By Lama Abi Ammar | Staff Writer

Oftentimes, in a city as wild as Beirut, people simply cannot let matters be. Every day, trifles and existential questions alike materialize in colors and calligraphy of different shapes and sizes, splattered all over the city. So much remains unsaid in Beirut, but it is all written on its walls.

A narrative like no other, Beirut’s graffiti is a collage of different timelines by different authors in different genres at every turn in the street. This narrative is partially interrupted by commercial posters, political slogans, and profane images, or is simply whitewashed. The lifetime of a work of graffiti reflects the narrative of the city itself, which goes through traumatic events and quickly covers them up, avoiding confrontation yet also avoiding complete erasure. The city’s walls have become too thick with paint and paper.

Yet, every morning, there is a new thing to express, a new catchphrase, a new illustration. Sometimes, the inscriptions on the walls of Beirut are rather amusing – people use graffiti as a way of expressing their love, frustrations, or inside jokes with their friends:

So far, yet so close / Absurd / Age / S + M = <3 / Riad, are you okay? / Ali Imperio / Real G’s move in silence

Other times, graffiti is used as a means of communicating political and social ideas. Often, it is paired with political flags and posters of party leaders to mark certain streets as “belonging” to a certain group of people. In this case, it morphs between being a means of segregation and a collective call for justice and peace:

Gaza is the graveyard of the invaders / Justice and peace / Lebanon does not want war, Israel does! / Resistance

Graffiti is also used more loosely to communicate day-to-day information in parking lots and streets, as if the walls become the instruction manuals of navigating the city:

The parking closes at [words whitewashed] / Smile, here is Hell Hamra main street / No parking

To express their existential desires and questions, the people of Beirut also spray the walls, for once uniting all the different faiths in the city under common questions they all grapple with:

Through God seeking greatness / We pass

It is common, however, for individuals to use the city walls as their personal diaries and expose ways in which the city, or the country, has been cruel to them. It seems that they see Beirut as the link between them and their country, an entity speaking for them and displaying their struggles every day:

“I am Lebanese. On the date 20-10-2022 the Lebanese General Forces took my ID – I am a man without an ID and without a nation. Shame on the great people of Lebanon.

Signature.

The circumstances.”

– Anonymous, written near the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC)

Graffiti including illustration becomes a playground for caricatures and exaggerated realism, often intertwined with calligraphy. Yazan Halwani, for instance, uses calligraphy and illustration to create murals on the walls of Beirut with the aim of uniting the people of the city over images they identify with, whether it is iconic figures like Fairuz and Sabah, or familiar faces loved by the people of the city. Others use the medium to simply doodle. Most use it to express a struggle recognizable from far away, a struggle so ordinary to encounter in the city that it seems as if the swatches of paint ought to be on the street where they are, as if the characters displayed are real people that never leave. All together, these murals and images animate the city, bursting it into colors.

This “vandalism” makes the city look lived-in, using the most intimate mode of communication: writing. People scribble their diary entries on the streets of Beirut like codes for others to discover from miles away or by reading up close, intimately, as if it is a whisper

shared by two friends in a crowd that is hard to navigate. The collective screams, struggles, and desires are passionately declared on the walls, like promises, threats, reminders and celebrations all at once. These messages are not not always up for dissection – they belong to people in a certain inaccessible moment in time, waiting to be covered with layers of a new story with different colors, characters, wars, jokes, and tragedies. Yet, they all belong to the same walls, agglomerating on top of each other to form Beirut as we know it.