A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut

By Nadine A. Sinno

Demonstrates the role of Beirut’s postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

Over the last two decades in Beirut, graffiti makers have engaged in a fierce “war of colors,” seeking to disrupt and transform the city’s physical and social spaces. In A War of Colors, Nadine Sinno examines how graffiti and street art have been used in postwar Beirut to comment on the rapidly changing social dynamics of the country and region. Analyzing how graffiti makers can reclaim and transform cityscapes that were damaged or monopolized by militias during the war, Sinno explores graffiti’s other roles, including forging civic engagement, commemorating cultural icons, protesting political corruption and environmental violence, and animating resistance. In addition, she argues that graffiti making can offer voices to those who are often marginalized, especially women and LGBTQ people. Copiously illustrated with images of graffiti and street art, A War of Colors is a visually captivating and thought-provoking journey through Beirut, where local and global discourses intersect on both scarred and polished walls in the city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477328767

Book preview

A War of Colors

Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut

NADINE A. SINNO

University of Texas Press

AUSTIN

Publication of this work was made possible by financial support from the Faculty Subvention Fund at Virginia Tech.

An earlier version of chapter 1 first appeared in ASAP/Journal, Volume 2, Number 1, January 2017. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2017 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2024

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Sinno, Nadine, author.

Title: A war of colors : graffiti and street art in postwar Beirut / Nadine A. Sinno.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029701 ISBN 978-1-4773-2874-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2875-0 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2876-7 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Graffiti—Social aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. | Graffiti—Political aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. | Street art—Social aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. | Street art—Political aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. | Graffiti—Appreciation—Lebanon—Beirut. | Street art—Appreciation—Lebanon—Beirut.

Classification: LCC GT3913.813 .S56 2024 | DDC 751.7/3095692—dc23/eng/20230928

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029701

doi:10.7560/328743

For my parents,

for Will,

and

for Beirut.

Contents

Preface

Introduction. Ḥarb alwān / A War of Colors

Chapter 1. Al-shāri‘ ilnā / The Street Is Ours: Reimagining Beirut’s Visual Culture

Chapter 2. Anā shādh / I Am Queer: Challenging Patriarchy and Breaking Social Taboos

Chapter 3. Hadhā al-baḥr lī / This Sea Is Mine: Engaging Hazardous Environments as Toxic Politics

Chapter 4. Thawrat Beirut likul al-‘ālam / Beirut’s Revolution Is for All the People: Animating the (Intersectional) Revolution

Chapter 5. Al-sha‘b al-sūrī ‘ārif ṭarīquh / The Syrian People Know Their Way: Articulating Regional Struggles beyond Lebanon

Inconclusions. Qabl mā mūt baddī Libnān / Before I Die I Want Lebanon To

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Color Section

Preface

Professing Positionality

I was born and raised in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). In 2001, I left to the United States to pursue a higher education and ultimately a career in academia, which would lead to me splitting my time, and my heart, between the two countries. Like many Beirutis of my generation, my visual memories of Beirut’s streets are dominated by pockmarked walls, crumbling buildings, posters of political leaders (both dead and alive), and logos of various militias. In my mind’s eye, Beirut’s streets have always belonged to militias, thugs, and shabāb, or young men (and boys) who act as vigilantes in their respective neighborhoods. The rest of us hurriedly walked through the hazardous, dirty streets to get from one place to another. Even after the war ended, militia stencils and dehumanizing sectarian graffiti continued to monopolize the cityscape, reminding residents and visitors of the tenacity of sectarianism and the precariousness of peace and coexistence in Beirut.

