Nerve 24 - A Bookshop as a Space of Dissent

A Bookshop as a Space of Dissent - News from Nowhere at 40

A fortieth birthday is supposedly a milestone, an arbitrary number of years at which life is meant to begin. Ha! Life has never stopped for a minute round here. But it does give us cause to reflect. Why are we here? What value is there in that increasingly rare breed, the radical bookshop? One of the themes for our celebrations this year is "No Glory" ... in the 1st WW or any other. We'll be Celebrating the Peacemakers, with a Light Night event focusing on Conscientious Objectors on 16th May, and we are co-hosting Lindsey German of Stop the War Coalition on 20th May during Writing on the Wall. The other theme is "Spaces of Dissent". Our Radical Bookfair on 1st June at the Bluecoat will feature authors and poets who create such spaces in their work, and all year we are offering our high street window to campaigns and groups who would like to use it as a space of dissent.

But more importantly our everyday work consists of ordering, displaying (and hopefully selling) books which create those spaces of dissent from the prevailing order, along with providing information on our noticeboards, our displays and through our social media about those campaigns and protests you are all involved in, those exhibitions and songs and plays and artworks which express dissent, those actions and movements and (as noted by MLK to be the voice of the unheard) riots which collectively dissent.

We all sometimes need to say "No!", to create a space in which to imagine new worlds, in which to discuss and debate and affirm each other's sanity in dissenting from the accepted norms, to say it is the system which is crazy not us, to point to the nakedness of the emperor and refuse to collude in the lie that there is no alternative, to give each other succour and hope.

We know it is needed, we know because the bookshop is praised daily, because every day we meet customers and visitors who desperately need a contradiction to their sense of hopelessness, who leave, after a moan or a rant or a browse, with their heads held a little higher, their determination a little stronger, their isolation a little lessened.

As we lose some battles, and are battered on every front, as we watch our public services destroyed, our NHS sold off, our Cooperative Bank handed over to hedge fund sharks, our employment rights slashed, our poorest and neediest demonised, our disabled sisters and brothers vilified, our recent immigrants scapegoated, our libraries slashed, and our planet's cries ignored...what we need most is hope that this is not the only scenario humanity can create.

And every space we can carve out which belongs to the people, which is held in common or collectively, not corporately, which shows us we are not alone, is to be treasured.

Every graffitied wall, every busker, every luddite, every striker, every online petition, every angry poet, every same-sex kiss, every utopian dreamer, every mental health or abuse survivor who speaks out, every hairy female armpit, every community garden, every defiance of racism & hate crime, every rainbow alliance, every occupation, every subversive story ..... adds to the critical mass of individual and communal dissent. Nothing is wasted.

So that's one reason we're here, why we battle to take enough money each day to pay the bills, to continue providing that space of dissent.

And of course, "Dissent is not an end in itself. Non-conformity alone can quickly become outmoded, obsessional and even reactionary. Dissent needs to be sharpened on the grindstone of a larger politics, and linked to systematic action, if it is to be brought to political fruition. But politics without dissent has a corpse in its mouth and the Left, often surprisingly conformist in its attitudes, needs to recognise the importance of a much wider notion of subversion." (Michael Rosen & David Widgery, intro The Vintage Book of Dissent)

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