time held me green
Archaic green colours time. Passing centuries are evergreen. To mauve belongs a decade. Red explodes and consumes itself. Blue is infinite. Green clothes the earth in tranquillity, ebbs and flows with the seasons […] We feel green has more shades than any other colour, as the buds break the winter dun in the hedges.
— Derek Jarman, Chroma (1994)
What does green mean? Like every colour, green is multivalent. It combines cultural symbolism and history with our own perceptions, moods and memories. Things I associate with the colour green:
grass
arsenic wallpaper
the Palm House at Kew Gardens
absinthe
bodies of water when the light hits a certain way
Kermit the frog
a particular velvet coat and matching skirt
the Queen of Elfland’s gown, and fairies in general
The unnamed narrator of Marie NDiaye’s Self Portrait in Green (2020), translated from French by Jordan Stump, is haunted by mysterious green women. At first the women wear green clothing, or have pale ‘ogress’ eyes. But when the narrator’s own mother becomes such a woman, she wears pink because ‘we’re well past such childishness now, in a way.’
The narrator begins to seek out the green women: they are necessary to her sense of self. She worries that they might disappear from her life, ‘leaving me powerless to prove their existence, my own originality.’ How to ‘find bearable a life without women in green exhibiting their slippery silhouettes in the background’?
I need to remember they decorate my thoughts, my invisible life, I need to remember they’re there, at once real beings and literary figures, without which, it seems to me, the harshness of existence scours skin and flesh down to the bone.
In an interview with Marie NDiaye for The White Review in 2021, Aurélie Maurin comments on the ‘dreamlike world’ and fairy tale nature of Self Portrait, whose title suggests some form of self-disclosure. The book contains autobiographical details: chapters dated to the early 2000s, the author’s home in the Garonne, the number of her children, details of her mother’s life.
NDiaye was influenced by the fairy tales she read as a child, the Brothers Grimm and stories from her French and Senegalese heritage, such as Charles Perrault and collected Tales and Legends from Senegal by Fernand Nathan. Asked whether she is the green women, NDiaye replies:
I’m not entirely sure what those green women represent, but they don’t represent me, I don’t think. They’re more like beguiling women, in my view. The ‘I’ of the story is much closer to me than the green women. Ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by women […] This book is a self-portrait of how I was bewitched by ‘the feminine’.
What are the characteristics of NDiaye’s green feminine? A description of the narrator’s mother seems to encapsulate its essence:
My mother is a woman in green, untouchable, disappointing, infinitely mutable, very cold, able, by force of will, to become very beautiful, and able, too, not to want to.
The first green woman is a teacher who inspires dread, connecting the colour with cruelty. Others appear as a charismatic but demanding neighbour, an ex-best friend who marries the narrator’s father, the erotic vibrancy of a woman known only as ‘Ivan’s wife’. Her mother, whose existence was supposed to be as ‘immoveable as stone’, shocks the narrator by having another child within a short-lived relationship.
These women have different personalities but crucially they are all willing to be off-putting, to convention and the somewhat judgemental narrator. So unsettled by her mother’s news, she buries the postcard and picture of the new baby underneath the neighbour’s chicken coop, as if trying to get rid of a changeling. But she is still drawn to the green women, contrasted with the ‘ordinary’ lives of her two sisters. They are almost her muses.
Green is uncanny. In Europe, it is connected to fairies and the supernatural — from mermaid’s tails to the Green Knight of Arthurian legend, the Queen of Elfland in Scottish balladry to the leaf-green coat of the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004).
The association with coldness evokes a serpent, the transgressive femininity of Eve who succumbs to the snake’s temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Mélusine is another snakish woman, a figure from French folklore who became popular across medieval Europe; nobles and royalty even claimed descent from her. Cursed by her mother to grow a serpent’s tail on Saturdays, Mélusine’s husband is prohibited from seeing her bathe on that day. When he disobeys, Mélusine turns into a dragon and flies away, in some versions returning on occasion to visit her children.
Self Portrait’s conflicted interactions with the green women perhaps reflect the narrator’s ambivalent relationship with constructions of femininity. After all, the green women are caught somewhere between ‘real beings and literary figures’. It is as if the narrator is negotiating the double-edged legacies of these mythical and folkloric women. Their femininity is evergreen, a spirit of persistence. Of meeting her half-sister in the future, the narrator imagines her voice ‘with the echo of something green in it — just as her eyes will be green, and green her jumper and trousers, so that none of this ever comes to an end.’
While I wrote this, I was also reading the essays of Cristina Campo, collected in The Unforgivable and Other Writings (2024), translated by Alex Andriesse. Her discussions of fairy tales seem to describe elements of Self Portrait:
At the age of six, I used to read fairy tales all day long. But why did I always return, fascinated, to certain images that later on I would recognize were almost recurring emblems for me, almost heraldic devices […] A story that I discover in every corner of my life, ready to be interpreted on new levels and opened with new keys.
Green is the emblem of Self Portrait’s disconcerting women, the focus of the narrator’s obsessive attention. It is one of the motifs we acquire for ourselves, infused with intense meanings we cannot express perfectly. Apparent accidents that become fateful with repetition. Things that may not have gained such significance if they were not so beguiling.
If you want to read more
The title of this log is taken from the last line of the poem ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas: ‘Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.’
Translator Jordan Stump wrote an appreciation of Marie NDiaye and Self Portrait in Green for Lit Hub:
The shape of the book is […] as elusive as its subject—maybe, in fact, that shape is those green women’s very nature. Is, to extend the narrative’s final words, this book itself a green woman, as productive of meaning, confusion, and sad, strange beauty as they are?