Few more potent as means of protest than the blank page
• By holding one up, you haven’t said anything yet — for or against an oppressive regime. You’re expressing that your mind is free
Afamous revolutionary once observed that “on a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted”.
That revolutionary was Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. How fitting — or ironic — that its citizens have been holding up blank sheets of white paper as they protest against the draconian Covid-19 restrictions of Mao’s heir, Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the long history of revolutionary symbols, these sheets may be the subtlest, simplest and most subversive icons ever. By holding one up, you haven’t said anything yet — neither for nor against an oppressive regime. You’re simply expressing that your mind is free and beyond the fetters of any autocrat.
The regime’s thugs can still seize that piece of paper and arrest you; but every time, they expose the overlords as tyrants.
In Iran, a different symbol has come to represent freedom and revolution. Technically, it’s the absence of an object, or its removal. What started the country’s uprising was the arrest of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, for the crime of not wearing a hijab, and her subsequent death in police custody. Now women are ripping off their headscarves publicly and defiantly.
The absent hijab has therefore transferred its symbolic power to feminine hair as such. Oh, how it torments the prurient mullahs, each lock a satanic taunt blowing in the breeze. Some women flaunt their hair, others publicly cut it. Either way, the message to Tehran’s theocrats is the same as the one to Beijing’s communists: you won’t enslave us much longer; one day, maybe soon, we will be free.
Human beings need symbols for inspiration, so they can come together to effect change. The most obvious iconography involves colours and clothes. The sans-culottes of the French Revolution wore pants to distinguish themselves from the aristocratic toffs in their kneelength silk breeches. They also donned Phrygian caps, to which they pinned cockades of red, white and blue, which turned into the tricolor of the republic.
When the dictator of Minsk, Alexander Lukashenko, stole another election in 2020, Belarusian women and men took to the streets dressed in white. When the wife of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Yulia, wore a red sweater to his sentencing, other Russian dissidents donned red too. People who support abortion rights in Argentina and other countries wear green. Uprisings against autocracies have been tinted orange, yellow, rose or velvet.
Coloured textiles — from pink triangles to rainbow armbands — are good for showing allegiance and rallying the like-minded. But by being so provocative and identifiable, they also make the wearers easy targets. The organisers of the soccer World Cup in Qatar are spending a lot of energy at the moment sprinting after streakers with rainbow flags.
An alternative category of symbols is gestures, which demonstrators can make to state their point, but can also stop making when the situation becomes dangerous. For the Black Power movement, it was a clenched fist, for Black Lives Matter, the bent knee. Protesters in Thailand and Myanmar give the three-finger salute.
Another option is to infuse ordinary objects with new meanings. Flowers, being so delicate and pristine, have been symbols from Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” in 1974 to protests in Myanmar and Belarus more recently. Sometimes standard-issue road-safety jackets will do, as in France’s Yellow Vest movement. Other times, as in Hong Kong in 2014, umbrellas become Torches of Liberty — with the advantage that they can also shield the bearer from pepper spray and water cannon.
If the cause is just and the goal is liberty, I would march with, under and behind any of these symbols. But the blank sheet and the bare scalp may be the most powerful so far. It’s possible that I feel that way because the stakes are so high. In Iran as in China, people are taking big risks to demand human dignity from regimes that draw their might not from legitimacy but from oppression.
But the potency also comes from the symbols themselves. There is a natural innocence in human hair, and an implied violence in cutting it. And there is purity and potential on a white page — a clean slate of imagination that could at any moment display the human spirit in all its poetry. No despot can seize or suppress that. Mao was right about the beauty and potential of a blank sheet, and Xi is right to fear it.