I like to imagine that the graffiti I see around campus is the product of an underground, grassroots movement — one that is striving to accomplish a mysterious yet vital goal. Each time I see a piece of bathroom wall graffiti, it evokes this picture in my mind of how I think UC Berkeley might have looked fifty years ago. I like to imagine that the student body of the 1960s was wholly united, that each student threw himself “upon the gears and upon the wheel, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,” as Mario Savio declared on the steps of Sproul Hall. I like to imagine that the graffiti of today is also fighting the “odious machine.”
I am probably wrong on both counts.
To start with the latter, not every student in 1964 was actively campaigning for free speech. While it is true that as many as 3,000 students protested together in October and November, many of them were likely fighting for different causes and many more were not involved whatsoever. Nonetheless, the idea that there could be one unified, collaborative movement is uplifting when surveying the current state of student activism, which is easily more diverse.
In regard to the first point about graffiti, I am wrong without a doubt. As much as I like to picture a student’s outstretched Sharpie as one of the microphones in front of Savio, most restroom graffitists are probably not seeking broader political freedoms. Instead, they write out confessions, pleas for advice, deeply held religious views or philosophical musings. Mirroring the activism of today, these sentiments are diverse.
But when I see a paraphrased Randy Pausch quote in the women’s restroom of Pimentel, “Brick walls aren’t there to keep you out. They’re there to give you a chance to show how much you want something” or the Doctor Who-inspired “Allons-y Allonso — We have a bathroom stall to take back!” in a recently cleaned Dwinelle restroom, I cannot help but think that Savio’s fire still burns inside students.
Herein lies the parallel. The graffiti of today and the protests of the past each represent the struggle to disseminate speech against those who wish to silence it. No matter how many arrests were made during the 60s sit-ins and protests, the voices never stopped. Likewise, no matter how many times bathroom partitions are scrubbed down, graffiti always resurfaces. In the case of the Evans Hall women’s bathroom, it’s even a competition, with some declaring, “First!” to show that they reached the blank stalls before anyone else.
Without diminishing the significance of the Free Speech Movement, graffiti has a uniqueness unto its own. It is inherently a dialogue among individuals, even those who do not actively write back responses. Simply reading a text already makes someone engaged in the conversation. Like all forms of communication, graffiti attempts to fish out an innermost thought and transform it into words or pictures. Sometimes, the words don’t come out quite right or the drawing is not how it was pictured in someone’s mind. Beneath a whale cartoon in the same Evans restroom, an artist wrote, “This came out slightly creepier than intended.”
As powerful as Savio’s words were, they might not have embodied the true essence of what he felt. As majestic as a whale might be in someone’s imagination, it inevitably loses its essence when given concrete form. The transformation of an idea into a verbalization is a challenge for everyone — from political activist to whale cartoonist. Although we might never understand what a person truly means in his mind pre-language or pre-art, we are united in the shared struggle to communicate such feelings. Speech has power not because it is perfect, but because it is the imperfect product of a common endeavor to make our thoughts known.
Contact Kimberly Veklerov at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @kveklerov.