Here, wedged in
between yellow and green, lies a vast array of hidden colours waiting to be
discovered, but with so few words available to describe them. Even fruit, usually
generous with its naming does not have enough variations to adequately
categorise this part of the spectrum. Yellowgreen, such a young colour. It’s
the bud of a daffodil, softly yielding if you press it, yet firm with nascent
life. If you could peek inside, just before it opened, and smell all those
flowery juices, raw and acidic, they would be the colour of spring and
possibility. But it’s a sickly colour as well, bringing to mind infection and
nausea, and perhaps no one has ever liked it well enough to find a suitable
name.
There was a
cramped corner of Marrakech made irresistible by particular colour that hung
from the rafters of the market house to dry – yellow; like the pollen as it
gathers on a bee's legs. It made me madly, light-headedly happy as it sang its
bright song and whirled away into the dark corners of the old city, reaching
out to touch the faces of the woman through their veils, smoothing the lines in
the old people's brows, playing with the children and twisting around their
legs like cats, making them laugh and jump about. How I loved it… though, just
as it’s said that pleasure comes with pain, the beauty of this yellow made all
the colours in the vicinity jostle for space and I had to focus my vision
otherwise it became tainted. Such is its demanding nature, casting spells that
dizzy the senses.
In Morocco, I
learnt that when the sufis put on their rags and forgo the material world for
the spiritual one, they undergo a 'green death', full of the positive
connotations of that most sublime colour and a gentle forerunner to their
physical death. But I shall have a yellow death, I think, the colour of the sun
and saffron, a blast of last light.
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