An Annunciation In Ochre
Mother Animal, Chapter 3
3.
An Annunciation In Ochre
“A woman needs to tell her own story, to tell the bloody version of the fairy tale. A woman has to be her own hero. The princess cuts off her hair, blinds her eyes, scores her arms, and rushes wildly toward the mouth of the dragon. The princess slays the dragon, sets off on her own quest. She crushes her crown beneath her foot, eats dirt, eats roses, deals with the humility and grandeur of her own human life” (104).
- from The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, by Louise Erdrich
Last month, we observed how in the fairytale tradition, a woman’s longing for a child can conjure babies out of apples, hazelnuts, juniper trees, hens, frogs, snakes and flowers. How the whole living world is leaning in and listening, participating in conception.
In these stories, terrestrial, celestial and chthonic forces seem to have their ears tuned for that call for new life, and a woman’s speech - “If only I…” - carries an old resonance that can be heard across species.
At the end of last month’s chapter, we explored the recurring symbolism of the red, the black and the white— if I only I could have a daughter with lips as red as the apple peel, and skin as pale as its pome, and hair as black as earth— and how they encode a kind of maiden-mother-crone trinity, a “wisdom to do with the blood of women— red stain on white cloth—and its life-giving magic. Wisdom about the black earth our blood comes from and is supported by, and will return to” (from Conceiving Fairytale Apples). A wisdom, I’ve been musing in the intervening weeks, that is as old as the ochre handprints pressed on the walls of the Paleolithic.