Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity by Rahimi Sadeq

Author:Rahimi, Sadeq [Sadeq Rahimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317555490
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Impurity and cleansing: the color red

Along with the running theme of ironic discrepancy, another major theme strongly connects Senem’s village square and balcony stories: the theme of impurity and cleansing. Both events are constructed around a burning fire that was meant on both occasions to act as a cleansing agent: in one event it was to cleanse a certain stain off Senem as a social subject; in the other it was to burn everything ‘red’ and erase a charm off Senem the private subject. A question that I cannot help entertaining is, ‘Could the stain for which Senem was to be cleaned be understood as a “red” stain?’ When Senem’s psychiatrist told me of the day Senem had made a fire on her balcony, she said, “[Senem] collected bushes and tinder in the balcony and lit a fire, and then she threw everything red she found into it, including a red door knob and bloody hygiene pads.” Elsewhere in that same interview, the psychiatrist also told me of a fight that Senem had raised at one point with her husband, because while he had been traveling abroad Senem noticed bloodstained sheets in their apartment and thus believed that the husband had had a secret relationship with another woman. Her husband, of course, was traveling in Romania at the time, according to the doctor. We do not have enough data to decide whether those ‘tainted sheets’ were ‘real’ or of a hallucinatory nature, but in either case the association here with that event and the pursuant ‘red-burning’ event and the village square vision is hard to miss. The color red is a semiotic ‘hub’ in Senem’s story that serves to link the personal to the collective. Consider the fact, for example, that elsewhere in the interview (see the following discussion) when Senem told me of her ideas about the red Turkish flag she said, “Red symbolizes the bloods that have been shed for our flag. I mean all that blood that has been shed for the Republic, for our freedom … so that’s a bloody thing, it’s a bloody rag, excuse me for saying that.” The association between ‘bloody rag [kanlı bez]’ and stained hygiene pads is immediate in the Turkish semiotic system, especially in the discourse of a female subject. The association between the ‘stain’ and color red is simply too pervasive through the discourses of the patient and the clinician to ignore. When the clinician spoke, for example, of the fact that Senem would pick fights with anybody in the ward who had any red pieces of clothing, she made it clear that Senem herself never made such a connection (between her picking fights and the red item) but, instead, that she would often accuse the other woman of having been “dirty” – establishing once again the association between color red and a sense of being stained. But how are we to understand the significance of such an association, between color red, female blood, the Turkish flag, and an

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