The Process
Using myth in Pilgrim State
Demeter and Persephone - a summary
There are many versions of this story and it is told across the world but in the Ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Zeus (the most powerful of the Gods) agrees to let Hades take Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, to the Underworld to be his Queen without the prior knowledge or agreement of either Goddess. Up to that point Persephone and Demeter have lived in a state of blissful contentment with each other.
Once she realises what has happened Demeter searches frantically for her child, taking on the appearance of a mad woman, not washing or combing her hair, till eventually, in desperation, she curses the Earth, spreading winter and famine across the world. Through this action Zeus is forced to concede and at last he gives permission for Demeter to retrieve her daughter. However, Persephone has already eaten the seeds of a pomegranate, an action that binds her to the Underworld, forcing her to return to Hades for three month of each year; at that time, when Demeter loses her daughter, winter returns and re-claims the Earth.
The myth and Pilgrim State - a context
The Mother Goddess is the most ancient of deities. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter the Mother originated in Ancient Greece around the seventh century BC, but we know Demeter was worshipped long before that date.
I’ve had an interest in Greek and Roman legends since I was a child. Later, when I was researching my mother’s life, I discovered she too had loved the Classical world, so perhaps it’s not surprising that I chose the story of Demeter and Persephone to frame the narrative of Pilgrim State as this particular myth has a mother and daughter as its main characters.
Even as a child I had noticed the way stories were repeated across time and cultures - creation myths, tales of a great flood, mythical stories of the loss of paradise, these narratives are told and re-cycled across cultures again and again. It seemed clear that these myths were not just fairy tales, not simply stories for children. When I joined RAG (the Radical Anthropology Group) I found myself with a group of people who felt the same; that myths are a code, a key to our past, a way of reading the events which shaped Human pre-history. The story of Demeter and the brutal kidnap and seduction/rape of her daughter Persephone is one of these ancient key stories.
At first I thought it was extraordinary how well the story of Demeter, her love for her daughter, her separation from her child, her subsequent madness and triumph over death seemed to echo my mother’s story until I realised the obvious; that this was no co-incidence. Like all myths, the story of Demeter and Persephone survives and is re-told because it contains a universal truth, dealing with the complexities which lay at the heart of the mother/daughter relationship; love (or the absence of it), the transition from adolescence to maturity, dependence and individuality, anxiety around intimacy and separation and the sure knowledge that at some point a separation must occur, even if it is only finally accomplished through death.
I followed the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone in the Prologue and Epilogue of Pilgrim State pretty faithfully, though like any storyteller I took the liberty to re-write it in my own words. I’m not a fast writer; each sentence feels too important, but the Prologue and Epilogue of Pilgrim State was an exception, there seemed no problem, the words flew onto the page.
I kept the myth of Demeter and Persephone running through my mind as I was working on Pilgrim State, it deepened my understanding of the mother/daughter bond and gave the writing texture, a particular narrative lift, providing an epic, universal quality to what is essentially a personal, in some ways a very domestic memoir; it was the context my mother’s story deserved.
Demeter was a central deity in the mythology of Ancient Greece. She was the Mother, the Mistress of the Flowers, Goddess of harvest and fertility, often depicted holding a sheaf of corn. Although Persephone is Demeter’s daughter she is also, in that extraordinary way only a Divinity can actually be, seen as another aspect of her own mother, that’s why Demeter was often portrayed as three sided, the originating trinity of mother, daughter and crone – all the wonderful faces of woman.
In the context of Ancient Greece, Demeter’s was a relatively egalitarian cult; even slaves and women were encouraged to take part. Attendance at Demeter’s mysteries, which were celebrated every seven years through a ritualised pilgrimage to her shrine in Eleusis, offered devotees the promise of an easier passage from life to death.
It was expected that everyone would attend Demeter’s Mysteries at least once in their lifetime. It was a sacred, if at times a raucous pilgrimage. Many historians now believe that this ceremonial journey to Demeter’s temple took the form of a re-enactment of Demeter’s search and retrieval of her daughter from the Underworld, including ritualised bawdy dialogue, jokes, a carnival mood and symbolic enactments of death and resurrection. Traditionally the story of Persephone’s abduction was also part of marriage celebrations, endorsing through it’s re-telling the inevitability of the often stressful and at times enforced transition of girls from the state of maidenhood (‘Kore’ in Ancient Greek is one of Persephone’s titles) to maturity and therefore to the marriage bed. Even today in some parts of Greece and the Mediterranean a pomegranate is given to a bride as part of the wedding festivities.
