Eartheater explores motherhood without going pronatalist on “Wasp In The Fig”

There’s an old, crude joke, that men enter the world by leaving the female anatomy and spend their entire lives trying to get back inside. It’s a bit reductive, but I have a feeling Eartheater, as much a student of Lil Kim as she is Roberta Flack, would agree. I suspect she’d even take it a step further: we all long for return to whatever amniotic mud birthed us.

Eartheater’s discography has circled the idea of metamorphosis and rebirth before. What sets her latest album Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message, released on July 10, apart from her previous records is circumstance: the album was made around the conception, gestation, and birth of her first child. Around the same time, she serendipitously stumbled across a realty listing for the family farm where she was raised until the age of 15, when the property was sold. “When we packed up and left I said, ‘I’m going to get it back one day,’” the artist recounted on Instagram. She bought the property. And that return brought with it a new beginning, where Eartheater and her husband conceived that very night (so she says).

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I was thinking about this story as I listened to the album track “Wasp In The Fig,” named after the mutualistic relationship between fig trees and fig wasps. Much like Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos, these species have co-evolved into perfect niches, anatomy precisely adapted to attract a single type of wasp to pollinate a single type of fig. Eartheater keeps her relationship private, but on the album, she sings about her husband with pure adoration. “Used to be such a hornet / To then wake up in your father's arms, an angel,” goes “Wasp In The Fig.” You have to imagine she also feels they’re perfectly shaped for each other too, that she ruled over “Sodom and Gomorrah” only until the right symbiont finally came along.

There is a delicate thematic balance to “Wasp In The Fig,” a song that’s completely devoted to family and motherhood without sacrificing art or agency. At a time when women’s bodily autonomy is under attack from every angle, pronatalism has become a right-wing dogwhistle arguing that women would be happier barefoot, pregnant, and unemployed. “A lot of moms have warned me that culture and the art world hate mothers,” Eartheater acknowledged in an interview with The Quietus.

Eartheater wants love to let down her armor, but she isn’t interested in that sort of regressive femininity or reactionary softness. To her, and on her latest record, maternity is a quest or an adventure or an honor, certainly more important than “demon time,” but without a moral imperative. “When I'm on my deathbed / These are the days that I'll come back to,” Eartheater wails at the end of the song’s lone verse. Her childhood home is now her motherhood home. New nostalgias intertwine with the old.

When a pregnant female fig wasp enters a fig, she burrows into the fruit – really an enclosed bulb of hundreds of tiny flowers – through a small hole known as an ostiole. As she passes through this tight opening, her wings are torn off, as are her antennae. Sensorially blinded, she deposits her eggs inside the fig, spreading pollen from other fig plants as she does. This is the end of the fig wasp’s life. Later, her eggs will hatch, and larvae will mate within the fleshy fruit. The wingless males will impregnate the female larvae, then tunnel out of the fruit, carving a path for the cycle to continue again.