Notes from the Women’s March, 21st January 2017
The train was packed with groups of women: smiling, gathering, holding hands, holding bags and signs and children. My boyfriend, our three-year old son and I squeezed onto the carriage and thought up child-friendly slogans as we glided through London. The Future is Feminist! And (my son’s favourite), Spiderman Against Trump! When we got to Victoria Station, the concourse was full of teenage girls crouched with pens and cardboard, writing slogans for ad hoc banners.
We were on our way to join the Women’s March in London. The event was one of a wave of international marches taking place in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington D.C. And the Women’s March on Washington D.C. was convened in protest against the inauguration of Donald J Trump as President of the United States of America.
‘Who is that angry man?’ my son had asked, a few weeks ago, when he saw a picture in the paper. Donald Trump, my boyfriend said. But how to explain the rest of it? Donald Trump: open racist, open misogynist, openly incoherent in the way that only rich, white men can be.
The tube was so busy we couldn’t get through the barriers, so we took the bus to Green Park on our way to Grosvenor Square. This is where the march was going to begin: outside the US embassy and in the shadow of billowing American flags. The closer we got, the more the crowds coalesced into a public. Streams of people stopped traffic at Berkley Square, pouring across pedestrian crossings, making the expensive passengers of expensive cars wait to drive through Mayfair.
A few years ago I saw the artist Dave Beech talk at an event about art fundraising. He said that politics, like art, is a practice. You have to keep doing it, even when you don’t know exactly where it’s going.
We half walked, half jogged to keep up — negotiating the pace of the crowd, the pace of a three-year old, the pace of conversation. We hurried down Mount Street, a road of exclusive, high-end shops. I used to work in one of them, in my first job after leaving university. Armed with a degree and six-months worth of unemployment, I took a role as an assistant in a jewellery shop with stock so expensive there had to be an air lock on the front door. We had one or two customers a week: rich American and Russian men, buying tens of thousands of pounds worth of jewels to decorate their women. It was my job to hand out champagne to these men, and then to model the gleaming gold and dazzling diamonds. The men peered and stroked at the stones on my skin.
When we arrived at Grosvenor Square it was half full and filling quickly. Helicopters were circling overhead. By now, there were probably as many men as women, and lots and lots of children. We started to dance to the sound of drums, to keep ourselves warm. We stood on benches to look at the crowds. I explained to my son that all these people were here to stop a bully. We are not going to let Donald Trump bully us, I said; and we are not going to let him bully anyone else, either.
Recently, I’ve found myself being paralysed, temporarily, by a fear of London. It comes and goes, this response to the city I have lived in all my life. It’s not so much to do with the place as to do with people, crowds, targets. It’s to do with a smog of threats hanging in the air: threats of violence, of terrorism, of a suspicious and snooping government, of a pervasive culture of hatred, and the threat of fear itself. Sometimes I think I can feel something in the news, or in the street, or on TV that makes it real — some rubbery ball to chew on, or bat back, or hide behind. But mostly it is all intangible. The feeling is like a blast of cigarette smoke in my throat when I breathe in. It’s bitter and shocking and I think I am going to die.
A friend had asked me, earlier, why I was going on the march. “In solidarity with the minorities that are discriminated against by the growing alt-right,” I replied on the WhatsApp Group set up between me and a crowd of women I’ve known for 30 years, “in the knowledge that white, middle class women’s rights are the most protected of all ‘minorities’, and so it’s my responsibility to stand up when other people are threatened; against the poisonous anti-logic of late-capitalism; and because I don’t know how I can explain Trump’s inauguration to [my son] in any way except physically protesting about it.”
The crowds were thick, now. Unmoving. Crushed together, I picked up my son and pointed out the signs around us:Girls Just Wanna Have Fun … damental Human Rights! Surrounded by Phenomenal Women! Resistance is Fertile! ‘P’, ‘U’, ‘S’ … he said, reading something over my shoulder. I turned round and helped him with the words, ‘This Pussy Grabs Back’, and told him, as best I could, about Trump’s infamous ‘grab them by the pussy’ remark. He wanted to read out all the other signs with ‘PUSSY’ written on them, and asked me what the pictures were. The pictures were of uteruses, so I explained that Donald Trump and his friends are so mean, they don’t just want to hurt the outside of women’s bodies, but to control what happens to the insides of them too.
There is an extraordinary video made recently by the artist Dickie Beau, in which he appears to be accepting a prestigious show biz award, while he lip-syncs the words of the American theatre director, Peter Sellers. Lip-syncing is a mode of performance that Dickie Beau has made his own. He moves with every nuance of the recorded speech, but there is just enough stiffness in his body to drive a splinter between identity and authorship. In this video, Dickie Beau’s face mimes to Sellers’ words about Ancient Greek citizens. Greek democracy was exclusive, the words say: it excluded everyone except the rich and the male. But Greek theatre was the opposite. All surviving Greek plays are named after women, poor people and foreigners, and all Greek citizens were encouraged — in fact, paid — to go to the theatre. Here, in the architecture of the amphitheatre — a structure designed for listening — citizens heard the voices of the people with no other voice. To be a democratic citizen was to listen to the powerless and the under represented. Listening is a pre-requisite for democracy.
After two hours, the crowd began to move slowly through a bottleneck to get out of the square. My feet had gone numb with cold and I couldn’t carry my son anymore, but the crowd was so close and so strong that I didn’t want to let him go. When we reached a side street we decided to take a break from the march, so we could warm up and rejoin the rally in Trafalgar Square. Suddenly, the change in perspective meant we could see the extent of the public walking together — streets and streets filled with marchers, holding signs, holding hands, holding up the traffic.
In the weeks leading up to the Women’s March, I read some online responses to the guiding principles of the London event. There were criticisms of the principles’ solidarity with the sex workers’ movement (which fights for the legalisation of sex work), as well as their blanket inclusion of the rights of trans women and girls. After the march, a small ripple of online protest ran through social media, in response to ‘cissexist’ and ‘transphobic’ signs and symbols. If it’s easy to explain to a three-year old the point of a march, and how Donald Trump is a bully, it’s much harder to talk about the minutes and years of thought and conversation that create the circumstances for a march to move in the first place. It’s much harder to discuss the potential consequences of legalising sex work, the difference between gender-criticism and transphobia, and the reasons that ‘cis’ (used by transactivists to differentiate between trans women and non trans women) is a disputed term amongst feminists. But politics is a practice. And I am practicing. Amidst these arguments, and through them, we have that in common. Politics, citizenship, listening.
We ducked into the café at the Curzon Mayfair — part of an independent cinema chain. We weren’t the only ones who’d had that idea. The dimly lit bar was filling up with marchers peeling off their hats and parking their brightly coloured banners by the loos. Staff came out with extra seats for the people sitting on the floor. My boyfriend, my son and I bumped into some other friends who had also just come from the march. We ate cake, drank hot tea and compared notes. The rally at Trafalgar Square, our phones told us, was so busy the police had stopped anyone else from getting in and my son suggested that we invite everyone round for dinner instead. And so we did. For me, it was a chance to practice erasing the lines between community and politics. For him, I don’t think those lines exist. His pratice is something different.
‘You’re a bully!’ my son said to me that evening, as I was getting him ready for bed. ‘I hope not,’ I replied, ’that’s a horrible thing to be.’ He was smiling — play-acting his new word, to see how it works in the real world. ‘You’re not a bully,’ he agreed. And then, in the next moment, he tried out his new word for an awesome and powerful force. ‘If you were, I would catch you with my vagina!’
