Political Graffiti in Lebanon
POLITICAL GRAFFITI- A MESSAGE OF UNITY
Lebanon has gone through a lot over the past few years…a seemingly never ending rollercoaster ride. And the people have been expressing their reactions through songs, ads, protests and, for the first time in Lebanon, through distinctive political graffiti concentrated in one particular locale. February 14, 2005 has become a day no one will forget, the day on which Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in a car explosion in Beirut. This tragedy triggered the Cedar Revolution typified by its massive protests which united Christians and Muslims in their move to claim their freedom from Syria’s control with the exception of the Shiites. At the time an intense surge of political graffiti manifested itself on the walls of Down Town Beirut’s Martyrs Square. Patricia Barakat Al Asmar, a visual communicator, recently wrote her MA thesis on the political graffiti in Martyrs Square from a socio-cultural perspective focusing on a 3 month period (ten days after the assassination until May 29, 2005). And then the political graffiti took on a digital form…
As Al Asmar states: “the overall aim of this thesis is to analyze and interpret the people’s communication of worries, desires, political interests, frustrations and taboos through the study of graffiti at a particular time of history and selected place. The study is based upon a collection of 455 photographs of graffiti…Twenty months later, a website was developed www.politicalgraffiti-lb.com aiming at opening a forum which will allow graffiti-makers to express their opinions, anonymously or not, on a virtual wall emulating the walls in Martyrs’ Square.” She went on to say that her supervisor: “Dr. Eugen Sensenig pointed out that this is the first time this kind of study is done in the Middle East.”
Drawn to this subject due to the phenomenal impact of the assassination and prominent presence of the graffiti, Al Asmar found that it felt like people were shouting in the graffiti through their use of big letters, it was a expression of unity and fighting for freedom. Al Asmar explains her findings: “The Truth was a popular slogan created at the time, which indicated plainly the need to know who was responsible for the murder. The most important result was the one that affected positively the unity of Lebanese. The comparison between the graffiti collected on Martyrs’ Square walls and the virtual graffiti www.politicalgraffiti-lb.com confirms the relationship of peoples’ reactions with respect to event and context. The place, the writer, and time are as important as the graffiti itself, as suggested in Bakhtin’s theory (which was used in my study). The tool was not flexible enough and did not encourage many individuals to participate. The data analysis on the virtual graffiti suggests a desire for unity and shows diversity and division among the Lebanese.”
Genovese Worldwide 