I’ll assume there’s no ill will in David Pesci’s “correction” to the Butt Tunnels graffiti story. I’ll assume that he honestly believes that the tunnels were completely repainted “a little more than three years ago.” I’ll assume that this is what “representatives of Facilities” told him, and to be extra-generous, I’ll even assume that they believe it.
There’s just one problem. I was in the tunnels a little more than 4 years ago, and remember a few particularly striking images. One was a giant face, (half red, half black,) another an excerpt from an e.e. cummings poem, penned in unassuming lowercase, and another a painstakingly decoupaged doorway, leading into a room full of mysterious electrical-equipment rubble with a pair of pants hanging from the ceiling.
And somehow, impossibly, some of those works of art were still there when I revisited them more than two years later.
So I am by no means accusing David Pesci of deliberately lying in an effort to portray the living art of the tunnels as something completely new, invented, and without history. I’m not accusing any anonymous “representatives of Facilities” of doing that either. And maybe I’m remembering it wrong, as I’m almost positive they are.
But what I am pointing out is yet another example of Wesleyan, as a bureaucratic institution, attempting to use the short memory of the student body to erase a living, breathing, incredible part of the campus.
First, the administration’s dubious discursive practices reconstitute the legacy of chalking: from subversive anti-racist and anti-heteropatriarchal speech acts to racist and homophobic slurs in a single presidential mumble.
And now, in a similarly concise move, a history of incredible creative energy and living art is being fictionalized out of existence. If the tunnels were totally repainted 3 years ago, then painting over them again cannot possibly be a violent act of erasure, or a negation of student power. It’s just business as usual.
Something to get used to: until something big changes, “business as usual” for Wesleyan, as an institution, involves the periodic, systematic erasure of histories of student agency, creativity, and power. Chalking was being glossed as homophobic and racist (and when that didn’t work, as sexual harassment), when the moratorium was first instated, in October of 2002. The moratorium provoked a campus-wide spraypaint campaign. Business as Usual was what provoked the massive student takeover of North and South College in the fall of 2004. It was business as usual which “integrated” first year students of color by denying them access to X house, in the face of massive student opposition. (This led to the student actions which produced 200 Church in 2003.) And it was an insistence on Business as Usual on the fifth anniversary of Malcolm X’s death, and an insistence on business as usual in the face of a wave of racist hate crimes against black students which provoked the armed takeover of Fisk Hall in 1969. The creation of Malcolm X house was the direct result of that takeover.
Business as Usual is to repaint the whole of Wesleyan’s campus and history every three to four years (and always, as in the tunnels, with White on top) and chalk and spraypaint are among the least threatening of students’ responses.
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