The Bluest Sea
One of the first questions a visitor to the Red Sea ponders upon is its curious appellation: why “Red” when the sea’s spectrum of blues range from cobalt to turquoise to cyan? No-one seems to know, but some have surmised.
Dr. Wolfgang Jahn and his wife Rosel Jahn offer this explanation in their book Sinai and the Red Sea (The American University of Cairo Press): “…on some winter evenings, immediately after sunset, the Red Sea is ablaze in an orgy of reds. If only for a few minutes, the sky glows in a display of orange-red fireworks, and colors ranging from red to deep violet are reflected in the water.”
Though I’ve never been here in the winter to witness this crimson reckoning, I think Dr. and Mrs. Jahn might be on to something. While names are sometimes the fruit of a conscious reflection, they just as often manifest via the revelatory route at a given time and place. In the latter instance, the name can appear random, and yet perceptive observation such as the Jahn’s will attempt to retrace the elusive reason that wedded name to object. It’s all speculation, of course, but that’s often where the best stories begin.
Writers find themselves constant contestants in the Naming Game because moniker scouting is central to our work. Sometimes we have to delve deep and search wide to find just the right name for a character or title for a story, novel or poem; at other times the name or title imposes itself upon us like a dictate. Remedy, the name of my first novel’s heroine, revealed itself to me in the kitchen, on a chilly, grey winter morning in Paris as I was percolating coffee. Preposterous! I can’t call my character that – it’s not even a real name! But the disclosure happened and I heeded. My conscious mind doubted while my writer’s bonnet trusted, and where art is concerned the scale must always tip towards faith, which is really doubt put to task. So I wrote Remedy’s narrative not realizing till I neared the end what exactly my character was really up to whilst pretending to pine for her prince; namely, that she set out to remedy the world around her, by turning its contradictions on their noses and taming them into paradoxes. Her name, therefore, fit perfectly.
But back to the Red Sea, which has treated me so kindly this past month. Though it be the bluest of blues it will always hover red in my mind; red because it has energized and rejuvenated the exhausted working-mum-writer who arrived at El Gouna on June 1st. Now I shall pack up clothes, books, and gather the pages I’ve written. Everything in my room is coated with a thin blanket of red sand and I’ll be sure to pack that too.
A snap of the sea to give you an idea of the blue. Bernice McFadden is in the background looking elegant and in her element.
The four of us (from left to right), Razinat, Bernice, me and John after dinner at the Fanadir Hotel.