As the years progressed, however, a new phenomenon seemed to be at work. Around the mid-2000s, during my visits to Lebanon, I started noticing unprecedented types of graffiti: colorful tags marking the names of graffiti crews, stencils featuring witty social commentary, and elaborate artistic murals paying homage to Lebanese and other Arab artists. The sight of unexpected portraits, such as those of Lebanon’s beloved singer Fairouz and the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, or a witty antiwar stencil gave me pause and tempted me to actually linger on the streets to marvel at and contemplate these artifacts. I was developing a new relationship with Beirut’s streets. The graffiti inspired me to take strolls and to wander around in search of more artifacts. Who or what awaited me on the next street or tucked-away alley? I was not in a hurry to get anywhere. It became clear to me, however, that this new artistic graffiti had not replaced other types of graffiti and visual symbols on the walls of the city. Rather, artistic murals stood side by side with, on top of, or under partisan slogans, political posters, casual doodling about old or new loves, and anonymous scrawls expressing frustration with the government. In other words, the cityscape was being contested by both old and new actors who competed in the visual (re)production of space. Such actors included partisan scrawlers, casual doodlers, frustrated citizens, and local and global street artists. The militias and their followers were no longer the only ones policing the city’s space and authoring its walls.

Not only did the polyphonous walls intrigue me personally, but the literary scholar in me yearned to study them more closely, as I consider them unofficial yet legitimate texts that register the concerns, fears, and aspirations of residents in postwar Beirut, as seen through the eyes of graffiti makers. I yearned to record and study these visual artifacts, which often engaged in dialogue with one other as well as with off-the-wall political events and cultural narratives—sometimes overtly, sometimes through subtext and mimicry. I wanted to learn more about my city, its transformation, and the culprits behind this new multitextured visual culture. The inscriptions and images on the walls captured me, and I needed to capture them, too, before they disappeared.

Capturing the City’s Walls

Armed with an inconspicuous, high-resolution digital camera, my husband and I walked the neighborhoods of municipal Beirut in search of graffiti and street art for over eight years.¹ We took thousands of photographs of Beirut’s walls. While photographing the city’s surfaces, we aimed to document all the visual artifacts we encountered, regardless of message or aesthetic quality—or lack thereof. Our forays into the city’s various neighborhoods went smoothly, for the most part. Beyond pausing to check which graffiti caught our attention, most people ignored us and went about their daily business. Sometimes, members of the Lebanese Army or the police force would stop us and inquire about our motives and affiliations. They were usually satisfied with our answer that we wanted to take pictures of the city for my academic research. At the same time, we were often instructed not to take pictures in heavily surveilled areas that were considered security zones or potential targets of bombings. In fact, it was in the summer of 2014, during our first official fieldwork trip, that three suicide bombings occurred within the span of one week.² That summer, ISIS took over Mosul in Iraq, and the Lebanese Army raided multiple hotels in the Hamra area of Beirut, where ISIS militants were allegedly preparing to unleash a series of bombings. The Lebanese Army was on high alert because of security concerns. Undoubtedly, such security concerns often became a pretext for heavy policing, particularly with regard to protecting commercial and touristic areas and government facilities. We came under increased scrutiny in areas near government offices, headquarters of political parties, mansions of political leaders, and famous churches and mosques. Beirut’s southern suburb Dahyieh was completely off-limits to photography.

Occasionally, we were stopped and interrogated by the police or members of militias. On one particular occasion, while my husband was taking a picture of a poster of Nabih Berri (Lebanon’s speaker of the Parliament and the leader of the Amal party), we were approached by a man in civilian clothing who ordered him to stop taking photographs, blocked our car with his moped, and started questioning us. After demanding to see the picture my husband had just taken, he asked for our taṣrīḥ (permit). When we failed to produce a permit, he reprimanded us for taking pictures without official permission. After making a phone call and conferring with a group of young men who quickly showed up at the site, the man ordered us to leave the Mazraa neighborhood immediately.

At times, it was easier to take pictures along with a girlfriend instead of my husband. While my husband’s company spared me the occasional catcall, it subjected us to scrutiny since he clearly looked ajnabī (foreign). Americans lingering on the streets of Beirut are often suspected of being spies, CIA agents, or even members of underground radical groups—perhaps in part because of the scandalous history of US military and political intervention in the Middle East. When taking pictures with my girlfriend Rowan, it was much easier to convince interrogators, be they police or neighborhood vigilantes, that I was a harmless, nerdy academic. Sometimes, police officers would allow Rowan to park illegally while I got out of the car and snapped pictures. Having spent the entire first half of my life, and almost all of my summers, in Lebanon, I am used to handling such gentlemanly gestures without feeling too patronized. In many ways, I have also been inspired by the tactics of graffiti makers, some of whom I met in person and who explained to me the importance of delicately navigating tricky street politics by cooperating with authorities in order to achieve one’s goals.

