Reddest Red

by Z. R. Ghani

Be a darling and imagine. The reddest of all reds—
changeable in velvet, the usurper in broadcloth;
smooching the ground, cheek to cheek, in Louboutins.
I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital
under your skin, trumpeted by pulse. I need to exist,
as the poison arrow’s target; dirty on the warrior’s face;
a flag rippling like a dragon overhead.
You wish you could know my names, all secret,
sacred, and true, but call me whatever you want,
I don’t care, or summon me as rose, claret, vermilion,
ladies-blush, lust; evoke me from ruddy, madder,
brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucum—I need
to exist. For no other colour in two lengths of cloth
makes a gentleman and keeps him that way,
and there’s nothing I can’t improve with a scandal,
though I’m happiest reclining on a girl’s pretty lips,
pitying potential left to rot, lesser reds that shall
but one day bloom into me if they dare. Know me
as a fiesta in everything I star in: I tickle a tree
and it’s autumn, I tap someone and they blush,
I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies,
all the time living my best life, as I always will,
me, Shakti, dancing like a graceful madwoman
in the flames of a star, roaring myself redder
(yes, it’s possible), and charging back down to Earth
in the pope’s fresh socks, diving into a dazzling
Diwali of fireflies as they, for a flare-and-sigh,
jaunt through my impermanent soul. But I need
to exist. Shed me, if you must, on your wedding night:
sari cloth, petticoat, silk blouse swaying with the bed,
or pin me as a bindi on your third eye like a sun,
so when they look at you they’ll see me first, exalted.

How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone
Red.

---

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Zaina, where did this poem come from?

Zaina: This poem was inspired by a book I read. It’s called My Name is Red by a Turkish writer called Orhan Pamuk. it’s such a beautiful novel. It talks about red and art and miniaturism in such kind of flair and floral language, but not done in a saccharine way. It’s so beautiful.

And it is a murder mystery, but the way it’s written is it’s written from different perspectives, different narratives. And you’ll have a tree talking, for example, or the colour red, or blood in this novel, which I found really creative. And I thought, ‘I want to…’ – because it’s so poetic. I wanted to write a poem kind of very similar to that, or just inspired by it, but obviously not copying it.

So I began writing about it, inspired by that. And also, at the same time I was writing, I had these other poems, about Persephone and Hades in this pamphlet and nature and all these things. And I really wanted to unify all these poems and write an introductory poem. And this is what this is in this pamphlet. It’s the first poem.

And to be honest, how it came together is it’s just automatic writing, which is when you just put pen to paper and you just write what is in your head and you don’t think too much. I just wanted it to flow, because that’s how I imagine red would be if it was a person. It would just be so confident. It doesn’t need to overthink anything. It believes in itself so much. It’s self-serving.

Mark: No self-esteem issues with red!

Zaina: No self-esteem issues. Yeah. And I just wanted to include all these references, which I found when I was researching, the history of red. And, there’s kind of references to fashion, to natural dyes. When I was researching it, I was very surprised to find that it’s not just a… it’s a masculine colour. Red is also a masculine colour, not just a feminine colour. I always thought it was a feminine colour. So I kind of talk about, ‘no other colour in two lengths of cloth makes a gentleman’, which is…

Mark: Is that the redcoat, the soldier?

Zaina: Yes, it is. Yeah. So the British Army used to wear red, in the Napoleonic Wars, which is funny to me to wear red on the battlefield. But yeah, it just kind of expresses confidence, doesn’t it? To your enemy.

Mark: Right, right. So it’s had quite a fluid history in terms of the associations.

Zaina: Yes.

Mark: And, I’m really curious about this thing about the novel because I would never have guessed that this came from a novel. And maybe we don’t need to know that because it’s not dependent on it. It’s almost like the spirit has flown out of the novel.

Sometimes you read a poem and it’s really obviously linked into another work of art, whether that’s a novel or a painting or whatever. And you kind of…it feels like it’s in dialogue. I mean, to what extent do you feel like this is in dialogue with the Pamuk novel, or do you feel that it’s kind of flown free and come its own thing?

