I've been haunted by the question of "what walls mean" since first reading the description of this task.

The first place I go these days to find out what things mean is Wikipedia. Their page on walls bored me, as it has much to do with the construction of walls and little to do with the social meanings imbued in them. There's a reason I'm a social science/humanities guy and not an engineering guy. However, one of the links proved more promising and took me to a the List of Walls, specifically famous ones. How can a wall be famous? It's certainly not fame in the sense that first pops into my mind when I hear the word. I doubt Jay Leno will have the Tsoi Wall in Moscow on his show right between Renee Zellweger and The Fray. That being said though, obviously I've stumbled upon certain walls that have been given meaning by their social and cultural contexts to the point that they can be considered to posses "fame."

Some interesting things about certain walls.
- The Democracy Wall in Beijing was used as a staging grounds for pro-democratic protest in the late 70's. Wikipedia says that "the wall was closed in 1979." I don't know what it means to close a wall.
- The Green Monster in Fenway Park surprised me by its inclusion on this list. I figured all famous walls had to have political import. It is the highest wall in professional baseball, frustrating many the home-run hitter who instead has to settle for a double.

Ultimately, though, a wall is what separates people from things. Whether it's a person from nature (like the walls of a house), or people from their politically incompatible neighbors (Berlin Wall), or to keep a powerful nation "safe" from people is afraid of (Israel's West Bank Barrier, US-Mexico Barrier).

With walls, we can create Others. We create difference between us and them, allowing us to shun them and ignore their plights and their suffering.

I found this poem on the site FromOccupiedPalestine.

I am armed with a handful of chainlinks
MYKA TUCKER-ABRAMSON
13 October 2003

I am armed with a handful of chain links,
scraps of concrete, historical
warnings in my yidish tongue.

Well, work never made us free
And we have forgotten,
My yellow coat-sewn star has forgotten
What happens when I become my history,
resurrecting the walls
enclosing Warsaw and Treblinka
where butterflies don't live anymore.

We know what happens when butterflies
who try to fly
over wire barbed
With hate and electricity.
We know the sounds of rifles moans,
their angry chatter and screech
of shattered skin and bones,
back broken over nazi knees
or the sounds of fingernail, clawing
at gas chamber walls.

My silence is their bones, gas and wire,
is another olive tree
razed like homes and blood-written choirs,
my clothes stitched with yellow stars
numbers and names sewn into skin,
because we don't need to sew
stars into boys with brown skin,
their eyes already a rifles bulls eye
and my silence is the building of settlements
and my silence is the resurrection of Aushchwitz
with its tattoed signs
on my arm:
work will make you free

And I, I have had photos of corpses mounted
Like pyramids, and I, I have had
Stories of starvation and scents:
The rot of blood still charring
The sky like ink.
And I, I now have stories of corpses,
our corpses, and what happens
when they becomes soldiers,
your blood running, fast as we flee,
And walls should be built to hold families,
Contain blood, contact skin,
But we now bulldoze walls,
Build only barricades
Like blood, a barrier, doesn't free,
is never more than blood,
its crimson red only dull as death
A warning in a language we all understand
Walls never made us free.

-- October 13, 2003


For the final part of this project, I printed out a copy of the poem and a copy of the Wikipedia article on walls. I like the contrast between the relative straight-forward definition of a wall provided by Wikipedia, and the meanings behind a specific wall that Myka Tucker-Abramson invokes in her beautiful poem. I posted them on a wall the encloses a dumpster in the housing community I live in. I think this symbolizes well the feelings many people have about the people on the "other side of the wall" being garbage that we don't like to look at and need protecting from.