Writing Revolution

The Voices from Tunis to Damascus

Matthew Cassel, Layla Al-Zubaidi, Matthew Cassel, Layla Al-Zubaidi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780765402
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

From Cairo to Damascus and from Tunisia to Bahrain, Layla Al-Zubaidi and Matthew Cassel have brought together some of the most exciting new writing born out of revolution in the Arab world. This is a remarkable collection of testimony, entirely composed by participants in, and witnesses to, the profound changes shaking their region. Situated between past, present and future - in a space where the personal and the political collide - these voices are part of an ongoing process, one that is at once hopeful and heartbreaking. Unique amongst material emanating from and about the convulsions in the Arab Middle East, these creative and original writers speak of history, determination and struggle, as well as of political and poetic engagement with questions of identity and activism. This book gives a moving and inspiring insight into the Arab revolutions and uprisings: why they are happening and what might come next.

1

GREETINGS TO THE DAWN

LIVING THROUGH THE BITTERSWEET REVOLUTION (TUNISIA)

By Malek Sghiri

Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger

Tunisia and its twin

You could go mad. That is how living in my dear country, Tunisia, made me feel. I concluded, not entirely seriously, that every Tunisian who, like me, looked closely at the situation in his homeland must carry within him the seeds of such a madness: the early symptoms of a split personality.

From the outside all seemed fine and nothing was fine from within. Everything was beautiful, rosy and full of life and hope on television and the 8 o’clock news, in the papers and on the radio; advertising slots were full of laughing, attractive faces encouraging us to buy what we produced. But in the city streets and suburbs, in the villages and towns, all was sad and shocking: faces yellowed by the vicissitudes of fate, the evaporation of dreams. Hordes of police stood watch everywhere, observing the cries and groans of lost time, which stamped its tattoo across the lips and brows of this fine people.

It was a dreadful contradiction, one that you lived out in the fine grain of your existence: the conflict between the life you were told that you lived and the one you really did; between the Tunisia of the TV screens and official pronouncements and the Tunisia of crowded transport, cities of dust, nepotism and police repression; between the verdant Tunisia that sprang from the minds of the liars who sprawled over our bodies and the sad Tunisia whose sufferings we bore in our palms each morning as we dreamed of a dawn to come.

Whether luckily or unluckily, I became familiar with this contradiction from an early age, not because of any precocious awareness or formidable intellect on my part, but thanks to the small, happy family in which I was raised.

The family had come to Tunis in the mid-’80s from a long-forgotten town called Tala, a place on the edge, geographically and otherwise, with bitterly cold winters and scorching heat in summer. The family carried the curse of political opposition, perhaps as a result of some genetic flaw (my two grandfathers, Tayyib and Lazhar were revolutionaries of the National Movement, their fathers were leading figures of the 1906 peasant uprising in Tala and they were all descendants of Ali Ben Ghadahom, the leader of the 1864 revolt against Med Sadok Bey). Whatever the case, we lacked immunity to the virus of revolution and resistance and it infected us all, uncles, aunts, sons and daughters, with exceptions that, of course, proved the rule.

Memory

My father was imprisoned for his political views on two separate occasions, a total of seven years, first between 1983 and 1985 under President Habib Bourguiba and again under President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali between 1991 and 1996. My mother, who with my ailing grandmother and wonderful uncle, shouldered the burden of raising me, my brother Dhaffer and sister Sana’a, became withdrawn. In nostalgic moments that squeeze the heart I still remember my mother’s radiant face as she, not yet 30, gathered up our things and told us to be brave and strong as we were getting ready to visit my father in jail.

We would wake at four in the morning, sometimes three or even earlier when the journey was particularly long. Prison visits taught us the map of Tunis and its byways. The regime punished both him and us by constantly moving him from one jail to another.