Zaina: I agree with you. I think it’s flown freely from that. It was just the starting point. It was the inspiration. But when I was writing this, because it was done in the technique of automatic writing, it just kind of became its own creature, its own thing. And that’s good in a way because I didn’t want it to be linked with this novel. I just wanted to write a poem that was in this voice, in this red, that red is speaking to you. That was inspired by the novel, but this voice is its own voice, and it just came out of that automatic writing.

Mark: And it’s interesting that red in the poem says, ‘Call me whatever you want, / I don’t care,’ or, ‘Summon me.’ It’s like this is the spirit of red that you’re channelling through the automatic writing.

Zaina: Yes. So it is witchy in a way, it looks like a spell.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Zaina: And when I think of red, I do associate it with the kind of darker symbolism of red, which is witchcraft and blood, thinking about the Incas and the Aztecs who would probably use it, a pigment of red in ritual, and they wore it in their headdresses, their clothing, they put it on their face. That’s what I mean by ‘dirty on the warrior’s face’ as well.

Mark: What was it like for you as a poet channelling that voice? Is it exciting? Is it scary?

Zaina: It was exciting because, I am not a very, very confident person, I wouldn’t say, and I’m quite reserved. And one of the reasons why I did write this poem is because I wanted to channel that confidence and that pride and be completely uninhibited, you know.

Mark: Yeah.

Zaina: Yeah, sometimes you just want to step outside of yourself, you know. And I think, for example, actors can do that. They just can go mad and become someone else.

Mark: Yeah. That’s quite true.

Zaina: And I think poets can do that in a way as well, you know. It is a dramatic monologue, and there are lots of dramatic monologues in this pamphlet too, because one of the motivations behind writing this was just to step out of myself and just feel liberated from being held back so much. And that’s what red means to me, it’s just freedom.

Mark: Well, you’ve done a tremendous job there, because there’s not a moment of hesitation right from the beginning. ‘Be a darling and imagine.’ I mean, that’s so kind of… it’s seductive and confident and taking us into its confidence, but it’s confidence, I guess, in both senses. But we’re doing what it’s going to tell us because we are going to imagine…

Zaina: Yes, so the first line, yes, ‘Be a darling and imagine,’ that’s sort of talking about this poem but this pamphlet is about readership, it’s about how readers interpret what they read and they make it their own. So as readers, we take in what we read, and we use our experiences to process what we read. And, interpretation is so important. We all see the world differently, we see colours differently, I’m sure. So the imagination in this pamphlet is so, so important. It’s such a core part of this. You know, it’s a major theme here. And that’s why I really wanted to get that word at the forefront. Yeah.

Mark: And for anyone who hasn’t read the pamphlet In the Name of Red, this is the first poem in the pamphlet. So this is really, on the one hand, it’s the voice of red, but it also seems like it’s the voice of the poet. ‘Be a darling and imagine.’ It’s like Shakespeare at the start of Henry V, telling the audience to ‘work, work your thoughts, and in imagination, see a siege’, orsomething like that. And he’s saying, ‘Look, you have to join in if this play is going to work, because we’re just some guys on a stage with some threadbare props.’ But you invite the reader to join in and to imagine and participate in the book right from the beginning.

Zaina: Yes. Well, another inspiration for this pamphlet was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. And she talks to the reader a lot in the novel, she addresses the reader, I’m feeling like this, this is happening to me. And as a reader, when you’re addressed, you’re more attentive and you want to do what the writer says. And I really wanted to include that element of talking to the reader directly. Because as a writer, that gives you so much power.

And I think red would want all the power. You know, as a person, you just want to control everything. So yeah, that’s another kind of element to that, speaking to the reader, because there is a relationship between the writer and the readers, kind of a symbiotic relationship. The writer provides the work but the reader brings the spirit and the life to the work, they bring it to life, I think. A piece of writing is nothing without the reader. That’s why, I think.

