bc magazine

The protest in Hong Kong is in its third week and clashes between the people themselves are beginning to unfold. Anti-Occupy groups are beginning to self-organise themselves against Occupy protesters, hiring trucks and lorries to dismember makeshift barricades that have been blocking traffic off some of Hong Kong’s major thoroughfares on the Island. The development of events and interaction between government and protesters are totally unpredictable. Negotiation talks that were announced to take place on 10 October were called off suddenly; everyday is rumoured to be a deadline for police clearance of the Occupy sites. And every night protesters stay on the streets till the sun dawns the next day.

The experience of the protests is immediate. The barricades so far have come in no standardised form, and because of them there is so much more space in the city. On 26 September, before we erected the barricades, I saw the crowd overflowing from Admiralty Centre into Harcourt Road. I am in the crowd flooding out from Fenwick Pier Street as the traffic seemed to voluntarily halt. I looked to my left as I walked westward on the eastbound lane of Gloucester Road alongside people whom I had never met and faces I cannot recall. I looked to the right into the Government Headquarters plaza and saw more faces I cannot recall. A ribbon of blue uniforms kept the three crowds apart. Roads that I rarely took, I now roam. I felt the heat swelling up in the asphalt as I sat on the road in midday; I felt the road contracting and cooling as I stretched my legs during sundown.

The experience of the protests is mediated. Social media has been the most powerful tool of communication and diverse news source at the moment. Rumours too fly through the ether, including manipulated images of the People’s Liberation Army advancing into town. And the head of the city speaks only through pre-recorded videos and interviews. At 23:34, on 28 September, the protesters flew out a drone from the bridge in Admiralty. I am on the ground and I look up into a negative landscape of the sky, at cutouts of the night amidst the buildings that surrounded me. And I am also in the skies as I look down upon a sea of black dots, my fellow people occupying the streets, alleyways, and roads that we never thought of standing in shoulder to shoulder. As I look into the screen, onto a back-lit surface on which we swipe our fingers to sift through not only images and text, but also information, knowledge, and emotions. An announcement scrolled across the television screen on that same night read “Fireworks for National Day celebration cancelled.”

On 3 October, some brought chalk with them and wrote on the ground “I am here today because”. What ensued was a whole section of the lane filling up with lines after lines of writing in chalk, of people telling the world why they were there that day and every day. Some of us found an open spot on the bridge amongst the crowd and perched there for fresh air. You asked me if I see myself as an activist. I replied I am not sure if I would call myself one. But I think, I know, and I believe, that the life and practice I have chosen to live and breathe, is a choice to hope that we can live differently and more justly. I do not know if we can live differently and more justly, but I think I would choose to hope so. And if hope is fleeting, like our friends from Tahrir Square cautioned, I am determined to live differently and more justly and demand the impossible. Just 3 nights before, we opened and closed our umbrellas rhythmically and cheered. It had just past midnight, it was 1 October, and though there were no fireworks, with umbrellas we counted down to the National Day.

A few days later I went back to that bridge where I had stood, looking for this one signage that I did not capture then. I was stopped by a young fellow protester who was no older than 16, who denied me access to the footbridge where the sign was because I did not have a staff pass to the building that the bridge led to. Protesters were restricting access to the bridge in fear of police clearance. But I got through to photograph the sign in the end. It read:
“During the 1989 student movement, there was a time when it was like a carnival in Tiananmen Square. The students and citizens were dancing and singing together, thinking that their resistance would win because of the huge masses. No one could imagine what happened afterwards. Do not forget why you are here, stay strong and determined.”

In another historical moment and in another place some 73 years ago, a poet had written to his people some verses in Urdu that feel like ours. I think they beckon us too, today.

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your own tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith’s shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, ’cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

“Bol” (Speak) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, published in ‘Naqsh-e-Feryadi’, 1941.

Originally published here http://www.inmediahk.net/node/1027625