womb

Art by Deb Pollard Materials: Watercolor, markers, and vintage pearl button on paper.

In 1989 I was 37 years old. My body’s sacred work, centered around eggs, hormones and fertility, strongly governed my everyday existence. I’m sure that influence is strong for all women of that age, mothers or not, body conscious or not. I was directing a large women’s choir in Asheville, Womansong, composing and arranging for the women’s voices, as well as leading ritual-like rehearsals in a seated circle on the floor (pretty sure I can’t do that any more!) where I would often read my latest poems.

Now I know that the egg of our own existence was carried in our mother’s wombs while in our grandmother’s bodies. I can see how my imagination in 1989 would go further and further afield, to women’s relations with all the egg-bearers, flora and fauna, of our amazing Earth. Quite a family we are!

Joyce Zonana
The first time I came across the phrase, I thought I must be making a mistake. “Que Dieu l’enveloppe dans sa matrice,” the passage read in French, “May God’s womb enfold her,” or possibly, “May God enfold her in His womb.” His womb?

I’d just started translating Ce pays qui te ressemble [A Land Like You], Tobie Nathan’s remarkable novel of Egypt’s Jews in the first half of the twentieth-century, and I couldn’t be sure I was correct in thinking that “womb” was the proper rendering for “matrice.” But a quick search confirmed my hunch. Matrice (from the Latin matrix < mater) might be translated as “matrix” or “mould,” but that made no sense here. “Uterus or womb” was the anatomical meaning, and it was the first meaning listed in my French dictionary.

The phrase, or something very like it, kept turning up, always after a dead person was named:

Que Dieu accueille son âme en sa matrice.

Que Dieu l’enveloppe dans sa matrice.

Que Dieu la berce dans sa matrice.

May God’s womb welcome his soul.

May God’s womb enfold him.

May God’s womb cradle her.

In all, “God’s womb” is mentioned seven times in this novel set in Cairo’s ancient Jewish quarter, Haret al-Yahud. Each time, it’s part of a ritual prayer, a formulaic wish for the wellbeing of a departed soul. But what extraordinary wellbeing is wished for here, what a remarkable envisioning of God as the possessor of a welcoming, warm womb. Continue reading “God’s Womb by Joyce Zonana”