Feminist feelings aside, I am grateful for the kindness and assistance that these men extended to me and that advanced my research. I also made use of my brother’s moped, which allowed us to bolt from places such as Downtown after taking photographs of antigovernment graffiti, when security guards and police officers eyed us with suspicion or headed our way for questioning (or so I thought). This was especially helpful in 2016, when I was documenting some of the graffiti that erupted in response to Lebanon’s garbage crisis. I sometimes visited the same area twice or thrice, months or years after I initially documented its graffiti. Going back to photograph the same sites allowed me to see which graffiti pieces endured and which were tampered with, defaced, or reinscribed on the city’s walls. As this book will show, the presence, disappearance, and reappearance of some graffiti pieces have much to tell us about contentious politics, government control, and civic engagement in postwar Lebanon.

In addition to amassing a collection of photographs, I spoke with several graffiti artists, either in person or via Skype, including Ashekman, Yazan Halwani, Ali Rafei, Siska, Phat2, and EpS. Whenever I had the opportunity, I visited their studios, homes, or stores. I regret the extenuating circumstances that precluded me from meeting some of the graffiti makers whose work is featured in this book. I also recognize that it is impossible to account for and to analyze all of the graffiti and street art that appeared on Beirut’s streets during the past several years. I did make every effort to include a diverse, fairly representative sample in terms of styles, themes, and time frames. I trust that future scholarly work will include other pieces not covered here. I felt it necessary to give the artists I was able to identify and meet a chance to discuss their work and to represent themselves, with the understanding that my and, ultimately, the readers’ interpretation of their graffiti and street art may diverge from their own. I remain indebted to those graffiti makers whose insights and ways of being in the world—not just cultural productions—have enriched my research and given me much-needed hope, even as they themselves often felt uncertain about the country’s future.

INTRODUCTION

Ḥarb alwān / A War of Colors

Streets, as spaces of flow and movement, are not only where people express grievances, but also where they forge identities, enlarge solidarities, and extend their protest beyond their immediate circles to include the unknown, strangers. Here streets serve as a medium through which strangers or casual passersby are able to establish latent communication with one another by recognizing their mutual interests and shared sentiments.

—Asef Bayat, Life as Politics

Figure 0.1. M3alim and EpS, A war of colors, mural in the Corniche El-Nahr / Peugot area. Photograph by Nadine Sinno and William Taggart.

The Lebanese Civil War left its mark not only on the bodies and psyches of the Lebanese people but also on the visual landscape and cultural ethos of Beirut. During the war, and for years following the cessation of armed conflict, the city’s walls teemed with political posters, sectarian slogans, and the logos of various militias who fought to control Beirut’s streets, literally and symbolically. While the visual culture of wartime Beirut remains generally understudied, Maria Chakhtoura and Zeina Maasri have contributed pioneering studies of graffiti and political posters, respectively. Chakhtoura’s La guerre des graffiti (The graffiti war, 1978) offers an annotated survey of the ubiquitous graffiti slogans that prevailed in Beirut’s streets from 1975 to 1977. Risking her personal safety amid bombings and kidnappings, Chakhtoura aimed her camera at the city’s walls and documented the acerbic visual battles in which people of all political affiliations participated. Her collection documents the overwhelmingly dehumanizing rhetoric produced and circulated by Lebanon’s various political factions. The derogatory scrawls collected in Chakhtoura’s study include expressions such as The Phalanges are dogs. Their leader is a pig; Jumblat birthed a mule; Jisr el-Basha is the graveyard of Palestinians; and Arab = Animal.¹ It is no surprise that Chakhtoura lamented the findings captured by her camera, which, according to her, reflected the spirit of delirium and orchestrated fanaticism permeating Beirut at the time.²

