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Overview
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s By Fire, the first fictional account published on the Arab Spring, reimagines the true-life self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, an event that has been credited with setting off the Tunisian revolt. The novella depicts the days leading up to Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Ben Jelloun’s deliberate ambiguity about the location of the story, set in an unnamed Islamic country, allows the reader to imagine the experiences and frustrations of other young men who have endured physical violence and persecution in places beyond Tunisia. The tale begins and ends in fire, and the imagery of burning frames the political accounts in The Spark, Ben Jelloun’s nonfiction writings on the Tunisian events that provide insight into the despotic regimes that drove Bouazizi to such despair. Rita S. Nezami’s elegant translations and critical introduction provide the reader with multiple strategies for approaching these potent texts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810133396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
RITA S. NEZAMI teaches in the Writing and Rhetoric Program at SUNY–Stony Brook, where she focuses on global issues, visual rhetoric, the personal essay, and postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literatures.
Read an Excerpt
By Fire
Writings on the Arab Spring
By Tahar Ben Jelloun, Rita S. Nezami
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3339-6
CHAPTER 1
The Spark
Tunisia
December 2010–January 2011
The Tunisian national anthem by poet Aboul Qacem Echebbi ends with these four lines:
When the people will to live,
Destiny must surely respond.
Oppression shall then vanish.
Fetters are certain to break.
The demonstrators sang this verse, as had their grandparents, during the fight for independence in 1956.
Ben Ali's regime could be compared to a colonial occupation; that is to say, illegitimate and cruel. He spent more than twenty years assembling networks and structures that rendered the country at his mercy. Using the pretext of protecting the country from the Islamist peril, he allowed himself anything that pleased him, all under the watchful and encouraging eyes of European nations.
Revolutions and resistance often inspire a surge of creativity in poets. After Tunisia embraced new ways of living and working, Egypt followed with a revolt that subverted the idea that the Arab region is cursed and doomed to dictatorship and regression. Some writers devoted their lives to denouncing this curse. Always visionaries, poets foresee what absolutely must change. Dictators would do well to read the poets, whom, in general, they hate. A day always arrives when people's resistance itself becomes a kind of poem. We saw it in the streets of Tunisia and then in Egypt.
Today, we're still talking about the collapse of Berlin's immense wall. Other walls, other taboos, and other oppressions continue crumbling at this moment. Poets were among the first to see what might happen: the Russian Vladimir Mayakovski, the Turk Nazim Hikmet, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, the Iraqi Shakir al-Sayyab, the Egyptian Ahmed Chawki — each in his own way raised his voice during the last century to reveal the intolerable and the vital need for freedom and justice. Yet, no authoritarian regime took seriously what a poet or an artist had to say about society.
Everybody knew what the police were doing in Arab countries; the international media often spoke about the repression whose victims were the common people, the destitute, the forgotten, and all those who suffered from injustice but couldn't speak for or defend themselves. Many journalists or exiled militants wrote books that denounced dictators, yet these dictators were "acceptable" for Western leaders, who were too tolerant. But isolated voices can never bring down dictators; it took many incidents, clashes with the police, glaring injustices, and intolerable acts for the spark to finally ignite.
This is how people live in developing countries. This is how they die in countries where, in the eyes of the West, stability and security are guaranteed, although the people are denied their freedom and rights.
Everyone supported Ben Ali's takeover in the late 1980s. They even called it a "medical coup d'état." On a beautiful morning on November 7, 1987, the person whom Habib Bourguiba had named minister of interior, and then prime minister, entered the palace and forced the sick old man out of his bed and informed him that he was no longer the president. The day before, Ben Ali had assembled seven doctors at the Ministry of Interior and obliged them to sign a certificate attesting to "Bourguiba's incapacity to govern." It is said that one of the doctors who didn't want to sign, as he hadn't seen Bourguiba for ten years, was ordered by Ben Ali: "Sign. You don't have a choice." For some time, Ben Ali had placed his own henchmen in the ministries. He got rid of a great man and shamelessly took his place. Bourguiba, of course, could have decided to leave power on his own if his health condition didn't allow him to govern anymore. But once one has tasted power, one acts as though infected by a virus. Only Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal, left office voluntarily, to dedicate his time to writing, poetry, and reading. To say the least, not all heads of nations are poets — far from it!
Let's now remember Bourguiba's audacity and sense of modernity. Above all, he negotiated with France for his country's independence. Straightaway, he led Tunisia on a path to modernity that was rare in the Arab world at that time. He changed the personal status code — Tunisia was the first, and, for a long time, the only Muslim and Arab nation to recognize women's rights: polygamy was forbidden, divorce was authorized, and abortion legalized (long before France!). It was revolutionary. Bourguiba was the only leader to publicly advocate secularism: on a day during Ramadan in March 1964, he gave a live television presentation during which he drank a glass of orange juice in front of amazed viewers. He justified his gesture by invoking economic reasons. He said he couldn't tolerate the country's economy going to sleep for an entire month, because by fasting, workers have neither the strength nor the energy to do their work well. During the decades in which Bourguiba ruled, Tunisians were free to fast or not to fast. Cafés and restaurants remained open. People could eat in peace. No one reproached or bothered those who fasted due to religious convictions.
