Abstract
The authoritarian regime in Tunisia can be defined as an intensive bio-political regime where disciplinary techniques of surveillance and governmentality are entangled with sovereign logics of exceptionality and decisionism. Authority and power is woven through every aspect of everyday life and to exceptional instances of the power over life and death. Within a bio-political imperative, the body must constantly be managed, governed and controlled. The body is therefore at the same time the strongest medium to enact protest. In this light, we can read the self-sacrifice of the different martyrs during the liberation phase of revolution as a potent symbol of disruption of the expected cooperation of the body within bio-political power that allowed for the appearance of the people in all its complexity and diversity, including the life of the most disenfranchised. Comparing the performances of Fanni Roghman Anni and Danseurs–Citoyens, two different collectives that emerged during the revolution, the performance of self-sacrifice will further be analyzed as a condition for the coming into being of a necro-political space of appearance. Not only the bodies in the street but additional embodied artistic performances during the constitutive phase of the revolution produce extra-discursive effects outside the bio-political logic, that allowed to further engage in fundamental ethical question in the future constitution of new post-revolutionary body politic.
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Notes
- 1.
Hafsi Bedhioufi, “Danse des hommes et transgressions sociales,” Cultures et sociétés (2010), 93–101.
- 2.
Most of the performances of Fanni Raghman Anni are captured on video, uploaded and available on the internet: https://www.youtube.com/user/seif3644/.
- 3.
Most of the performances of Danseurs-Citoyens are captured on video, uploaded and available on the internet https://www.youtube.com/user/bahriben/.
- 4.
Joseph A. Massad, “Love, Fear, and the Arab Spring,” Public Culture, Vol. 26, no. 1, Durham: Duke University, 2014, 128.
- 5.
Nadia Marzouki, “From People to Citizens in Tunisia,” Middle East Research and Information Project, 2011, 259.
- 6.
Frances S. Hasso and Zakia Salime, “Introduction,” eds. F.S. Hasso and Z. Salime, Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, Duke University Press, 2016.
- 7.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vol. 9 (2011).
- 8.
This is a fragment of a letter by Abu al-Qasim Al-Shabbi to his friend. See: Shabbi, The Complete Work, Vol. 2, Tunis: al-Dar al-Tunisiyah lil-Nashr, 1984, 254.
- 9.
During the last decade of Ben Ali’s rule, oppositional forces had regularly recourse to their body as the ultimate weapon of protest against the regime, as countless activists resorted to the method of hunger strike. This wave of enduring hunger strikes not always ended successfully and sometimes even continued until death liberated activists from the prevailing dehumanizing conditions in or outside prison. Not only fatal hunger strikes were common in the period preceding the revolution. Already in 2008, following corrupted recruitment methods by the Gafsa Phosphates Company, inhabitants of the mining center of the Gafsa region massively took the streets during six consecutive months, which resulted in hundreds of imprisonments, dozens of wounded and three dead. Contrary to what is commonly acknowledged, Bouazizi was not even the first fatal self-immolation in the period preceding the Tunisian Revolution. In March 2010, Abdessalem Trimech set himself on fire in front of the building of the general secretary of Monastir after having protested in vain against the repeal of his vending license. The young man was also an itinerant salesman, who was hindered in his work by the municipal administration. While in the hospital, angry locals clashed with the police. Tens of thousands appeared at his funeral that ended in a demonstration of hundreds against the government. Slogans relating to burning political and economic issues were shouted and symbols of authority were attacked by the moving crowd. The protests however only lasted one day. Approximatively a month before Bouazizi, a young man from Metlaoui, Chams Eddine Heni had his turn. After a futile fight with his father over money, for he needed to burn his papers and go to Italy, he kept the honors to himself. Heni was one of the seven young Tunisians who died through self-immolation between Trimech and Bouazizi. Remarkably, already in 2006, Sami Tlili envisioned self-immolation as an ultimate act of resistance, albeit in a fictional way in his short film Sans Plomb (“Unloaded”) captured the general mood of everyday desperation that caught the youth in the 2000s.
