Meet me in the street

In January I bought a Palestine flag and draped it over the sofa. Some evenings, our cat Prawn likes sleeping with her back legs propped up against the flag, and this scene suffuses me with an acute awareness of peace, like a living room filling with light at golden hour.

On Saturday Zedeck and I took the flag to the capital for the big Palestine march. Grace met us at Taman Jaya LRT station. We got off at KLCC, where there were lots of cops and shoppers, but no signs of protest. We headed down Jalan Ampang towards Tun Razak, and as we passed Wisma Central, the sound of chants floated towards us.

The first thing I saw was a red placard with a huge Nazi swastika, which completely overshadowed the caricature of Netanyahu as a horned Hitler in the same image. Graphic signs have a potent ability to drown out all other visuals. From a distance, I couldn't make out the caricature, only the swastika, and wondered if we had stumbled onto the wrong march - an epic fail of propaganda design.

The Palestine flags on the other hand, rose up from the ground to frame the street like a graphic field. A construction worker watched us from a high building. The jumbotron screens at the corner of Yap Kwan Seng played a Loewe ad. Outside the Ritz Carlton, a street cleaner sat slumped and staring into space. The forest of green, red, black and white sliced through the familiar city like flashes of clear light. We carried no other flags, not even Malaysian.

We passed an abandoned showroom for a development project called The Luxe. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows lay shattered on the ground. A scale model of the building sat on its plinth, protective case ripped away. The scene of destruction made me want to dance and cry. I thought about Gaza. I thought about the end of one world and the birth of another. How long. And would she arrive screaming or dead?

On protest marches I always keep an eye for outfits. Rallies are visual spectacles, and people's sense of style returns our attention to individual bodies. No drone shot can tell you how the act of walking expresses human dignity. A broad-shouldered pakcik in a striped polo strides steadily ahead of me, not fast not slow. To his right, kids stumble along in too-big puffy slippers. An older boy helps a younger one adjust a portable fan. An elderly couple in matching beige have fantastic swag: his shirt and pants contrast perfectly with the proportions of her billowing hijab and blouse. They never let go of each other's hands. A pretty girl wearing a black tank top, combat boots and a red keffiyeh as a skirt is overthinking it, which makes me smile - I want to see what she wears at the next protest! A cool couple strolls by draped shoulder-to-shoulder with a Palestine flag. She's in black and he's in tanjak and baju melayu...

It's a long walk. For months, I've been doing nothing but strength training to rehabilitate an ankle injury, and the sudden cardio is a jolt to my system. A makcik moves easily through the crowd pushing a huge icebox, calling 'air, air, air!'. As we rounded Tun Perak, the memories pressed down like a curtain of air. The color was yellow, ten years ago. We slept at Dataran Merdeka. We were tear-gassed in front of Menara Maybank. A person we marched with is a minister now. The current government was at least partly put into power by Bersih's street protests. Promises of reform not withstanding, it knows the protest playbook like the back of its fist. If we want to shake it the way we did its predecessor, we'll need to change the script.

I saw a couple of friends. Okui ran up to me and we hugged. I put my arm around Ez, who said: 'Finally, people I know!'. Since Covid, our networks, such as they were, have grown even looser. This was the first time we'd seen each other in 4 years.

At last, we arrived at Padang Merbok. Grace's smartwatch said 10,000 steps. There was a stage, so there would be speeches. I was prepared for an anti-climax, but not for the once-open field to be surrounded by a security fence. The crowd trickled onto the field through a single opening with the air of students at morning assembly. When the emcee started cajoling people who had stayed outside to join in, we knew it was time to go.

We had dinner together - spicy beef noodles, soft sandwiches with egg and vegetables, prawn rolls. Warm showers and an air-conditioned room. Zedeck and I drove back to Port Dickson afterwards, and put the flag back on the sofa. The preciousness and privilege of peace, which is not at all the same as safety. Meet me in the street, my friends, because every act of resistance is practice in knowing the difference.

This has been Signal 002. If you subscribed, thank you, it means so much to me!

Until the next send,

Sharon

Further reading:

• Palestinian History Tapestry project
• 'Rites of Change: Artistic Responses to Recent Street Protests in Kuala Lumpur' by Fiona Lee, 2017 (PDF)
• We Are Marching Now: The Inside Story of Bersih 1.0 by Danny Lim (2022, Matahari Books)
• Women's March 2024 - 9am, SAT 9 March 2024, from Sogo Kuala Lumpur to Dataran Merdeka

Snapshots from the Studio

Testing out this bonus section at the end of every letter.