WHOSE STREETS?
Sunil Yapa’s debut hits with the force of a police baton
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of A Fist
By Sunil Yapa Lee Boudereaux Books 320 pp; $32
On a grey Tuesday at the end of November in 1999, thousands of people convened in the streets of Seattle. They planned to shut down the the World Trade Organization’s final meeting of the millennium. Low estimates for the gathered crowd would put the number of attendees at around 40,000 people, with representatives from the Teamsters and other American labour unions, environmental activists, direct action pressure groups and additional organized communities joining forces in opposition to global trade agreements that would potentially endanger workers and their livelihoods all over the world. Seattle’s police department, led at the time by Norm Stamper, was overwhelmed. Pepper Spray and tear gas filled the streets and mass arrests were made. By noon, the opening meeting for the WTO convention was officially cancelled. The National Guard was called in the following morning, and Seattle’s mayor, Paul Schnell, decreed purchasing, selling or even possessing a gas mask constituted criminal behaviour.
Seattle’s police force attended the rallies and marches in full riot gear, meeting both active protestors and gawking civilians as a wall of militarized Storm Troopers. Today, of course, the sight of American municipal police forces dressed fully for war is hardly unusual. In a December, 2014 article for The Walrus, John Lorinc wrote that we “live in a world of mission creep, a world where the lines that once separated local policing and national security have become profoundly entangled.” Especially in the wake of the cops’ militarized occupation of Ferguson, Missouri after the city’s residents demonstrated their anger and sorrow over the death of Michael Brown, the sight of the officer kitted out for full combat has become all too familiar. The 1999 WTO Protests, which has over time come to be known by the unfortunately Wrestlemania-ish sobriquet The Battle in Seattle, was among the first mass- mediated instances of the incorporation of military-grade vehicles and weaponry into municipal police work.
Sunil Yapa’s debut novel is set in the tumult of the first day of the protest, using short chapters to flit between the perspectives of seven people in attendance. The bare outline of the circumstances in the novel align with reality: Bill Clinton sits in the 1999 Oval Office; about 50,000 people block the street using a diversity of resistance tactics; tear gas and pepper spray abound. But Yapa fictionalizes certain particulars. Here, the chief of Seattle’s police is a man called Bishop, and, unlike his real life counterpart Stamper, he does not necessarily resign after the demonstrations, nor go on to author books and articles on what went wrong on Nov. 30, 1999. The Sri Lankan delegate to the WTO is a fictional character named Charles Wickramsinghe, attending the meetings for the very first time, even though in reality Sri Lanka has been represented at the WTO meetings since 1995. It is the province of novelists to imagine, to divert from reality in order to open some other window on the experience of living a life; Yapa does so with style, departing from reportable facts in order to tell a story that poses questions about global trade agreements and American police work, certainly, but alongside ones about commitment, family, character and complicity. Bishop and Charles are joined by a woman who goes by the name “King,” a nonviolent activist organizer measuring her sense of conviction against her own personal safety;
a Guatemalan- born officer named Ju, who loves her work but feels uneasy with the mobbish cruelty she’s witnessing in her colleagues; her partner Park, an officer who survived the Oklahoma City Bombings and is still dealing with the lingering professional and personal trauma; and Victor, Bishop’s black step-son, returned to Seattle after three years as a nomadic runaway folowing his mother’s death. Laid out in one paragraph, the cast seems relatively small, but given the short chapters Yapa prefers, the assembled group is a bit unwieldy. The troubled backstories and hastily developed relationships can take on the feeling of something barely sketched as they take a back seat to Yapa’s bristling and violent descriptions of the first afternoon of the protests, heading toward the novel’s climax with all the torque of a bullet.
Set entirely on the first day of the protest, Yapa’s characters provide a diverse set of perspectives, typically in close- third person, what veteran critic James Wood calls “free indirect style.” The device works very well on the whole, lending the experience of reading something of the chaos of the event depicted in the novel. Unlike the news reports immediately following the demonstrations, Yapa’s reimagined WTO Protest gives readers access to multiple points of view on the contentious issue of globalization. Charles’s perspective, present across five short chapters as intermissions — though they are more vitally ancillary than they are breaks in the action — illuminate a context for the protest missed by other stories of American civil disobedience (including the idiotic militia making news in Oregon).
Charles is coming to the conference by way of 15 years of ugly civil war. Seated beside a clueless American actress on his first class flight into Seattle, he thinks about “his house in Colombo behind two lines of concrete wall and wire. Of the two armed guards who manned the gate, M16 rifles at the ready.” Later, encountering the police and the protestors, he thinks about the birth of the Tamil Tigers, the terrorist organization that invented the suicide vest and whose 1983 bombing of a police station caused widespread rioting and arson in Sri Lanka. He thinks about how peaceful Tamil citizens were dragged from their homes and burned to death in the street.
Encountering the demonstrations in the street, Charles iforms one greasyhaired protester that he is a delegate from Sri Lanka en route to his meeting. “Oh f-k. I’m so sorry,” he’s told. “Is that even the thing to say here? We’re out here to protect countries like yours.” Yapa’s depiction of Charles’s aims, his observations on American idealism work under the skin like a particularly baroque splinter. The gentlemanly diction of his thoughts are as infected by colonial legacy as the rest of the world: “...there was something distinctly American about it all, a fundamental difference in perspective and place — in how they saw themselves in the world. And this was what made it so American — not that they felt compassions for mistreated workers three continents away ... not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no, not that either, but that they felt the need to do something about it. That they felt they had the power to do something about it.”
Reading from the perspectives of Yapa’s other characters, we see this American trait extends beyond the protesters into the minds of the police. Bishop, facing a crowd of 50,000 people with a protective sense of arrogance, refuses to call in the National Guard and instead trusts his regular duty force with military grade chemical agents. Victor, deciding essentially on a whim to perform a radial act of civil disobedience with King and her friends, listens to the protesters chanting “WHOSE COPS? OUR COPS!,” and thinks, “The Police protect money and power. They protect the few from the violence of the many. Do you have to be black or brown to know this? No. Maybe it helps. S-- t, our cops? The police, they pickle the world, preserving it the way it is.”
In the wake of a new order of police work, where large scale events — 1999 WTO meeting, the G20 meeting in Toronto, or the civilian response to police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri — come with delineated zones for free speech and municipal officers dressed for the occupation of combat zones, Yapa’s novel is a startling and perceptive depiction of life during wartime. In a scene from the novel that mirrors one in the hastily made, December 1999 citizen journalist documentary of the Battle in Seattle, This is What Democracy Looks Like, a man has an officer’s foot on his neck as he calmly informs the arresting officer that he is not resisting arrest. “I am a peaceful protester, I am willing to be arrested,” he says. Yapa writes, “The cops answered succinctly with their batons and fists.”