Walled Women

Like others have said, I felt a lot of different things about the Mural Arts tour and look forward to having the space to talk about it tomorrow!  I don't want to merely repeat sentiments already expressed so will instead focus on just how it felt to be in Philadelphia outside of the walls of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr bubble with our group.

I thought that it was interesting that, as a group who defines ourselves in this course as members of a 'walled community,' it was good to have the reminder of how radically different our walls our from those of prisons.  It is as easy as jumping on the train to get into the city, but we almost never do.  How much do we imbue our walls with significance and how much purpose do they actually functionally serve?  Bryn Mawr is not actually worried about students escaping and welcomes visitors (or the right kind of visitors at least, as we discussed in Barb's class on Friday).  So why put walls around the college?  Haverford doesn't have the same architectural features as Bryn Mawr, including less of a formal wall, so I've been taking the term pretty loosely but actually looking at Eastern State and Bryn Mawr made me realize that I do live in a pretty different environment (visually).  Our tour guide had us name reasons people build walls as well as emotions walls provoke, and that, as well as the art installation, have made me think a lot more about walls specifically over the past few days.

Something about yesterday’s trip made me feel as though I was on the verge of tears all day. I had a hard time understanding it – especially because when I explained what happened to friends I said, “Well, it was just a tour of some of Philly’s murals and of Eastern State Penitentiary – and people do that all the time.”

I was feeling a lot of things during the trip. Something about guided tours has always made me uncomfortable, I suppose, because they make me feel like an outsider (it’s ironic that I work as a tour guide here!). This particularly struck me during our trolley tour because there was such a strong sense both of being in a fishbowl and of viewing the world outside as an aquarium scene. I also felt emotional because of the murals and their meaning for those who were involved (particularly, this is relevant when looking at the memorial murals).  I was struck by the impact on the community that our tour guide stressed because I felt in many ways he was over emphasizing it. I could see that there was no graffiti on the murals, but I also wondered why we were looking at graffiti simply through the lens of it as a negative thing (in this sense, the artist wall we saw covered in intricately designed tags was beautiful and I viewed it as a positive addition to the community, even if it wasn’t a sanctioned mural).

I can't stop thinking about the idea of building residential housing and neighborhoods around a prison.  How anyone thought that was a good idea, or why the government even allowed such a thing.  The answer the tour guide gave was helpful and terse: it's cheaper. But I guess I'm wrestling with the implications of a walled community to be so close to "the outside".  I'm left with questions like "what was it like to live so close to such a space" and "how did it mentally affect them on a daily basis?"  When I pose these questions, I'm thinking about both sides.  After all, it was probably psychologically frustrating to be so close to the "outside" and be able to hear life go on and remain so sequestered.  

Hey guys, here is a link for the album where I uploaded the photos I took yesterday! Feel free to share and download them. The password to access it is serendip .

http://s749.beta.photobucket.com/user/sharaai/library/Mural%20Arts%20Tour%20and%20Eastern%20State%20with%20360

As I have been reading my classmates posts about our field trip yesterday, I find myself agreeing with everyone and all the comments on their postings- the problem is a lot of what people are saying are in someway contradictory, so it is hard for me to understand how I agree with everyone.  I keep reminding myself that nothing is black and white and that my mixed feelings are reasonable. While we were on the tour, it reminded me of when I was in Kenya and would see white people going on slum tours and how upset it made me feel; part of me feels the two situations are very different, given that the level of disparity is so much less, but part of my knows it would not have come to mind if the similarities were not there.  Our guide was an especially interesting person to me.  I believe he and the organization he represents are extremely well intentioned, however sometimes good intentions go awry.  For example, when we were looking at the victim mural and someone drove by blasting loud music our guide said "someone needs to get that guy a paint brush!"   I believe this tour guide cared deeply for the community, and really wanted the best for the people living there.  However, I wonder if his method, and the methods of this Mural Arts organization are constraining and restricting to some.  Who is to say if loudly playing music is more or less helpful than painting a mural.  Who is to say that murals are better than street art?  Also, I wonder why he wanted us to wave at everyone?

Silence feels a whole lot more complicated than it did when I wrote my first paper on the images of protest that Esty used to represent silence, and the difference between my feelings and thoughts about silence now and the image I posted three weeks ago of the moonrise, my image of silence, is huge. Over the summer, because I was alone in a country where I did not speak the language fluently, I became accustomed to silence, and though I hated and feared it at first, I grew to appreciate it, even need it to some degree. That, I suppose, is where the calm, peaceful image of space comes from.

Since then, I’ve begun to see silence everywhere and nowhere, to relish breaks in conversations or class discussions even as my skin crawls from the discomfort, to take out my headphones as I walk so that I can better hear the silence and noise of my mind. There are so many ways to conceptualize silence and so many judgments to be made; is it good or bad? A privilege or oppression? A presence or an absence? I have come to see that it is all of these things and more, though I’ve yet to show whether or not I can articulate my feelings. “How would you now visualize-and-vocalize silence?” The visualization is not so hard, but the vocalizing, the explanation, being coherent…that’s where I often stumble and retreat to silence.

I thought yesterday's field trip was a lot of fun. I was reluctant at first to go because we had to leave so early in the morning on a Saturday, but it was beautiful out! I think my favorite part of the trip was the Mural Arts Tour. When I visited Bryn Mawr for the first time, we took a walking tour and I learned about Philly and how big it was on murals. I've been taking the Market-Frankford Line into West Philly for work for the past year and I always noticed these funny, lovey-dovey messages in mural form on the top of the buildings we pass. My friend told me that they were love letters but I didn't believe her. But in the Mural Arts bookstore, as I flipped though a little booklet detailing how these love letters came about, I couldn't stop smiling. I'd totally take a mural over flowers any day!

I think this idea of creating murals to prevent tagging and beautifying the city is a brilliant idea. It's so cool to hear about how people in the city take pride in the murals and how the people respect the artwork and take ownership of it.

Sometimes people talk all the time in class, while still staying silent. 

            Class discussion is about sharing thoughts and ideas, but sometimes it is also about sharing yourself.  Now that we are already three weeks into the 360 experience, it is becoming incredibly clear that more than one kind of dialogue occurs in our classrooms.  This is true of many discussion-based class settings, but the intimacy and intensity of our cluster of courses makes these different kinds of sharing even more apparent.  What I am still not sure of – but am very interested in exploring – is to what extent these two modes of discussion are intertwined, and whether one is even possible to do one without the other.  Dissecting and analyzing readings or books on their own is important (and is what I am usually referring to when I talk about class discussion). But telling personal anecdotes, and relating readings, theory, and overarching concepts to our own lived experiences gives a window into how we relate the subject matter to who we are. 

Saturday was a very long exhausting day for me. I loved the mural tour; even though I found myself paying more attention to the people I saw rather than the murals itself. My favorite part of the day though, was the Eastern State Pen tour. As the tour continued I kept getting more and more frustrated, not with the tour, not with the tour guide – but with society. Walking around hearing the stories reminded me of how someway somehow society finds a way to turn good into bad.

I kept imagining these prisoners in those cells and kept connecting it to modern day incarceration and how inhumane it has become. The numbers of incarcerated people still shocks me no matter how many times I hear them. It also made me think about how prisoners first started being all White, and then there was a complete 180-degree turn that flipped the population in prisons from White to those of color. It makes me wonder if there will ever be a way of stopping this without giving birth to another type of modern day slavery.