As black women in a predominantly white country, they stand out and also feel invisible. Both struggle with what it means for them. Both deal with color as a marker of race.
Both Zuhra and Mar-the other central protagonist in the novel-are Italian women who are black. And, of course, there are the colors that we human beings are born with: the various shades of our skin, distinctive and indelible, that also tell a story, that indicate our genetic heritage and mark us from birth to death.īeyond Babylon is a novel that interrogates language, race, and identity from beginning to end. Color, in this sense, stands for language itself. In the Middle Ages, when each panel of a fresco told a separate story, each color had a value. They are linked, in almost every culture, to rites of passage and to ceremonies of all kinds. Of sobriety but also impurity, given that it is not an independent tone, but a meeting point of both.Ĭolors have always been freighted with meaning: political, aesthetic, psychological, emotional. Gray is the color of cities, of asphalt and cement. A mixture of black and white, gray may be seen as a compromise, as ambiguity, as a meeting point between extremes. A singular shade that has no opposite, it is the color of in-betweenness, of imprecision, of shadows. Gray, on the other hand, is absent from the color wheel. Red: a primary color on the spectrum, representative of life and death, of anger and love, of communism, of Catholic cardinals, of brides in the East. But red and gray, and the contradictory realms they symbolize, are the two dominant threads. While her loss of innocence at the hands of a predator can never be restituted, her second loss, represented by a state of exile from the multi-hued world, imbues her with a heroic mission.īeyond Babylon is a variegated tapestry that unfurls over more than 400 pages and weaves together myriad stories, voices, settings, and time periods. Her blood, representative of her fertility, her physiological female identity, has been visually muted, altered, literally drained of significance. Sexually molested as a child, this young Roman woman doesn’t see a red stain on her underpants when she menstruates, but a gray one. Zuhra, one of the novel’s two central female protagonists, has been deprived of her ability to experience, perceive, or distinguish color. The quest, in this case, is for color, and for one shade in particular: red. What has been lost and must be found, what must be regained in order to set things right, is something far more elemental, also more elusive, given that it is something most people readily “see” and therefore don’t have to go looking for. The epic quest that sets Beyond Babylon in motion is not for a place, or a sacred animal, or a precious object. Matteo Nardone/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Imagesĭetail from a painting by Daniela Melli from a show of street art at the Palazzo Velli entitled “Exit-Migrate in the Arts,” Rome, Italy, January 2019
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