Mark: Right. And very often, it’s an assumed relationship, isn’t it? But maybe in poetry, particularly, some poets like to play with that relationship and be quite artful like you’re doing here.

And, it’s always been a theme on the podcast to how much does the ‘I’ of the poem, how closely does that align with the ‘I’ of the poet? Now, clearly, on one level, this doesn’t align because as you say, it’s a dramatic monologue. But then the game has got another level, because, behind that, as we’ve seen, maybe there is the poet’s voice as well.

Zaina: Yeah, definitely where there’s a repetition of ‘I need to exist.’ That sort of reflects my urge sort of to prove myself as a writer because this is one of the first things I’ve ever written, this book. I’m not a very experienced poet. And yeah, I need to exist. So it’s kind of from the heart. I want to be part of this poetry world. I want to be here. I need to exist. Yeah, I would say that’s me speaking there from the heart.

Mark: ‘I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital / under your skin, trumpeted by pulse.’ Isn’t that wonderful, ‘trumpeted by pulse’? Yeah, it’s a joyous poem of announcement, isn’t it?

Zaina: Yeah, it’s saying, ‘I’m here, and I’m not going to go away. I want to inhabit all these things. I am versatile. I can morph into different things,’ as a poet can, a poet can inhabit so many different characters and write about so many things. And poetry is so free. It’s not like prose where you do have to think about structure but you can just be so free about it. It is a form of art, I would say, poetry more than it’s about writing.

Mark: And obviously, there’s so much verbal richness in this, I mean, all the words for red you’ve got: rose, claret, vermilion, ladies-blush, lust, ruddy, madder, Brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucam. I mean, I had to look some of these up. Did you have all of these at your fingertips? Did you have to look some up? Were there others that didn’t make the cut? I mean, how do you deal with such a kind of richness of description?

Zaina: Yeah, I did do my research, to begin with. I wanted a variety of different things, claret being, wine, vermilion is a pigment, but it’s also used in Hinduism. You know, the wives would wear red on their hairline to show that they’re married. And there’s these kind of juxtapositions. You know, there’s that kind of, following the rules, religion, and then there’s lust and being free and not being afraid to be sexual almost. And that’s what colour is, it inhabits all these different ideas. And it’s just free to do that. And that’s what I wanted to show. There’s just so many things you could write about colour. And that’s why it is such a long poem because there’s just so much to include. But yeah, I wanted to include as much as possible and be as varied as possible.

Mark: Well, also, another thing I noticed is obviously there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to adjectives to describe a colour, but I love the way you use verbs as well. So you say, ‘I tickle a tree / and it’s autumn’. That’s just delightful. ‘I tap someone and they blush. / I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies.’ I mean, you get a shiver down the spine when you realise the implications of that.

Zaina: Yeah. Again, it’s just showing how varied this colour is. It’s elegant, it’s delicate, but also it can storm into a battlefield. It’s powerful. It’s almost like I’m writing about a trickster god, like Loki. He could be in the myths, he could be very serious, but most of the time he’s just joking around. So I’ve always been fascinated by these trickster gods because yeah, they do very, very big things. They can destroy the universe if they could, but at the same time, they don’t take themselves seriously. They’re just joking around most of the time.

Mark: So Loki is from Norse mythology, but you’ve also got Shakti from India…

Zaina: Yeah. So I include a lot of Hindu references because when I think of red, of all the cultures, I think Hinduism really adopts red. Shakti is a very important goddess in Hinduism. She is the wife of Shiva, one of the creator gods, but she’s sometimes seen as more powerful than Shiva and she has many different guises. Sometimes she’s a demon slayer. Sometimes she’s the goddess of death, karma, and sometimes she’s a little bit more benevolent and kinder.

