{"id":6054,"date":"2024-06-27T23:04:31","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T22:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/?p=6054"},"modified":"2024-06-27T23:09:33","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T22:09:33","slug":"you-cant-kill-the-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersrebel.com\/you-cant-kill-the-message\/","title":{"rendered":"You Can’t Kill the Message<\/span>Amber Massie-Blomfield<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

We marched, that day, towards the Houses of Parliament, leaving the square outside the Tate Britain and forming a procession along the Thames. Someone had brought branches to the protest, green and freshly coppiced from a managed wood, and we held them aloft like we were extras from\u00a0Macbeth,\u00a0<\/em>converging on Dunsinane. As a line of figures dressed in red moved past we stopped, marking their slow, silent choreography. Smoke bombs exploded outside the Department of Transport. I looked upwards as purple and pink clouds swelled in the sky above us.<\/p>\n

Rage pounded in my heart, rage and exhilaration. The emotional score of the protest, and soaring above it all, sweet as a lark \u2013 joy. No one tells you, before you take to the street for the first time, how much joy there is in protest. But you feel it, the moment you slip into the crowd and shove the sign you made from an old bit of cereal box in the air above your head. Artist and activist Fehinti Balogun once likened a protest to being at a gig by your favourite band. Standing shoulder to shoulder with those who share what you\u2019re passionate about; raising your voice to join the chant everyone else is singing. I wonder, too, if \u2013 like the crowd in an auditorium \u2013 our heartbeats began to synchronise. As if we were no longer a group of individuals but a single, vast body.<\/p>\n

When you think of art you might not imagine a scene like this. You might instead think of a gallery\u2019s flawless white walls. In a library, a \u2018silence please\u2019 notice hanging from the door. The red velvet curtain in a theatre that marks the drama\u2019s edge. You might think of an art that is – and it so often is \u2013 roped off from the every day, kept behind plate glass in halls at once astonishing and fearful in their grandeur. To become an artist so often, it seems, is to join a rarefied sphere, removed from the terrain where the political battles of the day play out, and although so many artists have professed their desire to make change, the mystery of how art moves us might infuriate those driven to direct action, feeling history slip through their fingers as artists talk smoothly over glasses of champagne at press nights and private views.<\/p>\n

But there is an edge land where art and activism meet, sharing the hope that to articulate human circumstances clearly is a means of improving them.\u00a0Art in its truest sense is not something neatly circumscribed, cut off from the rough and tumble of politics, but intimately woven into the ways we negotiate the society in which we wish to live. Throughout history, artist-activists have slipped between both spheres, as if art and activism were on the same continuum \u2013 their art not distinct from their direct action but integral to it. In the most direct examples, artists become activists by joining protest movements, bringing their creativity to give shape and form to the political demands they make. If we seek out the march, we will find them there, amid the placards, the steel drums\u00a0and the figures dressed in red.<\/p>\n

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+<\/p>\n

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By evening it had begun to rain. We occupied a street in Westminster, the tarmac we sat on turning slick and luminous with the city lights. A samba band played and at either end of the street two bamboo tripods stood, protestors perched at their apex, ten feet overhead. No traffic could pass. Policemen lined the railings, faces inscrutable.<\/p>\n

Writers Rebel, a group of authors, poets and playwrights, had organised this action\u00a0outside 55 Tufton Street – the offices of climate sceptic \u2018thinktank\u2019, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.\u00a0Campaigner Esther Stanford-Xosei took to the makeshift stage we\u2019d set up and began to speak. \u201cWe all stand before history,\u201d she said. \u201cSome have already cast themselves in the role of villains, some are tragic victims, some still have a chance to redeem themselves. The choice is for each individual.\u201d The words she spoke were not her own. They belonged to the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa: his execution speech.<\/p>\n

Saro-Wiwa. That was the first time I had heard of him. I think he would have appreciated the setting. Before Saro-Wiwa became involved with activism, he wrote: novels, short stories, poetry and drama, as well as being a TV producer. His art resounded with his deep political convictions. In 1986 he published the novel\u00a0Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English,\u00a0<\/em>a bold experiment in writing in Nigerian pidgin English that was the first of its kind; his short story collection,\u00a0A Forest of Flowers<\/em>, which received the Commonwealth Prize, gave voice to female narrators in a way that was uncommon in Nigerian literature of the time.\u00a0Basi and Company<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>a low budget soap opera shot in lurid hues, was the most popular in Nigerian history \u2013 following the capers of a luckless antihero, Basi, the show was shot through with Saro-Wiwa\u2019s belief in the need to overcome tribalism in the country, portraying troubles that united all working-class people in Nigeria, regardless of their tribe or ethnicity.<\/p>\n

