I have been passionate about colors for as long as I can remember. I was born with cataracts, so perhaps once they were removed, I marveled at the world of hues and shades, sheens and tinges with a heightened sense of perception, perhaps to make up for the year and a half which I spent not knowing that everything around me was colorful: the toys, the furniture, the people around me, the sky.

When I was eight years old, I traveled from Poland, my native country, to Western Europe, for more eye exams and possible surgeries. While during my first trip to Germany and Belgium the doctors did not touch my eyes, except perhaps for administering some eye drops to dilate my pupils, my eyes opened wide to admire a range of colors that surrounded me daily. And what a magnificent range it was! I could spend hours wandering around the big department stores just admiring the colors competing for my attention. The towels were not just red: they were salmon, poppy red, scarlet, copper-tinged red! The blue t-shirts were not just available in blue: they were in light turquoise, bright turquoise, sapphire blue, baby blue, cobalt blue! I could not take my eyes off the cheerful colors surrounding me. I was soaking them into my body, realizing that the world which I had inhabited for eight years of my life, the world known back than as the People’s Republic of Poland, was pale and gray, dull and sad, in comparison.

Since that first trip to the Western part of Europe, I resisted the relative colorlessness of my daily life by wearing pink, aquamarine or red sweatshirts to school, for which I was sometimes punished with a B or an A- for my daring behavior. We did not have to wear uniforms, but we were told to wear subdued colors, like dark blue, brown or beige, so as not to distinguish ourselves in the crowd of children. Despite the punishment, I wore the cheerful, Western clothing with joy. They gave me a sense of freedom, of presenting myself to others in the way I wanted, not in the way the school officials thought I should blend in with others.

Now that the Polish communist government is long gone, and now that I live in the US, colorful clothing is not so much a sign of liberation, but of self-expression. Still, I revere colors perhaps because during my childhood so many of them were lacking. In Breaking the Silence: A Story in Paintings, my recently published novel that takes place in the postwar, communist Poland, I wanted to convey the absence of colors and the effect it had on people’s lives:

Well, after the war, it seemed that all the colors faded, subdued by suffering. Everything seemed colorless: the ruined homes, people’s lives, people’s faces. Islands of happiness ceased to exist. Most people had to deal with their losses. (p. 32). 

I do not know of any research that would support my claim, but it seems to me that after World War II, when Poland was rebuilding itself, with the helping hand and under the watchful eye of the Soviet Union’s government, colors, in the national Polish psyche became associated with excess, with luxury. And luxury was something one should not display right after the war, right after so many people had perished under the crushing power of the heavy, gray stones of bombed houses. However righteous this idea was, it persisted way longer than the effort to rebuilt Poland; it stuck to our daily lives like the much resisted communist regime that wore on for years, for decades, for a quarter of a century and beyond.   

The absence of color is not limited to Poland though. Milan Kundera made reference to the gray, Soviet-style high-rise buildings watching over the dull landscape of the Czech Republic. Beyond Europe, Barbara Demick’s (2009) book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea offers descriptions of the gray, almost monochrome landscape, “Occasionally, door frames and window sashes are painted a startling turquoise, but mostly everything is whitewashed or gray.” (location 172-175 in the IPad’s Kindle version, with the largest font used).

The author speculates on the reason for the overwhelming lack of colors in the Korean landscape, and the explanation goes far beyond mine, related to the wish of respecting those who died during the war:

In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in the vivid poster  colors favored by the Socialist Realism style of painting. The Great Leader sits on a bench smiling benevolently at a group of brightly dressed children. (…) Red is reserved for the lettering of the ubiquitous propaganda signs. The Korean language uses a unique alphabet made up of circles and lines. The red letters leap out of the gray landscape with urgency. They watch across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate the main roads like mileage markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public buildings. (172-175 to 179-180)

In this description, the red letters are not merely an attractive diversion from the gray landscape, but they in fact control it: they “watch,” “preside,” and “punctuate.” Colors in the North Korean reality have more control of the world than they ever had in the much milder Polish version of communism. At the same time, because they stand out so much from the gray landscape, they become a vehicle for change greater than my refusal to dress in school-approved colors.