In a similar vein, Maasri’s Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (2009) offers an insightful study of political posters that were ubiquitous during the Lebanese Civil War. Maasri’s study reveals the power of these discursive tools in commemorating sectarian leaders, intimidating and demeaning perceived enemies, and advocating for each political party’s version of truth and its vision for Lebanon. Arguing against the reductionist conceptualization of political posters as mere propaganda, Maasri demonstrates that political posters "are inscribed in the hegemonic articulations of political communities in Lebanon’s war and that they serve to articulate the discourses, desires, fears and collective imaginaries pertinent to the various political identities being formed and transformed during wartime."³ Similar to sectarian graffiti, political posters served as a weapon of war—one that sought to elevate sectarian leaders, dehumanize rivals, and assert the real or imagined dominance of local and regional actors.

In addition to bearing the marks of sectarian graffiti and political posters, Beirut’s walls have endured the impersonal, sterile touch of urban revival in the postwar era, as Lebanese leaders have sought to reintegrate Lebanon into the global market and to reinvigorate its tourism sector. After the end of the war, reconstruction efforts swept the country, and signs of change appeared in some parts of the city: freshly painted walls, shiny storefronts, newly paved streets, renovated sidewalks, and striking high-rises. As many Lebanese artists, scholars, and activists have contended, however, such cosmetic changes have been alienating and exclusionary in their own way. Upscale development projects—including Solidere’s infamous reconstruction of Downtown Beirut—do not truly reflect or honor the Lebanese people’s struggles, local talents, or unique history.⁴ While the reconstruction projects did alter select public spaces, rendering them more habitable, such projects have been largely reserved for neighborhoods deemed worthy of resuscitation because of their potential market value. As Rasha Salti notes, When a public domain was deemed potentially ‘marketable,’ it was rehabilitated and swiftly auctioned off. When it was not deemed potentially commodifiable, it fell into malign neglect.⁵

After the war, around the mid-2000s, Beirut’s walls would be transformed by the hands of emergent graffiti makers who sought to reclaim the streets from their alienating wartime and gentrification-era conditions by producing colorful, thought-provoking visual artifacts. This new form of graffiti making initially took place in the city’s lesser-loved alleys, bridges, and streets and gradually spread into more visible parts of the city, including main thoroughfares and highways. By summer of 2014, these innovative graffiti pieces started to resemble a substantial and constantly expanding corpus of work rather than isolated works here and there. Walking the city, residents might come face-to-face with a portrait of Lebanon’s renowned late composer and singer Wadih El Safi or encounter an Arabic-speaking rat bouncing off the walls and inviting them to partake in its abundant feast—a reference to the trash overflowing from garbage bins all over the city. Recognizing the potentialities of graffiti and street art in forging an intervention and presenting an alternative discourse to sectarianism, Beirut’s graffiti makers have reimagined the streets as a space for creating community-centered artwork, engendering civic engagement, and voicing social critique—sometimes in aesthetically pleasing ways and other times in a raw, acerbic manner, depending on the sociopolitical moment. By transforming the physical and social landscape of the city, graffiti makers have reclaimed the streets, albeit partially or temporarily, from the hands of political factions that monopolized them during the Lebanese Civil War.

It is important to emphasize that artistic stencils and murals do not stand alone in the streets in postwar Beirut. Rather, they exist alongside casual doodling, political posters, partisan slogans and scrawls, antigovernment messages laced with obscenities, and militia logos. In other words, aesthetically pleasing street art, which can be political in its own right, has not replaced other types of inscriptions and visual symbols but rather competes with them in the production and interpretation of space. Furthermore, in Lebanon, as in other places, the production of (implicitly or explicitly) political visual symbols tends to wax and wane depending on shifting sociopolitical conditions. For example, the Cedar Revolution protests, which erupted in the aftermath of the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, were supplemented by the creation of on-site graffiti by aggrieved civilians. Sune Haugbolle notes that the fence around Hariri’s mosque in Downtown Beirut had been overwritten with graffiti that revealed the multiplicity of interpretations and standpoints generated by his death.⁶

