Personal Memoir - Remembered Event

It was born out of a collective fury. That was why, in a matter of minutes after we found out what had happened, we had grabbed chalk (not finding any permanent markers) and a ladder and marched out. We wanted to make it known that it was not ok. We wanted to paint out our fury. We wanted to let it be known that, permission or no, we would communicate ourselves and our beliefs.

It was a Sunday night at around midnight; I was at a rehearsal in the “teatrito” of the Colegio, located in Chardon, the humanities building. I walked outside to go buy myself a snack and noticed that this guy that I couldn’t recognize was in the process of creating a mural. No big deal – murals are painted “clandestinely” all the time; in fact almost 90 percent of the time they’re done on the exact same wall that this guy was using. It’s a good location for a mural. It faces the plaza that all students have to pass through to get to the library, cafeteria or Chardon. The murals are usually of political nature, and they are respected for about two or three months before the university discretely paints them over, making the wall once again neutral and blank, as they prefer it to be.

I stopped for a second and sipped my root beer as I observed the latest painting and tried to discern its purpose. It wasn’t immediately obvious from my standpoint. There was a giant bleeding penis, along with the silhouettes of a man wielding a knife and a woman on the floor bleeding. All around these two images were messages of hate and violence against women – “Cut their clits!” “Beat the whores” and so on and so forth. Ahhh…it was an (obviously) ironic statement against the mistreatment of women. I appreciated it for a minute or two and then returned to my rehearsal.

Skip to the next day, and I was (not surprisingly) once again in the teatrito, spending time with my other theater geek friends. A friend of the group came to tell us about an incident that they had just seen happen. She told us, “S- has been arrested!”

“Ahhhh?!” (S was another acquaintance of ours)

She explained to us that he had spent last night painting a mural on the wall, but that when he had arrived to colegio that day at 7 in the morning it had been painted over, as if the mural had never existed in the first place. S got mad, and using spray paint, began a new mural. He did a hasty re-do of the giant penis (figuring that it had been this to cause the college authorities to erase it) and began writing a message next to it. It said, “My name is S. Last night, I painted a mural on this wall against violence towards women. This morning at 7 am it was already gone. This is a public college, and we are supposed to have the right to freedom of expression, but that is obviously not the case.” As he had been writing this message, college guards had come, ripped his spray paint away from him and put him in handcuffs.

For about two seconds we stood silently. I couldn’t quite believe that what she was telling us could be true. Then we all got mad. Fast. We moved quickly to get tools we could write with. What we found was multi-colored sidewalk chalk, so we took these and went over to the wall. I got even angrier when I saw that they had again painted over what S had done. It was ridiculous, maddening. In their apparent haste to make the university “respectable” (or whatever their goal in erasing it was) they had apparently painted over it with the first paint they could get their hands on – a white primer that was so thin it didn’t even do anything to hide the image. It was like a double insult. There was the penis that had supposedly been such a big issue, clear as day. They hadn’t even covered it, they had just made it perfectly clear that they would decide what we would and wouldn’t express.

We grabbed our chalk and began writing our own messages besides S’s message. The messages we wrote were about freedom of speech, of our right to express ourselves. They were messages about art and its function. Messages challenging those who would to silence us. Hostile messages. Furious messages.

The guards, who always seemed so slow to appear when something had been stolen or someone had been hurt, now seemed to materialize out of thin air. It looked like they had all been ordered away from their posts to deal with our peaceful little manifestation. We were writing on a wall, for goodness sakes. Writing! Not breaking, not fighting, not even rallying more people to write with us. Nevertheless, the guards told us to stop what we were doing because we were vandalizing government property. Largely we ignored them, but they insisted so we pointed out that it was chalk. Students wrote all the time on the “government property” with chalk to announce all types of events – why was that any different from what we were doing? They acted as if we were speaking a different language, and again insisted that we stop. It’s chalk, we said. The rain would wash it away in a few days.

A friend of mine who is hot-headed could not hold back and began a discourse. He said things that were very true, and extremely valid. He condemned those who would silence anybody else because they didn’t agree with their ideas, or their way of expressing their ideas. Students had gathered in droves, all three floors of the building were full of people straining to see what the commotion was. All of them cheered when he stopped talking, but the guards (and other university workers that had gathered, and I’m sure that even some students) called him disgusting. One heavily built guard wanted to hit him and was held back. At this point things began to get a bit out of hand. A friend pulled me away as I screamed at one of the guards. After, we were taken to talk to the man in charge of student affairs. He was very nice, friendly and calm with us, but not at all helpful. We didn’t think things should be left as they were, so late that night we got together to talk about what we wanted to do. What we decided on was my first performance.

The next day at 10:30 (it was a Tuesday and so there were no classes at this time) we walked out to the wall (still covered with what we had written) with paintbrushes and buckets filled with water. We decided on water because we did not want to give them any excuse to be able to arrest us. We began silently painting the wall with the water, pantomiming the act of writing. Pretty soon there were students, professors and guards surrounding us. Two of the guys from our group, one being my friend that had given his inflamed speech the day before, came out with fake guns dressed as guards. They began calling us freaks, disgusting, spitting on us. They said that we should know that the university was not a place to express ourselves or get ideas. It was a place where we would be taught to function “correctly”. Clearly we should be punished. One by one the two “guards” turned us around and lined us up. One by one they read us our crimes and proclaimed our sentence. Death. When we were all dead and silent, they walked away. After a second we all open our eyes, gathered our materials and followed.

It was an exhilarating experience. Performance is not quite like doing theater – in a performance, I am always myself, not a character assigned me. Doing this performance really helped me understand what performance was about and how it could be utilized. I realized that I could use my own passion to reach other people, that I wasn’t impotent. I realized that I could channel my fury, and any other stress or emotion, into action that could help me express myself.