The bicycle is a force multiplier. Through the power of torques, pistons, and the arcing ankle it is one of the most efficient machines ever created. This was first told to me by a man at the pedestrian lights across from Newtown Station one night. I responded that I could feel it, I knew it to be true. On those two wheels I feel like a knife through still wind.
A protest group is also a force multiplier. It takes the resolutions of its individuals and funnels them through a single, multi-owned throat. Powered by swinging fists and beating hearts, it is one of the most effective ways for people to be heard.
I was riding to my interview with Marto (on Instagram as @Komfy) when, somewhere on Riley Street, I heard a voice behind me, on my side a shadow, then in front a familiar face. Weaving through backstreets, main streets, and footpaths with Marto felt like being two ends of lightning, our conversation zigzag between us as we overtook each other, slowed down, sped up, eyes keen on hand signals and obstacles. I felt, perhaps for the first time ever, like a cyclist.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
“My name’s Marto, sometimes known as Komfy. I see myself as maybe an observational cyclist documenting the day-to-day. I manage a retail store in Darlinghurst called Pam. I also have my own art practice in ceramics, making incense chambers at the moment. I guess the personal is the political and I find being present in the moment important to my life.”
The bicycle is a mystery. For the beginner it is clumsy like new languages on the tongue. Then, after enough time spilling red onto asphalt, you turn hybrid. You step into the saddle like a pair of trousers, comfortable as legs. If I walk anywhere now, it is with the same loss that I’ve heard ex-smokers describe when drinking without a dart.
I first met Marto at the low-cost community-oriented bike repair workshop Cycle Re-Cycle, which operates out of the Waterloo social housing ‘suicide towers’, where I occasionally volunteer. He rocked up to discuss with us potential interest in a bicycle group he helped facilitate which rode from the Palestinian restaurant Khamsa, in St. Peters, to the Free Palestine rallies in Hyde Park on Sundays (on Instagram as @ride4palestine.syd). I was interested in it, neglecting my repair duties to chat. The intersection of cycling and protesting fascinated me.
This feeling (better described as a knowing), also baffles me. Not so much for the experience but for the cause. A bird-boned two-wheel contraption explodes into what Marto calls a “subliminal liberation… there’s that freedom. And the repetition of movement is this kind of hypnotic feeling, you can kind of lose yourself in those moments.”
This link between bicycles and protesting seems like back-patting puffery, yet the concrete history is there, from Susan B. Anthony of the American women’s suffrage movement remarking: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” To Mohammad Nazarpoor writing of how, in Tehran, “Iranian Women see cycling as a political practice to challenge everyday spatial regimes.” Or how Jose Etxebarria of the Human Gallery in Battambang, Cambodia, gathers donations to purchase bicycles for students so they are able to attend school. The Samajwadi socialist party of India, the third largest political party in the country, spotlights a bicycle on their flag. This most innocuous method of transport is a torpedo, as quiet as it is destructive. Marto continues:
“Every time you hop on the bike you’re beating the system in some way. You’re not paying for public transport, not emitting greenhouse gases, staying healthier as an individual which hopefully means less need to buy [from] big pharma which means in turn having more time to show up for causes bigger than yourself if you’re a healthy, active kind of person.”
What does Khamsa Eatery think?
“Sara’s fully down with it. That was an important thing when we did the first one. We reached out to her and made it a collaborative thing which is important, to have the Palestinian voice at the forefront of actions. Sara and the team at Khamsa have been super supportive.
Couple times they’ve put on some dishes for donation. So if you have some breakfast just pay it forward with what you can to a QR code for a specific family trying to evacuate Gaza, or the Gaza Sunbirds, or mutual aid.”
Do you think something like this can ever become decentralised to the point that it continues on without having a leader?
“There’s been offshoot little rides, which I actually promote when I do a speech at the rides. ‘Take this day as an inspiration to the others and go and do your own little rides…’ A friend hit me up to do a graphic for a ride from Newtown to the Inner West council meeting in Ashfield at the Town Hall there. And I was like for sure, I can’t make it, but I think 10 of them gathered in Newtown and rode with flags to the meeting.”
I don’t know why some people cycle and some do not. The list of benefits are obvious like a receipt. But I don’t only wonder about cycling. I wonder why any of us, myself included, accept the norm when the norm is bad. Normal life is killing us. It has us more sedentary, lonely, depressed, and anxious than any previous generation. With a burgeoning awakening to the hole we’ve dug ourselves, what marks those that take to the streets? Why, in the mufti peloton of the protest, is not everyone involved? Even still, my question is projection. I rarely add my drop to the flood, and I know I don’t have any good reason why.
Have you adjusted how you do the Palestine rides as time’s gone on?
“The first one… was a little more backstreets. And once everyone got a bit more confident and understood what was going on we actually changed it up to go through the encampment [at Usyd]. And naturally through the encampment we went onto City Road which was cool as we could take up a bit more space and be seen, more than [in] the backstreets of chippendale. From that we could go underneath the Harbour bridge into Circular Quay where lots of eyes are.”
Is there any meta-anxiety beyond the rides? Being a figure in the [protest] space?
“I try to not be a figure. It’s never really been my thing. And it’s something I’ve learned through the palestinian resistance. Especially someone like Abu Obeida covering his face and doing these revolutionary speeches every few months for the whole globe to see. Obviously it’s not about him, it’s about liberating his land and his people.
There’s lots we can learn from the resistance and how to make it less about certain people and more as a collective and how we’re going to work together rather than individually.”
Of course, the path of progress is never assured. It is sidestreets, doubling-back, headlamps, obstacles, sunlight. Misery and comfort and hundreds of differences. But it is not in my mind how fast we turn the world, only that the handlebars are gripped. Swarms of protestors suffer the sharpest headwinds so those that come later may eclipse them with their own slipstream. In the middle of Gaza Al-Dali rides with the Gaza Sunbirds, a para cycling group that helps deliver aid to those in need, his own leg blown up by an Israeli sniper.
“I truly believe that Palestine is awakening the global consciousness and shifting collective sentiment. With an Earth quickly diminishing today is a good day to spark thoughts around personal plus collective actions we can put in place for everyday to be the change we hope to see in our lifetimes. I believe that Palestine is the portal and may its humility continue to free itself and those who don’t just stand with it but act with it.”
Sydney is mud under the cyclist’s wheel, imprinted by the pressure of legs pushing rubber. While the trickle of new riders swelling this city’s streets annually is small, there is a rising damp still, with cycle-infrastructure breaking pavement like tree roots. I go back to the suburb of my parent’s home and see an old footpath with a new pale blue line, an acknowledgment of an increasing way of movement within this city. There is no always-normal, change is the only constant.
I end with a quote from Olivier Haralambon’s book The Cyclist’s Shadow. It is incredible how, in writing of an experience so singular as cycling, he speaks of everything. His writing is a bubble suspended in mid-air, reflecting the world around it in an iridescent wrap.
“Breathless, isolated in my own echoes by the wind, my fingers stiff and my eyes full of tears from the cold, I found myself in a blurred and muffled yet terribly real world… The swelling glebes might have spread and drowned me with the patience of waves, aware that they would eventually force the highest cliffs to give way and topple the proudest castles… I was riding away from those misleading visions… I was weaving a new skin for myself… something in the landscape wrapped up around me and forced me to look inside. I recognise now that on my bike I did not have my vision restored but I discovered what it means to see.”
