My friend, the poet Éireann Lorsung, sends me a photo of some banners she made for a No Kings protest where she lives in a very Republican state in the US. The protest is relatively small, the likelihood of effecting immediate, measurable change low, but nonetheless, her banners are beautiful and well-crafted.
I tell her this and she replies “hard world needs best things”.
On my desk I have a photo of me, my husband and my sons on one of the big anti-Brexit marches in London, in the event among our last family days out before lockdown. The week after that disastrous referendum, one of my 16-year-old’s friends had said to me that she would never again give her seat up for an older person on a bus, that they could stand or fall on the same legs that took them to the polling booth to give away her future.
I understood her rage, but I said no, that’s not how this goes, don’t take petty revenge based on assumptions about other people’s age and opinions. Here, I said, is what you do as the angry citizen of a democracy – let me help.
READ MORE
I taught my kids and their friends to write to their elected representatives, to join and organise peaceful demonstrations, to make banners and posters. I knew – I think the teenagers quickly saw – that our actions wouldn’t “work”, in that British politics in the hands of Boris Johnson’s government was beyond reason, but they worked in the way that any serious action undertaken in good faith works, to experience integrity, to act on the basis of moral imperative.
I had been a teenaged activist, often skiving school to help organise and participate in public demonstrations. In those days in England, we were hoping to Ban the Bomb, end the Poll Tax – that was an exciting day out, and my English teacher privately congratulated me on my priorities, though it was shortly before A-level exams – Take Back the Night and End Racism Now.
As readers with long enough memories will see, only one of these achieved its stated ambition, and though Thatcher’s fall was glorious in the moment, her legacy runs deep. But I learnt to stand up and be counted, to decide when to put my body on the street, and what risks and costs I was willing to incur in doing so.
I don’t romanticise marches – some recent demonstrations in many European countries have been the stuff of nightmares for people of my refugee and immigrant origins
Later, I marched against the Gulf wars, pushing a pram and keeping to the edges, and since then, as has seemed right and good. I’m a long-form writer not a poet, and my banners and slogans weren’t great, but I was there. I find crowds stressful, I fear loud noises, and like any survivor of childhood bullying I’m anxious in groups, but I turned up. I joined in.
Here’s the thing: when you take to the streets in protest, you do so in a position of radical vulnerability. Think of the lone figure before the tanks in Tiananmen Square, the offering of flowers to soldiers bearing guns, the women dragged away from the vigil for Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a serving officer of the Metropolitan Police in London. The fragility of the protesting body is the protest.
The protester exposes their ideas in public, the body unprotected, and finds strength and safety in the company of others with the same calling. I don’t romanticise marches – some recent demonstrations in many European countries have been the stuff of nightmares for people of my refugee and immigrant origins. But abhorrent ideas may be legally and peacefully expressed in a democracy.
The difference between the demonstration of radical vulnerability in marches, vigils and sit-ins and the exploitation of the command of heavy vehicles is obvious. There’s nothing innately moral about gathering on foot to raise our voices, which can be done for evil just as for good, but the point is to declare a perceived abuse of power, to use our tender bodies to expose oppression. When angry men use trucks and construction vehicles as tools of their power, when dangerous machines are weaponised to intimidate and control fellow-citizens, the vocabulary of peaceful protest is not appropriate. Big trucks are not best things and there are uglier terms for such acts.
