Political prisoners in South Africa's apartheid-era Robben Island prison signed their names next to passages in a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Many years into his sentence, Nelson Mandela signed next to these lines from Julius Caesar:

• Cowards die many times before their deaths,

• The valiant never taste of death but once.

• Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

• It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

• Seeing that death, a necessary end,

• Will come when it will come. (II.ii.32-37)

It's a kind of reverse graffiti. Instead of making your mark on the world by putting a slogan on a blank wall, these prisoners put their mark next to an eloquent, already-existing text, signing it as in some way their own. It's an example of something that is probably always going on, sometimes subversively: revoicing, which we might say is claiming a new tone or context for an old text.

A fictional example of this might be in The Hunger Games, when Katniss mourns the fallen Rue and then salutes the people of Rue's district who she knows must be watching on the public video screens. The ordinary gesture has compounded its meaning in this context, letting the spectators know that one person shares their loss even though the political order effectively silences them all. This allows the spectators to acknowledge their own emotions and express their rage by rioting. Writing, speech, even a gesture, grows richer as the inventive person recasts old signs into new messages of solidarity and resistance. Something like that, anyway.