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The hit show is about U.S. intelligence efforts to thwart
Middle East terrorism. In the episode aired in the United States
last week, CIA agent Carrie Mathison walks through a Syrian
refugee camp and past a wall daubed with graffiti - one of which
declares, in Arabic: "Homeland is racist".
Other scenes had walls covered with similarly pointed Arabic
messages: "There is no Homeland", "Homeland is not a show" and
"Black lives matter".
"It was a way to start a discussion," Heba Amin, one of the
artists responsible, told Reuters in Cairo. "You know, we were
hoping that once this aired that somebody would pay attention to
it, and we never anticipated that it would be so massive.
The sabotage of the set has become a worldwide story, picked up
by major newspapers and media outlets across the globe.
"This is exactly, for us, what we wanted," Amin said. "This is a
huge success, and now we can have that discussion and people are
talking about it."
The graffiti were planted by a trio of artists calling
themselves the "Arabian Street Artists". They were hired to make
walls on the outskirts of Berlin, where the show as filmed this
summer, look like part of Lebanon. Nobody detected the meaning
before the show aired on the Showtime network last Sunday.
Alex Gansa, co-creator of "Homeland", said in a statement
distributed by Showtime: "We wish we'd caught these images
before they made it to air."
But he added: "As 'Homeland' always strives to be subversive in
its own right and a stimulus for conversation, we can’t help but
admire this act of artistic sabotage."
The artists said they were motivated by stereotypes and
inaccuracies in the scripts used by the show's producers.
"Based on previous episodes, they had made many mistakes and it
was clear that they didn't have a strong research team, and so I
figured this was the opportunity to incorporate subversive
graffiti," Amin told Reuters during the interview at her home in
the Cairo district of Maadi.
"What we are trying to raise is that regardless whether or not
the show is fiction, it still has very dangerous implications
because they're basically stereotyping an enormous region of
people."
Among the inaccuracies the three artists - Caram Kapp and Don
Karl, in addition to Amin - point to in "Homeland" are episodes
that portrayed Al Qaeda as being backed by Shiite Iran, when the
group is Sunni-led.
The show, now in its fifth season, had run for so long that it
was affecting viewers' perceptions of the Middle East, Kapp said
an interview with Reuters at a cafe in Berlin's artist district,
Neukoellnin.
"By doing this for a long time they are forming a certain
opinion, a certain representation of this part of the world in
their audience's mind," he said.
"I hope that what we did will lead the makers of the show to
interact a bit more with the subject matter and maybe try to
represent people in a more differentiated way," he said.
Claire Danes has won two Emmys and two Golden Globes for her
portrayal of Mathison, who struggles to do her job while
afflicted with bi-polar disorder. But the show has been
criticized for its inaccuracies and accused of stereotyping in
its depiction of the Middle East and Islamic culture.
(Reporting by Tina Bellon in Berlin, Mostafa Salem in Cairo and
Michael Roddy in London; Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing by
Larry King)
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