Tunis, December 12, 2010
“Life hasn’t been easy for me, understand?’
Uncle Mounir’s eyelashes were fluttering. He was not looking at me; he was gazing into the distance instead, as if he was trying to bring the past into focus.
“I’ve been through too much. Ours was a poor family with five kids that had to keep moving from one place to another. No sooner did my father finish building a gourbi out of stone, brick, old scraps of cement, and sheet metal, than we had to build another. The police or the neighbourhood delegates of the Destourian Party would come calling and order Father to demolish the gourbi he’d just built. He did as they said, but started work on another one right away. Poverty moved in with us, became another member of the family. Until the day when a party delegate came knocking and made Father an offer. The government would give us a house, let’s call it social housing, and in return Father would work as a day watchman for the municipality. The only condition was that he wouldn’t be paid. It was their way of making him pay for the house we were living in. He accepted. What else could he do? It was like choosing between suffering less or suffering more. His choice was to suffer for us. My mother, my brothers, and my sisters were tired of always moving from one place to another, and even our animals — the few sheep and chickens we possessed — had had enough. So, rain or shine, my father sat on an old chair next to the entrance to city hall. His job was to report every day to the party delegate. He knew that he was reporting everyone’s comings and goings, he knew he was a kaouad, which is what we call shills. Besides, I’m not even sure there was really such a job. And when he wasn’t sitting right beside the entrance to city hall, Father took his donkey and cart and went off to sell manure to the people who live in the fancy neighbourhoods that had sprung up all around us. Time and again we had to move. The new residents had the money and the contacts they needed to buy the land and build their private palaces. But my father had neither the money nor the contacts. He spent his whole life between an old chair and a donkey cart. That’s what poverty and injustice did to us.”
Uncle Mounir stopped for a moment, then, still looking off into the distance, he went on: “I hated what the government had done to my father and one day, after I’d read Capital by Karl Marx, I swore that I would change things when I grew up. I wanted to spare my family the humiliation and the poverty, but I was too young, too idealistic.”
His story excited me so much that I forgot my fears of only a few moments before.
“But you weren’t asking for the moon, all you wanted was a little dignity, if I understand. What does that have to do with idealism?”
He looked at me for the first time since we’d stepped out onto the balcony, as if he was surprised to see me there. But just as quickly, his gaze shifted off into the distance once more.
“That’s the problem. It’s almost impossible to protect your dignity in this country. Asking for it is like asking for the moon. When one of my instructors began to lend me books by Samir Amin, an economist who specialized in developing countries, it was as if I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought that my family’s problems, and those of others like us, would be solved by a revolution. A social and economic revolution. ‘Equality from the bottom up,’ as we put it, so proud to use such sophisticated terminology. It would be a revolt of the poor against the mafia-style political power that controlled our lives. At university, I became active in the students’ union. I wasn’t one hundred percent Communist, and I wasn’t one hundred percent Islamist. I was a hybrid. A dangerous and explosive mixture. For the police and the intelligence services at any rate. Nobody knew it, but I began talking with the workers on the construction sites not far from campus. I asked them if they wanted to improve their financial situation, to have medical care. They were young guys, seventeen or eighteen years old. They’d come in from the countryside, but there was no work for them in the towns and cities. There was never any serious agrarian reform in Tunisia. Every time they tried, it failed, and we ended up with more corruption, more young people unemployed, and more people leaving the land. The best they could hope for was to find jobs as apprentices on the construction sites that were sprouting up all over the Tunis suburbs and send their miserable pay back to their families in the village. I talked with them and encouraged them to set up a union, to unite against the greedy foremen and the contractors who paid them starvation wages and left them to sleep on the construction sites. No insurance, no social programs. Nothing. They had to make do with bitter black tea and a baguette spread with harissa to get through the day. Some of them would listen to me attentively, but most of them didn’t want to hear a thing. One of them ratted on me to the police. You reach out a hand to help them, and they cut it off, and throw you to the lions, see what I mean?”