“We have nothing to envy in the world,” Barbara Demick explains, is a universally known tune in North Korea. Children learn it in kindergarten and it sung to the workers in the fields or at construction sites as part of the government’s propaganda. Thus, it is also a universally known slogan, for which red letters are appropriate.  Each time Demick brings it up in her narrative about the daily life in North Korea-- based on stories of six defectors interviewed over the period of five years and currently living in South Korea—the characters attach a different meaning to the slogan, depending on their personal circumstances.    

In the beginning of Mi-ran’s, one of the defector’s, narratives, we learn why she had no reason to question the meaning of the slogan until her teenage years. As Demick points out,

Her [Mi-ran’s] family was poor, but so was everyone they knew. (…) Mi-ran assumed that nowhere else in the world were people better off, and that most probably fared far worse. She heard many, many times on the radio and television that South Koreans were miserable under the thumb of the pro-American puppet leader Park Chung-hee and later, his successor, Chun Doohwan. (…) Mi-ran felt she was quite lucky to have been born in North Korea under the loving care of the fatherly leader. (186-189 to 193-195)

The next time “we have nothing to envy” is evoked, Mi-ran, a kindergarten teacher in her twenties by then, has to sing the song to her young pupils. As time goes by, salaries for the teachers shrink, and the children starve to death due to severe food shortages. When Mi-ran began teaching, there were 50 children in her group; when she stopped, there were only 15.  The realization that she cannot help the starving children must have cast a dark shadow over the truth contained within the red letters. Not overtly, not even in the slightest gestures, because this would jeopardize the safety of Mi-ran’s family, but silently, in the form of a plea for help to save the innocent lives. No help came to save them. 

The third time we come across the ubiquitous song with its slogan is when Mi-ran’s boyfriend, Jun-sang, is at the train station and hears the tune sung by a little homeless boy in oversized, adult clothing. As Jun-sang reflects,

It was beyond reason that this small child should be singing a paean to the father [Kim Jong-il] who protected him when his circumstances so clearly belied the song. There he was on the platform, soaking wet, filthy, no doubt hungry (3252-3254).

For Jun-sang, seeing the little homeless boy singing was an epiphany, a moment of self-revelation. From that moment on, there was no doubt in his mind that the North Korean government was cheating its own citizens and not providing the care that Kim Jong-il ‘s fatherly figure portrayed in the propaganda posters promised to fulfill. From that moment on, Jun-sang watched the South Korean TV even when it was a risky activity that could end his career as a scientist. With the broken promise to care for North Korean citizens, I can imagine Jun-sang breaking the red letters into smithereens, too tiny to put them back together and tell lies to others.

The final time we see the reference to the “we have nothing to envy” is when Mrs Song, another defector, made it safely to China. From the physical distance, from the comfort of a home in which she is awaken to the whistle of the rice cooker with enough rice for three meals a day—a luxury beyond the means of most North Koreans—she reminisces about her beloved husband who had taken enormous pleasure in eating and who died of hunger.  She realizes how much of her life had been wasted on just trying to survive and to be subservient to the party that did not care for her. In my mind’s eye, she turns to look at the red-lettered slogan with distain and disbelief. Then she walks away and disappears in the colorful world of South Korea. 

In the end, for the individuals featured in Demick’s book, “we have nothing to envy in the world,” the red-lettered propaganda slogan meant to subjugate the people of North Korea effectively became a vehicle for their liberation. When it could no longer match the reality of the hard daily life, the slogan emboldened the individuals to have doubts and questions about its meaning, and then gave them courage to leave their gray fatherland behind and settle in South Korea.

In utterly different ways and under different circumstances, colors lead to greater personal freedoms. Surely my insistence on celebrating colors is not as dramatic as the defection to South Korea. However, in both cases, colors played an important role and made our lives more meaningful. And for that reason alone, I am grateful to them!