coauthor of Constructions of Masculinity in the Middle East and North Africa.
Sinno applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A War of Colors: Graffiti and Street Art in Postwar Beirut, and reported the following:
The first half of page 99 includes the image of a stencil that overlaps with a rushed scrawl in Beirut's Hamra area. The stencil features the head of a woman with bright-red lips and hair in the shape of the map of the Middle East and North Africa. The Arabic caption underneath the stencil translates to "The Uprising of the Arab Woman," therefore echoing the numerous protests that swept the MENA region at the beginning of 2010 and 2011 (spanning months, or years, depending on the Arab country in which they occurred), paying special tribute to women's roles and rise against oppression, both internal and external, during the uprisings. On the previous page, I explain that this stencil is reportedly associated with an eponymous feminist campaign that advocates for various rights for women, including freedom of expression, movement, dress and education, insisting that women's struggles must remain at the forefront of any political protests. On the other hand, the scribbled scrawl that intersects with the "the uprising of the Arab Woman" stencil, translates to "Jesus persists," perhaps demonstrating its anonymous writer's attempt to deface, or contest, the feminist message that the stencil articulates or, at the least, to shift the focus on the wall from women’s rights to religious proclamations. The second half of page 99 is devoted to the analysis of another Arabic-language stencil that translates to "my vagina is not a swear word," thereby exposing the sexism and violence embodied in a common, every-day Lebanese curse, which aims to dishonor a person by referencing sexual assault against that person's sister or mother. The stencil contests the sexist language of the curse, as well as the act of violating a woman’s body as a means of slandering her relatives, usually her male kin. I argue that by summoning and engaging with one of the dominant linguistic and cultural narratives that undermine women's bodies, this irreverent stencil exemplifies Bakhtin's assertions regarding the ongoing dialogic interactions among different language users and social discourses—since "utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another…" (Bakhtin, Speech Genres, cited on page 99). The next section in this chapter engages with progressive (and anti-progressive responses to) queer-centered graffiti, thereby complementing and extending this section to focus on LGBTQ+ concerns, while still using a Bakhtinian lens.Learn more about A War of Colors at the University of Texas Press website.
On the most obvious level, page 99 falls short of demonstrating the book’s scope and depth by virtue of its focus on the image of one particular women-centered stencil and the textual analysis of another, also women-centered graffito. While the page depicts graffiti's connection to significant “real life” social issues, in this case women’s liberation and the violence of patriarchal discourses and practices, it does not give the browser the full picture regarding the multiple functions of Beirut's postwar graffiti and street art. However, looking at the “big picture,” page 99 most certainly passes the test in that it highlights one of the book's key arguments (and theoretical frameworks) regarding the dialogic, polyphonous, and unfinalizable nature of postwar graffiti in Beirut. Unarguably, page 99 elucidates the book’s overall ethos and commitment to excavating the various texts and subtexts manifested in Beirut’s polyphonous graffiti. Throughout the book, drawing on Bakhtinian thought, I argue that Beirut's graffiti and street art often articulate multiple, often contesting voices and discourses that constantly engage and clash with one another on and off the streets--whether the pieces under study are centered on issues regarding women, LGBTQ communities, sectarian and regional politics, environmental devastation, or the Lebanese revolution.
Readers interested in learning about the myriad, comprehensive ways in which Beirut's postwar graffiti and street register the interconnected concerns, hopes, and repeated political engagements of the Lebanese people with regard to issues of spatial transformation, gender and sexuality, local and regional politics, and environmental devastation, will simply have to read the entire book for a fuller, more scrumptious reading experience.
--Marshal Zeringue