I

Red came into the world bloody. Of the Sanskrit rudhira and the Proto-Germanic rauthaz, it means “proceeding from the blood” and “ruddy” and “the bloodred planet of Mars.” The word rudhi means “birth.” 

When I was twelve years old, I watched my sister give birth. I watched her naked body strain dogwise and saw the skull braced between her pubicbones and heard her pain tearing up the air above us. Later, in a makeshift pool, I watched my nephew swim up through the water. He surfaced and drew breath, a masterwork of a human being streaked in mucous and blood. 

Red is defined as a colour at the end of the spectrum, as blood, fire, and rubies. For a long time after the birth of my nephew, my dreams were bright-hot with this colour. 

II

I have sometimes wondered what red sounds like. I imagine that, like the human voice, it has many different articulations.

I’ve heard it in the low laughter of those I love. I’ve heard it in the resonant hum at the back of a monk’s throat and the tolling of church bells and the clean bare song of the muezzin at dawn. A warm sound, flushed with prayer. 

But there is also something imperative about red’s tone. It can be loud, authoritative. It tends to interrupt other colours and talk over them. Imagine red as a drill sergeant. See it lean into the faces of its inferiors – that coward yellow, for instance – and spit out prohibitions, regulations, warnings. STOP. NO ENTRY. DANGER. 

It is just like red to speak in capital letters. 

III

Studies have shown red to be the most appealing colour to eat. Think of pomegranates and strawberries and Liberty apples, blood oranges and plums. A child will often choose red sweets over other colours. In ancient times, sacrificial blood constituted the gods’ main food source. 

A woman from the Middle Ages would have chosen this colour to speak of love, too. A gift of cherries, for example, contained a whole lexicon of romance.

But red is not always to be trusted. Sometimes it is both an enticement and a warning. In two voices, it says EAT and DO NOT EAT. Often, the former is loudest. And so Eve eats the red fruit, as does Persephone. Snow White, too. They are deceived women. They should know better but do not heed or hear the warning. 

What we find in myth is that women never do listen. They are driven interminably towards the destruction of themselves, and, of course, the destruction of men.

IV

Red is often associated with taboo – that which is forbidden, off limits. It may have something to do with all the blood we have inside us. That bright, live colour running through our veins. When it breaches the borders of our skin, we are afraid. A line is drawn between us and it. DO NOT GO THERE.

In The Golden Bough, James Frazer outlines a universal fear among men of the menstruating woman. She must be segregated in a hut. If she touches a pot, it must be destroyed. Weapons will not work if touched by her. 

How does that men’s joke go again? Never trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.

My sister cried the first time she bled. Not because she didn’t know what was happening, but because my mother had not spoken to her about menstruation. The subject was cordoned off inside taboo and she had no vocabulary to speak of it. And so she wept with shame.

My mother inherited the silence of taboo from her mother. When my mother turned fifteen and still had not bled, my grandmother broached the subject by sending her to a doctor. He put her on a regimen of Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. These pills contained ferrous sulphate and magnesium sulphate, both believed to stimulate blood flow.

The word “taboo” is rooted in women’s blood. From the Polynesian tapua, it means both “sacred” and “menstruation.” 

V

Many centuries ago, red was a celebrated physician. Scarlet relieved melancholia. Red stones protected the wearer against fire and lightning. The blood-stone Carnelian was good for haemorrhages and sores to the flesh. I have heard, too, that rats grow weightier under red light. I can believe this. In the mornings my curtains are edible with crimson.

I know a man who suffers from chronic nosebleeds. A deviated septum, he explained. Too many blood vessels too near the mucous membrane. 

He once yielded to his blood nose. He stood in the bathroom mirror and watched the blood stream down his lips and neck, and then he smeared it up over his face. For a long time he looked at his reflection stained in red. All his life he had felt something dark and nameless inside himself. The bloodied face in the mirror named it.

If he had lived in eleventh century Persia, he may have had his nosebleeds treated by Avicenna. The Persian polymath would have prescribed red. Red clothing, a red room, red food. He would have handed his patient a scarlet cloth and told him to press it against his nose. 

Perhaps, on the day he refused to stanch the flow of blood, the man with the nosebleed was trying to speak to his malady. STOP.

But it did not listen. Not even the doctor who rubbed liquid cocaine into the inner walls of his nose and cauterised the blood vessels could make it listen. I would know. I have seen his face streaming colour on more than one occasion.

VI

I once heard the story of a man who melted down his mother’s gold jewellery and recast a bullet in the shape of Buddha. The day before he shot himself in the head, he showed the gold bullet to a friend. “What you hold there in your hand,” I imagine he said, “is my enlightenment.”

Think of how much colour there must have been. Red, and a small fragment of gold. “It would be better to bury them in red,” muses Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. “A dark red.”

The man who shot himself with a Buddha-shaped bullet had been fighting a heroin addiction for years. That act, like all acts, did not come out of nowhere. It took gold and heat. It took deliberate casting. It took an infraction against the capitalised law of red.

VII

In Russian, the word for red (krasnyy) and the word for beautiful (krasivy) share the same lexical root. Beauty as the colour red. 

Consider the beetroot, for example. Cut it in half and it switches on like a lightbulb. Marbled ruby and white, the soft geometric shapes dilate out and out. You can hardly believe how beautiful it is. Touch it and the juice paints your fingers. 

Like my mother and sisters before me, I waited a long time for my blood. When it came, I was rapturous. It was as if, even then, I recognised its connection to tapua, the sacred, and krasivy, the beautiful. As if I knew women’s blood as a gift, as something precious enough to give. 

To bleed without a wound does seem something of a miracle. 

About the Author:

Kharys Ateh Laue is a writer and editor based in Cape Town. She is the author of Sketches (2023), and has written for Pleiades, Isele Magazine, and Brittle Paper. She is the senior editor at Botsotso and is currently completing her Creative Writing MA at the University of Cape Town.

*Feature Image by Dasha Yukhymyuk on Unsplash