Come on with me cruising down the street
Street Life, Roxy Music
Who knows what you’ll see, who you might meet
This brave new world’s not like yesterday
It can take you higher than the milky way
Over recent months, I have become aware of an increasing number of people sleeping on the streets of the town in which I live.
I am not proud of my initial internal reaction to seeing more rough sleepers . I found myself asking in quite a negative tone, “Why is this happening?” It seemed so easy to drift into the technocratic realm of social policy instead of tapping into a deep sense of common humanity. I allowed myself to isolate this visible homelessness as a social problem that needed fixing rather than as a mosaic of individual human tragedies. Subsequently, of course, party politics has doubled down on this by dismissing it as a “lifestyle choice”.
As I thought more about this and in light of the work that is so important to me these days, I started to think how the voices of those who end up on the streets are silenced. Where once their voices might have been heard – in a family home, a workplace, in various social settings – their appearance in our towns, potentially companionable places where human beings come together to live and work and socialise, environments where voice is noticeably present, they now live amidst us but in an enforced silence.
For those of you able to remember the Starsky and Hutch series that aired in the UK in the 1970s, you will have been exposed to the character Huggy Bear, the main informant for the eponymous cops, who would often preface the delivery of some crucial piece of information with the phrase, “The word on the street is…”
This is a reminder that in various social milieu exchanges occur sotto voce, reflecting the fact that the dominant culture is not tolerant of subaltern voices, who as a consequence engage in sub-cultural conversations outside of the mainstream. Without Huggy Bear, it seems likely that Starsky and Hutch would have been unaware that any such discussions were taking place, let alone what it was that was being said. For most of us, the word on the street, in terms of what homeless speak about together and what experiences they share, is inaccessible.
This is why coming across a particular man sitting on the street one extremely chilly morning recently was all the more significant for me, because amidst his belongings clustered around him on the pavement was a prominent cardboard sign on which he had written, “Homeless but chatty”. With this simple statement, he seemed almost to be doing something akin to a TV or film performer breaking the fourth wall, challenging our status as passers by or mere fleeting spectators of this person’s straitened circumstances and implicating us in his experience.
Above all, these three words established him as a fellow human being, someone with whom I felt privileged to start a conversation that I enjoyed. And his use of a particular form of rhyming slang in terms of certain phrases that I have not heard since my beloved maternal grandfather passed away in 1985 meant that there was a shared cultural experience of which I would not have been aware had he not invited me to speak with him in passing.
This offered an ideal opening for he and I to shoot the breeze, to engage in the sort of small talk that serves in some fashion to connect us all to one another. Just that term “small talk” relegates it to a position that seems to lack importance, and yet I personally find these exchanges in themselves extremely pleasurable, wherever they might arise.
Despite my introversion, I increasingly look to converse to connect with anyone with whom I might intersect in terms of our lives momentarily coming together. The person in the coffee shop who makes me a drink, the cashier in the supermarket who is holding onto their job despite the way in which prosumption sees customers being made to work unpaid for the store in which we are shopping by scanning our own goods, the person next to me in a queue with whom I am sharing one small experience in the overall fabric of my life – these are people with whom we can momentarily connect.
These connections are interesting in themselves…but may also offer a possible basis for a deeper connection or a wider conversation.
But seeing the sign Homeless but Chatty was a powerful reminder that the social milieu, the cultural context, and the physical environment in which we reside determines on a moment by moment basis our relationship to our voice and silence. We may be told to speak up – we so often are – but our ability to do that is overdetermined by these factors. Constantly inviting us to use our voice whilst neglecting how we experience the space wherein these exchanges are meant to take place is a foolhardy and condescending pursuit.
The people sleeping on the streets of my town may have been able to speak up and speak out previously. But nowadays their location – in the centre of the town but on the periphery of society – has stolen that voice and condemns them to silence. In the theatre of the street, they seem to have possibly gone from leading lights to uncredited extras.
Like the person with whom I spoke, it is almost certainly the case that there is a need here to engage in the crucial business of merely chatting person to person. In these seemingly unimportant exchanges, we get to speak about ourselves and – at the same time, assuming an essential generosity towards the other – we gain an insight into another person and all that they have seen and done in the course of their life to date, alongside, of course, their feelings, thoughts, and dreams.
This highlights a secondary element in all of this, namely the need to bear witness to our personal experiences – and to find ways to share that with others who are happy to pay attention and to hear what it is that we are talking about. In this case, it is about ensuring that people now sleeping on the streets are not thoughtlessly defined as the “homeless”, a category that is freighted with all manner of crude suppositions and erroneous assumptions. Homelessness cannot be understood without attending to what those who are without homes have to tell us.
This requires us to ask a number of questions in our various social settings – including, of course, the workplace and the behaviours of leaders therein, which has been perceptible in the shadows throughout this piece – in order to actively support voice amongst us and to understand silence around us.
- What is it that I consciously or unconsciously do and say that might encourage those around me to be silent?
- What is it about the place in which we find ourselves that might silence some people, even as I and others offer people the chance to speak? And what might I be able to do to change that?
- What categories might I ascribe to individuals that that alter the way in which I choose to see them and hear their voices – or that might lead those people to opt to be silent?
- How do I find a way to connect with another person on a human to human basis, bearing in mind that what starts as chat might stay at that pleasurable level…but is also the foundation for humans to step into dialogue together?
Radical OD 