Bourguiba gave a visionary speech on March 3, 1965, in Jericho, but no one could accept it at that time. He advised Arabs to "normalize their relationship with the state of Israel," claiming "the politics of everything or nothing brought the Palestinians nothing but defeat." He antagonized all the Arab heads of state, especially Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he criticized for his fanatical nationalism. The people in Arab countries protested in the streets against the capitulation of a "traitor to the sacred cause of Palestine." This didn't dissuade Bourguiba from demanding that the United Nations "create a federation among the Arab states in the region and Israel."
Two years later, on June 5, 1967, Israel launched a sudden war against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Naqba, meaning catastrophe, is the Arabic name they gave to their defeat. Today, the Palestinians might dream of getting back their territory from before June 1967 ... but Israel will never give them even a square meter.
Bourguiba was secular, educated, and a visionary man. His authoritative temperament damaged his image. He was, despite his reforms, an unjust president, particularly to those who democratically opposed his politics. But was it a sufficient reason for Ben Ali, a military man married to a hairdresser, to dispose of him like a decaying body awaiting death?
Ben Ali didn't make radical changes when he first took power. He continued Bourguiba's reforms, particularly in the field of education. He consulted Mohamed Charfi, a human rights activist, and put him in charge of the Ministry of National Education with the aim to cleanse textbooks of Islamist and fanatical ideology. With a team of about fifty professors, Mohamed Charfi did remarkable work. He rewrote all the textbooks in the spirit of the Enlightenment and open-mindedness. Ben Ali encouraged his work. As soon as the work was completed, though, Mohamed Charfi resigned and disassociated himself from the Ben Ali government.
The fight against Islamic fundamentalists rapidly became one of Ben Ali's obsessions; it turned into a witch hunt, involving arbitrary arrests and torture at police stations in the worst possible conditions imaginable. Under the pretext of the Islamist threat, Ben Ali became more and more dictatorial, instilling fear in the country, forbidding the foreign press, hunting down opponents, even those who had nothing to do with Islamism. The country's economic growth and its appearance to the West as a fortress of stability — even at the cost of repression — rapidly framed Ben Ali as a reassuring "rampart against Islamism." That's how, during three decades, Ben Ali was able to subject his country, without any opposition, to a dictatorship that strictly denied Tunisians any rights. Tunisia became his private affair. His family, in the strict and broad senses, profited from the country excessively and shamelessly. Paris officials released one of Ben Ali's brothers, caught red-handed trafficking drugs in France; he calmly returned to his golden villa in Tunis. At the same moment, activists were getting arrested. Graduates, young and jobless, roamed the streets rather than swell the ranks of illegal immigrants.
Tunisia and its president, who got himself reelected every five years with up to 90 percent of the vote, always enjoyed good ratings from Western embassies. During his official visits to Europe, Ben Ali was applauded and celebrated, and his country was recognized as an optimistic example of "making progress toward democracy." It was beyond belief. When he fled as a thief from Tunisia (because he was a thief), TV channels rebroadcast talks by Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Silvio Berlusconi, and others. It was frightening to hear what these people said in front of Ben Ali, and baffling when they were at a loss for words when the thug ran away. This is called "realpolitik."
Thanks to Tunisia's positive image, the country gradually became a popular tourist destination. This helped boost the country's economy and employment. Tourists couldn't see any of the regime's scandalous aspects; it took an informed journalist or an attentive writer to see these traits. I first experienced them in 2005. I was invited to give a talk to university and high school students at the invitation of the French Cultural Center of Tunisia. Before long, I noticed that civilian-clothed police officers were continuously following me. The students asked strictly literary questions, but as soon as the talk was over, they came to see me and spoke in whispers. I hated this trip and the leaden atmosphere. Journalists who dared denounce this hyper–police state were simply imprisoned. The best known among them, Taoufik Ben Brik, spent six months in prison during 2009 and 2010 after a trial built totally on lies. The regime found intolerable his outspokenness and criticism against the regime, especially regarding torture and disappearance of opponents.
The bombing of the synagogue in Djerba on April 11, 2002, that left twenty-one dead made the most vigilant observers realize that even though Ben Ali managed to keep the Islamists at bay in his country, his police didn't succeed in stopping al-Qaida from committing bloody acts on his land. The suicide bomber came from an immigrant family in France and had connections with a German who had converted to Islam ...
The Spark
I had never heard about the small town of Sidi Bouzid. Yet, it's there that it all started. Even though the incident was common and banal, this time it ended by triggering the irrevocable.