Truth be told, neither I, my mother or my sister, and certainly not my father, ever slept the night before for reasons my words are powerless to convey. Twisting and turning on the narrow bed that I never once complained about because I knew my mother could not afford to buy another, I would ask myself why I couldn’t hug my father like other children. Why must I pay weekly visits to my own father surrounded by jostling crowds, policemen, and heavy sticks? Why, Lord, do we not get to go with our parents to the seaside, the zoo or the funfair? Why don’t we stay up watching TV, like all the families we see on the TV: laughing and joking in a warm and lovely home? Why do I have to stay awake, sharpening my hearing to catch my mother’s weeping, the choking sobs she does not want to wake us with, while knowing that my siblings and I are listening in, our senses straining and our hearts catching at the sound?

Ah! How many times did my mother try to cover her mouth, I wonder, to protect us, or herself, from the torment of bitter wakefulness? How many times did my too-wide body flip on my narrow bed to my young thoughts and youthful questions?

I did not complain. I was raised on values that I imbibed with my mother’s milk: courage, to bear the burden of a sacred trust; fortitude, to defy and overcome your baser self; honesty, to speak the truth when others fall silent; modesty, to turn your back on material wealth; manliness, to hold your head high when asked to bow before the storm; piety, to remain faithful to your parents; dignity, to pluck your right to live from the hands of your tormentors; and gallantry, to tread humbly.

These images and symbols were engraved on my consciousness and can never be erased: tears, a shaking hand, a sob stifled in the throat. I do not like to put my private self on display. I am not one of those who have no difficulty unburdening themselves to an audience, perhaps because I cannot control myself when I write or talk about even a part of this family life. I feel that I’m betraying those moments as I set them down: a distortion that robs them of their powerful presence in my life.

I remember every name, every date: everything. I remember every prison and every prison guard. I remember every entrance and exit, every visitor, every prisoner’s face. I remember the chilly waiting rooms, the iron bars that kept me from my father, the little pieces of halva he held out to us across the metre that separated us from his warm embrace. I remember the train, the bus, the railway, the long road and utter silence that preceded our meeting with our father. I remember every detail and I do not have to pay the price of wringing my memory out to retrieve it. My memory is alive with these details; details that formed me as I am today. How can I forget how I am?

Taken together all these things formed part of my rage at the regime that fractured my family. I confess that I am angry and bitter at this regime and I confess that I wanted revenge, but I also confess, with a clear conscience, that the trifling things I did – which others call fighting for freedom and which I call the search for meaning in an unintelligible world – were in no way the fruit of that thirst for vengeance. I can state quite categorically that what I did and do is utterly removed from the logic of vengeance, not to excuse myself or lend a fraudulent moral veneer to my brief and modest experience in the field, but because I cannot remember ever being pleased to see another person’s downfall or making the fight against tyranny a purely personal issue.

Viva the student movement!

In 2005 I arrived at university, burning with enthusiasm to participate in a great movement whose glories and heroism I had heard about since childhood: the student movement. A new chapter in my life was set to start, living out what I had dreamt of for so many years: I would give public speeches, lead marches, march in the footsteps of my glorious predecessors and lecture my contemporaries about the true meaning of freedom of speech and action.

I enrolled at the Preparatory Institute in Literary Studies and the Humanities, part of Tunis University, the same year that my brother Dhaffer graduated from the College of Economics and my sister Sana’a finished Year 9: a successful year for the family.

The fact was that my siblings and I had been determined to please my father, the engineering graduate barred from resuming his former profession, now the neighbourhood épicier, and bring a little joy to our mother who longed for us to do well at school. Our social standing was modest to say the least but we were armed with big dreams, convinced that the best was yet to come.

By the way, our names mean something. Dhaffer, the ‘Victorious’, was born in 1982 and my parents gave him his name because that was the year the Lebanese resistance was fighting off the Zionist invasion and required a victory to crush the enemy. Then, because my father knew there could be no victory without knowledge and proper planning he named me Malek after the great Algerian intellectual Malek Bennabi. I was born in 1985 and my sister in 1987, when she was named in honour of Sana’a Mehaidli, the resistance fighter who died on occupied Lebanese soil in the first ever female suicide bombing. While most people were naming their children after soap stars or because the names had a nice ring to them, my mother and father were naming us in solidarity with the pressing issues of the times, in particular the decades-long struggle over Palestine. This alone left a deep imprint on us.

