(no subject)
There’s a light tongue-twister which every schoolchild in Latin America learns at a young age to practise the sounds of the Spanish language: mi mami me mima, which means ‘my mummy looks after me’. In Bogotá I saw a version of the saying sprayed across the wall of the central library: MI MAMI ME MIMABA…PERO LE DISPARARON. My mummy used to look after me…but they shot her.
All across South America there’s a kind of low-scale ideological war being waged, and its battlefields are not the jungles of Amazonia or the congressional debating-halls, but the city streets. Graffiti is up to speed with current political and social polemic. It tells it like it is - as the writer sees it, at any rate - it has no party line to toe, and it provides the perfect counterpoint to the standard political arguments. If you’re new in town anywhere from Chile to Colombia, and you want to feel out the local issues, there’s no better gauge than to take a walk and literally check out the word on the streets.
Society is talking about itself on the stone and bricks in a thousand towns throughout the continent, and the people who feel compelled to broadcast their slogans are apparently motivated by more than a vague sense of anomie. While their politicians are so frequently bogged down in scandal or partisanism, these writers are cutting through the conventional vocabulary to reach not the objective truth about an issue, if such a thing exists, but at least the objective truth about an individual reaction. It is the unmediated and direct voice of someone who feels strongly enough to write their opinion on the city itself. In many places it exists alongside, and comments on, ‘official’ political graffiti, which is one of the most effective ways of canvassing in South America - painted instructions to ‘VOTA ASÍ’ or ‘MARCA ASÍ’ can be seen throughout the continent.
I thought I knew about graffiti. Those angular scribblings on tenement walls, the dirty arabesques on railway sidings, signifying nothing, drawn by bored deliquents and seen only by drowsy commuters who watch them jerk by the train window. I was never able to interpret the letters and I used to wonder where aspiring graffiti artists learned to warp their words so distinctively. There is a feeling of exclusion about this illegibility; you have to be an initiate to understand, you have to be in the club, otherwise the scrawls will always be a cipher, speaking only of a mild social breakdown.
In South America, it seems to me, graffiti benefits from exactly the opposite opportunities. It is inclusive, open, written in clear and legible script, and it wants to be read by everyone. It also purports to be speaking for everyone, not just for an elect cadre of spray-can enthusiasts. The issues it addresses are, more often than not, socially or politically resonant. The grafitto at the start of this essay is typical of Colombia, where almost everyone has been personally affected in some way by their country’s long-running war between left-wing guerrilla fighters and right-wing independent armies. When I was there, earlier this year, the USA’s Plan Colombia was still a contentious topic, and it featured in a lot of graffiti which did not try to be witty or ironic but just brought the issues, however crudely, into a very public forum. NO AL PLAN COLOMBIA, NO A LA GUERRA was written more than once, as well as NUESTRO PLAN…¡LA VIDA!
Sometimes the slogans are cynically comic. In Melo, Uruguay can be found the often-quoted AYUDE A LA POLICÍA: TORTÚRESE (Help the police: torture yourself). Near where I used to live in Quito, one of the more arresting sights was the slogan
D __ M O C R A C __ A next to a crude picture of a hanged man. Down the road from that is a wall which reads NUESTROS PONCHOS NO SON ANTIBALAS PERO NUESTROS CORAZONES SÍ (Our ponchos aren’t bullet-proof but our hearts are). A piece of weary political comment from Buenos Aires is TODOS PROMETEN Y NADIE CUMPLE. VOTE POR NADIE (Everyone promises and nobody delivers. Vote for nobody). Other graffiti are based more unambiguously on humour, although even then their context can provide thoughtful overtones or reduce cliché. LA HORA MÁS OSCURA ES LA CERCANA A LA AURORA (The darkest hour is the one before the dawn), for example, is an exhausted phrase in English, but when it is seen daubed on a wall in the grim slums around Lima, it acquires a fresh potency.
