By A.M Poppy,
It’s a clear November night. It’s pitch dark, the temperature is plummeting, and I walk home as if I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I've
discovered what it means to be gutted. I’m returning from a squalid
car-park where a small crowd of young people who have become friends were
assembled forlorn, alongside their motley belongings. Hi-viz jacketed
bailiffs were silhouetted in the double doors that give out onto the car
park of the Bohemia pub from which the occupiers are being
evicted.
Under a lamppost my friends are holding an impromptu meeting
deciding what to do, where to go, how to proceed. I can’t help. I’m
helpless. The police had arrived after dark, in riot gear, with dogs and bailiffs and broken the door down, apparently. Phoenix has never known such haste in enforcing an eviction order. The ferocity of the entry was captured on a local journalist’s phone. Danny takes comfort in the fact that a neutral reporter will be able to bear independent witness to what has occurred. The journalist as the eyes and ears of the community, yes.
But can he be the heart and stomach of our community?
Can he fathom the significance of this expulsion to us who live near this unglamorous, suburban high street? He needs to know that the fact these
young people had opened the space up for reading groups, yoga, socialising,
and entertainments including some daring burlesque was just the outward
surface things.
I am going to make a bold claim: That occupied Bohemia’s
main significance was immanent and symbolic, and all the more powerful for that. Occupied Bohemia gave us a stake in the high street, a space that
we could invest with a wish, witting or unwitting. Its space represented
potential, and in potential anything is possible. Not until I saw the
gutted Bohemia – its vital organs, the occupiers, spilled on the car-park
tarmac – did I realise that a part of me had died. A part I hadn’t known
was there. A part that had invested in that space a sense that as soon as I
needed to, or wanted to, I could make something happen in the Bohemia. That
feeling has been called many names: empowerment, self-actualisation,
hope.
In a time of austerity, when options for most of us are shrinking, when laws are tightening around us and the social safety nets are torn apart, occupied Bohemia offered a chink of the prospect of being agents
in our own lives, of shaping our destiny at least a little bit.
With
screaming riot police and dogs, the establishment has made clear what it
will do to such an impudent feeling. I’m not weeping. I’m stunned, kicked,
gutted.
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Poppy was the Green Party candidate for the GLA Elections in 2012. Guest Blogs are always welcome
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