Unbounded by literary form, Saro-Wiwa let his pen follow his message, finding the medium that best suited it, flitting between literary and populist forms with a deftness that few writers possess. His activism was no different \u2013 another form in which his words could meet their audience, and it was his understanding of how an idea travels, honed through his literary work, that equipped him as a brilliant political organiser.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), a nonviolent action group against the exploitation of the Niger Delta by Shell, he was no stranger to protests. Oil was discovered in Nigeria in 1958. Saro-Wiwa, who was born in 1941, grew up a witness to the callous destruction of his homeland in pursuit of this \u2018black gold\u2019. With apparent impunity, Shell transformed a lush and ecologically diverse land of verdant mangroves and vital waterways into one of the most polluted places on earth. By 1990, when MOSOP was founded, thousands of oil spills had turned large swathes of it into a hellscape of lifeless brown waterways and towering flares that left the air redolent with the smell of crude, the land unfarmable and the water, slick with the rainbow tarnish of oil, undrinkable. Human bodies were left as broken as the land, as the spills were linked to high levels of malnutrition, infertility and cancer.<\/p>\n

Saro-Wiwa called it a genocide. His use of the term was deliberate. He understood the power of that word, which had only recently been invented – in the wake of World War Two – to capture horrors that were hitherto literally unspeakable. For the first time associating the term with the actions of a private corporation, he grabbed international attention and changed the frame of reference for what was happening in the Niger Delta.<\/p>\n

In 1993, he led 300,000 people in a peaceful march against a new Shell pipeline, the largest protest against an oil company in history.\u00a0 At the protest, police clashes left several protestors shot and injured; one man was killed. In the months that followed, conflicts between the Ogoni and other tribal groups flared up, apparently stoked by the government and Shell. In November 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists \u2013 the Ogoni Nine – were hanged after being found guilty of the incitement to murder of four conservative Ogoni leaders who had been brutally killed by a mob in May 1994. Though the four were at odds with MOSOP over their campaign against the oil companies, the case against the Ogoni Nine is widely regarded by humanitarian organisations as a stitch up. Shell was accused of colluding with the Nigerian Government in the unjust execution of the Ogoni Nine – in 2009, on the eve of a legal action over the claims, the company agreed to a $15.5 million dollar out-of-court settlement over the claims\u00a0(Shell director Malcolm Brinded stated at the time: \u201cwhile we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people\u201d).<\/p>\n

The message, always, was the thing, the atom at the heart of all Saro-Wiwa did. His biographer has written of his \u201cunique literary voice that enabled him to bring his ideas to a mass global (and local) audience\u201d. Saro-Wiwa wasn\u2019t allowed to read his execution speech at his death. But just before they killed him – finally, after several attempts at his execution had failed – witnesses reported that he shouted: \u201cYou can kill the messenger but not the message\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Amber Massie-Blomfield <\/strong>is an author and theatre producer, currently working for Actors Touring Company. Her second book,\u00a0Acts of Resistance<\/a>,\u00a0is about the power of art to create a better world, is published by Footnote Press in the UK and will appear in the US with WW Norton in November.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Call to action:<\/strong>\u00a0Find a pen, a piece of paper, and a timer. Got it? OK. For the next ten minutes, you’re going to write about ‘the neighbourhood I’d like to live in’. Start now. Don’t let your pen leave the paper. Don’t pause. Don’t edit yourself. Don’t let the ego intervene. After ten minutes, stop. Don’t look at your paper. Fold it up, and put it away overnight. The next morning, take out the sheet of paper and read it. This is the neighbourhood you’re going to create. Start now. Don’t let the ego intervene.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  We marched, that day, towards the Houses of Parliament, leaving the square outside the Tate Britain and forming a procession along the Thames. Someone had brought branches to the protest, green and freshly coppiced from a managed wood, and we held them aloft like we were extras from\u00a0Macbeth,\u00a0converging on Dunsinane. As a line of […]<\/p>\n

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