Colourful language

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Guillermo Pina-Contreras

For the people of the Dominican Republic creating colourful surroundings is almost second nature.

The dominant colours they use are the primary colours: blue, red and yellow, with a few others thrown in - green, sky blue, purple and pink. Black is excluded from their palette and white is used to separate other colours or to create a neutral area. These colours are used to beautify dwellings and their surroundings. If the doors are blue, for example, the main structure will be red, green or yellow. The aim is to create a colour scheme for a whole neighbourhood or village, not for each individual house. Variety is the keynote. Doors and windows may be the same colour, separated by white from the dominant colour of the house. Few houses are painted in more than three colours - one at least of the four main tones is always missing - but no house sports only one. The whole effect shows an intuitive knowledge of the art of using colour.

* A symbolic attachment

The predominance of blue is a way of bringing the sea into everyday life. There is a paradox here, for the Dominicans turn their backs on the sea, which they regard as the origin of all their misfortunes, of both natural and human origin. They fear and shun it. The only thing they like about it is its colour. On other Caribbean islands gardens are decorated with conches, sea-shells and starfish, but not here. Dominicans believe that conches bring bad luck. And blue is always accompanied by white, like foam on the crest of a wave. "In its desire to become sky, the sea makes clouds of foam," Dominican writer Ruben Suro has written of this bond between the two colours.

The main structural element of the traditional Dominican rural dwelling is the trunk of a palm, the island's symbolic tree. It is a more developed form of the Taino Indian hut and the African cabin of the early colonial days. The roof is usually made of leaves from the royal palm and fibre from another local variety, the cane palm.

The dialogue with the environment is not limited to dwellings; it also extends to artistic tastes and religious beliefs, the latter of which blend aesthetics with superstition. Many gardens contain an altar surmounted by a picture of the Virgin Mary of Altagracia (the country's patron saint) at the end of a path of white stones. The niche housing the image of the Virgin is usually painted white, setting off the blue and red of her robes. Houses where there is no altar are protected by crosses placed at the edges of courtyard or garden. These crosses are also painted white, for white is the colour of faith. (In the mountainous north, tresses of garlic are hung on the door to keep the devil out.) Roads, parks and other public places are decorated in a similar manner. It is not uncommon to see roadside shrines at places where accidents have occurred, and altars in public squares. These practices are illegal, but they are tolerated by the authorities and are part and parcel of the Dominican Republic's magical-religious landscape.

People have also modified the appearance of the urban landscape. Trees, especially palm trees, and electricity poles are often painted in a single colour to head height. For someone who knows nothing about Dominican political life, a row of palm trees or electric power poles painted in alternating reds, blues, greens, whites, purples and yellows is simply an eye-catching sight, a way of enhancing the environment. In fact, each colour represents an ideology. The colour of the party that won the presidential election recurs at regular intervals, and so does that of the party that won the local elections. This way of marking out political turf goes back to the early days of independence, when colours were used to designate the main parties in order to overcome the obstacle of illiteracy: red for the conservatives, and blue - like the sea - for the liberals.

* Politics and sport

Today the custom of painting pillars and posts has become widespread, but it still has political and sometimes sporting overtones. Some people even paint the front door of their house the colour of the party they support. Colours can express sporting rivalry as well as ideological conflict, since each of the big Dominican baseball teams has its own colour: red, blue, green and yellow. Politics and sport are ever-present in daily life.

Poverty also plays a role in this unending dialogue with the environment. In the slums poverty has given rise to a specific architectural style. Lacking the funds to buy construction materials, slum-dwellers use tin cans, crates and all kinds of trash with great imagination to cover the walls of their homes in the shanty towns that sprawl around the edges of the big cities, along river banks and near the sea shore. To create an effect of uniformity, some people use cans of a single brand as walls for their dwellings, or paint them with distinctive naive murals. The variety of colours used to decorate large abandoned public buildings reveals the number of families living there. Each family uses colour to mark off its living area.