The Question of Red

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

‘I’ve learned not to read humankind by racial characteristics.

History is like a long, twisted joke. You never know when the punch line will come.

She thought beauty the most overrated attribute in the catalog of human qualities, and couldn’t understand the currency it held in the Javanese culture.

no woman should accept the conventions of her name, much less be trapped by it. It was Amba’s fate to rise above the old judgments, to give her name its own meaning.

proceeded to teach themselves how to breathe meaning into their names.

Later, Amba would learn that politics is not about getting it right. It’s about getting it wrong rightly.

He who doesn’t know her, doesn’t deserve her.

Sadness demanded a big heart. And hers wasn’t that big.

“These are hard times. Flowers are a bourgeois comfort. Or a poet’s conceit.”

Reading poetry is a sort of prayer, Amba thought.

she felt like something was soaring inside her, bearing her aloft, as though her life was about to change.

she had shut down their world in order to open up hers.

She was ready for more.

All adults liked to warn you about life’s dangers. They did so not because they knew about the world, but quite possibly because they were cowards.

But, you see, not everything foreign is English.”

there was no ground for patriotism.

Pride: what a nasty thing. Nasty and corrosive, often sounding no different from vanity.

at certain critical junctures, politics and duty are one and the same.

There was no one here who needed anything of her, no one wanting her. Is this what abandonment really meant?

“This is the first thing / I have understood; / Time is the echo of an axe / Within a wood.”

Too fast, this dismissal of things once loved, and this denial of how desire destroys.

Astounding how similar the face of freedom can be to the face of fascism.

Jealousy, Amba knew, clouds judgment and poisons all common sense,

She needed a man who would understand that she must be the center of her own story,

by opening her entire world to him, he made her shame and guilt seem trifling.

I didn’t then know the words for the myriad shades of black—jet, ink, ebony, coal, raven—much less the names of carbon-containing pigments—bone, lampblack, drop black. I did not know yet that in this alien language that has eased into my own, black is not always evil; it is not always scary or calamitous. I did not know then that in the poems of lovers and losers alike, black can even bring peace. And that the reason the world is so fraught with violence is because Black and White are cast as enemies, as absolutes: Us and Them.

Do you remember saying once, lightly, perhaps in jest, that black might even be the color of light?

That meant loving a thousand colors, loving what makes you feel alive. It also meant loving imperfection.

I’ve left my home to journey, and to journey is to enter Deep Contemplation.”

vanishing can be the sign of resurrection, as black can be the color of light.

history is not always on your side, but for the most part it knows its place.

there was no difference: train stations, transit lounges, moving walkways, boarding areas—they were all the in-between places that were his true home.

Some say that happiness writes white; it doesn’t show up on the page.

Yet in my heart of hearts I believe in this: give humans darkness and most will see the light.

domination only breeds resistance.

It’s amazing how language can be deployed to do man’s dirty work.

Idea becomes doctrine, doctrine becomes slogan, slogan becomes the seal of loyalty.

But I’ve discovered that learning to rest in solitude is in itself a religious experience.

“Suffering can’t be compared.

“History knocks ordinary folks off the record. It makes them disappear by not putting their names down on Posterity’s list.”

History, indeed, is a heartless giant.

No journey is ever about one person alone.”