“Children growing up on the wrong sides of urban borderlines are at risk in so many ways; on the edge of everything, they are almost doomed.”
Nandrea’s essay brings up an interesting function of graffiti. All art invites, or even demands, questions. However, usually, individuals can choose whether or not to see art, and so can choose whether or not to be exposed to the fuel that burns into questions. However, much like Nandrea claims the cemetery claims the human rather than we claim the cemetery, one does not choose to see graffiti. Rather, graffiti watches us, to see if we are asking questions. Graffiti challenges us not to think and ask why it exists, and usually this challenge is too great. That is why the “writing on the wall” unnerves political authority; not because it signals a present threat, but because it propels children to ask parents why it is there, and may propel parents to think.
Even graffiti not intended to be political, it of course is; it is a record of a crime committed, visible to all. Why did someone do it? What went wrong, or right, in the conversation between the many and the one that caused this aberration? Nandrea notes that gang violence displays similar themes as the history of colonization, in which Western nations were the most successful “gangsters.” I think that it is the socio-cultural explanations to gang violence that satisfy people enough so that such parallels are not widely discussed in the popular media, and perhaps this is why the “War on Graffiti” is so necessary as well.