But this is introducing this theme of femininity and women not just being, one-dimensional. We have a good side, but also there are times when we do lash out. It’s introducing… You know, I talk about my Mum a lot in this pamphlet, Persephone, mythical character, and myself. You know, there’s this very chaotic poem in this pamphlet about Alice in Wonderland and it’s just so mad, called ‘The Red Queen’ and she’s all mad in the book. So it’s kind of looking at mental health in a way as well.

Mark: And it’s also really nice as an opening poem. This one colours the other poems, it’s like we’ve got spatters of red from this in things like ‘The Red Queen’ and some of the other poems later. I think that’s one of the real pleasures of a collection of poems, is the way the poems start to refract and reflect each other and speak to each other.

Zaina: Yes. This was definitely supposed to be an introduction to all the other themes in the book, kind of getting yourself ready for the chaos that follows. It’s not all chaotic. There are moments of reflection and contemplation and pauses, but this is a very chaotic, mad pamphlet.

Mark: So picking up on the writing process. I’m going to pick up that thread from the automatic writing. How close was your first automatic draft to what we see on the page today?

Zaina: I’d say it’s very close. I had to revisit the list of reds, rose, claret, vermilion. I think I took some things out and added… I think urucum was the last thing I added.

Mark: And what’s that? That’s one of the ones I had to look up. What is urucum?

Zaina: It’s a plant. It gives off pigments of red and it’s used in South America by Indigenous people. Yeah. And they rub it on photographs to protect themselves, to protect their spirit. It’s kind of used as protection.

Mark: So was the form basically there? You’ve got this wonderful almost like a helter-skelter of it’s all one verse paragraph and there’s a lot of enjambment, a lot of lines spilling over the sense from one line to another and so on. Was that pretty well established in the original draft?

Zaina: I had to revisit where everything ends, the line endings, the enjambment, making sure that it had a sort of rhythm to it, it wasn’t just blocky and prosaic. I wanted it to flow like a poem. And the ‘Be a darling and imagine’, that’s where it all started, ‘Be a darling and imagine’, ‘Okay, I’ve got that now. Now this is…’ Everything else flowed from that, you know. So yes, it was automatic writing but I had to start from ‘Be a darling and imagine’. Once I got that, I just wrote it down from there and it was pretty much like this with some tweaking here and there, but yeah.

Mark: Yeah, so fine-tuning, but this is… And it does have that kind of freshness, that energy of the… I really feel that automatic voice coming through, all the way to the end where you have quite a bold ending certainly formally, where you’ve got two lines.

So we’ve got one long verse paragraph and then we get these two lines on their own, including one of the boldest enjambments I think I have ever seen. So you’ve got, ‘How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone’ – line break – ‘Red.’ And it’s red with a capital R and a full stop afterwards. I mean, how did you get to that? Did that just spill out? Did you think about that?

Zaina: No, so that came afterwards. I didn’t know how to finish this kind of flowing of words, yeah. I didn’t know how to finish this. You know, I could go on forever and then I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve kind of come to an ending here with the sun and the bindi and when they look at you, they’ll see me first.’ I thought, ‘Okay, it doesn’t sound like an ending, it’s kind of coming to an ending but it’s not ending.’ And yeah, I spent ages trying to find how to end this and then maybe it should just kind of go back into itself, this red, what am I? Essentially, ‘I am a colour, I’m fortunate to be a colour’.

And yeah, it just came. One day it just came to me. And this is the beauty about poetry is that you can just put it to one side but it’s still in your mind. Okay, you’re carrying it around with you while you’re shopping and you’re going out or whatever and it’s still in your mind, and one day something just drops, and this line is one that just sort of dropped while I was doing something that was not even related to poetry. And yeah, it was all on one line and then I thought, ‘No, we need red on its own at the end because it loves itself so much, it needs to be on its own, kind of standing on this platform and loving itself.

Mark: It’s brilliant, I love it. And I also love that story about you patiently waiting for the ending because, there’s a lot of stories of poets getting the inspiration for the beginning of a poem, you know, Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’ and so on, but we don’t often hear the story of the poet wandering about and ransacking their brains and going for walks until they get the ending, but very often that’s the case, isn’t it?

