‘Moments, just moments,’ is what Serene Williams said ten years ago just after defeating her older sister Venus at the US Open quarterfinal. Three words. Venus, before the match, had more to say.
‘If it doesn't happen, it's not going to make or break you. We don't have anything to prove. She has nothing to prove. She's really the best ever, so what are you going to do? Just try to make it. If you don't, then that's that and go to the next one.’
It didn’t happen for her, but did for Serena. Venus still had more words: ‘I’m so happy for you.’ Serena said she didn’t remember anything at all. 'Moments,' that’s what she said. That’s what it is all about.
There are moments everywhere. All the time. Obviously. Last night some came to me. Or, let’s say, just one.
‘I Can’t Breathe’ protests erupted all over the United States of America following the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis when police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost ten minutes, fatally asphyxiating him. That was not Chuvin’s first knee stunt.
The moment. It happened in Philadelphia.
‘We will stop protesting when you stop killing.’ That was on a placard. There were many ‘Black Lives Matter’ placards too. The protestors marched on the parkway to the museum. They were loud. Insistent. Indignant.
The cops were out. In full readiness. Riot gear. Helmets, shields, batons and guns.
I had family out there, that’s how I know this ‘moment’ (that I will describe below). My sister and two of her daughters. The youngest and her friend had found themselves at the head of the massive protest, quite by accident.
‘On the way,’ my sister relates, ‘she was feeling bad for the cops — because we were all yelling at them. Then she got there.’
They marched. Reached the barricades. And eventually teargassed.
So they were confronted by a line of police officers. Each a potential Derek Chauvin, some may have thought and they may not have been wrong. In the US of A that’s something you can’t pooh-pooh away.
There was a short video which I can’t find now, but in it, there’s my sister speaking to one of the police officers, a Hispanic. I can’t remember the exact words, but she was trying to explain why she was out there with her daughters and hundreds of others.
Conversation in the midst of yells and screams. Yes, they were livid, were the protestors and one cannot fault them.
And then he knelt. Not on anyone’s neck, but in solidarity with ordinary people who knew that Derek was out of order, that the Police Department was out of order and the USA was out of order, and used that very act symbolising ‘Out of Order’ to protest. He knelt. As did my sister. They clasped hands.
‘I wonder what happened to that cop,’ I told her.
‘Yeah, I wonder too,’ she replied.
A moment. Just a moment. It was captured by the other daughter.
‘Powerful pictures,’ I observed.
‘Yeah. There are really some fantastic ones. [She] should do a photo essay of some sort. I have so many — hundred or more photographs from this time,’ she said.
What do we get when we add up all such moments from all such protests? How about the moments that are personal and were never captured on camera or indeed could never have been photographed? What of moments interred with the bodies of those who lived them? What of moments that were not recognised as such but constituted the poetic threads that unbeknownst to the wearer nevertheless made the weave that protected and made more elegant and soft the heart and mind? That place in Philadelphia, what does it look like now?
The ‘America’ that is not but could be that my nieces, their friends and literally hundreds of thousands of others envisaged, is it closer or farther away today, ten years later?
It didn’t happen. But it could. One day.
And when that day comes, no one who marched that day in Philadelphia or turned moments into sparks and flowers may be alive to celebrate and perhaps smile and say to themselves, ‘I did my bit.’
Moments pass. They leave something behind. Always. I picked something of the something-left-behind ten years ago in Philadelphia. Thus do we challenge the might of tyrants.
There are little drones carrying drops of deliberate engagement as photograph and poetry, taking out missile systems, slipping through impenetrable domes and falling on barren lands and somehow coaxing the earth to yield flowers and corn.
Moments. We could call them that.
