Apartheid walls

This year’s Black Lives Matter uprising in the US and the way it resonated with people in different corners of the world drew renewed attention to the art of protest. However, the distinctive art forms that express and help shape social movements and revolutions exist in a much larger frame of reference that certainly includes the Black Lives Matter movement but is not limited to it.

From Asia and Africa to Latin America, murals and graffiti calling for justice, honouring the fallen, and shaming the oppressors act as mirrors to a broken and fragmented human soul yearning for a unified liberation made impossible by the very walls on which they are drawn and painted.

Together, these artworks draw a different map of the world than the one shaped by fictitious colonial borders that divide nations and their collective dreams. From the murals and graffitis painted and drawn in the last century during national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, to the ones created during the ongoing struggles for freedom and justice in Kashmir, Palestine, Hong Kong and most recently in the US, these artworks reveal the overcoming of false borders and the mapping of global defiance.

In renowned Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar’s 1177 masterpiece, The Conference of the Birds, we read the story of a flock of birds that embarked on a journey towards Mount Qaf to find their “king”, the mythical bird Simorgh. In the poem, Attar tells us how this divine bird once dropped a single feather from its wing upon China and cast the entire world into commotion:

That feather is now in a museum in China – That’s what the Prophet meant by “Seek knowledge even in China!” If the colour of its feather had not been revealed So much commotion would not have happened around the world …

Attar’s sublime mystical allegory has found renewed meaning in our troubled time. It is as if scores of selfless, mostly nameless, artists around the world have seen a vision of Simorgh’s solitary feather and been inspired to inscribe the humanity’s collective cry for freedom on walls around them.

The feather of Simorgh has always been a symbol of beauty and truth, inspiring poets and philosophers to do and say the beautiful and the just. These anonymous artists, the mystics of our time, depicting the cruelties of our age on those fearsome walls are the offspring of Simorgh.

Revolutions and social movements, however successful they may appear in the moment, often face the risk of being squashed by blunt military force or paving the way for a different type of oppression with the passage of time. But the artworks they inspire keep alive the dreams and aspirations of the brave souls who initially brought them to fruition.

Let me share an example: Soon after the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979, my colleague Peter Chelkowski and I collected an entire archive of revolutionary art that included murals, posters, graffiti, and other related material and published the first book on the visual memories of that historic event.

Excerpted: ‘Simorgh: The art of apartheid walls’

Aljazeera.com