'Homeland is racist': Arabic artists secretly slide in subversive graffiti on TV show

What took off as a refreshing take on America’s ‘war on terror’, Homeland has only spiralled down to what today is a show that is as confused about the politics of war as it is unaware of its fall. A political thriller based on critically acclaimed Israeli show Prisoners of War, Homeland has constantly come under the scanner for inaccurate portrayal of the orient. Many have cried foul over the show’s distorted portrayal of Pakistan, one that of a place with “just mosques and burqa shops”. Even the teaser poster for the show’s fourth season came under fire, with allegations of bigotry and plain ignorance coming to the fore. [caption id=“attachment_2469896” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] One of the subvertive graffitis created by arabic artists for Homeland. Photo courtesy of the artist/ www.hebaamin.com[/caption] Many have pointed fingers at Homeland’s slapdash research, talking of clear distinctions between, Urdu, Pashto and Hindi which the show constantly fails to recognise. People have criticised bizzare language translations on the show and also pointed out glaring factual errors to the point where Pakistanis are barely able to recognise their ‘homeland’. You can read about it here, here and here. The infamy surrounding its shoddy attention to detail and sloppy research has surfaced once again when the latest episode of the fifth season aired. According to a report in the Washington Post, three arabic graffiti artists, who were hired to do wall art for the show to lend authenticity to the locale, sprayed out “Homeland is racist” graffiti on the set walls in Arabic script, without the showrunners even catching a whiff of the subversive act. The artists were hired to create pro-Assad graffiti in order to lend environmental authenticity to the depiction of a Syrian refugee camp on the show. “What if we could use this as an opportunity to be subversive, to make a point with it?” the report quoted Cairo-based artist Heba Amin as saying. Heba Amin has published a statement online explaining why they “hacked” the award-winning show. Other graffitis include “Homeland is NOT a series”, “#blacklivesmatter” and some that poke fun at the show. The showrunners didn’t even look twice at the true meaning of the graffitis. “The content of what was written on the walls … was of no concern. In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanising an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees,” T__he Guardian quoted Amin as saying in a report. Wherever it may have started out, Homeland is far from home these days.