THE CONTENTIOUS RHETORIC OF THE CAIRENE WALLS: WHEN GRAFFITI MEETS POPULAR POETRY
THE CONTENTIOUS RHETORIC OF THE CAIRENE WALLS: WHEN GRAFFITI MEETS POPULAR POETRY

Summary/Abstract: The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 had among the common features of political popular expression in the public space the overwhelming presence of poetry to which Elliot Colla attributes a prominent role from the beginning of the uprising being not an ornament but a soundtrack contributing to the revolutionary act (Colla 2012:47). The political graffiti of Cairo, a cultural practice brought about and fueled by the revolution is not exempted, with poetry acting as the sound recorded by graffiti, transformed at the same time into a rhetorical device. This article will present an analysis of a selected corpus of graffiti featuring revolutionary imagery and fragments of poetry, focusing on the specificity of the re-appropriation of literary fragments used as elements of a revolutionary, contentious rhetoric, and the creation of an inter-textual topicality that transcends historical contexts. We will follow, at the same time, the relationship between poetry and graffiti in order to clarify the mechanisms of a lyrical dimension of Egyptian protest graffiti.

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