Similarly, Marwan Kraidy observes that as the Syrian uprising intensified, Beirut’s walls were transformed into battlegrounds between friends and foes of the Syrian revolution.⁷ In the summer of 2015, antigovernment graffiti filled Downtown Beirut in the wake of the #YouStink protests, which were sparked by Lebanon’s garbage crisis. Multilingual slogans such as Ḥukūmit zbāleh (Trashy government), You stink but you don’t do shit, and Anā bitnaffas ḥurriyeh (I breathe freedom) remained visible on the walls of Downtown Beirut for years, thus transforming the usually spotless commercial area into a multitextured canvas of crude obscenities, witty remarks, and poetic dictates for a more just society. More recently, the 2019 protests inspired another surge in graffiti and street art, ranging from amateur scrawls that speak of the Lebanese people’s heartfelt frustration and agony to exquisite murals that voice antigovernment dissent and people’s solidarity, demonstrating the porousness of art and politics, particularly during times of turmoil.

For me, the crude scrawls, the minimalist stencils, and the painstaking artistic murals represent equally valuable artifacts that reveal complicated affects, thoughts, states of being, and material realities of individuals and groups who have decided to inscribe their grievances and/or aspirations on the walls of the city. A serious study of Beirut’s visual culture necessitates attending to the different types of graffiti and street art—the good, the bad, and the ugly—as well as examining the ways in which these different artifacts evoke, advance, or critique broader sociopolitical narratives and cultural practices. Analyzing graffiti and street art involves exploring actual objects (stencils, murals, scrawls, and walls) as well as the numerous (intangible) matters and discourses they engage with, such as political events, cultural beliefs, daily practices, national or international crises, and mundane and grand affects.

Presenting a Contribution

The growing body of scholarly and creative work focused on the visual culture of the Arab world attests to the increased production of public visual artifacts in the region and demonstrates the crucial need for documenting and critically examining these visual artifacts in their complexity and diversity. Chakhtoura’s and Maasri’s aforementioned books on Beirut’s wartime graffiti and political posters, respectively, emphasize the spatial dimension of the Lebanese Civil War, demonstrating that bullets and grenades were not the only weapons employed in dominating the streets. It is important to note that because the deployment of graffiti to reclaim and transform physical and social space, to protest oppression, or to enlarge solidarities, to use Asef Bayat’s expression,⁸ has always existed in Palestine, the journey of Palestinian graffiti is instructive, especially as it demonstrates graffiti’s malleability and adaptability to changing sociopolitical realities.

In the context of the West Bank, Julie Peteet’s pioneering study of the graffiti of the First Intifada demonstrates the instrumentalization of graffiti works as weapons of communication, assault, and defense.⁹ Peteet asserts that the sheer ubiquitousness of graffiti was a constant reminder both of the abnormality of everyday life under occupation and of the mass uprising. . . . [Graffiti] encouraged resistance, cajoled, demanded, critiqued, and provided running political commentary on the progression of the uprising.¹⁰ In Gaza Graffiti: Messages of Love and Politics, Mia Gröndahl persuasively argues that graffiti has consistently served as a barometer of the political situation in Gaza.¹¹ Gröndahl explains that the inscriptions and images on the walls of the city often offered invaluable insights concerning ongoing political events, the general mood of the residents, planned protests, and even the availability or scarcity of material resources—including spray cans and paint. She demonstrates that whereas the first year of the peace process resulted in happy and more hopeful graffiti, the city’s walls articulated the disappointment, frustration, and anger over a peace process that had not kept its promises in the autumn of 2000.¹²

Craig Larkin’s nuanced study of the graffiti of the separation wall—which Israel purportedly erected to stop Palestinians without permits from entering Israel through the West Bank—explores the ways in which the (in)famous wall has been transformed by local and global graffiti artists into the world’s largest canvas for oppositional protest art, global critique, and local resistance.¹³ William Parry acknowledges that while some Palestinians are opposed to beautifying a wall that has caused them tremendous pain, most appreciate the international show of solidarity the artwork and graffiti represent, and the foreign interest it generates.¹⁴ Importantly, Parry argues that protestful graffiti is another example of the growing number of ways in which civil society is leading where leaders—for decades—have failed.¹⁵

