In Shades of Blue

For some reason, today my mind was playing a song to itself as I was reading. It was a blue piece- not "blues" but just something that made me feel something that in my mind is linked with a dusty blue and a strawberry-yogurt pink. At first, I could not quite place the song- it was there until I thought of it and then it disappeared, only to reappear once I'd decided to quite ignore it. 

As I ate my ham-and-cheese sandwich of a noon-snack, I flipped open my lap-top and went to check on Jhaniel's blog. And what do you know, the song which was haunting me began playing. Finally, I verified the name; fittingly, it was called Blue Caravan. I knew now why it was in my mind- Andromanche had written about it on her blog a while back and I'd reread that post last night and listened to the song before going to bed. 

The song enchanted me, and I replayed it a few times. For reasons that do not even seem to fit to my own mind, the song begged to be paired with Reading Lolita in Tehran. So I curled up with the book and finished it. The book also made me think of that same shade of dusty-blue, a sort that longs to be bright and sunny, but has been forced into a paler shade. A colour that has been cheated of its' desire and made all the more beautiful for that. (Oddly enough, the shirt I decided on wearing today is very nearly the exact colour I'm thinking of.) 

My mind argued that I was being unreasonable to link the song and book together- they had nothing in common. Except that blue feeling. But finally, I realised why I had joined the two.

In the song, Teng sings these lines:

"For my true love is a man,

Who never existed at all.

Oh, he was a beautiful fiction

I invented to keep out the cold.

But now, my blue, blue caravan,

I can feel my heart growing old."

And I thought of how in the book, Nafisi wrote about how during the Thursday meetings, the girls talked about how this was their life they created- their fiction. Also, one of them mentioned how the characters of fiction were the only real ones to have existed; their lives were more fictional than those in the books they read. For after all, they would die and become forgotten, and no one has yet forgotten Elizabeth Bennet. She is real. She endures. 

My blue-day has been shaded by these thoughts of reality and fiction, by thoughts of half-articulated desires and partially realised dreams. Through writing the book, Nafisi has made the girls she taught to become real. They have a life- in her book. They have moved beyond that dusty-blue into the sky-blue they thought that they could never have. They have been moved from reality's fiction into fiction's reality- and no one, not even Khomeini, can destroy them now. 

Sorry for the ramblings, but I just had to get my blue-thoughts written down somewhere. And now, to make up for that, I'll leave you with a video of Vienna Teng singing Blue Caravan.