This is how graffiti has always been, and if it seems a long way from the tags at London Bridge or in New York subways, then perhaps such distinctions are misleading. Certainly graffiti has been around a long time - the word itself was coined to describe the wall-scribblings found at Pompeii and other ancient Italian cities, mainly consisting of obscene quips and often accompanied by rough drawings (plus ça change…). The Bible describes what must be the first recorded instance of graffiti, written in Aramaic, by an invisible hand, on the wall during a feast: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin or ‘numbered, numbered, weighed, divided’. Daniel interprets the slogan rather loosely as being indicative of Belshazzar’s imminent downfall; here is a curious connection with the tags of today which are equally ambiguous, though these days the confusion comes from pure legibility rather than semantic interpretation. But it’s intriguing to contemplate the possibility that graffiti’s first practitioner might have been God Almighty.
Graffiti has always provoked strong reactions from those who see only a pointless defacing of private property. In the mid-eighteenth century, Alexander Cruden gave himself the title of Alexander the Corrector and took to patrolling the streets with a damp sponge in order to erase any public scrawlings he came across. Now, modern cities spend small fortunes on ways to render walls graffiti-proof, and its sharp decline in New York has been seen as one of Mayor Giuliani’s greatest successes - graffiti having always been linked to other forms of crime, in popular imagination and in fact. From a legal standpoint, it is indefensible.
There are elements which should be set against this, however. Graffiti has always modestly functioned as society’s alternative voice, and perhaps it is a cause for concern that, unlike in South America, most people here can no longer understand what is being said. It was not always like this. During the 1939-45 war, London had Mr Chad, the balding, large-nosed cartoon figure who would be drawn peering over walls asking ‘WOT, NO BANANAS?’ - or whatever - as a kind of constant monitor of wartime rationing. Set against the traditional image of a patient populace doing their bit for the effort, these mural sketches start to seem like a way of allowing society’s ‘true’, or in some way suppressed, concerns to leak out and find expression at a time when open complaint or even debate was not necessarily desirable.
(I must have written this in about 2002 when I came back from South America. It's obviously not finished - I just found it as I was clearing out files from my laptop, and thought I'd preserve it.)
All across South America there’s a kind of low-scale ideological war being waged, and its battlefields are not the jungles of Amazonia or the congressional debating-halls, but the city streets. Graffiti is up to speed with current political and social polemic. It tells it like it is - as the writer sees it, at any rate - it has no party line to toe, and it provides the perfect counterpoint to the standard political arguments. If you’re new in town anywhere from Chile to Colombia, and you want to feel out the local issues, there’s no better gauge than to take a walk and literally check out the word on the streets.
Society is talking about itself on the stone and bricks in a thousand towns throughout the continent, and the people who feel compelled to broadcast their slogans are apparently motivated by more than a vague sense of anomie. While their politicians are so frequently bogged down in scandal or partisanism, these writers are cutting through the conventional vocabulary to reach not the objective truth about an issue, if such a thing exists, but at least the objective truth about an individual reaction. It is the unmediated and direct voice of someone who feels strongly enough to write their opinion on the city itself. In many places it exists alongside, and comments on, ‘official’ political graffiti, which is one of the most effective ways of canvassing in South America - painted instructions to ‘VOTA ASÍ’ or ‘MARCA ASÍ’ can be seen throughout the continent.
I thought I knew about graffiti. Those angular scribblings on tenement walls, the dirty arabesques on railway sidings, signifying nothing, drawn by bored deliquents and seen only by drowsy commuters who watch them jerk by the train window. I was never able to interpret the letters and I used to wonder where aspiring graffiti artists learned to warp their words so distinctively. There is a feeling of exclusion about this illegibility; you have to be an initiate to understand, you have to be in the club, otherwise the scrawls will always be a cipher, speaking only of a mild social breakdown.
