Proem

What Moves Us
Shailja Patel

Some moments
history comes to us and says:
What do you truly want?

We tremble.
Often we run.
From the terrifying possibility
that we could choose
movement.
That we could begin
exactly where we are
in all our screwed-up
imperfection.

Some days we stand
before our world
and the question
vibrates the air around us:
What do you choose?

This day?
This moment?
This
heartstopping
glorious
adventure?

There's strong like patriarchy
strong like institutions
strong like two-billion dollars a day
military occupations
spiked with genocide
anchored in neoliberal greed
buttressed by terror
designed to deliver
200-volt shocks
on contact.

Then there's the strength
of what flows.
Tears, grief, memory.
Blood, energy, breath.
Collective action.

The strength of what moves us
opens our throats
ignites our hips
unleashes our voices
puts the move back into movement
distils the motion from emotion.

Movement
strong as a river,
current of joyful resilience
wave and curl
crash and swirl
patterns that constantly change.

Movers who channel each day
the courage of divers
to plunge again
into this churning water.

Thankful
for what yields results
curious
about what does not.
Building lung capacity
to finally embrace
the wholeness of our struggles
exactly as they are.

Some moments, life asks of us:
What do you hope?

There's hope like a battleground
hope that's all soundbites
hope that rehashes a thousand manifestos.
What we intend, believe, imagine
what we propose and plan and dream
what we say, expect, pretend, how we think
things should look.

Then there's the truth on the ground.

What we show up for
each day
with our fearful, angry,
tired, clumsy selves.
With our complex, precious,
wounded, brilliant selves.

We grapple with the chasms
of all that's gone before.
Negotiate the heartbreak
of decades of betrayal.
Stretch our brains and wills
until we feel it,
to hard analysis
until we get it
unpack systems, structures, models
mine the data, map
the stories
'til we know
what works and what does not.
What truly
moves
us.

Some years, life comes to us and says:
What do you know?
Why we kept at it, for forty, fifty years.
Why we have never regretted it.

That this movement
Still moves us
In our guts, our hips, our hearts

That this laughter
this trust
this earned and tried and tested respect
is a house we have built,
brick by brick
and it will hold.

Some mornings life wakes us up
sets our hearts beating
sets our nerves thrumming
warns us
we're about to leap
into our iciest fear
our largest growth
our most piercing joy.
Some mornings,
We take a huge breath, say
Yes
to it all.

Some evenings, life wraps us round
in the softness of twilight,
asks:
What are you waiting for?

Truth.
Justice.
Reparation.
Healing.
In our lifetimes. In our
lifetimes. In
Our
Lifetimes.

Each day, love comes to us and says:
What will you show up for?
What, in the end, is the truth of your heart?
We answer with our bodies.

We show up
for the struggle.
We show up
for each other.
We show up
just as we are.
Precious, flawed
limited, magnificent
Human.

We show up
for change.
We choose
the power of movement.
We love
by showing up.

The Movements of Movements:An Introduction and an Exploration1

Jai Sen

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

— Arundhati Roy

Movement, motion, is a fundamental facet, fact, of life; of all life processes. Indeed, in some ways it is life itself. It is the most fundamental characteristic of change.

Movement intrinsically involves the flow of energy; of power in the sense of shakti.

Movement links points, in space and in time. Power radiates.

In a sense therefore, all movement is about energy — about energy harnessed, energy expressed, energy experienced, energy directed — and all movement is therefore about power, understood in a generic sense.

I do not pretend to be a sage, but my sense is that at this moment in history, we are entering — or perhaps have already entered — a period of another great transformation, where almost despite ourselves, we as human beings are embarking on a profound search for truth and for meaning.

This book and its companion volume The Movements of Movements, Part 2: Rethinking Our Dance are about what I suggest is a fundamental expression not only of this moment in history but also of the unfolding of human history and of life itself: Social (and political) movement.

Unfortunately, as in too many fields in the contemporary world, these terms and their meanings have come to be captured by particular and increasingly specialised disciplines and as a result have almost lost (or arguably, been made to lose) their generic meanings for us. At one level therefore, these two books are also an attempt to allow these more fundamental meanings to come out and to live, and to critically explore them.