The collected essays in Pascal Zoghbi and Don Karl’s edited volume show that Arab graffiti makers have utilized graffiti and street art as a means of contesting authoritarian regimes, sending transnational messages of solidarity, and memorializing key figures of the Arab uprisings.¹⁶ More recently, Sabrina DeTurk’s Street Art in the Middle East demonstrates the growing presence of street art in the Arab world in both stable and tumultuous countries, including Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Bahrain, Oman, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. For DeTurk, both prosperity and strife can influence the landscape in which contemporary street art is produced and received, as street art is often driven by private and collective memories that are positive or negative, real or culturally constructed.¹⁷ Mona Abaza, examining the territorial wars that erupted amid the 2011 Egyptian revolution between graffiti makers and the military junta’s security personnel (whom she refers to as professional whiteners), depicts an emergent public culture rooted in graffiti making that has engendered a novel understanding of public spaces as spaces of contestation, of communication and debate.¹⁸ Building on Abaza’s work, John Lennon states that graffiti is part of the revolutionary conversation that exerts opinions; it is a tangible display of the political complexity embodied by those inhabiting the streets.¹⁹ In his most recent study of graffiti in areas of conflict, Lennon persuasively argues that graffiti is essentially messy politics and that any study of conflict that precludes graffiti tells only part of the story.²⁰ In her visual memoir of the Egyptian revolution, Bahia Shehab, an artist and a professor who was inspired to design and place her own stencils in Tahrir Square, writes,

The artworks range from scribbled slogans and sprayed stencils to large scale murals. They are all beautiful. I feel like I’m walking in an outdoor museum. . . . It’s so refreshing to see all the different skills and ideas appearing next to each other. I feel like the street has all the ideology of the revolution painted on its walls and I finally feel at home. The street belongs to us all.²¹

Shehab’s memoir attests to the ways in which graffiti making enables average people to reclaim their sense of agency and belonging—even if temporarily—by transforming the cityscape through writing graffiti or by simply gathering in the streets and enjoying the graffitied cityscape before them.

Ultimately, as Lina Khatib reminds us in her analysis of visual cultures across the Middle East, the region has become a site of struggle over the construction of social and political reality through competing images.²² Following Khatib, I am interested in what Beirut’s locally produced and globally circulated graffiti and street art can teach us about the real and symbolic struggles of the contested city—as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants, most notably young people with brushes, spray cans, stencils, pens, and the commitment to make an intervention. In her study of Beirut’s 2015 trash protests, Dina Kiwan invites us to constantly seek competing forms of knowledge, which appear in different permutations, including film, performance, cartoons, and graffiti, and which constitute important acts of citizenship. Kiwan argues that these emotive knowledge forms redefine issues creating alternative discourses and forms of public knowledge, which can enrich our understanding of everyday politics and give voice to marginalized populations and/or nonstate actors.²³ Following Kiwan’s invitation to explore social change through a focus on the things that people do, termed performative acts,²⁴ I want to approach graffiti making as an emotive and performative act that articulates the discourses and practices of Beiruti residents who wish to show and tell otherwise. In other words, we have seen and heard enough from political leaders. The time is ripe for engaging more seriously with street politics (and play), from the ground up.

Crucially, the study of graffiti contributes not only to illuminating the existing lived realities of people in the Arab world but also to bringing to the surface people’s aspirations for forging alternative realities. In other words, graffiti making does not simply reflect different political, economic, and social conditions. Graffiti and street art can also serve as vehicles for shaping these material and sociopolitical realities and calling for change on multiple fronts. The graffiti and street art of Tahrir Square, for example, presented a scathing critique of Mubarak’s authoritarian regime, commemorated key figures of the Egyptian revolution, and protested sexual harassment, thereby demonstrating the multifaceted and expanding role of graffiti and street art. Meanwhile, the anti-Assad graffiti scribbled by a group of Syrian teenagers in 2011 contributed to breaking down the wall of fears and possibly sparking the Syrian uprising. As Rana Jarbou rightly argues, In a country where there was a common fear of merely having political discussions in public, the significance of visible censures could not be [overstated], especially when the streets were not short of abundant glorifications of the Assad regime.²⁵ In Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon, women-centered graffiti and street art have articulated a clear message that the fight for women’s rights should go hand in hand with the fight for political and economic rights, rather than be deferred to more peaceful times. In sum, Arab youths are increasingly employing graffiti as a means of intervening by visually making noise. These daily interventions invite us to focus our attention on the stories of those who have decided that a wall has always been the best place to publish [their] work.²⁶

