Not an Ending, a Beginning: Notes on Occupy Wall Street
By Guest Contributor Manissa McCleave Maharawal, originally published at In Front and Center
In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: “What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?” These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, when you are very much in it, it feels impossible sometimes. And so instead of describing what Occupy Wall Street feels like I say: “It is all happening so fast, it changes everyday, it is overwhelming, I am tired but I am also excited again, I’ve made new friends, new lovers and new enemies, I couldn’t have imagined my life would be like this a month ago.”
When I said this to my friend Amy last week she laughed and replied, half-jokingly: “That sounds like the start of the revolution.”
“Not yet,” I replied “but we’re trying.”
But my inability to answer this question has been nagging at me: Why is it so hard to describe what it feels like to be part of this movement that is not really a movement, this moment, this space? Maybe the fact that it is hard to describe is part of its strength?
Here is the thing: Occupy Wall Street has changed a lot over the past two weeks. It has grown tremendously, garnered more and more media attention and seems to be staying put for a while. While two weeks ago I walked away from Liberty Plaza thinking of how beautiful and inspiring it was, but also worried about how long it will be there, now the terrain of questions have shifted, it isn’t: When will the cops kick us out? but How will we grow? How do we sustain all the people that have come here? Should we occupy somewhere else too? That doesn’t mean that the cops getting rid of us isn’t still a major concern, but simply that now we feel like we are semi-established in some ways, or at least in enough ways that we can sustain something.
That said, on Friday I realized how much I have grown attached to the actual space of Zucotti Park when we were threatened with eviction by Brookfield Properties, the private real estate company who owns the park. That day I woke up at 3am and made my way over to the park, anxious and deeply sad that it might all be over. Arriving at the park I saw friends, old and new, and we hugged in the chilly pre-dawn air, “I don’t want to lose all of this” I kept saying over and over again. “We won’t” they replied, “and even if we do we’ll build it somewhere else.”
We didn’t lose on Friday morning, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people willing to stay in the park, refusing to back down even if the cops threatened arrest was powerful beyond what I can express here. The moment made me realize that the way that I feel about all this, and the way I talk about it, has shifted. All of a sudden I am using personal pronouns– this is “our” movement, “we” are worried about the cops kicking us out. I don’t know when this happened but at some point I started feeling some sense of ownership over this movement. And I’ve started calling it a movement. I’ve started saying things I never thought I would , things like “in the movement….”
As I wrote in my last post, I still think OWS is more of a space than a movement, a space of radical possibility, but I also think it is becoming something else. It is a space, but it is also a moment: a moment in which radical critique of our political and economic systems and the harm they have caused, a critique that many of us have had for a while, feels possible to have on a larger scale. It is a moment in which people who never thought they would be out on the streets protesting are protesting. And this is revolutionary in itself.
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