This book, then, is about people in movement; it is about women and men who feel moved to do something about the world around them and about the social and political movements for justice and liberation that they form. But, in a way, it is more than this. It is an attempt to present (and to see and to hear and to feel) the extraordinary drama of the flow of social movement taking place across the world in our times, that we are so privileged to be a part of or to be witness to, perhaps more than ever before in history. It is also an attempt to take a look across the landscape of movement that is sweeping the world in our times, towards understanding it.

In this Introduction, I argue that what we see and understand as 'movement' is not merely what we now normally understand it to be — crowds of people around an issue, important as that is — but a fundamental expression of the human spirit, of life itself, and of the life of Mother Earth herself. Perceiving it in this way opens up many new doors.

Among other things, the fact that movement is so fundamental to our lives is reflected in the simple fact that the term 'movement' occurs in so many different spheres of life — the social, the scientific, the creative (an 'art movement' or a movement in music), and also the intensely personal and private (such as when we are moved by a poem or a song or a picture, or by a piece of music, and at a very different level, the experience of what in some contexts is called a 'bowel movement'). This is perhaps true in all languages and cultures. Even the word 'emotion'— which gives expression to such a basic part of what makes us human — is rooted in motion, in moving, and in being moved. Accordingly, I suggest that we need to try to see and comprehend what we otherwise understand as 'social and political movement' in this much wider and deeper sense and that we can gain new understandings both of movement and of the world around us if we can see them in this way.

In particular, and with this lens, I would like to invite readers to see this book not just as a space where we, as outsiders, can view and read the work of the contributors, and/or where we can then comparatively and critically present and discuss movements. Rather, I invite you to consider this book as a space where movements themselves are speaking to each other, and where they can perhaps grow through their interactions, learning from their exchanges. Through this we all — including those of us in movement — can perhaps move towards a more full understanding of the deeper meanings of movement and of their potentials and limitations, individually and collectively, and of the worlds of movement around us.

As a contribution to this, I have also tried in these two books to go one step further. By attempting to see the essays contained in them as the diverse and varying politico-cultural compositions that they are, and by attempting to compose the book with the essays as movements in themselves (using the terms 'composition' and 'movement' here in the sense they are commonly used in music), I have tried to see the two books themselves as compositions, and to consciously compose them (with the limited skills I have), and so to perhaps make manifest something of the dance and the music of movement, and of worlds in movement.

As discussed later in this Introduction, these two books are the fourth and fifth in a series titled the Challenging Empires series. Our aim — in this series and in these books — is to strengthen movement by critically exploring its transformative power, and to widen and deepen a critical understanding of movement by outsiders and by participants as not an auxiliary but core part of politics, governance, democracy, and social transformation, and of life and of hope. In the case of these books, we attempt to do this by presenting a range of analyses of and reflections on both the everyday praxis of a wide range of movement and insistently, and simultaneously, also the wider worlds within which movements take place — and of which they are an integral part.

This Introduction attempts both to sketch out this book and also contains some reflections on what we are attempting by a book of this kind. It has the following sections:

• About This Book • Locating Myself

• Worlds in Movement

• Meanings of Movement, the Movements of Movements, and This Book

• Reading Across the Essays

• Closing Comments.

About This Book

I feel I must make clear at the outset that although this two-volume book contains a large number of essays (see the Table of Contents for details, and more on this below), it does not in any way attempt or pretend to be a comprehensive encyclopaedia of movement today, or even an up-to- date reportage of all movement that has recently taken place or that is taking place today. It goes without saying that no one book can cover everything; nor, arguably, is it even preferable that any one book attempts this. Rather, this book is merely one attempt to bring together some outstanding essays that in my editorial judgement can, both individually and collectively, help us all to perceive the larger world of movement, and to begin to understand it; and to the extent possible in the format of a book, to make this book a space where conversations between movements begin to open up, at different levels.