I see this study as a contribution to the existing scholarship on visual culture in the Arab world. I wish to take the reader on a journey in which graffiti makers and the city’s walls—not pundits, experts, and political leaders—do the storytelling. The graffiti makers show and sometimes tell that there are alternatives to spending time on the street fighting, planting bombs, harassing women, or scribbling sectarian slogans. Young street artists provide community-centered ornamentation, commemoration, and constructive social critique. These individuals create sites that can tell stories and unfold histories.²⁷ Teasing out the stories and histories embedded in artifacts of graffiti making is the key to ensuring that graffiti makers—not just warring politicians and religious zealots—are given the opportunity to share their interpretations regarding the past and present events affecting their country, as well as their visions and visualizations of the future. Importantly, in her study of the impact of assisted reproduction on the lives and subjectivities of Arab men, Marcia Inhorn offers invaluable insights regarding the ever-changing enactments of masculinities in the contemporary Middle East. She argues that shifting socioeconomic conditions, new technologies, and life changes contribute to shifting enactments of manhood, not just among different men but also within the person’s lifetime. Calling for a paradigmatic shift, she proposes an emergent masculinities approach, inviting us to critically examine the ongoing, relational, and embodied processes of change in the ways men enact masculinity.²⁸ Inhorn’s reflections on embodied emergent masculinities provide further validation regarding the importance of studying graffiti and street art, in part because graffiti making can complicate dominant stereotypes about Arab masculinity (and femininity). Young graffiti artists are modeling alternative modes of being in the world, or being in Beirut’s streets. As I will show, some graffiti artists consider graffiti to be their weapon of choice against more lethal weapons, like Kalashnikovs, bullets, and bombs. For some, the war of colors is about creating more habitable environments and inviting young children to care for their city. These nonviolent warriors, whose stories rarely make it to the mainstream Western and Middle Eastern media, deserve critical attention.

M3alim and EpS’s mural that features a man wearing military camouflage and standing in front of the words Ḥarb alwān, or A war of colors (see fig. 0.1), epitomizes the dynamics of civic engagement that are rooted in competitive graffiti making. Mimicking the trope of warfare, the mural heralds an urban war of a different order: a battle for the ornamentation of Beirut through the production of street art. Armed with brushes and spray cans, young graffiti makers strive to outdo one another in creating colorful street art that is designed to please the eye and open (or challenge) the mind. When I spoke with EpS about the dynamics of graffiti making on the streets of Beirut, he referred to graffiti making as a healthy competition that enables graffiti makers to demonstrate their skills while also allowing pedestrians to interact with the artifacts and respond as they please.²⁹ This type of intervention is potentially transformative, as it not only physically transforms the cityscape into a more aesthetically pleasing space but also promotes an ethos of artistic rivalry and community building. M3alim and EpS’s proposition offers an alternative discourse to the aggressive usurpation of urban space through the wielding of weapons or the construction of sterile buildings and impersonal commercial centers.

Before entering into a more detailed discussion of the conceptual tools and theoretical concepts I draw upon in my analysis of graffiti and street art, it is important to consider the key events and sociopolitical circumstances that characterized the postwar period (1990–present) and under which the graffiti and street art under study were inspired, produced, and circulated. Beyond the following overview, I further contextualize the graffiti artifacts as they appear in each chapter by probing the specific political and social events pertaining to them.

The Precariousness of Peace and Security in Postwar Lebanon

The Lebanese Civil War came to a halt after substantial regional and international intervention. Representatives of Syria, the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries, organized the signing of the Taif