A Day Of Protest

Against Occupation:

At twelve today I went down to Nakba Commemoration 2010. A protest organised by Stop The War that took place opposite ten downing street. We were there, amongst other reasons, to commemorate the Nakba of 1948, to speak for the people of Palestine who are so often denied a voice, to keep the voice of Palestine firmly in the ear of con-dem-nation, and to demonstrate our solidarity with the people of Palestine who live under constant Israeli occupation. During the protest 20 copies of a pamphlet, which is still in the process of being written, called Slogans 1-5 (this time accompanied by subtitle: a message for the new coalition government) was distributed by myself and Tessa Whitehouse (who, it needs to be said, did most of the distributing). The idea was that if you attended the protest you got to have the publication. But more than that, the proper environment for this poem is the protest environment. It was about creating a politics of distribution where the poem (poetry) and the protest (a manifestation of politics) are not allowed to pretend that they inhabit hermetic spaces, somehow sealed off from one another, but where the two talk to one another, and for me at least, where the two complete one another. The poem completes at a point where political, poetic and socio-cultural space meet, where aesthetics and politics are redefined against one another. Better than all this though (because who knows if any of what I have just written actually happened) was that all the pamphlets were distributed and the protest felt like a success (to the extent that any protest in support of the Palestinian cause feels like a success, while there is still occupation, still no right to return, still the blockade of Gaza, still settlements, checkpoints, refugees etc.) Anyway, we were there and it was a truly encouraging experience, and indeed, a new experience for me, to see fellow protesters occasionally reading poems, which use the rhythms and the structures of pro-palestinian chants as their metrical and philosophic base, while the cacophony of the multi-vocal and multi-pitched chanting swelled around us, and directed itself towards the architecture of government. I realized today that despite the fact that some of these poems will be appearing elsewhere in other publications, and in other forms, that from now on the protest environment will be the main site of publication and distribution for this work.

For Occupation:

on in the day Tessa, I, and friend Adam Stark, joined many others outside the Mansion Building at Middlesex University Trent Park Campus to show solidarity with the students and lecturers at the Philosophy Department at Middlesex, who had staged a twelve day occupation of the Mansion Building to protest about the the abrupt closure of their excellent department, by a management more interested in profit margins than the right to education, the right to think and learn. You can read more about the campaign to save Middlesex Philosophy while signing a petition to save it here. Adam took some photos of the occupied mansion just before the occupiers, under great and sustained pressure and threat from management, a management who had decided that it was better to attempt to criminalise the staff and students involved in the occupation than to negotiate and enter into dialogue with them, finally walked out to great applause.

Adam's Photos

We were also there to hear Tariq Ali give a talk entitled Kentucky Fried Education: The Market Assault on Reason. One thing, out of the many things he said that will stay with me is that we can not afford to privatize our protests. We need to expand them, and to use his term, we need to nationalize them. This blog post is a small, small gesture towards the anti-privatization of protest (others have done, and continue to do, much much more). Clearly privatization has the ability to invade thought and poetry in the same way that it invades our universities. I really feel that poetry has a great role to play in the struggles ahead. I think that in all activities, readings, publications and writings, we should be looking out, outside of poetry, but also looking in, wanting to expand what poetry is and can be, and wanting to establish what I can only vaguely describe as connections. It is these connections that will be valuable to us all in the struggles ahead.

The occupiers promised that there would be more events and more spaces to gather in to show our solidarity in the coming weeks and months ahead. I think their website (which can be found here) will be as good a place as any to keep up to date with what is going on.

Steve.