In all, we have commissioned and/or collected some 50 essays for this book, as well as two major Afterwords, one in each book. As already mentioned above, in order to present and make available as wide a range of movements as possible however, and to make these essays as accessible as we can, we are publishing this book in two volumes, or parts. This present book is Part 1, and has three Sections. It opens with a Section 0 titled 'Invocations', containing a Proem by Shailja Patel on 'What Moves Us' and this Introduction, and then goes on to sketch out, in Section 1, certain key features of the landscape of contemporary movement in the world from 1968 till about 2010. The sketches are by people from different parts of the world and intentionally include essays by both indigenous peoples and by settlers, thereby offering fundamentally — and structurally — different views of the landscape they inhabit and see. It is the same world, but seen through different eyes and different experiences.

In Section 2, we present a wide range of sensitive and reflective portraits of movement, several of which are critical discussions of how different movements move (and/or have moved) in different contexts. The essays in this book and in its companion volume are by authors (both activists and researchers) from many parts of the world, North and South, and from many different persuasions; and broadly speaking, though mostly written during and focussing on the period 2006–10, over the past fifty years. This book ends with a major, specially-commissioned Afterword by Laurence Cox, co-author of We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism, that reads across all the essays in this book and critically engages with several.

Part 2 of this two-part book — titled The Movements of Movements, Part 2: Rethinking Our Dance — also has three sections, as above. Looking at movements as the dances of warriors — and here drawing on and inspired by the lives and cosmologies of aboriginal peoples across the world, and in particular on the magnificent body of work by Taiaiake Alfred, a contributor to the book — the book asks the question: How can, and should, we rethink our dance?

Here too, and following another stunning Proem by the same author as in this book, Shailja Patel, and an introduction by myself as "Invocations", Section 3 brings together a wide range of essays — again, by both activists and researchers from different parts of the world — but in this case critically reflecting on movement and drawing out fundamental issues that those in movement are concerned with. Part 2 closes with Section 4, composed of several rich and provocative reflections on movement and on possible futures. A major Afterword by Lee Cormie (researcher / teacher / writer and sometime activist concerning social justice movements and coalitions, and a professor emeritus of theology and interdisciplinary studies, who has published many articles on liberation theologies and social movements and been involved in major church-based social justice initiatives over the entire span of movement covered by this book) follows this. This essay reads across both parts of this two-part book and reflects on the meanings of this collection as a whole.

For an overview of the contents of each of the two parts that make up this book, see the Table of Contents in this book; for a discussion of some cross-readings of the essays in this Part, see the subsection further on in this Introduction titled 'Reading Across the Essays'.

Locating Myself

Writing an introduction — just as much as producing a book, or taking part in a movement — is an act of power (though where I use the term 'power' here not in its common sense of power-over, but of power-to). For an introduction such as this then, and to a book (and book project) such as this, it is probably useful for me to introduce and situate myself in relation to the book, as compiler and lead editor. In short, I am not a disinterested observer, nor a 'scholar' (understood in the sense of a well-informed person trained in academic skills who seeks to document, report on, and analyse what she sees and understands, in the somewhat detached manner that the conventions of scholarship demand). Rather, I have been deeply immersed in social movement as a participant, organiser, and strategist, and then more as researcher, commentator, convener of gatherings, and facilitator (and as a compiler and editor of books!) for the past forty years. I have for some time now, and as a part of my research and writing work and my work on the World Social Forum and world movement, been trying to nurture and build transnational and transcommunal exchange and reflection on it. I therefore come to this book with a very subjective and committed position on movement and the subject of this book.

I have come to realise only recently that my first experiences of movement, and of resistance and struggle, happened almost without my being aware of it. In school, and then in college, I all but unconsciously got involved in raising issues with those who ran the institutions, organising resistance, and fighting my way through them. After a first career through the 1970s as an architect and urban planner (first in Montreal, in Canada, then in Kolkata [then still Calcutta] in India) I moved to working as a community organiser / activist, movement strategist, and campaignist based in Kolkata. As an architect, I came to be radically re-educated by this experience of working on the ground.

Although this was an enormously creative and productive period for me personally (and, I think, for all of us who worked and struggled together through this period, in different formations), I also got burned out by continuously being a frontline activist — as well as being an outsider, because I was not born in Kolkata but had moved there (and to what I realise, in retrospect, was a quite closed political environment that was often suspicious of outsiders such as myself). It was in Kolkata that I became aware of 'politics' and cut my political teeth, such as they are (and perhaps lost some of them).