I couldn’t tell what he was driving at. “Does that mean I shouldn’t go with Donia and her friend Jamel to help the poor and denounce injustice?”
He did not reply; it was as though he hadn’t even heard me. “The police came for me two days after the bread riots started in Tunis. I had comrades who kept me up to date on the situation in other towns. Tozeur in the south. Gafsa, where all the mines are. Me and other student unionists, we’d made up our minds to start demonstrating in Tunis. A lot of young people came out. We weren’t expecting violence, but it happened. We were against the increases in the price of bread and semolina, but we were also against injustice, against nepotism. We wanted a fair chance for everybody. We wanted to alert the middle class about the way the poor were being treated. The unemployment. The humiliation. Whether we went to school or not, nothing was going to change for us. We were poor, and we’d stay poor. We were modern-day Misérables. The government ignored us. So did everybody else. But the young people of Djebel Lahmar, the ‘red mount’ — the colour of blood and of danger — from Ettadamoun Township, from Sijoumi, from Bab Souika, all the slums and the working-class districts, came out in the thousands when the unions sent out the call, but still more came out on their own. It was a cry of pain. A cry of despair.”
I was shivering.
“When we found out that the government had reversed its decision on the price of bread, my comrades and I could barely contain our joy. We were shouting like madmen. But that very evening the police came to pick us up, one by one, like mice in a trap. They slapped us, they beat us, threw us in prison. That’s what happens to revolutionaries. To people who try to change the world.”
“How long were you in prison, Uncle Mounir?”
He rolled up his shirtsleeve and showed me his scar. It was like a snake eyeing me intensely. His skin had adopted a new texture. Time had done the rest.
“You see, Lila, this scar reminds me every day that you shouldn’t try to take on the big shots, that even your union will drop you if you don’t have the right connections. This scar shouts out to me that the police aren’t choirboys, and that they won’t hesitate to do what their superiors tell them, if not worse. I spent seven years in prison. It could have been ten, or twenty. What’s the difference? The years don’t mean a thing. Seven years, just think about it. My mother came to see me every Friday, a basket in hand and hurt in her eyes. Seven years for belonging to an unauthorized association and inciting the youth to violence. That’s what they accused me of — I never confessed a thing. Even when they sliced the skin on my arm with a broken bottle I didn’t talk. I let them do it, and that made them even more furious. At first, my father would come to visit me, but he died two years later. He was ashamed to work for the government that had confiscated his son. He never forgave himself. He was really hard on himself. They didn’t even give me permission to attend his funeral. They told my little brother who came asking that I was too dangerous to be let out on leave, even for a few hours.”
“And today, can you pardon them?” I asked, eyes moist, overcome by what I’d heard.
“I don’t know. I’ll leave it to God to deal with.”
He stopped as suddenly as he’d begun. I wanted to comfort him, but I didn’t know how. His story had given me the answers I was looking for, ever since I’d said goodbye to Donia.
What he told me set my bowels churning. It was the missing link in the chain of events that had brought me to Tunisia. Mother, fate, or God had brought me to this distant country. The idea was to learn Arabic, but there was another plan for me. A much wider plan, a more complex and subtle one. I’d met Donia. She’d asked me to help her in the struggle. And now I’d heard Uncle Mounir’s horrifying story. What should I do? Back up? Go back to where we began, or start a new adventure? Do as Uncle Mounir did? Or follow Donia, who turned her back on wealth for the sake of her ideals?
Uncle Mounir stood up.
“Uncle Mounir, I’ve got a question for you. I’m certain you’re the only one who can help me. Do you believe I should help Donia with what she’s doing?”
He looked at me long and hard. His scar was hidden by his shirtsleeve. The past had unfolded there, on his arm. Now it was gone. Obscured by pain.
“When I was your age, I followed my ideals. I didn’t hesitate for a minute. Are you ready to do the same thing? I don’t know. You have to decide.”
I could not answer. Then, abruptly, he went back into the apartment, and I was alone with my thoughts.