So, I entered university in 2005. At that time I was, and perhaps still am, passionate about getting to know people: students from every corner of Tunisia, different cultures and dialects, different, and sometimes clashing, customs, ambitions and desires. I plunged into the scene wholeheartedly and, with nothing to hold me back, soon became a friend to all. I invited many people to the family home in Omrane supérieure and visited their rooms in the Avicenne Student Accommodation. The circle of my friends grew and I soon had a far-flung network of acquaintances that remains largely intact to this day.

The first weeks were a beautiful introduction to a world that was much as I had expected it: diverse and seductive. University meant absolute freedom, the destruction of the old and traditional and a passion for the new. It was there, in its lecture halls and classrooms, that I learned to criticize, to interrogate, to deconstruct, to philosophize, and to ponder questions of existence, the universe and the human condition.

Gradually, my former feelings of vengeance against the regime transformed into a political consciousness. My desire to join the students’ struggle against despotism intensified. I was full of life, burning with enthusiasm, 18 years old. I lived on the songs of Sheikh Imam, Marcel Khalife, an old Palestinian band called The Lovers and Bob Marley, the balladeers of commitment and revolution, but also Charles Aznavour, Edith Piaf and others with whom I travelled to other worlds of love and romance.

With good friends of mine from the Institute, I founded a negotiating committee for the General Union of Tunisian Students and we engaged in mighty confrontations against the regime and its educational policies. My early experiences in the union movement were some of the most wonderful of my life. I gained the love and respect of my peers, but this was not just an honour; it was a burden, too.

The start of the long road

The price was my expulsion from university.

In May 2007 the Institute convened an emergency disciplinary panel that voted to expel me and two of my comrades, Damir and Munji, on charges of ‘defaming the president of the country, incitement against the regime, disseminating false information damaging to national security, distributing leaflets, inflaming citizens against the ruling party and seeking assistance from foreign elements’.

We turned the disciplinary hearing into an open-court trial against the Ministry of Higher Education and the regime itself, and the room where it was held into the cockpit of a struggle that exposed dictatorship.

I was an excellent student and the decision to expel me came as a genuine shock. I was unable to tell my family because I was afraid of how they would react, especially since I was being threatened with a blanket ban from all institutions of higher education, not to mention the possibility of being taken to court in view of ‘the seriousness of the charges against me’.

It was days before I finally told the family what had happened and, as I had feared, the news hit them like a thunderbolt. Now all of us were wracked with nerves, fearful for my future.

On the other hand, when I was by myself I felt enormously happy and proud. My expulsion was like a membership card, an entry permit to the ranks of the struggle heroes. I was 19 now, and hoping to follow in the footsteps of my role models, particularly Mohamed Ali al-Hami (a Tunisian labour unionist and revolutionary of the 1920s), George Habash (founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Che Guevara, and all the martyrs of the Tunisian student movement: Fadil Sasi, Nabil Barakati and others. I believed, with a child’s idealism and perhaps a touch of foolish arrogance, that fate had chosen me to continue with my father’s and forefathers’ struggle against dictatorship; that it was my duty to embrace my destiny, setting aside the world and its pleasures in pursuit of the noble cause for which I would sacrifice myself.

Big claims require big sacrifices.

The truth was that my expulsion was my first real test of my relationship with myself, my family, my comrades, and my romanticized lifestyle. It was the moment I awoke from the intoxicated daze that had possessed me since the stormy start to my life as a student. Simply put, it was the moment of truth. I had grown up in a family that never interfered in my choices and I will never forget what my father said when he heard I had been sent down: ‘I have complete faith in what you do, so you must have faith in what you do.’

It brought my feet back to earth after I had been soaring in the clouds with my eyes tight shut. I realized that the world of unions and politics had many faces and not all of those who moved in it were the honest and honourable freedom lovers I had imagined them to be, but included the unstable, the opportunists, the brokers, the cheats and the liars as well. All this I discovered gradually, over the course of many battles, and as much as it shocked me to have my rosy stereotype of the ‘noble comrade’ shaken so severely, it also left me wiser and calmer. I started listening to what wasn’t being said, reading between the lines and prising out what lay behind the ringing phrases.