- 10.
Mary D. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
- 11.
Amira Mittermaier, “Death and Martyrdom in the Arab Uprisings: An Introduction,” Ethnos, Vol. 80, no. 5 (2015), 583–604.
- 12.
Joel Rozen, “Civics Lesson: Ambivalence, Contestation, and Curricular Change in Tunisia,” Ethnos, Vol. 80, no. 5 (2015), 605–629.
- 13.
Banu Bargu, “Why Did Bouazizi Burn Himself? The Politics of Fate and Fatal Politics,” Constellations, Vol. 23 (2016), 27–36; See also: Jacob Uzell, “Biopolitics of the Self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi,” e-International Relations, Vol. 7 (Nov. 2012), www.e-ir.info/2012/11/07/biopolitics-of-the-self-immolation-of-mohamed-bouazizi.
- 14.
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, New York: Routledge, 2002.
- 15.
Tarik Sabry, “On Historicism, the Aporia of Time and the Arab Revolutions,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 5 (2012), 80–85.
- 16.
Rafika Zahrouni, “The Tunisian Revolution and the Dialectics of Theatre and Reality,” Theater Research International, Vol. 38 (2013), 148–157.
- 17.
Charles Tripp, “Performing the Public: Theatres of Power in the Middle East,” Constellations, Vol. 20, no. 2 (2013), 203–216.
- 18.
Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.”
- 19.
Miriyam Aouragh, “Framing the Internet in the Arab Revolutions: Myth Meets Modernity,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 52, no. 1 (2012), 148–156.
- 20.
Marwan Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World, Harvard University Press, 2016.
- 21.
Marwan Kraidy, “The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 5 (2012), 43.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Béatrice Hibou, La force de l’obéissance: Économie politique de la répression en Tunisie, Paris: La Découverte, 2006. See also: Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo; Illan Wall, “A Different Constituent Power: Agamben & Tunisia,” New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, Abingdon: Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2012; Hanna Samir Kassab, “The Power of Emotion: Examining the Self-Immolationof Mohamad Bouazizi, the Arab Revolution and International Politics,” Perspectivas Internacionales, Vol. 8, no.1 (2013), 9–39.
- 24.
Tripp, “Performing the Public: Theatres of power in the Middle East.”
- 25.
Marwan Kraidy, “The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Vol. 5 (2012), 43.
- 26.
Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta, “Salafist Movement and Sheikh-ism in the Tunisian Democratic Transition,” Middle East Law and Governance, Vol. 5 (2013), 1–23.
- 27.
Achile Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, Vol. 15, no. 1, Durham: Duke University, 2003.
- 28.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Grove Press, 1952 [2008], 2.
- 29.
Merone and Cavatorta, “Salafist Movement and Sheikh-ism in the Tunisian Democratic Transition”.
- 30.
Sarah Ahmed, “Embodying Strangers,” Body Matters, eds. A. Horner and A. Kearne, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, 55.
- 31.
Hasso and Salime, Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, 12–15.
- 32.
Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.”
- 33.
Michael Marcusa, “Potholes in the Road to Revolution,” Middle East Research and Information Project, 2014, 19.
- 34.
Hourya Bentouhami, “L’emprise du corps: Fanon à l’aune de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty,” Cahiers Philosophiques, Vol. 3 (2014), 34–46.
- 35.
Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre in: F. Fanon, Œuvres, Paris, La Découverte, 2011.
- 36.
Bentouhami, “L’emprise du corps: Fanon à l’aune de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty.”
- 37.
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, New York: Grove Press, 1967, 65.
- 38.
Hibou, La force de l’obéissance: Économie politique de la répression en Tunisie.
- 39.
Illan Wall, “A Different Constituent Power: Agamben & Tunisia,” New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, Abingdon: Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2012.
- 40.
Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21.
- 41.
Judith Butler, “Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 27, no.1 (2006), 3–24.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
- 44.
Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 128.
- 45.
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 671.
- 46.
Butler, “Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon.”
- 47.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An introduction, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
- 48.
