Review: RED, I. Allan Sealy

The Painter's Family

The intense cover of Sealy’s latest book captures its essence. It is that perfectly effusive shade of red with the letters of the title embossed over the surface. Tantalized, you flip through and stop short at the dedication: “To the writer’s family”, and below that, a painting. It should have been in colour. Matisse, The Painter’s Family. The Painter is missing and his daughter wants to step out of the frame.

Written in the form of an Abecedary, Sealy constructs three parallel stories that are bound to collide. There is the stodgy ‘N’arrator and his conflicted relationship with his ‘D’aughter; ‘a creature who will not stay’, and his ex-wife ‘O’live. There is ‘A’line, a wealthy Matisse fanatic who will rip through his canvas just to find the source of the colour red. She is in love with ‘Z’ach, a musician who hears the world as sound. And finally there is ‘G’ilgitan who steals his way into the landscape of Red. He is a low caste criminal, an amateur painter of trucks, signs and tiles. He falls in love; with a stolen painting and with Aline. And finally, there is the ‘red’ that is Matisse’s obsession and the elusive ‘R’ed who is obsessed with Matisse.

The book, like Matisse’s Red Room is intense, delicious and palpable. Sealy is indulgent with his plot and his language without compromising on structural integrity. He is crafty with his words, scattering them like seeds, watching them grow, take root, ripen into a delicious red till they begin to bear the colour ‘Y’ellow; the colour of ‘repose’ that comes after ‘the song of red, after the scrum of brown and blue and green’.

Read red to decipher the codes.

BLESSING FOR SCHEHERAZADE, Age 3.

And you will live happily ever after, you wild child with your fanatic obsession with strawberry pink and all its corollaries!

And you will never be contained, constrained, locked up in Gothic castles with iron chains and white mice and spindles meant to poke your tiny little fingers!

And you will always live life pink-sized, giant, bubblegum pink. And you will always be radiantly free—

I’ve tried hard to keep you, to make you my own as if you came from me, as if you were born from my words, from my womb. You give me gestures; a cherubic smile, a crayon painting filled with different shades of pink, or a story that you tell me while I try to put you to sleep, a tale about a princess locked in a castle: you drift in between slumber and dream, you change positions, move from my lilting lullaby to your nanny’s silent symphony.

You make me jealous of the universe, of all that you touch and feel, of everyone who isn’t me. I offer you my pink heart; torn around the edges, dog-eared. You crumple it into a ball and throw it into a river and watch it float downstream. You watch while you twirl gracefully, my lovely ballerina! Your hands are raised above your head and you stand on tipytoes and your pink dress swirls on the edge of a soft wind.

I ask you for your pink heart in return, all you give me is a hug. Warm and coveting, but poor compensation for my beating, crumpled heart that you tossed into the tide. You wrap your arms and your legs around me, you cling to me like a teddy bear. You call me your doll and you play with me—you make-believe wash my hair, pity-kiss my face, fumble with my skin, tickle me till I slip into laughter and forgetting.

You make a playground of my body. You jump onto my lap when I’m sitting and slide down the length of my legs and go ‘Weeeeeeeeee’ and then you climb over me and slide again, and again. When I stand you leap up to reach my heart as if it were a princess locked in a tower, begging to be rescued. You climb upon my long, winding hair and you grab my heart. It is pink and it is bleeding.

Why wont you protect me? Why wont you keep me locked inside your 3 year old ballerina body? Why wont you twirl my hair with your fingers like I unfurl your curls?

You do not know the meaning of red! You know only the world of pink. I changed the colour of my heart for you! I used a magic potion and made the blood contort from deep red to swift, pristine pink, like the cotton candy that you dipped your lips into. Your tongue swerved around its flesh while you ate off it, like forbidden fruit.

You do not know the meaning of sugar, or the unbearable lightness of fluffy, cotton candy. You only know pink and that is enough. You dug into its core and found the source of its colour, your pink lips slipped into frenzy and everything else ceased to matter; your unknown universe, your parents back home, the mall that we were in, the barbie in your pocket, the drawings you made of Mr. Flower earlier that evening or the metamorphosis of my blood. You stood walking still. And in that quiet instant you became pink and stayed forever and left and never returned again once and for all, once upon a time not so long ago.