What Colour is a Ceasefire?
The burden of a black and white brain a complex world
In August 2011, one month after South Sudan announced their independence from the North, I sat in a briefing at the UN Headquarters in Yei, South Sudan. Behind white-washed walls and protected by roaming peacekeepers in sky blue helmets, I felt safer than I had moments earlier, even outside of those walls. Days earlier, a rebel faction had declared a ceasefire agreement with the government. Outside of the gates, peacekeeping vehicles roamed the streets, muddied by thick dust rising from the roads. The soil of the youngest nation on earth clung to the vehicles, dirtying them shades of orange, brown, red, almost hiding them from view.
I have written before that war leaves nothing untouched, even a strand of hair.1 The first colour of Landrover Green, also known as Light Green, wasn’t so much an aesthetic choice as a necessity2 – there was a surplus of this colour available after World War Two as it was no longer needed to paint Royal Air Force planes. This reference is one of many, I’m sure, that show the consequences of war on the colours of everyday life in technology, employment, farming, fashion and our own homes.
We have all been watching war, lately. We are hurting for others but often unable to help. We are begged to act but feel that our actions are a drop in the ocean of state-funded, powerful transnational decisions. We are asked to bear witness, but our eyes and bodies are bound in specific times and places. I recently told a photojournalist friend after seeing a harrowing video clip: “I’m lost. What can I do?” She expressed that she felt the same and suggested that we must keep listening and talking in a way that humanizes people — at the very least. Language brings colour. She also told me that it’s okay to weep.
Everywhere we look, our chequerboard minds divide us.3 With limited space and time, we, as lookers and image-viewers, can clutch at simplifications. We are numbed; expecting reality to fall into the stereotypes and categories we have created, closed off to unexpected beauty and colour and variance. Overwhelmed, our minds (and vision) skips to black and white: Good versus evil, rich versus poor, the past versus the present, the migrant versus the refugee, us versus them. It’s easier to view these dichotomies as stark opposites instead of mingled, messy, time-consuming intricacies – much like the dirtied underbelly of a white peacekeeping vehicle.
Psychologist, Dr Kevin Dutton, In Black and White Thinking, The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World, writes:
“Life works because our brains are black and white. But wisdom lies in knowledge of the grey; in the deeper understanding that although, as cognitive grandmasters, we are destined to play the game, the squares on the board, indeed the very board itself, do not exist.”
In Dutton’s book, he writes about meeting an extreme negotiator, Claire, who worked in China (she speaks Mandarin), Pakistan and Islamabad. She’s one of a small number of women to have ever negotiated successfully with the Taliban. Extreme negotiation, she says, is actually about building relationships. To communicate appropriately, understanding must come first. Claire tells the story of a school deep in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: one day, a woman ran to the school and informed two teachers that a section of the Taliban opposed to the education of women were heading their way. A class of thirty three girls was gripped by fear. The teachers calmly guided the girls back to their villages. The women stay put. Some half an hour later “when a squall of boots descend on the school yard, they serve up basins of rosehip and cardamom tea and saucers of barfi and laddu.” They put the commander and his men at ease, showing them around the classrooms and playground and inside store cupboards. They ran through the curriculum and explained to the commander that by learning to read and write girls will be able to better progress their Islamic studies. The next morning, the school bell rang across the mountain pass and the girls began their first lesson of the day.
I love this account because I don’t know if I could ever do what those teachers did. For a few simple moments, they challenged the us versus them divide; wisdom was found in the shades in between. Language and communication added colour. Understanding what mattered to the Taliban was important, and against daunting and dangerous odds, the teachers’ courage and creativity saved the school, and possibly even many lives that day.
This story also reminds me of an ancient scripture where Christ asks people to remember the chequerboard doesn’t exist : Give your coat to someone who wants to sue you. Pray for those who persecute you. Serve tea to your enemies. If those instructions make you angry; me too. Jesus is flipping justice and vengeance on its head. He models a shade in-between retaliation and a passive permission of evil. It sounds dangerous and risky because it is.