There was once a young man of twenty-eight, who had degrees but no job. He lived with his mother, brothers, and sisters. To make a little money, he got himself a fruit stand, a kind of cart on which vendors put seasonal fruit and vegetables to sell. Street vendors. We see them everywhere in Maghrebi cities. Often, cars stop or double park in front of them to buy last-minute fruit as dessert for lunch. These vendors can't afford to have a store. They are poor and live from day to day. Sometimes their carts get in the way of the traffic, but everyone makes do. And, if a vendor "buys" the neighborhood police officer's favor, he is left in peace and can sell his produce without being harassed. At times though, the same police officer, eager to demonstrate his strictness to his supervisor, is excessively zealous and forces the vendor to sell his produce elsewhere. Some spots are better located than others — those with more traffic are obviously better for selling. For these spots, one has to "pay." Slipping one or two banknotes to a police officer is indispensable. The relationship between the police and vendors is one of the dominating and dominated, not unlike the small neighborhood mafias in Italy. You want to work? Well, you have to pay. If the vendor refuses, his cart is knocked over or confiscated for causing "trouble in the public thoroughfare."
The amount of money a street vendor makes is not huge. It's hardly enough to feed a small family. No one has ever seen a fruit and vegetable street vendor make a fortune. Mohamed Bouazizi was one of these people who toil every day to try to live in dignity. He refused to beg or accept the mafia compromises, to steal or do anything that is illegal. He could see very well how Ben Ali and his large family, his own and his wife's, took advantage of the country shamelessly. Like all Tunisians, Mohamed knew about the lawlessness of Ben Ali's in-laws, brothers, brothers-in-law, cousins, and friends, and how this pack's members didn't bother hiding while they made millions. All the big businesses, all big companies, and all foreign investments had to go through the "Ben Ali–Trabelsi law." Everyone knew about this system; they talked about it, and then said, "We'll close our eyes to it because Tunisia is finished with Islamists." The well-off, middle-class people of Tunis, La Marsa, Sidi Bou-Saïd, and Hammamet boasted of living in a country "with perfect security," "without robberies or attacks in the streets, where the police do their job really well." People who collaborated with the regime enjoyed remarkable comfort and well-being. They were grateful to Ben Ali, this former military man, who knew so well how to capitalize on his country's wealth. French and Italian politicians often viewed Tunisia as exemplary in the Arab-Muslim world. The Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi took refuge in London. No one heard about him or his Ennahda movement anymore. Islamism was buried.
Mohamed Bouazizi had to stop his studies because his father died. Mohamed's father was a farmworker. Mohamed has to take care of his entire family of seven. He buys a cart to sell fruit and vegetables in the street. However, he doesn't have authorization from the police. The police harass him, but he refuses to give in to corruption. In any case, he doesn't have the means. The police don't leave him alone. As soon as they see him, they go after him, threatening to confiscate his cart and weighing scale. On this morning of December 17, 2010, he comes across a group of particularly mean police officers who confiscate his cart. One of the officers is a woman; she slaps him, and another spits on him. Supreme humiliation. He tries to get his cart back, explaining that he has seven people to feed and that he hasn't done anything wrong. ... The police officers' aggressiveness doubles in ferocity. Mohamed's anger rises, and he decides to talk to someone in the town hall; no one wants to listen to him. He then goes to the governorate. ... At that moment, no one knew that this humiliation would lead to the spark of a revolt with immeasurable consequences ...
Some spend their lives swallowing affronts, rationalizing and accepting their fates; they keep telling themselves that light will return one day even though life is nothing but an accumulation of disasters. They hope, they pray, they look elsewhere: the beauty of trees, the flight of a bird, the flutter of a butterfly, the smile on a child's face, and they feel a sudden burst of confidence in humanity; they tell themselves things will get better, that it's just a bad moment, that God is merciful and will open doors. But on that day, Mohamed felt he was banging his head against a concrete wall. He saw no way out of his fate. He couldn't see any compassion in the eyes of passersby. Not a single hand reached out, not a word of encouragement, no justice. Mohamed is a citizen of the world who has reached the end of his patience. Yet, he could have thought about the character of Ayoub — about Job in the Koran — and the patience he had to demonstrate to endure all God had inflicted on him. But Mohamed didn't think about him. Job is far away. Everyone is far away. There's no one around him. He can't even feel the presence of his mother or his sister, Leïla, whom he loves very much. He feels isolated, abandoned. God has abandoned him. Now he's sure about that. On this cold December morning, he looks at the sky. Nobody gives him the slightest sign. Absolute solitude deepened by a cruel sense of unbearable injustice. The slap and then the spitting. One doesn't do this, not even to a dog. He's been stripped of his humanity much as a woman wipes makeup from her face. His face is no longer visible, his eyes can no longer see, and his self-esteem is gone. His dignity has been crushed beneath police boots. He tells himself, "It's crazy how the poor are mean to each other, to those who are even poorer." Because these police officers are miserable, they turn to corruption; they become servile and behave like slaves when the governor calls them to bring a cup of coffee or when they are told to paint his villa. They obey; they bend over to serve the authority. They lower their heads and eyes to serve those who have given them a job. Everyone knows that. Being indebted is a modern form of slavery. So, they do more than their duty. They take initiatives and see themselves as small chiefs, but chiefs anyway. They give orders with the same arrogance, the same violence that their supervisors use on them. A poor street vendor becomes an ideal victim. They can despise him because they have power over him; they can confiscate his cart, and if he's not happy, let him die. "Ah! Let him croak!" These, apparently, were the words spoken by Ben Ali when he found out the street vendor had self-immolated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from By Fire by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Rita S. Nezami. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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