Hibou, La force de l’obéissance: Économie politique de la répression en Tunisie.
- 49.
Stuart J. Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life,” Polygraph, Vol. 18 (2006), 191–215.
- 50.
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre.
- 51.
Banon Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons, Columbia University Press, 2014, 85.
- 52.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 1993.
- 53.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.”
- 56.
Mbembe, Necropolitics, 38.
- 57.
Butler, “Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon,” 13–17.
- 58.
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 625.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life.”
- 61.
Butler, “Violence, Non-Violence: Sartre on Fanon,” 16–19.
- 62.
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre.
- 63.
Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée, Paris: La Découverte, 2010, 19 (my translation).
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Tripp, “Performing the Public: Theaters of Power in the Middle East.”
- 66.
Chokri BelaĂŻd was a charismatic and eloquent lawyer and leftist opposition leader under the Ben Ali regime and even more so during the revolution. On February 6, 2013, however, he was fatally shot outside his house in El Menzah, Tunis. His funeral gained national proportions. It was held on February 8 at the Jellaz cemetery and was attended by more than a million people, provoking clashes between police and protesters. This political murder provoked the most severe political crisis since the start of the revolution.
- 67.
Besma Khalfaoui, “Op-ed,” Tribune de Genève (Mar. 1, 2013).
- 68.
The video “Feel it do it” was later put offline, but integrated in the edited version “We are just fucking angry! A.C.A.B.” This last video has unfortunately also been put offline.
- 69.
In the period following Chokri Belaïd’s assassination, Tunisia witnessed an escalation of deadly fights between its military and Jihadi cells (Okba ibn Nafaâ, the al-Qaida cell in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Ansar al-Sharia) hiding on Mount Chaambi in Kasserine near the Tunisia–Algeria border and in Jebel Jelloud in the governorate of Ben Arous.
- 70.
Jmal Siala, M. 2014, Non à la division: la photographie citoyenne, Tunis: Sa’al Editions.
- 71.
Following this symbolic incident, the Interior Ministry banned all demonstrations on the Bourguiba Avenue. During the following national day of the martyrs, people nevertheless tried to occupy the Avenue, but clashes erupted with the police. In the following period, the police found inventive ways to prevent people to gather on the stairs of the Municipal Theater, they for instance occupied it themselves or sometimes allegedly covered the stairs with oil. Finally, before the ban was repealed, a Facebook event gathered hundreds of youngsters for a read-in on the Avenue.
- 72.
After having taken refuge in the theater, they called the police. Nevertheless, the police did not intervene, but arrested the artists. The attackers followed them to the police station to file in a complaint. They denounced the show as indecent as the actors were partially naked. In the official complaint filed at the police station, the attackers do not mention any religious motivations. Finally, the artists and not the attackers had to appear in front of the public prosecutor. They were expected to be charged with indecent behavior/public indecency and potential violation of public morals. The collective called on social media for a rally in front of the court of El Kef to defend their (artistic) freedom. Leila Toubel, artistic director of theater El Hamra, formed, together with Azedine Ganoune (El Hamra), Fadel Jaibi (Familia), Raje Benhammar (Mad’art), members of Tahadi (defiance), the El Massar party, and others, a support committee to demand a fair trial and to defend freedom of expression. The general prosecutor questioned the actors charged with “public indecency,” a charge that can potentially carry a sentence of up to six months in prison. They were accused of throwing bags of dirt and of being naked in only pilgrim’s clothes, which the locals saw as a provocation. The collective denied and countered the accusation. After further police investigation, the tribunal of El Kef finally dismissed the actors. While leaving the court, the accused members of the collective were welcomed by dozens of people chanting the national anthem and repeating their demands with the slogan “El Fan, Horyya, Karama Watania” (Art, Freedom and Dignity for the nation).
- 73.
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, 604.
- 74.
Ibid., 603.
- 75.
Ibid., 616–617.
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Ben Yakoub, J. (2018). Performing Self-sacrifice, Despite Everything or Despite Oneself? Embodying a Necropolitical Space of Appearance in the Tunisian Revolution. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_14
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