I have been raking the news for colour lately, but it’s hard to find. I have spent years noticing colour in some of the most vulnerable places on earth.4 Searching for colour and the ways that people express their creativity, imagination and care has kept me believing that the face of God is visible in anyone. Isn’t hate and hopelessness easier to find? It’s often easier to show too. Dignity and courage in the face of terror or extreme poverty or terror is what keeps me here. Not necessarily because I believe the whole world can be saved this way, but, I believe that maybe some lives can.
I will never forget meeting Wilson’s family who lived between tombstones in the Philippines. His family furnished their home with cups, baskets and chairs all the same shade of green, carefully collected over time. Did I assume the colour of life would be hard to find in the homes of those living between the dead?
I won’t forget Princess and her family, Wilson’s neighbours, who had nailed a small jar of toothbrushes to their bare cement wall. In a small alcove, too low for an adult to stand, next to a neat row of kitchen utensils hanging neatly on small nails, the container was attached to the wall. Inside were eight well-used toothbrushes, one for each member of the family. Here was strength in a cup – a daily routine of resilience on display in the fraying strands.
I don’t know why I was surprised that a family who lived in a graveyard brushed their teeth. Surprise often shows me that my prejudices are without proof. Had I really come to believe that people living in poverty would be dirty? Had I assumed that a family living between graves would not take pride in something so basic as teeth-brushing? Was my vision so skewed by the death and the dying, that I had forgotten that living consists of hours and minutes filled with tasks which bring us order, comfort and satisfaction? Did I forget that as created beings, we will always create?
I also won’t forget MawPaw*, a refugee from Myanmar, telling me about a seedling tree she planted outside her home the same week she had to flee her country and how she hopes to return one day to see how much it has grown. Did I forget that some refugees long to return home, but can’t? Did I overlook the stories of refugees who can and do return home for good?5
There is much in the world that leaves me reeling: all facts and no feeling, all faith and no fear, sings Brooke Fraser. I don't know why a good man will fall
while a wicked one stands, she writes. I don't know why our words are so proud, yet their promise so thin.
So, I’ll keep searching for a thousand shades – a tiny thousand mirrors of God’s light in the most unexpected places.
I’ll remember that war zones can become gardens within a single lifetime, like the one I photographed above.
If I am myriad, fickle shades of light and dark, good and bad, grateful and discontent in ways that are impossible to quantify, then I’ll pay attention to the limits of my own judgement.
In-between the default spaces of my black and white brain, I’ll ask for wisdom and for a third way, wondering if a ceasefire starts with me.
Maybe to keep searching for colour is to keep asking for it, hoping it exists in the dark.
Look for the colours too, will you?
Thanks for your patience, readers. Between my day job and parenting, my newsletter frequency has been much less than I’d have liked this year. But, as always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections. Is there anything you’d like me to write about next year? Let me know in a comment, note or message.
Over the last few years, research projects conducted with refugees and asylum seekers, collected hair samples analysing the levels of cortisol (stress hormones) in the samples. A correlation was discovered between the levels of cortisol in the hair and the participants’ symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their exposure to ongoing instability. - Polaroids, 2022
https://www.paintnuts.co.uk/pages/classic-cars-the-history-of-land-rover-green#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20Land%20Rover%20green&text=The%20first%20Series%20I%2C%20unveiled,colour%20available%20after%20the%20war.
Dr. Kevin Dutton (2020)
In case my quest for colour in the face of terror seems superficial, let this story be a cautionary tale : alarmingly, in 1919 Russian Orthodox Christians supposedly met for hours to discuss the colour of their vestments while the Russian Revolution was breaking out a few streets away. This anecdote sticks with me as a stark reminder that people of faith and religious leaders can get so trapped in conceptual discussions which have few real-life consequences, when there are real needs which demand urgent action not far away.
Why Refugees are Returning to War Torn Sudan, The Times, Dec 2024 [article behind paywall]
That last line. Ugh. I swear your writing grows more beautiful, more tender with each piece. Promise I’ll keep looking too 🖤
Stunning Ella, thank you for these words 🙏🥰