Zaina: Yes.

Mark: You’ve got most of it but haven’t found the ending yet and it’s kind of irritating and it can’t let you go. But if you’re patient, as you were, and receptive, then sometimes it will drop into your lap.

Zaina: Yes, I find it more difficult to finish a poem. I’d never know when to finish it really and you can kind of keep on writing forever, especially for a poem like this, where the subject is vast. But yeah, some poems I find it very, very difficult to find that impactful ending. And the best thing to do, and that’s my advice, is just to wait, and instead of chasing it, let it come to you. I think a lot of writers do that. You just wait for it to come to you because it does. You just need to have some faith.

Mark: It’s a little bit when you’re trying to remember the thought you just had. The harder you try the more elusive it is, but then if you maybe stop to think of something else it will pop into your mind. It’s a bit like that.

Zaina: Yeah, I think with anything creative, when you put too much effort into it, when you try to restrict it too much with thought, it does the opposite of what you want. You need to let it flow. You need to let go a bit and then kind of everything sort of falls into place. It needs to be effortless. It needs to feel effortless. You shouldn’t try too hard.

Mark: Yeah. Well, thank you, Zaina, you know, just as the poem could have gone on forever. I think, we could talk all morning about all the different aspects of this poem, but I really think this is maybe a good chance for us to have a listen to it again and appreciate that in the light of the conversation we’ve just had. So Zaina, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing such a delightful poem.

Zaina: Thank you so much for having me.

---

 

Reddest Red

by Z. R. Ghani

Be a darling and imagine. The reddest of all reds—
changeable in velvet, the usurper in broadcloth;
smooching the ground, cheek to cheek, in Louboutins.
I’m here, I’m always here, itching to breathe, vital
under your skin, trumpeted by pulse. I need to exist,
as the poison arrow’s target; dirty on the warrior’s face;
a flag rippling like a dragon overhead.
You wish you could know my names, all secret,
sacred, and true, but call me whatever you want,
I don’t care, or summon me as rose, claret, vermilion,
ladies-blush, lust; evoke me from ruddy, madder,
brazilwood, orchil, cochineal, urucum—I need
to exist. For no other colour in two lengths of cloth
makes a gentleman and keeps him that way,
and there’s nothing I can’t improve with a scandal,
though I’m happiest reclining on a girl’s pretty lips,
pitying potential left to rot, lesser reds that shall
but one day bloom into me if they dare. Know me
as a fiesta in everything I star in: I tickle a tree
and it’s autumn, I tap someone and they blush,
I storm into a battlefield and it’s a field of poppies,
all the time living my best life, as I always will,
me, Shakti, dancing like a graceful madwoman
in the flames of a star, roaring myself redder
(yes, it’s possible), and charging back down to Earth
in the pope’s fresh socks, diving into a dazzling
Diwali of fireflies as they, for a flare-and-sigh,
jaunt through my impermanent soul. But I need
to exist. Shed me, if you must, on your wedding night:
sari cloth, petticoat, silk blouse swaying with the bed,
or pin me as a bindi on your third eye like a sun,
so when they look at you they’ll see me first, exalted.

How fortunate I am to be a colour, let alone
Red.

---

 

In the Name of Red

‘Reddest Red’ is from In the Name of Red by Z. R. Ghani, published by The Emma Press

Available from:

In the Name of Red is available from:

The publisher: The Emma Press

Amazon: UK | US

Bookshop.org: UK

 

Z. R. Ghani

Z. R. Ghani lives in London. She graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in 2012. Her poems, which explore themes of identity, femininity, religion, and nature, have been published in literary journals such as Magma, Black Bough Poetry and The Willowherb Review. In 2021 her first collection of poems was shortlisted in the Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. In the Name of Red is her first poetry pamphlet. 

Twitter: @zr_ghani

A Mouthful of Air – the podcast

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