I spent the summer of 2007 at sit-ins by the Ministry of Higher Education, the Presidency of Tunis University, the Preparatory Institute and the colleges of the humanities, protesting against our expulsion and asking union-affiliated professors to intervene on behalf of myself and my two comrades. I was acting alone, without any political or media support, even from those comrades supposedly closest to me. I felt I had been abandoned; that I was somehow expendable in the fight for some greater cause. At the time, I vowed that I would continue the struggle my own way: I would leave no stone unturned to expose any union or political activities that betrayed the ethics and traditions of the student movement.

I was successful. In October, 2008, myself, Damir and Munji, enrolled at the April 9 Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, the great academic institution that helped found modern Tunisia and the first university institution to be founded after independence in 1956, with its politically conscious students and academic rigour. This is what attracted me in the first instance: it was one of the strongholds of the struggle. We called it ‘the Vietnam of Tunis University’. It was famous for its public plaza, Red Square, a wide, rectangular expanse of tarmac enclosed by four huge walls, where the major student demonstrations were held, with activists and revolutionaries flocking from all parts of the country to organize mass strikes and boisterous public meetings.

Walking into the April 9 college was a watershed moment in my life. I spent a total of four years there, learning what could not be learnt anywhere else. April 9 is lived, not told; April 9 welcomes you into its awe-inspiring, high-walled square and infuses you with culture and scholarship. But its spirit is what makes it as it is. It is the cries of the massed students, the speeches of union activists, and the manifestos of marginalized politics.

At April 9 I debated and discussed; I warred and skirmished, if I may be excused my self-aggrandizing words. I entered a fiercely partisan Marxist and left a dogmatic atheist. I entered a believer in laws and determinism and left a believer in plurality and knowledge. I was at the forefront of strikes and protests that disturbed the sleep of tyrants. I wrote hundreds of articles and texts, proselytizing, analyzing and criticizing. I remember my first intervention, when I called on people to remember their dignity, ‘in the name of those who raise the hoes and shovels, in the name of those who make scythes from swords’, I became an ambassador for April 9 at the other colleges, starting fronts, drawing up movements, overseeing demonstrations, creating unionists and founding branches for the General Student Union. When I look at myself in the mirror now, I see April 9 written there and I see, etched in my face, expressions of anger, joy, anticipation, pain and ecstasy: all the feelings that swept over me then.

I also owe April 9 and Red Square a debt of gratitude for introducing me to Ezza Darbali. I’m not sure if this is the place to talk about it, not because it’s a private matter but because there is so much to say and I always surprise myself how loquacious I can be when the subject comes up. Memories overwhelm me: the first shoots of love, feelings aflame, the first flirtatious glances. The pen turns it all to poetry.

17 December 2010

I was in the college library when a friend from Sidi Bouzid phoned to let me know that a young man from the city had immolated himself inside the governor’s headquarters in protest against the beating and humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the municipal police. Hundreds of enraged citizens were gathered outside the building in an open sit-in, demanding to be told the truth and paying their respects to the victim.

The news was shocking and painful. Such suicides had been taking place regularly in Tunisia (the most recent had been that of Abdel Salam Trimsh in Monastir on 11 March 2010), the product of poverty, unemployment and a sense of degradation and indignity that reflected the frustration and despair felt by young men throughout Tunisia.

All Saturday long I kept in contact with a friend of mine, a participant in the sit-in and an eyewitness, who kept me up to speed with the latest developments. From him, I learnt that it was turning into a protest against the local authorities, then that a mass protest movement was taking shape, as more and more angry citizens poured into the street.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Greetings to the Dawn: Living through the Bittersweet Revolution (Tunisia)
• 2 Cairo, City in Waiting (Egypt)
• 3 Bayou and Laila (Libya)
• 4 We Are Not Swallows (Algeria)
• 5 The Resistance: Armed with Words (Yemen)
• 6 Coming Down from the Tower (Bahrain)
• 7 Wishful Thinking (Saudi Arabia)
• 8 And the Demonstrations Go On: Diary of an Unfinished Revolution (Syria)