Many interpretations have been made of the myth of Demeter and Persephone; after all, it has been a source of inspiration for mystics, writers and artists for millennia. For some people, like Freud and Jung, it speaks of essential female qualities, about the process of separation and maturation, of the sexual energies that are destined (so we are told) to divide women against each other, of the creative anger and the so called ‘madness’ that can be exhibited by a mother protecting her young. For others it is a story of female resistance, exemplified through the ebb and flow of the cycles of the seasons, or it is a way of understanding the unremitting turnabout of life, a celebration of the possibility that maternal love, that essential bond between women, could work so powerfully it might even traverse the bounds of death. All these interpretations are compelling in their own way, and I’m sure there is truth in them all.
About Writing Pilgrim State
The last few years of working on Pilgrim State has been, in a real sense for me, a pilgrimage. I jokingly told a friend recently that the story of writing Pilgrim State could make a book in itself; the truth is, as this friend well knew, it would, though perhaps this is not the right time to tell it.
I had wanted to write my mother’s story for some time; it’s hard to remember exactly how long, but certainly it feels as if I’d been considering it in one way or another most of my adult life. It began as a family project, a way to find out more, not just about my mother; like many children who had been in Care, our family had little information about what had happened to us as children.
My brothers and I began with research, getting in touch with whoever we thought might have relevant information. We traveled to Jamaica and America, we had interviews with Social Services and returned to many of the Homes and places we had lived. We were lucky; some records had been lost or had ‘disappeared’ but Freedom of Information Acts in the US and the UK had recently been passed and while some documents were withheld (in America for reasons, we were told, of ‘State Security’, in the UK because they referred to people still living) we were given access to an amazing amount of material. While this research answered many questions, it left even more un-answered; there was confusion around dates, there were discrepancies and gaps, not helped by the fact that my mother had at times used a variety of names, but one search led to another until at last we were able to piece together a chronology that appeared to work. As I continued to look at my mother’s story what began to intrigue me was the realization that even with the contradictions and discrepancies everything my mother had told me, even the things I had expected to find had been embellished, were verified, either through documentation or conversations we had with people who had known her or us. I felt as if I was finding my mother, or rather that my mother’s voice was finding me. But the question, in terms of writing her story, was this; how could I make sense of the hundreds of documents, the photos, the conversations, and the memories? How could I use them in a way that wouldn’t detract from their immediacy, their veracity? As soon as I began writing Pilgrim State it became clear that the structure of a typical memoir would not contain the story. Some of the documents, particularly the verbatim court transcripts and the sound recording, were deeply moving, they spoke with more clarity than any reconstruction could, they didn’t need further dramatisation. I needed to find a way of writing that wouldn’t undermine the power of these documents, a style that would help me explore and understand what my brothers and I had found.
At this point I hadn’t thought of publishing, but I knew I wanted to write something that family and friends would want to read not just because they had a personal interest in me but because it was well written. I realised I needed space to think, time to understand, guidance and support to develop my skills. In 1997 I began a post-graduate degree researching Black British literature. In many ways the qualification was secondary, I was hoping that this period of study would give me the opportunity to learn more of the world my mother had lived in, the context in which she had made her choices. If I was lucky, I thought, it would also gave me confidence to write at length; a daunting task in itself. Being made redundant some years later gave me the financial support I needed to sit every morning and begin what seemed, and was in many ways, an epic project. Of course it wasn’t easy, but with the support of family and friends I kept going. I approached writing Pilgrim State as if it was work. I joined a local writing group, I chose three Arvon residential courses that seemed appropriate to my needs and I kept writing.
I wanted to bring to life not just the look of a particular place, not just the events, I wanted to evoke a response while giving the reader a number of different alternative perspectives. It wasn’t so much a voice I was looking for, I could still hear my mother speaking to me, it was an atmosphere, a rhythm; when at last I that rhythm beating in my heart as well as in my head I knew I had become connected to something real; it became the backbone of Pilgrim State.