Reading Responses :)

The articles this week were pretty great! I love graffiti as a form of artwork, and the Wall has some of the best graffiti I’ve seen in person! I like that the focus of the ‘Writing on the Wall’ article was that graffiti was a form of expression, and also highlighted some of the dangers that graffiti-ing the Wall has that wouldn’t be present if you were to tag a wall or a street sign in other parts of the world (for instance, the soldiers marching up the young boys at gun point to blacken it out.) There’s a lot of great artwork and messages on the Wall today, and I feel like maybe the soldiers have given up on trying to blacken them all out because some of the more famous ones have been up there for years (like Banksy’s work!) Back in the days when I was fifteen and thought I was cool, my brother and I found a relatively deserted corner of the Wall and had a field day drawing all over it. I forget what we put up there exactly, just that one of them was something ridiculous like, “Make tea, not war.” (I didn’t choose the thug life, guys – the thug life chose me.) Anyway, if you walk or drive past the Wall you’ll see a lot of really cool graffiti, and it almost always has a message. I think more and more they’re being done in English too, and I think maybe it’s because more and more people are seeing the graffiti on an international level so the message is getting passed around to more people.

I also liked Noura’s article as a sort of recap of the information about the conflict. She writes really well, so it was great to go through it! I never really considered the idea of a homeland and a political country being two separate states – everything in the Middle East ends up circling back to politics (try having dinner with my family and their friends and count how many times politics is brought up!) so I think that was my favourite part of her article.