Refugees, Longing for Shade: The Soothing, Unsettling Power of Trees

As our warming planet heats and burns, shade—that refuge from the sun—becomes increasingly precious, and rare. The refuge we find below the canopy of trees is soothing, essential, and yet also threatened. We find ourselves facing a world that is more difficult for arboreal survival, and so for our own. In conversation with trees—perhaps the paradigmatic shade provider—this paper explores the unsettling, but also soothing, powers of shade and the power of the trees who provide it.

In the paper I will engage with the work of anthropologists, to highlight cultural differences in the perception of shade. Michael Dove’s study of shade, in the life of farmers in Pakistan’s northwest province, explores how tree shade is attributed with materiality (size, duration, density, temperature, and even taste). This will be complimented by Eliza Kent’s study of tree shade as a sign of sacred space and divine presence, in villages of Tamil Nadu. Dove critiques the perception of shade in climactically cooler western cultures as dismissive, or even suspicious of the powers of shade. Indeed, in this context, shade has often had a chthonic power associating it most immediately with metaphysical negativity. Spirits of the dead have been named shades. And it is shade (along with its illusory deceptions and tricks) that the prisoners of Plato’s cave are liberated from, as they emerge into the light.

Shadows can be slippery, and elusive. They are almost impossible to measure, and even more difficult to understand or describe as a thing in themselves. But shade is more than merely unsettling. In order to develop a more playful and nuanced perception of shade, I will also engage with the work of popular ecophilosopher, and sleight of hand magician, David Abram. Trained in phenomenology, Abram describes shade as a “vast and brooding presence” that is an attribute of the bodies that (as he puts it) “secrete shadows.” For Abram, we might say, shade is not a power restricted to trees but one that we humans also possess, and one that holds us as we sleep in the massive form of shadow that we call night.

Abram highlights a soothing and protective presence of shade that resonates with select religious uses of shade and shadow, as in the Book of Psalms where God is described as a form of shade (Psalm 121:5), or a presence whose shadowy wings provide protection (Psalm 36:7, 57:1, 63:7). For Sayyid Qutb, author of the influential commentary In the Shade of the Qur’an, the holy book itself (made from trees) is a protective shade provider.

When we can see not only the unsettling dimensions of shade, but also its more protective dimensions it is easier to understand and reflect on shade as form of refuge. Even in its chthonic form, shade can provide us with a form of retreat. And when we can see shade as a space of refuge, it is easier to understand what it means to lose or be stripped of shade: it is to become a refugee.

Philosopher Michael Marder argues that humans today, at least those of us living in places like Europe and the US, are refugees from the world of plants. When we seek refuge in “the vegetal world” (forest bathing, and other forms of escape) we come to it as refugees, “uprooted from what we call nature.” We seek escape in that world of plants that our culture has also “been fleeing for millennia now.” Because of this great migration, “it is tremendously difficult to undo the effects of this flight that has come to define our culture itself.” Marder also observes that the attempt to force others to migrate—to make them into refugees—is often accompanied by the destruction of their trees. Writing about the uprooting of olive groves in Palestine, by the Israeli army, Marder notes that such a destruction is not only the evisceration of a symbol of peace (the olive branch). More, “accompanied by the destruction of Palestinian houses, the uprooting of trees reinforced a transformation of the entire population—the entire people—into refugees, prevented from seeking meaning and refuge (even) in the vegetal world.”

On a planet that’s getting hotter, more and more people are forced into migrations of various kinds. More and more people become refugees. Perhaps this fact alone underscores the importance not only of trees, but of the shade they can provide. Perhaps we need to think about a right to shade. Even when we are displaced, shade can reshape the way that our bodies inhabit a place, the way that we perceive things, and perhaps even our sense of time. The chthonic dimensions of shade, after all, plug it into the underworlds that harbor the earth’s deep time: cool, dark, and sheltered from the eviscerations of all that burns.