In South America, it seems to me, graffiti benefits from exactly the opposite opportunities. It is inclusive, open, written in clear and legible script, and it wants to be read by everyone. It also purports to be speaking for everyone, not just for an elect cadre of spray-can enthusiasts. The issues it addresses are, more often than not, socially or politically resonant. The grafitto at the start of this essay is typical of Colombia, where almost everyone has been personally affected in some way by their country’s long-running war between left-wing guerrilla fighters and right-wing independent armies. When I was there, earlier this year, the USA’s Plan Colombia was still a contentious topic, and it featured in a lot of graffiti which did not try to be witty or ironic but just brought the issues, however crudely, into a very public forum. NO AL PLAN COLOMBIA, NO A LA GUERRA was written more than once, as well as NUESTRO PLAN…¡LA VIDA!
Sometimes the slogans are cynically comic. In Melo, Uruguay can be found the often-quoted AYUDE A LA POLICÍA: TORTÚRESE (Help the police: torture yourself). Near where I used to live in Quito, one of the more arresting sights was the slogan
D __ M O C R A C __ A next to a crude picture of a hanged man. Down the road from that is a wall which reads NUESTROS PONCHOS NO SON ANTIBALAS PERO NUESTROS CORAZONES SÍ (Our ponchos aren’t bullet-proof but our hearts are). A piece of weary political comment from Buenos Aires is TODOS PROMETEN Y NADIE CUMPLE. VOTE POR NADIE (Everyone promises and nobody delivers. Vote for nobody). Other graffiti are based more unambiguously on humour, although even then their context can provide thoughtful overtones or reduce cliché. LA HORA MÁS OSCURA ES LA CERCANA A LA AURORA (The darkest hour is the one before the dawn), for example, is an exhausted phrase in English, but when it is seen daubed on a wall in the grim slums around Lima, it acquires a fresh potency.
This is how graffiti has always been, and if it seems a long way from the tags at London Bridge or in New York subways, then perhaps such distinctions are misleading. Certainly graffiti has been around a long time - the word itself was coined to describe the wall-scribblings found at Pompeii and other ancient Italian cities, mainly consisting of obscene quips and often accompanied by rough drawings (plus ça change…). The Bible describes what must be the first recorded instance of graffiti, written in Aramaic, by an invisible hand, on the wall during a feast: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin or ‘numbered, numbered, weighed, divided’. Daniel interprets the slogan rather loosely as being indicative of Belshazzar’s imminent downfall; here is a curious connection with the tags of today which are equally ambiguous, though these days the confusion comes from pure legibility rather than semantic interpretation. But it’s intriguing to contemplate the possibility that graffiti’s first practitioner might have been God Almighty.
Graffiti has always provoked strong reactions from those who see only a pointless defacing of private property. In the mid-eighteenth century, Alexander Cruden gave himself the title of Alexander the Corrector and took to patrolling the streets with a damp sponge in order to erase any public scrawlings he came across. Now, modern cities spend small fortunes on ways to render walls graffiti-proof, and its sharp decline in New York has been seen as one of Mayor Giuliani’s greatest successes - graffiti having always been linked to other forms of crime, in popular imagination and in fact. From a legal standpoint, it is indefensible.
There are elements which should be set against this, however. Graffiti has always modestly functioned as society’s alternative voice, and perhaps it is a cause for concern that, unlike in South America, most people here can no longer understand what is being said. It was not always like this. During the 1939-45 war, London had Mr Chad, the balding, large-nosed cartoon figure who would be drawn peering over walls asking ‘WOT, NO BANANAS?’ - or whatever - as a kind of constant monitor of wartime rationing. Set against the traditional image of a patient populace doing their bit for the effort, these mural sketches start to seem like a way of allowing society’s ‘true’, or in some way suppressed, concerns to leak out and find expression at a time when open complaint or even debate was not necessarily desirable.
(I must have written this in about 2002 when I came back from South America. It's obviously not finished - I just found it as I was clearing out files from my laptop, and thought I'd preserve it.)