Thu
25-Aug-2005

changealuia!

At midday today I joined Richard H at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church to meet with a group of about twenty or thirty people for a retail intervention against Starbucks. This was really enjoyable and I'm so glad I went.

The action was being led by the marvellous Reverend Billy who is over from New York, and was called Shop Lift! and what we did was all head into the Starbucks in groups of two or three, until in time we had filled up the store. Then we each chose an object around the store - whether a coffee stirrer, a table, a cup, newspaper, bag of coffee beans - and tried to fall in love with it. We slowly lifted these things high above our heads, while chanting out loud the stories behind them. The idea was to travel back in time and space, to the boxes in which these objects were packed, the lorries that drove them to the store, the ships from which they were disembarked, across the oceans from whence they came, to the ports, cities, mountains, farms and plantations where these things were made. We all created our own narratives, it was easier to do with our eyes closed, and gradually we recontexualised these transnational objects that had been stripped of their painful histories, we remembered the children and families that had died to pick the coffee beans in Guatemala, considered the fossil fuels laid down over millions of years and dug up to create the plastic lids on the cups, tried to move closer to our fellow human beings in the sweatshops and toxic fields on the other side of the world.

Finally, when we had raised the objects as high above us as possible, we were reaching back into the beginning, to the forests, to the soil, to the implacable immensity and mystery of life. Then Rev Billy gave a short sermon in the store, condemning the hypocritical, transnational devil of Starbucks and its rampaging drive to create corporate monopolies till everything looks the same, as we all cheered and called out "Changealuia!" Then we put everything back where we'd found it and left the stores with glad hearts, as bemused shoppers and coffee sippers reacted in various ways around us.

It was a very rewarding and fulfilling piece of activist drama. The journey into the visions locked away in the objects were particularly beautiful. I remember just standing there in the first Starbucks we went into on Tottenham Court Road, my arms stretched up, my eyes closed, sanguine in my final vision of the sun winking down through the tall trees of some primaeval forest.