Red is the Most Violent Color
Short Story Review: “If I Ever Lose My Mouth” by Rebecca Gonshak
“If I Ever Lose My Mouth” by Rebecca Gonshak is a nonfiction piece that deals with the evolution between numbers. Right? Or does it deal with the violent struggle between comprehension and articulation? The violent struggle between mother and daughter? Between the earth and understanding?
“I craved blood and God but settled for the desire to mate and birth babies. 6 was me, and 9 was my mother.”
Summarizing this story would be a disservice. It’s convoluted in its own articulation. But in its perplexing presentation, I think we sense something bigger than words. It’s supremely sensuous. We see bits of human body. We feel fish in our throats. We imagine the voluptuous curves of numbers. The narrator is 6, which she envisions to be pink like Britney Spears, full of lust and shy slopes of the neck. The mother is 9, which is red.
The color red is the central force of the story. The daughter’s life seems to revolve around red: the red insides of a mouth, the number 9, blood, red pens, root chakras that ground you to the earth, the mother. Red is linked to the erotic, to the earth, to violence, to danger. What does it mean that the narrator associates the color red with her mother? Why does the daughter feel as if she is reflecting red back to her mother? What does it mean that the mother writes that the red pen had the most ink because it was least loved?
“The purple pen was running out of ink and about to die, and the red pen envied its love-death.”
We also see the idea of “mandala” repeated in the story. The daughter explains to us that, by the time she achieved the same voice as her mother, her mother had turned “to air, to kief, mandala, the Buddha smoking in bed.” And then, later, we learn that her mother finds mandalas “extremely sexy.” This idea makes her father uncomfortable, but the daughter feels like she understands.
“I think I understand what she means about mandalas: the roundness, the hot and cold colors, the patterns woven tightly, almost bursting. And probably something I don’t understand. Something about the grief, or the kief, or getting older, or being a separate person.”
There’s a lot to talk about in this story. There’s so much to interpret that the story feels like the narrator’s understanding of a mandala. It’s round, like infinity, teeming with colors, and it’s bursting with eroticism and emotion. It reads like a fairytale, like a dream, which makes the fact that it’s marketed as nonfiction all the more compelling.
Read the story at the link below. Then come back here and let me know what you think in the comments. What did you make of all the references to the color red? What about the repeated images of throats, numbers, and white people being thieves and cheats? What did the life and death of her older sister mean to the narrator? How does the idea of a mandala inform your understanding of the story? What does the title refer to? What will happen if the daughter loses her mouth?
I can’t wait to hear your ideas!
