Colouring in reality

Source: youtube.com

After thirty three years of unremitting pain, Kim Phuc’s scars and nerve endings are being treated by a leading scar tissue expert who specialises in the effects of napalm. Many of us know Kim Phuc. We met her when she was just eleven years old, fleeing naked from her village on June 8^th, 1972, caught up in a South Vietnamese bombing raid.

We are entering the season of remembrance, a time when we remember not only those who have died, but also the living. We are remembering those whose lives have been so traumatised by conflict or abuse that they are alive in a quite different sense to that which most of us take for granted. Kim Phuc, having defected to Canada, made a new life out of the scars left on her mind and body by the Vietnamese war. Since then, millions of others have had their lives shaped, and distorted, by their memories of conflict.

The traumatised Syrian family landing on the Greek island of Kos will eventually make a new life in Munich. They will live that life in, and because of, their memories, memories which will also shape their identities as victims of humanity’s inhumanity. Unless they experience the kind of joy which precedes healing at the deepest level, these memories will destroy their future. But the father of the Kos family is beginning to smile again, and his children are laughing for the first time in months. Their laughter makes them instruments of healing for all of us.

The remembrance season is a good time to reflect on the fact that the victims of war are also the means of our own healing. They are to us the suffering Christ whose ‘stripes heal our wounds’. They show us not only how to survive but, more importantly, how we are meant to really live in these inchoate times. We live not by turning away from reality, but by embracing it and allowing ourselves to be forgiven, rather than seeking a way out  via some form of infantile escapism.

Yesterday, after news of more unrest and violence in Turkey, brought about by the heightening of tensions between the government and Kurdish resistants, and as a prelude to forthcoming elections, we immediately hear of the latest adult colouring-in craze. Apparently, the digital age, and the instantaneous access which it brings to the horrors of conflict, are proving too much for us. We need, it is said, ‘something analogue’ perhaps to soften things a bit, to give our eyes a rest, and possibly our hearts and brains as well, from what we see on our screens. 

But it is not clear what realities colouring-in books are designed to soften. Perhaps they are just supposed to remind us of safe designated areas, so also indicating a tendency to avoid that level of reality which takes us into the unknown, outside the safe designated area when it comes to making sense of human suffering – and to doing the right thing.

At the same time, the blank areas in the colouring books (the safe designated areas) also provide time. They provide a mental space, as they do for children, into which things can fall into place, so allowing questions to surface, as they also sometimes do for children, with respect to the inequality and random injustices which life seems to have dealt to many, while leaving others untouched. These are questions which the person doing the colouring-in would often rather not face.

The moment of truth might come suddenly and unexpectedly. As they inadvertently colour over a line, they get rattled, as we all do when certain lines (especially ones which suit our purposes at the moment) are crossed. The irony of the recent House of Lords rebellion is an interesting case in point. They are unelected. How dare they break out in the cause of justice?  and possibly, one might add, in the longer term healing of deep social divisions within our own nation. They pertain to an outdated system of class and privilege. How dare they cross the line? Colouring-in will reinforce the dubious notion that things need to stay safely in their allotted spaces, especially if the space is a contentious one. The negative implications for human well being are enormous.

Perhaps colouring-in for adults will be the means to finding something more than a coping strategy when it comes to remembering and healing the wounds of nations, and our own as well. Perhaps the blank spaces will oblige us to think of how we could colour-in the bleak lives of those who call on us for relief, asylum or fiscal justice and so begin to heal their memories with the beginnings of a joy which we so badly need ourselves.