I Cannot Wash Away the Blue
Medium: Sound
Country: UK, Germany
Year: 2023
Medium: Sound
Country: UK, Germany
Year: 2023
I Cannot Wash Away the Blue is a sound piece that interweaves the history of the indigo dye in India and its relationship to the independence movement with a personal address. The piece was first performed on the Montez Press Radio and later performed live at the Tate Modern as part of Tate Lates 2023.
“I Cannot Wash Away the Blue” was performed at Tate Lates 2023 as a spoken word piece and lecture. The title refers to the artist’s attempts to wash indigo-blue dye from her hands after painting, and finding that the dye refuses to come off. In this spoken word and video piece, this frustrated attempt to remove the dye becomes a metaphor for the steadfastness of trauma -both personal and generational. The work explores the history of the indigo dye and its relation to the British colonial violence in India, tracing its eventual symbolic relation to Indian independence from colonial rule, and the horror of partition that came with it. On a personal level, the poem attempts too to come to terms with the artist’s own family history. Her grandfather left India shortly after partition: the piece interrogates the silences surrounding his story, and questions the extent to which these silences have affected her own precarious identity.
I Cannot Wash Away the Blue
(The Ballad of the Blue Elephant)
You wrote me of your obsession with indigo. You wrote you were on a journey to find it, and you wouldn’t return until you did. True indigo: a colour so pure you’ve never seen it. Only its shadows dancing like sunspots in the corners of your vision.
I cannot wash away the blue,
I cannot wash away the blue.
When I was sick you’d lie with me
All night, hovering in the corner like a shadow
I lay cocooned in sleep and drugs on the bed
With nothing but vision
And the spots of mould on the hospital ceiling
And there you were, almost spectral,
Merging inchoate with the paisley
You became the room
but you also became
Me
I cannot wash away the blue,
I cannot wash away the blue.
And when I was well again
In the September where blue and black became indistinguishable
You became a hurricane
Of indigo tears.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
Sometimes I feel like I have no past
Have no history
When I look back, I feel I exist in some kind of eternally immediate present
Because my history seems to me like a memory or a dream
Like a fading photograph
Torn in fragments like splinters of glass
A dream of thick, heavy fog
Through which I stumble
Bumping roughly against incoherent objects
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
And how does one even begin to relate to a country that tore itself to pieces
Literally, in two pieces?
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
Because my grandfather tells me no stories
About his childhood
About 1947
He leaves me to imagine
Bombay in smoke
Delhi in smoke.
Or maybe because
I’m afraid that if I look too closely
At my history
I’ll find an empty room.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I dreamed last night of a blue elephant
Trampling through indigo-dark fields
His body was blazed with a spectral light,
The rain falling through him, eyes dark with
A raging and incandescent fire.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
His destruction across the beautiful land was total
And all-consuming. I couldn’t speak
I couldn’t move - I was rooted to the earth like a tree in an electric storm.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
One day I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
When I was sick, you’d lie with me
When I was well again, in the September where blue and black became indistinguishable
You became a hurricane of indigo tears,
a monstrous blue elephant
Your rage across the quiet lands was total
And all-consuming.
I cannot wash away the blue.
I cannot wash away the blue.
Stills from two-channel video installation “(Self)representation in Indigo” (2022)