The People and the Planet
The places we walk write poetry, but the people we are with create the places we walk. Be careful where you tread.
I cannot see: the route around the corner or the small woods alongside the back path or that place itself without thinking- of a morning we waited with baited breath, or the evenings in ease as we sang and drank and hoped our childish joy at adult delights could be heard from outside. Times we created a space that could not be recreated.
The University may tell us The Slate is a conference centre, but we were there when it was Our Occupation, its halls echoing with the sound(s) of resistance. They may turn up the speakers to drown us out, but nothing can contain the voices of youth- full of love. We accepted this experience to be unique and stand alone, so more poems have come from these weeks than we read to each other inside. And we made art, on cardboard and in photographs, and tunes strummed quietly on a guitar.
Although we carry these beauteous creations around now, they belong to Our Occupation, just as much as we belong to it- and it belongs to us. This space is sacred- even now (!) it has been defiled by the business people who bring strife and inequality into its precious rooms. These days it longs for our return; for its fulfilment. When we trampled in mud and hope, it rewarded us: its/our safety and ecstasy made us almost divine, no matter how broken so many of us are. Proof marginalised people can exist in this world happily, given a place and space and autonomy. Some would interpret our relationship to the building as one that deified the occupants, but this is unfair. Rather, we simply were allowed to exercise our own free-will. The oppressed taking control of some part of their lives is so foreign → alien → undesirable to some that they can only see us as malevolent dictators (the powerful have blamed those with less power for the existence of power).
In the winter’s cold nights, light filtered in from the high windows there weren’t blinds for, so ever-bright, the clarity of camaraderie and wisdom illuminated us. We learnt something new about life, the world, each other- every moment. Enlightened to our potential, upon entry we made the toilets gender-neutral and drew over the binaries they had once represented. The speakers extended to the bathrooms, so we played the music of fun throughout the whole area; my fondest memories are of brushing teeth with friends after a long day and finding joy in the odd intimacy of it all.
And there was an intimacy. We all slept in the same room- we said for warmth. But truly, it was to become close and foster trust among each other, until at the end of the first dramatic week we laughed and sang Les Misérables. Management had heard the people sing, and laugh and cry and become one voice over the wind. Still we were in awe at an industrial dishwasher and walk-in fridge, so we filled the kitchen with humus and collective responsibility to keep Our Occupation tidy. Those heavy desks told us “anything is possible”; we proved that all fourteen days we lived there, and I hope management see that and think- ‘a rag-tag group of young people with a cause held an entire building for a fortnight’- we cost a few hundred thousand pounds in damages, but a lot more in propriety. Because for the first time on Warwick University grounds, the collective/we belonged. Belonged in a way none of us did in our first-year accommodation or in common rooms. We had made that environment and treasured it. So occupying became an art we had mastered. Respect and resistance and recognition. Our collective name is engraved deeper than even the walls now, and so The Slate belongs forever to Warwick For Free Education.
But what of Senate House? Some stories are not good ones. Brutality. Screams. Unjust.
I watched. The video of that infamous day for the first time and could not hold back tears, still brought to desperation knowing how friends suffered. Like some fucked up Holy Day, I remember December 3rd 2014, when three were arrested, but a day later the protest was a thousand strong and their occupation opened the eyes of so many who stayed after that, and still resides in those whose hearts are open to resistance. And they try to tell me that religion is dying. So I’ll have faith in a day I didn’t see and try to hold dear those who suffered so that JUSTICE/PEACE might take root.
So, I will well up every time I must go into that place, and think of all the horrible things there and try to figure out where [redacted] was standing when they got dragged away and sprayed with CS gas, and where [redacted] ran to try to stop an arrest, and how [redacted] was forced outside with lights glaring and cried- the screams haunting the lobby.
It is said, to take your pain and make it into something beautiful is an art. I say taking your pain and making it is beautiful all on its own. The ability to feel what you feel, acknowledge it and to create something from it, to twist it into something you can hold, to mould yourself around the shape of pain and hold on is beautiful. Surviving pain is an art, and you hold the paint brush.
Although I can never experience what they did, I shall write my pain in this knowledge and hope I have done enough. Because chest tight fists clenched heart palpitation feet ready to run and mind whirring is not how I should feel giving in my key to reception. This is not the reaction of someone not deeply disturbed, and generational trauma can be condensed into university overturn. We are learning to overcome this- somehow.
I must remind myself some moments we move the landscape are not ones of fear and media buzzing, but of everyday life. Although the flat I lived in last year feels desolate and distant to me, the path towards it is enlightened with the memories of walks with friends before we would go separate ways. [The first time we hung out, I did not know if it was a date, or how to understand their lack of words, but] Or another day, with a new companion we wrote the words in our heart onto those styrofoam letters across the university, and once again Warwick For Free Education was written, inside a heart. The letters only stayed the rest of the week but we still collaborated to cover our campus with giggles and protest and belonging: that week navigating campus was the easiest it had ever been.
When two different groups convened on some bench, a gust of nature/poetry told me to commit this moment to memory for when I feel sad- and so this bench sings of contentment.
I remember how the sun came out for the first time in months, so we sat for hours without getting cold and drank bad beer. So many hours spent preparing what I had to say, but it felt so worth it. Or in their small room, like mine, filled with food and laughter and the casual intimacy that comes with close spaces and closer friends. Going to a talk and advertising a boycott and- for once- everyone laughed. Mocking our mental illness(es) but feeling alive and free despite it all. I have remembered. This day and the places we made.
We have made this wasteland, once barren of passion and heart, bearable- not quite home, but a place we could be. So we were, we are, and the poetry of protest chants shall continue to grow from the crude soil, rough and through weed killer, beautiful in resistance. On a campus so artificial, where nothing is natural and the conditions so harsh, we shall continue to grow through the cracks, accomplishing what few others today can do: we find our roots firm, because they are entwined together, in solidarity forever. Maybe one day our hard work will bloom into the song of a generation.
Resonating off the halls of Our Occupation.
