I hate the colour RED - by Eyitoluwase Soyinka

I stood in the doorway that eveningI watched, waited. My eyes became blurry,My lids burned with the cruelty of what they were forced to bearAnd in that still anguish,With my face caving in, features breaking into indecipherable bits, like acronyms without interpretation as old age lines etched themselves permanently into my eighteen-year-old faceI asked myself a question:“Was I going to be next?” You see, i had been told a story from a young age, a story that had turned into tales by moonlight.It was one I hoped even my great-grandchildren wouldn’t hear,yet I prayed, with bruised knees and clanking ankles, that they were warned.We were cursed… The village headmaster, a young man with a shoddy, plum-faced wife and two sons, had fallen—dazzled and helplessly in love—with a woman in a red dress.So besotted with her beauty, he had run away, stowing her in his teacher’s bag. Foolish maiden, she was.She had fallen for the way he chose her, taken her aṣọ ìbálẹ̀, and torn it to rags by becoming with child.The red dress faded into the drab cotton of maternity gowns, and the butterflies of their stolen love curdled into the birthing pangs of regret. The fantasy was over; The headmaster longed to go home... and home he went.The woman watched in abject terror as her love walked back into the arms of his past, welcoming arms that held no space for her, and in that instant she understood what she had become.So on that fateful day,She had worn her red dress,tottered on her heels, colored her face,and strutted, her round belly leading the way, to the river, and birthed her child onto the shore, and let herself fall in."That woman was my great-grandmother. My grandmother’s story was easier to understand. Her husband hadn’t loved her. She had borne only daughters. So the day she had worn that same red dress, it wasn’t surprising to hear the mourners crying the next morning. But my mother, she was different. She saw the red dress not as a garment, but as a ghost. If two was a pattern, then the third would be a curse. So she burned every scrap of crimson she owned, and swore she would not be written into the same story.How then could I understand that the woman who made me breakfast for school, who patted my neatly plaited cornrows and pulled me close into the folds of her breast held together by a worn brown tie-and-dye wrapper that had seen better days, as she whispered, 'When you come back, we’ll talk about that Segun boy... you have a crush on him, ehn?' How was I expected to reconcile that image with the red dress in my arms, and the fearful stares and wails from family members? I hate the color red.

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