The writing’s on the wall
Writing on the wall
All across the city, in every corner of the university, students are busy scribbling. Against the ravages of infrequent but devastating paint jobs, the threat of fi nes for defacing books and the onset of the Hilary term (when overcast is a good day and rain a constant threat) they put down their thoughts in pen, pencil and chalk on the toilet walls, library books and pavements of the city.
Deriving from the Greek ‘graphein’ (to write), and passing via the Latin ‘graffi to’, our own anglicised ‘graffi ti’ is instantly associated with the urban art that symbolised the hip-hop fl avoured New York of the 1970s.
The accepted wisdom says that an anonymous local delivery messenger in Brooklyn began to scribble ‘Taki 183’ whilst delivering documents around the city, and soon a number of copycat ‘tags’ (an acronym for Tuff Artists’ Group) began to appear, a much needed means of self-expression for alienated, under-privileged youth. The fact that Oxford has a graffi ti culture is perhaps a little odd.
The last time I checked, alienated and underprivileged weren’t synonymous with the average Oxford student; youth yes, but one out of three isn’t really enough. Clearly the graffi ti monster has been unleashed from its natural habitat.
What, then, can be deduced from graffiti in Oxford? Does the fact that anti-Brookes banter tends to be more common in the Rad Cam’s dilapidated underground loos, where nobody other than fellow Oxonians will see it, refl ect on us in any way? Perhaps it shows that, for all of Oxford’s ardent protests and declarations of modernisation; all the claims that we have abandoned the less pleasant aspects of our past by accepting and respecting the academic records of other institutions, we are still secretly elitist snobs driven by the overwhelming and consuming desire to express our contempt for inferior beings on the toilet walls, the last bastion of free speech in a world gone PC-mad. Then again, perhaps not, perhaps we just fear humiliation for weak gags like ‘education cannot be found in brookes’ and so hide them away in shame in the deepest, dankest parts of the university buildings.
The university’s graffi ti-producing students apparently do not take much pride in their creative output. We’re not graffiti artists - we’re opportunists with a pen and nothing to do in the toilets (besides the obvious). Trek up the Cowley Road and you can see huge, intricate outpourings of graphic inventiveness, ranging from the colourful and bizarre but beautiful to the cheerfully obscene, refl ecting in most cases some serious effort on the part of the artist.
Head back towards the town centre and the standard of graffi ti on display gradually peters out and worsens (perhaps because the thought of being called before the Proctors for redecorating Balliol’s front door is too terrifying). By the time you’ve reached the centre, the quality has deteriorated to such an extent that, if you are lucky enough to come across an attempt at illustration to go with the scrawled message, it hardly seems worth the effort.
There’s a good deal of pretension and one-upmanship going on, as the long, emotional debate on the Palestine- Israel confl ict which rages on the inside door of a toilet cubicle in the English Faculty shows. The comments here range from the provocative, to the unsubstantiated, to the downright ludicrous. Above it all someone has drawn a picture of an A-bomb with the accompanying note ‘Relax hippies, war is cool.
Not the most incisive commentary, but it’s encouraging to know that someone recognises that undergrads are beginning to take themselves too seriously when they start threatening to throttle each other over opinions written on a toilet door. In the adjacent cubicle a peace-loving writer has gone further, pre-empting hostilities by engraving square in the middle of the door: ‘STOP (Hammer Time)’. It seems there is something we can all appreciate, even if it does involve parachute pants.
As if having an under-informed debate on a complex political situation wasn’t sufficient food for thought, we find elsewhere graffiti written in virtually every language, from the inevitable modern language notes to middle and Old English, as well as Greek and Latin (there’s a set of toilets in New College which make especially good reading). Some even go so far as to correct their fellow writers’ mistakes: ‘Shaggst yu arse?’ reads one message.
Another obliging student has helpfully provided an annotation, rather than answering the question, politely pointing out that the proper way to ask about one’s sexual preferences in Middle English is ‘Swyvest yo ers?’ It’s good to know that the student loan isn’t being wasted, isn’t it? Some enterprising students have begun to use graffiti as a way of brainstorming essays: ‘Is Troilus gay?’ one muses.
The responses so far haven’t been overly helpful: ‘Why, do you fancy him?’ and ‘Maybe, but Criseyde is a total bitch.’ Nonetheless, if this idea is developed it surely won’t be long before you can pop into the library loos with a pad of paper or your laptop and emerge half an hour later with a full essay copied directly from the walls.
It’s bad etiquette, for sure, but the time you’ll save not having to do your own work is more than enough to make up for the frustrated glares that you’ll receive from the queue as you emerge, triumphant, from the cubicle of inspiration. There is a marked difference between the tone of Oxford’s male and female graffitists.
The messages in the boys’ loos tend to one or other of the extremes of pretentious and puerile (ultimately the difference between being up one’s own arse and making jokes about being up someone else’s). Meanwhile the girls tend to stick to more practical topics, and to avoid the childish, although an exception must be made for the young lady who thinks that, ‘Hearing people poop is funny.
One writer seeks advice on her love life, explaining that she fell in love with someone who seemed to feel the same until he left her. She asks despariringly, ‘What the hell should I do?’ The anonymity of the situation, and the assumption that responses will be more supportive than snide, makes for a perfect source of objective advice. In college facilities there is yet another style.
Here inter-college rivalries loom large and the relative merits (or otherwise) of well-known individuals around college are discussed with fervour. One college’s JCR toilet was emblazoned with the mocking statement: ‘We’ve got a squarer front quad than you,’ a jibe which, given that it’s at eye level, must bring bitter tears to users every time they sit down.
The toilet also makes the perfect setting for a quiet voice of dissent; the wall of one cubicle in a notoriously left-wing college says simply ‘Communism sucks.’ Elsewhere, someone has confided that, ‘I hate Oxford,’ only to be seconded by several of their peers: clearly it’s good to get this sort of thing off your chest. It seems then, that there is a place in Oxford for graffiti.
We may not need to define our identity as an oppressed minority; nor, it seems, do we need a forum for anything that could actually be called intelligent debate. But, for those of us who can never truly shut off the cerebral while attending to the physical, the toilet walls will remain a haven for some sort of anonymous, censor-free, self-expression.
12th Jan 2005