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Defacing Sectarian Leaders with Wadi’ al-Safi and Kermit the Frog: Beirut Graffiti and the Art of Reterritorialization
Abstract
During the Lebanese civil war, Beirut’s visual culture was dominated by posters of political leaders, sectarian slogans, and militia stencils. In the past decade and a half, however, Beirut’s postwar public spaces have been transformed by famous street artists, as well as anonymous pedestrians. Calligraffiti murals commemorating Lebanese musicians (or global cartoon characters), stencils advocating for social justice, and rushed scrawls protesting homophobia now intersect with warlike visual markers and compete with them in the construction of public space. The postwar visual artifacts often reflect the attentiveness of young graffiti-makers to intersecting local and global discourses. For example, graffiti artists such as the Kabbani brothers have elevated local cultural icons, such as the later composer Wadi’ al-Safi and the singer Sabah, by engraving their faces on the city’s walls. They have also tasked themselves with promoting the Arabic language, both in its spoken and written variations, by using the Arabic script. At the same time, the Kabbani brothers have incorporated global cultural figures such as Grendizer and Kermit the Frog, characters with which the Lebanese public is familiar due to the ubiquitous presence of global goods, Western film, and multinational corporations. The brothers “Arabize” and “hybridize” these figures, adapting them to the demands of Beirut’s streets. In Askheman’s hands, Grendizer demeans Arab politicians and mimics their pompous rhetoric, while Kermit the Frog articulates the manipulations of a corrupt Lebanese regime. Even when they disappear from the streets of Beirut, such glocalized artifacts continue to thrive online because they “continually code-switch back and forth between the city as a material structure and the ‘city of bits,’ the city as information node” (Irvine, “The Work on the Street,” 236). In this paper, I examine Beirut's polyphonous walls, focusing on the ways in which graffiti-makers seek to unsettle sectarian discourse by literally removing politicians’ faces and “filling [the streets] with the forests of their desires and goals” (De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi). Such acts of unsettlement and reterritorialization often involve a remixing of local and global iconicity. I argue that while sectarian visual markers persist on Beirut’s streets, graffiti-makers have engendered alternative narratives that re-imagine Beirut’s walls—and even the performance of masculinity—beyond the polarizing, sectarian paradigm of the Lebanese Civil War.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Cultural Studies