Graffiti, Geography, and God

I first started learning about graffiti (or street art, depending on your personal taste) in a class I took last year at SU. This class explored how hip-hop culture related to hegemonic society, and how marginalized people used hip-hop as a medium of expression. Hip-hop culture has carried over to the Middle East, and today in Amman you can find a handful of artists who choose hip-hop to raise their voice. These artists aren't in the game to score a deal with a big name label, since rapping in Arabic isn't necessarily conducive to financial success, but they care about the message they send out. A couple weeks ago I had a chance to go to an event held by the US Embassy called "From Harlem to Amman", and one of the performers was Amer Al Taher, an Arabic rapper, who was also one of the MC'S for the night. These MC'S talked at one point about how being an artist wasn't necessarily easy, and how they weren't rolling in mountains of cash with the profession they chose. This leads to the interesting question of why people do graffiti in Amman, and what it ends up being like.

Admittedly, most of the graffiti in Amman is pretty ugly. Usually it is just phone numbers haphazardly thrown up on buildings along the side of the road. There are some pieces in the city that are stunning. The first full piece I saw in Amman was on Rainbow Street, a hub of cafe's and Western style hangouts. This piece was done on some road barriers that lined the outside of the British Consulate in Amman. It was full of dazzling colors and poignant Arabic script, turning a defensive barrier into some sort of enticing display of character. This made me curious about what other pieces there were in Amman. Some searching on Google lead me to find that there are other pieces put up across the city, and I also found that there was a cafe called Cafe Graffiti.

Eventually, I made my way to Cafe Graffiti with a friend and we struck up a conversation with the man working the counter. My friend recognized one of the pieces on the wall because he had seen the same piece other places in Amman. The man working the counter said he was responsible for the piece, and he even runs an Instagram account,graffitirobot. My friend and I were instantly surprised by the fact that he had an Instagram account labeling his work. Back in the states, that type of thing is unheard of.,Bbecause putting up noncommissioned graffiti is a felony, most people choose to stay anonymous and avoid problems with law enforcement. Here in Amman though, he said it's really about following a simple rule:, don't put up anything political. Our new friend told us that as long as your piece didn't promote any sort of political message, police usually didn't care enough to try and track you down, or stop you. One of the famous graffiti artists in Amman, Wesam Shadid, has made a name for himself by doing only commissioned pieces. We were told if you really wanted to make a name for yourself on the street, you had to break the law and do a political piece.

One of the examples of doing a political piece is by the movement calledنسينا Nseena. Translated, nseena means "we forgot", and the campaign aims to protest the Israeli territories. A lot of the pieces put up by this campaign have been painted over by authorities. The people who are part of this campaign are pretty open with their work and even run a Facebook page. The man working at Cafe Graffiti said that they had a run in with the law where they barely avoiding getting in real trouble, but they were encouraged to stop the campaign.

The graffiti scene in Amman isn't necessarily frontline news. The thing about the graffiti that was being put up is it was a form of expression of politics, but it wasn't violent. Most of the people here learned graffiti independently or on the internet, presumably from some sort of hip-hop Bob Ross tutorial. These are the people that break down the concept of the Middle East that knows nothing but war. It's a fresh perspective about how messages can be created with alluring colors instead of bullets. What they also show is how people in this part of the world can unite. Despite the fact that a lot of these people have no formal collaboration, they seem to all gravitate towards at least one piece in their lives that express their love for Jordan. Here are just a few examples:






Some people claim that the first graffiti was done in the middle ages in the Middle East. Because people lacked the convenience of spray paint, or even a nice set of crayons, this graffiti took the form of carvings. I recently went to Wadi Rum and got to witness these carvings first hand. The ones I saw were of camels and people hunting them. Because cell phone service was so bad back in the day, these carvings were the medium people used to communicate with anybody else who happened to pass by. These messages would read something like "Hey Karam, we just dropped by here and knocked off a couple wild camels for dinner. We're on our way to Petra, hope to see U there. Say hello to the wife and kids for me."

These messages were pretty incredible, but equally incredible were the mountains they were scrawled on. These canvases are behemoths, reaching incredible heights that neither high definition photography nor Bob Ross's wonderful landscape paintings can fully capture. These mountains are so out of this world that Wadi Rum was chosen as the film site for "The Martian". Despite our failed attempts to find Matt Damon out in the dessert, we were able to find the city of Petra before we went to Wadi Rum. Petra is an incredible city, and definitely lives up to being one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Between scrambling to get that perfect photo for Facebook, rushing to see all the sites I could, and eating food, I was able to take a couple moments to marvel at the ingenuity of the ancient city I was touring.

Part of the reason that Petra is such a marvel is the geography of where it's located. Being a city in the mountain allowed Petra to stay hidden from many would-be attackers, and even if these attackers did find Petra the only feasible way to enter the city was through a narrow passage that could fit one camel at a time. This location worked so well that even Alexander the Great failed to conquer Petra with military force, choosing instead to result to coercion and diplomacy to rule the city.

Mountains didn't just protect Petra, they are also the reason for Amman's location. Mountains are a great way to maintain military control, and so when people found the seven mountains that originally comprised Amman, it seemed like a good idea to start building. Even though Amman was chosen for its military advantages, nearby is the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point below sea level on earth. Now I'm not one to get incredibly excited over geography, but between seeing gorgeous mountains formed by pressures of water and divisions of faults, visiting the lowest point on the globe, and living in a city built because of the significance of mountains, I've come to appreciate just how important something as mundane as geography can be to the environment we live in.

Not only is the place I'm living full of mountains, but it is considered by many to be holy land. One of the most striking differences between the culture of Jordan and America is the recognition of religion. When we got here we were told that it wasn't entirely uncommon for people to ask what your religion was here. We were also told that it's almost entirely unheard of to identify as an atheist, and that if we were an atheist we should probably just lie to anybody asking us because they might not understand the concept of there being no God. On top of that, there are numerous cultural expressions that center on god (الحمدلله - Thanks be to God, أنشاء لله -God willing, والله - honest to God, يا لله - dear God, and more).

Over 90% of the population in Jordan identifies as Muslim. In Amman you can hear the call to prayer five times a day, every day. On Fridays I don't have school because it's a special prayer day in Islam. This country is by no means religiously hegemonic though. There are Christian schools here that get off Friday and Sunday, going to school on Saturday, because of religious weekdays. Often times you'll find that the mosques and churches are next door neighbors. The King of Jordan is the 42nd descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. These are all examples of everyday things for Jordanians that completely flips the perspective of religion being a topic to avoid in America. Jordanians express religion with pride, and despite the concepts about religion being a point of contention, they show that public expressions of faith are not a precursor to violence.