Don’t Chant Together Right Away

When a crowd finds the same beat, things do not necessarily get better. To say this sounds cold, so cold it seems to judge from offstage a group of people in mourning; it must be corrected by the scene immediately.

Before Emma González came onstage, the crowd chanted her name. That chant was not an enemy. It was like holding her up, giving someone who had not yet spoken a place to stand first. She walked to the microphone and said, about six minutes and twenty seconds. Then came the names of the dead, one by one. After the names, the speech did not immediately continue. The scene did not empty out: applause, breathing, the friction of clothing, the sound of someone sniffling, all remained. What stopped was not sound itself, but the step by which sound becomes the next correct sentence.

At this moment, the easiest mistake is not to write the scene as too noisy, but to write it as too quiet. “Never again” had already entered. The phrase was, of course, right; and precisely because it was right, it made it too easy for people to know at once how the next breath should be used. The crowd already knew how to chant. That correct slogan had already reached the lips, like a road already laid down, one anyone could follow onward. But it did not take all the remaining time away.

This is not to say that not chanting is more sophisticated. Sometimes people must shout: Tahrir’s “peaceful” pulled bodies back out of the rhythm of violence. That kind of chant does not spare people hesitation; it lines them up before a worse rhythm presses in. Without that sound, the crowd might also be carried away by another, faster, rougher beat.

So those few minutes cannot be arranged into pure quiet. If the quiet is too pure, it instead resembles a memorial object retouched after the fact. What is more difficult is this: sound had already come, support had already come, and a phrase almost impossible to refute had already come; they were not judged wrong, nor were they solemnly driven out. They simply stopped at the edge and did not keep growing. The scene preserved a capacity that is rarely commemorated: not the ability to find one shared sentence, but the ability, after a shared sentence has already appeared, to still allow time to hurt a little longer.

When she began speaking again, six minutes and twenty seconds had passed. “Never again” had already come, but it had not taken the remaining time away. That breath did not come out right away.