Orange Blankets
February 2020
An orange blanket, one of many, hangs on the wall, stark against the crisp, sterile white paint. The softness of the fleece material is apparent immediately, but the colour, garishly bright, seems to somehow diminish the comfort offered by this simple piece of fabric. This is not a blanket to sip coffee under, cozy on the couch on a Sunday morning, perhaps doing a crossword, or reading a novel. This is not a blanket to spread over a bed, to use in front of a fire, or lay out a picnic on. It serves another purpose entirely.
Orange is the colour in the middle of yellow and red, trapped between a warning and a demand. With a wavelength that falls between 585 and 620 nanometres it is the colour most easily seen against water or in lowlight. Perhaps this is why it is so closely associated with notions of safety, or its inverse, danger. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say it is associated with a reprieve from or mitigation of danger, a life vest or a life raft doesn’t create an inherently safe environment, but it does offer some greater chance of surviving the perilous.
It would take too much out of me to tell you.
It’s so tiring to be alive here.
I don’t want to learn how to speak again.
Words, stitched on the blankets in black thread, speak to this other purpose; refer to some notion of the perilous. Words, spoken by Syrian refugees, heard by Egyptian-Canadian artist and translator, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, and transmuted into her artwork, Shock Blankets (2017). In the work Nematt Alla’s blankets, reminiscent of those carried by paramedics or distributed during emergencies, become stand-ins for the traumatized bodies of the refugees she works closely with as a translator. The words, spoken to Nematt Alla during intake interviews upon arrival in Canada, perform the collective and individual traumas of forced migration. This performance, or perhaps the necessity of it, clearly highlights the problematics of empathy as a decision making tool for migration policy. The need to generate empathy within a populous demands a constant performance, either of one’s trauma or one’s integration, to justify entry in the case of the former and one’s right to remain in the latter.
Ethics or empathy? Logic or emotion? What do we need to recognize the inherent humanity of all peoples? How can we understand trauma without the demand to constantly re-perform it? Perhaps the challenge lies in the dual nature of trauma, that it is both individual and collective, often simultaneously. That it resides both in our discrete bodies and the body politic. There is some comfort here, that our traumas can be shared, that their weight can be shifted, that they can move from being individually held to collectively supported, but this is perhaps an uneasy comfort, like that provided by a garishly orange blanket. Comfort trapped between a warning and a demand.