something of the rot that remains with us, between us.[1]
I watch him watch TV. Watch him chew the red, the white, and even the brown arils with false teeth. Watch him perform his ritual of eating fruit in bulk before it goes to waste. Here we are in peace that could turn at any moment under Judge Judy’s laws and language and tongue-lashing. Us, in the living room, so mundane yet so extraordinary.
How do we, the victims and descendants of upended lives, experience otherwise impossible moments? When survival robs us of this earthly world, how do we occupy the everyday? If trauma is one way in which imperial formations persist as the ongoing “ruination” of people’s lives and lands, then how do we imagine the future?[2]
I want a future with my father in which the quotidian is undisrupted, eating ancestral foods together. Conversations with banal, repeated words. I want a different history. To claim the past and its living presence. To take back home, family, and country of origin. To make it all mine. I want the future impossible.
My memory grabs hold of the anar doon. Seeds we ate. Seeds we planted. Baba’s tree outlasts the ruin he lived with, and in which he died prematurely. What stays after the body, amid compounded layers of debris? What else leaves a mark on the senses from one generation to the next besides the traumatic effects of empire? The boundless taste of pomegranate. The stubborn durability of seeds. Their substance. Their subjugated histories. “Rebellious. / Living. / Against the Elemental Crush”.[3]
History, with a capital H, cost me home, family, and country of origin. Everything but my relationship with seeds. An eight-thousand-year-old relationship. A “wordless prayer.”[4] A tangible memory in the domain of objects. The possibility of me knowing some other part of me. Of being “unorphaned.”[5] This is the power of my transgenerational relationship with seeds, which signals a problem for linearity and the totality of trauma. I can’t articulate it. I have no evidence of it, no claim to positive knowledge. It’s hieroglyphic. The pulling of flesh. An opening at the threshold of modernity. The smallest anar doon carries the coordinates of a different meta and micro-physics, counter to the sovereign “I” and needed to move toward “living intersubjectivity premised in relationality and solidarity”.[6]
What I’m trying to say is that nothing is past. The present regime acts through the psychic remains of earlier catastrophes. Even the dead are not safe from the enemy and his deathly repetitions.[7] And for the living, trauma is capillary.[8] But so too is the deep red of pomegranate and the network of vessels visible only when waters recede at a low tide. These memories endure in the flesh without allegiance to the boundaries of nation-states, neither individuated nor autonomous. A mundane yet extraordinary memory of Baba eating anar, the pomegranate seed itself, fucks things up in a good way. Dislocates trauma. Provides the moorings for another subjectivity rooted in the body’s sensibilities, the place where clock-time collapses. A “powerful infidel heteroglossia.”[9]
[1] A reference to “The rot remains with us” from Dereck Walcott’s poem “Ruins of a Great House.”
[2] From Ann Laura Stoler’s Imperial Debris.
[3] From Alice Walker’s poem “The Nature of This Flower is to Bloom.”
[4] From Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keepers.
[5] Inspired by Toni Morrison’s use of the term “unorphaned” in Tar Baby.
[6] From M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing.
[7] Adapted from this sentence in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
[8] A play on Michel Foucault’s theorization of “capillary power.”
[9] From Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
Tala Khanmalek is a writer, activist, and educator. She was a 2020 Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) fellow, a 2021 Anaphora Arts fellow, and a 2022 Periplus Fellowship finalist. Her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, the Indiana Review, and Zoeglossia.