Book Review: indigo: the color of grief by Jonathan J. Foster

This book throbs with life.

In a nutshell, it is a firsthand account of death and grief and, perhaps most of all, love:

the thing against
which [we are] flattened [in death and grief]
the thing
holding things
together (44-45)

indigo: the color of grief is the best kind of theology, a “lowercase theology” (1), which does not need to shout because it is not defending but exploring. It is not certain but hoping against hope. It is not closed but open.

indigo presents what might be called a theopoetics, the words of which are quite different from the logos of theology, which tries to have the last word. The words of a theopoetics are wounded, vulnerable, exposed. Always exposed. To silence (sometimes there are no words). To revision. To a new word. A theopoetics does not find God as much as it is found by God. Is surprised by God. Writing about the loss of his daughter, Jonathan Foster comments:

it’s weird
absence is nothing
a no-thing
but it’s very much something
a some-thing

it has no form but
it forms me
it has no energy but
it energizes me
i’m full of its emptiness (9)

It would not be an exaggeration to say that indigo was among the easiest and most difficult reads of my life. Easiest because of its honest, plainspoken-but-profound poetry—like Mary Oliver without the botany. Most difficult because nearly every passage employs the fine blade of memory to flay the ordinary of its familiarity and reveal the cross. Music, sunset, soccer. Everything here is intensely incarnated, or particular, and bears within it a certain crucified-but-risen character.

Foster writes about reading a fragment of Elie Wiesel’s Night and having to stop, which could well serve as a description for my own experience of reading indigo:

didn’t reopen the book that day

idk

seemed disrespectful

to move on too quickly

to read further

to possibly forget

what wiesel wanted us to remember (27)

indigo appears to take its title from Foster’s description of a sunset, which comes to serve as a sort of metaphor for the darkness of death, loss, grief. In Foster’s description, indigo is the last color seen “as everything fade[s]” to black (34). By implication, it is also the first color seen when black blushes into life. 

Indigo, then, is the color of life throbbing. And indigo is an inspiring call to life.

Books about grief are often recommended to the grieving, but this is a book I would recommend to anyone. Perhaps especially to those who are not grieving or, for that matter, not feeling much of anything at all. For reading indigo resensitized me to life—to memories long forgotten, to values often neglected, to a hope I too frequently relinquish. Reading it brought me to life.

- - - - - 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.