By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring: Essential Backstory

By Fire has its roots in mid-1950s Tunisian politics. Considering how the autonomous Tunisia was born reveals a lot about how Mohamed Bouazizi reached his soul-wrenching impasse in a small Tunisian town, Sidi Bouzid, more than a half century later. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali came to power in Tunisia because electoral institutions never found footing as the weary French colonial rulers moved toward handing power over to the Tunisians. In 1957, for the first time the people elected a constituent assembly, which declared Habib Bourguiba as president. Bourguiba then ruled — and was even granted the title of president-for-life by a constitutional amendment in 1975—until Ben Ali ousted him in 1987. Bourguiba had long been at the forefront of the Tunisian independence movement and spent years in French prisons for his beliefs. Leader of the Neo-Destour Party, Bourguiba found widespread support among the people, but he was no democrat, and many called him a dictator once he came to power. However, he was committed to a secular state and went so far as to criticize what he regarded as the negative effects of Ramadan on the Tunisian economy. To the dismay of other Arab leaders, he maintained good relations with the West and did not mince words about his East-West orientation: “Basically and profoundly, we are with the West,” he said in 1957 as Tunisia was coming together as an independent state. Perhaps this was true in terms of trade and secularism, but it was not in terms of political power, and it was precisely this kind of thinking about how and where power should reside that set the stage for Tunisia’s future police-state (“Tunisia: Neighbor’s Duty” 1957). Bourguiba esteemed Western values while, at the same time, thinking that such values, especially democracy, were not appropriate for Tunisia. “The state and its existence are essential before everything else,” he said in 1958. “All this preoccupation with liberty is not serious” (“Tunisia: No Time for Democracy” 1958).

This rhetoric betrayed the strength of authoritarianism that would come to dominate Tunisian life and eventually catch people like Bouazizi in its maw. Bourguiba loathed colonialism, but he was convinced that democracy should not be its successor. In the September 29, 1958, issue of Time magazine, Bourguiba spelled out his thinking about the relationship between political liberty and nation-building: “At the moment of a revolution there is no question of setting up a democracy like that in America. If they accuse me of dictatorship, I accept. I am creating a nation. Liberty must be suppressed until the end of the war in Algeria — until the nation becomes homogeneous” (“Tunisia: No Time for Democracy” 1958).

The combination of dictatorships and the absence of the rule of law ended badly. When the French left, there was a vacuum that the Neo-Destour Party and Bourguiba’s authoritarianism filled. Thirty years later, when Bourguiba grew old and feeble, there was, again, a vacuum, and Ben Ali, Bourguiba’s prime minister, was more than ready to fill it. In 1987, claiming Bourguiba was too ill and elderly to run the country, Ben Ali removed the president from power and named himself his successor.

In her comparative work on postcolonial North African political systems, Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics, Susan Waltz describes the disappointment of those who hoped the region would include reforms that vested political power in the people. Instead, the postcolonial state maintained control by defaulting to repression and civil-rights abuses (Waltz 1995). Glacier-size forces drive the fortunes of the anonymous masses, and it is Bourguiba’s legacy that made possible his succession by a man preoccupied with power, control, and personal wealth, and which, many years later, cost Mohamed Bouazizi his ability to support his family without selling out.

For twenty-three years, the Ben Ali regime stayed in power by clamping down on opposition, controlling the media, and liberally detaining and torturing citizens it suspected of being regime opponents. Omar Mestiri, secretary-general for the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia, said, “Torture occurs in the very rooms where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is hanging on the wall. Any tortured person can attest to that” (“Tunisia Country Profile” 2007). The people on the street knew the judiciary was rigged and that regulations crafted by Ben Ali funneled vast wealth to his clan. Especially infuriated were the educated unemployed who had played by the rules, gone to school, studied diligently, and now could not feed their families. In January 2011, less than a month after Bouazizi’s death, the BBC reported that this huge bloc of talented and well-educated but unemployed young people was overcome by frustration with lack of freedoms, the excesses of the ruling class, and anger at police brutality. “It’s all come together,” the BBC wrote, “to spark an unstoppable wave of public anger” (“Q&A: Tunisia Crisis” 2011).

Some familiarity with what started the Arab Spring may enrich readers’ experience of Ben Jelloun’s fiction and nonfiction. A reliable narrative of what exactly happened in Sidi Bouzid, before Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze in December 2010, remains elusive, but the main features are clear. A fruit and vegetable seller, Bouazizi was exasperated by his trouble with the municipal government, which looked the other way when police harassed street sellers, demanded they pay bribes, and whimsically imposed fines for missing permits, even if permits were not required. “Mohamed was in trouble because agents from the council were asking for bribes every time he was buying and selling his vegetables,” said his sister Samia (“Memories of a Tunisian Martyr” 2011). The police and inspectors routinely roughed up street vendors and brazenly helped themselves to the men’s wares. Bouazizi was the sole supporter of his widowed mother and siblings, and the local culture of petty bribery and harassment stifled his ability to feed his family.

December 17, 2010, turned lethal when Bouazizi got into a row with municipal inspector Fedia Hamdi, who allegedly slapped and spat on him while her colleagues beat him. Although this incident of a woman culturally emasculating an Arab man is central to the popular narrative of “Bouazizi as martyr,” readers should be aware that Hamdi denied using physical violence, that the Bouazizi family dropped charges against her, and that she was exonerated after the revolution (“Tunisia Revolt” 2011). The police claimed they confiscated his fruit cart and scales because Bouazizi lacked a vendor’s permit and was selling from what may have been a restricted area near government buildings. Hamdi stated at the trial that Bouazizi subsequently went into a rage. Sources agree that, publicly humiliated, Bouazizi first made his way to the municipal building, where authorities refused to return his fruit cart, and, instead, beat him. The governor’s office staff further ignored his demand to appeal his case. Then, desperate and perhaps irrational, Bouazizi, standing at the governor’s high gate, in the midst of traffic, cried out, “How do you expect me to make a living?” (Simon 2011). Bouazizi then doused himself with fuel and self-immolated in public.

