http://www.freewordonline.com/content/2012/09/tunisias-graphic-revolution/ *Tunisia’s Graphic Revolution* The graphic novel Sidi Bouzid Kids attempts to articulate the realities and concerns of the Tunisian youth who mobilised in last year’s revolution. But while the graphic novel is warmly received in Tunisia, the real town of Sidi Bouzid is tense with post-revolutionary skirmishes. Tunisia’s recent history is continually re-drawing itself in art – from graphic novels to rap – but the lines of free speech are also being re-drawn, and not always in artists’ favour. “Youth is finally moving. It’s beautiful,” says Fouad in Sidi Bouzid Kids to his friend Mohamed, who is dying after setting himself on fire in December 2010. This optimism in a moment of personal agony hints at the unreal times Fouad and his friends are living in, and the graphic novel Sidi Bouzid Kids draws us into their world: their frustrations at the corrupt, decaying regime of Ben Ali, the normal, sane, humanness of their cry for ‘karama’ (‘dignity’) in the face of its authoritarianism, and the excitement and tensions of the revolutionary fevour that is unleashed as Mohamed sets himself on fire. Eric Borg worked with Alex Talamba to produce Sidi Bouzid Kids as the dust was still settling on what became known as the Jasmine Revolution – although whether the dust has settled yet in the real town of Sidi Bouzid is debatable. Just last month over a thousand demonstrators gathered in the worn-down town to protest the detention of a young activist by the new Ennahda-dominated government. Mohamed in Sidi Bouzid Kids is drawn from the now-famous Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight outside the local municipal office to protest his humiliation at the hands of the clawing bureaucratic tyranny of Ben Ali’s regime, triggering protests that culminated in revolution. But while Sidi Bouzid Kids sought to articulate the desperation and desires of the Tunisian revolutionary youth, a year after the revolution, the screening of a film based on another bande dessinee –French-Iranian Marjane Satrapi’s celebrated 2007 film Persepolis – has highlighted the continued tensions in the country. After the television station Nessma broadcast Persepolis in October 2011, the station was stormed by Islamists – who some progressives and secularists fear are gaining a foothold in the wake of revolution – and the television station was fined for ‘insulting sacred values’. At the trial, the director of Nessma reportedly described the situation as “the trial of ten million Tunisians who dreamed of having a democratic country.” With the Tunisian constitution still far from completed, how Tunisia writes this revolutionary period into its history – which stories it tells itself, and how much space it allows for stories and art to speak – will echo around the region, just as Mohamed Bouzizi’s self-immolation sparked the cataclysmic worldwide events of 2011. What are Tunisia’s stories now, and will the new gathering forces allow them to be told? Tunisia in literature has often been a series of conversations that speak little to one another, with the country as a terrain for the colonial literary imagination. Reeling from the French public’s reception of Madame Bovary, Flaubert turned to ancient Carthage – the ruins of which still coexist with revolutionary graffiti in modern-day Tunis – for his work Salammbô, a novel set just after the end of the first Punic War, which may have spoken less to Tunisians than to contemporary European fashion, its subject matter fuelling the sensibilities of Art Nouveau. It was a honeymoon in Tunis that, in recovering from tuberculosis, Michel in André Gide’s The Immoralist is fundamentally changed, desiring now to peel away conventions to find “the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there.” But literature that speaks – in different ways – to forms of Tunisia itself, bubbles up in, for instance, the writings of French-language polymath Abdelwahab Meddeb, whose non-fiction Printemps de Tunis (Tunis Spring) was one of the first books to attempt a first draft of what was, in 2011, being referred to as the ‘Jasmine Revolution’. Similarly, Hassouna Mosbahi’s A Tunisian Tale, published in English translation in 2011 after its initial publication in Arabic in 2008, evokes the chaotic, gossipy, violent and tender worlds of the Tunisian slums from which revolution was born. The dynamics of bandes dessinées are a little more egalitarian than French nineteenth century literature – the graphic art form popular in France, Belgium and parts of North Africa has lent itself to voicing the realities of contemporary Tunisia. Sidi Bouzid Kids, though written and illustrated by French and Romanian artists, seems to have found itself in tune with post-revolutionary tastes, advertised in bookshops and referenced in the media. In 2012, though, spoken word poetry performances similarly seem one of the prime mediums through which new realities are expressed and reborn. Rap/ hip hop has often been turned to, after the Arab Spring, to find how the epochal-shift on Arab youth has expressed itself in art, but in Tunisia it bubbles up equally in poems, bandes dessinées and street art. In the wake of revolution, Tunisia’s art scene seems, to many, to be reborn – the high-profile exhibitions of Tunisian art in both Tunisia and France in the last year speak to the idea that spaces are opening up to explore identity, history, and multiplicity so often trodden-down, like daily dignity, under the Ben Ali regime. But how does this sit with the fact that, since the revolution, artists have been detained for “disturbing public order”? How does the freedom from authoritarianism hard-won against the Ben Ali regime in 2011 segue into the events, last month, in which Salafists attacked cultural events they deemed ‘un-Islamic’? Salafist extremists are not particularly renowned for their developed sense of irony. But there was something a little funny-sad, if not straight out funny, at how they attempted to shut down a screening of Persepolis – a film which, famously, tells the story of an Iranian girl’s initial excitement with a new, revolutionary world of multiplicity and justice, only to see it corroded cruelly, encroachment by encroachment, by Islamic extremists. There’s a similar duality to Sidi Bouzid, as symbol and reality. Sidi Bouzid Kids depicts the potency of the ideas, desires and demands that came together in revolutionary protests in 2011. One year on, the real town of Sidi Bouzid is tangled in strikes, demonstrations and – in part – resistance to the now-ruling Ennahda party. Like Persepolis and the attempts to shut down the Persepolis screening in Tunisia, the Sidi Bouzid Kids is also a loaded document, a snapshot of an unfinished story, as the demands of the ‘kids’ continue to manifest. André Gide and Flaubert appropriated Tunisia as static backdrop, but in their works the land was also the site of transformation, both for their characters and for their writing’s tone and style. And in this transformative time for the country, there are surely many stories yet to come – the question is whether the space can be carved out in which all are given a voice. Heather McRobie is a writer and journalist. Her non-fiction book on literary freedom will be published later this year and she is completing her second novel. As a journalist she has reported from Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia, Bosnia, Croatia and Germany for publications such as the Guardian, the New Statesman and openDemocracy. She is also completing a PhD on transitional justice in the Arab Spring and works as a contributing editor and gender columnist for openDemocracy's gender and equality section, 50.50. Follow her on Twitter @heathermcrobie