blue
COLOR HAS LONG fascinated me. I spend days or weeks debating color choices for knitting and art projects. As a kid, I loved mail-order catalogues for their distinctively named palettes. My shelves teemed with books containing facts about color — names for various shades, how ancient pigments were made (crushed insects, plant extracts, and sea snail secretions), and the meanings of colors in different cultures. Highly conscious of racial differences, I found this last topic compelling. I would match my favorite color that week (it changed constantly) to the meanings provided and see where my tastes aligned.
While I recall few details — such as white is a color for mourning in Japan — what I remember, unfailingly, is absence. Each time I enacted this color-play-as-identification, I imagined my way into a past, land, and set of values other than my own. Because, as with most Western maps of world cultures then and now, the cultural diversity of Africa and Afro-diasporic peoples was not represented.
Imani Perry’s latest book shows this absence to be a speaking one.
