"Where do you want to go?"
A year ago, I was sat in my hostel room in Belfast with Zana and Urska, two Slovenian girls with whom I'd traveled to Northern Ireland. Spread out between us was a map of the city. In no time, we'd made a list of places we wanted to see: the Titanic shipyard, Belfast Castle, Napoleon's Nose. That plan left us with one more day to fill, which coincidentally was Easter Sunday. With no other suggestions being brought to the table, I saw my chance and took it.
"There's only one place I want to add to the list," I said. "I want to see the art on the Peace Wall."


The idea had been planted in my head about ten months earlier. As I was sitting on the porch of my "apartment" in Wadi Rum, Jordan, an old man from the group I was traveling with came up to me to ask me about street art. He'd seen me jump ship on an excursion to some biblical site in Bethlehem so I could go to the West Bank Barrier. In hindsight, he regretted not joining me. I told him about my experiences and when he saw my face light up when talking about the intersection of art, history and politics, he told me I should go see Belfast's peace walls someday. I made a mental note of the location and promised him I'd go. My promise was sincere, but I thought of it as something for the distant future. Within a year, however, I found myself in Belfast with the old man's words ringing in my ears.


Granted, Easter 2019 was not the best of times for three to slightly naive university students to visit Nothern Ireland. Lyra McKee was murdered the day before we arrived. We received more than one text from worried parents, asking us about the situation and urging us to keep our eyes open, to stay safe. We were all a little tense when we read about what was going on not too far from us. But Belfast seemed calm and safe, so after a visit to St. George's Market, we went to the Peace Wall.


The easiest way to visit the Peace Wall that has capital letters and a listing on Trip Advisor is by booking a tour. You'll be picked up in a cab and a private tour guide will tell you all about the walls and their history. Us being broke students, we did not book such a tour. We decided to walk instead. It'd take us only half an hour to get there, the sun was shining, and we were oblivious to most of the city's recent history, so walking seemed like a great idea. But soon we found ourselves away from all main roads, in the middle of a residential area where tourists were a rare sight in the streets full of Irish flags. Some vague echo of a historical fact began to wriggle in the back of my mind. It took on the form of U2's song Sunday Bloody Sunday. That's when I realized we were visiting Belfast on days that had more than just a little bit of history attached to them.


I had mixed feelings when I saw the gate. At first, I just felt excited because it opened my eyes to the art I'd been blind to just moments earlier. Almost immediately after that, I felt awful for not fully understanding the history of the place I was visiting. These feelings kept fighting each other as Zana, Urska and I walked along the wall and interpreted some of the pieces. Like the West Bank Barrier, but to a lesser extent, this wall can be read as a newspaper. I lost all sense of time. The marker in my backpack called my name, so I took it out and found a blank spot on the wall. There, between the names of countless others, I wrote the message I'd taken to heart after my visit to the Palestinian Territories: "Make hummus, not walls".


When I left the Peace Wall behind, I was still plagued by mixed feelings. That situation hasn't changed much since then. I have a love-hate relationship with this type of walls, but I can't just not visit them. They prove that something beautiful can come out of a horrible situation, in the form of art. Nonetheless, walls like the Peace Wall in Belfast and the West Bank Barrier in Israel are scars on the face of humanity. They might be effective, but inhumane. Yet still I'll keep visiting them. There's a lot we can learn from ugly solutions, and maybe one day we'll sort our problems out without separating communities with walls. Make hummus, not walls.