FROM THE BOUNDARY
Last week, I noted my admiration for the Russian protest punk rock group, Pussy Riot. I also suggested that ‘protest’ might be defined as “foolhardy assertions of truth which cause people to be upset”, “foolhardy” because the assertion of truth always entails an element of risk to oneself. It seems these words were prophetic. You’ll remember the latest Pussy Riot affront I mentioned – invading the pitch in the World Cup football final in Russia. Well, apparently one of the invaders, the husband of band leader Nadya, has been poisoned in Moscow, possibly with novichok, the substance allegedly Russian agents used recently in UK. He’s lost his sight and can’t speak. “Can’t speak”? Can there be a worse tribulation for a protestor? What if Jesus had been struck dumb? As Masha Gessen, Pussy Riot’s biographer, says – it’s words which break cement.
I wonder if, deep down, we’re all capable of being Pussy Riot. Band member, Maria, says we are. If not, what does that say about us? Are we just worms for whom injustice and lies feed us, like soil? Surely, at least to challenge social, moral and political norms with only a feather duster means we’re truly alive. What’s the ultimate cost if we’re always moderate and restrained? Sometimes just ruffling feathers means we’re winning.
The printed word may do it sufficiently. Think of Zola’s ‘open letter’ to the President of France, published in ‘L’Aurore’ in 1898, on the Dreyfus case – Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer and scapegoat, scandalously sentenced to Devil’s Island for slipping military secrets to the Germans. “J’Accuse…!”, Zola’s letter was headlined. “J’Accuse…!” What powerful words! Imagine seeing them on the front page of one of our daily papers. How would you respond? In the short term, they did Zola no good. He was convicted of criminal libel and had to cut-and-run to London.
Think too of William Lloyd Garrison, another Olympian, a slavery abolitionist who published ‘The Liberator’, dedicated to “the extermination of chattel slavery”. I have a contemporary signed photograph of him in my study. He’s very much Pussy Riot. This is what he wrote in the first issue.
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice…I do not wish to think, or to speak, or to write with moderation …Tell a man…to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher …but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present…I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – and I will be heard.”
What of Colin Kaepernick and ‘taking a knee’? Well, his face has been very up-front lately because Nike has just started a “Just do it” campaign. They’re featuring Kaepernick in an ad onslaught with the slogan “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.” Great stuff, or just self-promotion?
Well, Trump is against knee-taking – and that’s the best argument I can think of for taking one. Isn’t protest specifically for black life, and justice and freedom for all people on one knee during an anthem both disruptive and disrespectful? So what if it is? At root, protest isn’t about disrespect. It’s about respect, here kneeling, for truth and justice – take it or leave it. Didn’t Jesus, reading from Isaiah, proclaim liberty for the oppressed in the synagogue at Nazareth, and then proceed to be utterly disrespectful of socio-religious norms?
Is there an acceptable protest which won’t offend? I don’t think there is. To assert otherwise is almost certainly camouflage. To say, for example, that though everyone has the right to express themselves there’s yet a right way to do things, that two wrongs never make a right because it only makes for more division, is really to fudge the depth of the original offence and so inevitably stands against what ‘right’ truly requires. But sure, if protest becomes too disruptive even fundamentally good men may return to their wives.
Protest is meant to be disruptive. Yes, we have nothing to lose but our chains – our conformities, our conditionings, our stale conventions. Sure, it was Marx who preached it. But it was Jesus who lived it on the way to claiming victory over the grave, the grave we dig for ourselves. So how can we remain blind to all the injustices of the world and simper merely for ‘business as usual’? The Christ we worship turned over all the tables of that, didn’t he?
Isn’t the very heart of our faith about protest? Didn’t Jesus persistently breach all the boundaries, scorn the supposedly sacred places and then sanctify them? And didn’t he overcome the death we surely give ourselves, by refusing to bow to all the death-dealing systems of this poor world? Are we big enough and bold enough to let the babe born in a barn lead us and stand with him with a raised finger in face of it all, and wherever it may appear? In fact, what is it really to be a Christian? Is it just about church going, dress codes, and obsessions about sexual orientation? You work it out.
Go safely, then – until the next time.
Protest from the boundary: “An unjust law is itself a species of violence” (Gandhi).