The spectacle of Bouazizi’s public self-immolation is widely regarded as having ignited the first revolts in Tunisia. Yet, his was not a cry to bring down the twenty-three-year-old regime of Ben Ali, a narrative protestors quickly took up. “Ah, he was protesting the oppressive and morally corroded state!” cried people who leveraged Mohamed’s suicide for political ends by imposing on him the martyr’s role rather than considering that he may have simply been a man at the end of his rope. His was probably the cry of a man left with no good choices about making a living in the barren and dusty outpost of Sidi Bouzid, a town of only thirty-six thousand people near the center of Tunisia. Sidi Bouzid’s poor live in boxlike structures that can scarcely be called houses. It was with the bureaucracy and corruption of this obscure town that Bouazizi had problems. He could not endure the daily struggle and pressure to feed his family and remain beholden to the local government’s petty tyrannies. In this, the municipal corruption that drove Bouazizi to destroy himself in a fit of long-repressed fury reflected the ethically fetid national government of Ben Ali. Sidi Bouzid is real; it is on the map; it is where Bouazizi killed himself. But, as Ben Jelloun writes fiction, not history, he asks that we don’t enforce Sidi Bouzid as the setting of By Fire. He leaves it for readers to think through the relationship between the historical and the literary, between the real and the imagined place in By Fire.

Ben Jelloun’s By Fire asks that we not conflate Sidi Bouzid or Mohamed Bouazizi with the setting of his fiction. The work does not pretend to be a literary reading of what happened to Bouazizi that December day. Instead, Ben Jelloun lets the story float in a Middle Eastern — like space. He never names the town, the country, its president, its currency, or anything that locks the narrative into particulars. Further, Mohamed Bouazizi’s surname never appears in By Fire—he remains, simply, “Mohamed.” (The actual date of Bouazizi’s death is an exception that surfaces near the end of the novella.) Despite the historical material’s importance, the story is freestanding: in many ways, it can be read without knowing any more than what is on the page. Readers can decide whether they experience the story differently if and when the historical record informs their reading. By allowing Ben Jelloun to take us into the world of By Fire’s Mohamed, we make the same agreement we make with any artist: we consent to be led into a sphere of his creation wherein we can see with greater subtlety and sensitivity the life and death of a poor street vendor.

The story initially appears to be a simple literary retelling of what happened in a small town in Tunisia during a couple of months in 2010 and 2011. However, that reading, though understandable, is mistaken. By Fire stands alone as a short work of literature; it is art. The protagonist in By Fire is not necessarily the Mohamed Bouazizi of history. Ben Jelloun’s protagonist is not contingent on the historical. The historical figure’s doubling makes no difference to the vitality and originality of the story as art.

Literature’s and history’s ends are different. Ben Jelloun wrote a story, so, given that the historical record and the story’s plot track each other, the question becomes, Why is the story necessary? Perhaps Ben Jelloun hoped to accomplish as a literary artist what he felt lay beyond the historian’s boundaries. We have two Mohameds, and they must both remain vital as readers think about Ben Jelloun’s story and about the real-life fruit vendor. In the space between the historical Bouazizi and his protagonist, Ben Jelloun imaginatively enters his Mohamed’s consciousness, and readers benefit from the insights he discovers in the process.

Long before Ben Jelloun wrote Par le feu, Milan Kundera captured what serious writers do. “I invent stories,” Kundera told Philip Roth, “confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything…. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude” (Kundera and Heim 1981, 237). Ben Jelloun’s project is of a piece with Kundera’s: to continuously interrogate anxiety, fear, anger, and loss, and thereby refine readers’ perceptions of a messy and complex reality. By Fire is not an inquiry into Tunisian politics. It is an imaginative exploration of one man’s experience at a specific moment. It asks questions. It probes, disturbs, disrupts.

It is in the geography between Mohamed Bouazizi’s real life and Ben Jelloun’s creation of his double where readers are invited to explore Mohamed’s desperation, his hopelessness, how he wants to care for his family, and his path toward suicide. These personal elements are perhaps harder to make available through historical inquiry. Through fiction, Ben Jelloun takes up these questions when he imagines Mohamed’s despair because the police confiscate his cart. The author implicates power and its corruption in police harassment and unresponsive municipal officials. He also maps Mohamed’s trajectory toward self-destruction by correlating it with unrelenting and escalating pressure and frustration and, ultimately, fatal desperation about how he could possibly be defeated by the state in caring for his family. Ben Jelloun offers us the chance to walk with this character through the streets of Mohamed’s small town as he encounters corruption and violence. The author renders the tortured complexities of political legitimacy and the relationship between the individual and the state by bringing them to bear on a street vendor and his rickety fruit cart. By imagining his way into Mohamed’s life, Ben Jelloun represents how the state’s reckless use of power ruined a man. The question of why the historical Bouazizi chooses death, and such a painful one, mocks itself because the only source of an answer is unreachable. The question became unanswerable the moment he touched the flame to his clothes. He did not and could not articulate his thinking before dying, so only the question survives. By rendering the incident as a story, Ben Jelloun preserves the question while refusing a facile answer. In fact, any answer would diminish the question’s integrity by tainting it with answers’ certainty. Ben Jelloun gives us in By Fire an intimate look at Mohamed’s last days and then steps away, allowing for question-asking.