Moncef Marzouki, former victim of the Ben Ali regime, newly-elected interim President of Tunisia, celebrated the first anniversary of the uprising with a series of dramatic statements. His rhetoric was that of a people’s President. But, in today’s Tunisia, that is an ambivalent register, caught between a sense of promise and of helpless fate.
The (President’s) speech... says more about Tunisia’s current predicament than was probably intended- Ranier Fsadni
The President wore no tie and draped his shoulders with a traditional cloak, saying he would be true to his austere Bedouin roots. Speaking out of the Carthage Palace, he promised to return all the national treasures purloined by the former kleptocracy to the museums where they belonged.
He proclaimed that he will auction off most of the opulent presidential palaces built by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and donate the money to an employment fund. (Tunisia’s unemployment rate is over 18 per cent and far higher among youth.)
And he implored the country – paralysed by a series of strikes for higher wages and countryside roadblocks demanding schools or factories for this or that village – to accept a six-month “truce” or moratorium on strikes to give the economy a chance to get going. Otherwise, he concluded, we will be committing collective suicide.
And, yet, he also committed to resigning six months into his one-year term if by that time no progress were taking place.
The speech betrays an ambivalence that is reflected in the rest of the country. On the one hand, the words of a man ushering in action and a new style of governance. On the other, however, an effective threat to join the country in its paralysing strikes if things don’t change in six months.
Scrutinised closer, in fact, the symbols of action on this occasion could themselves be read in more than one way. Selling the palaces to give the money to the people is an egalitarian gesture.
On one reading it is a divesting of the trappings of power. On another reading, however, the President was arrogating to himself a power he may not have, a de facto personal title over the palaces, which, in truth, belong to the state. Moreover, the measure itself is, of course, largely symbolic. The palaces, some of them sprawling over land with massive golf courses and swimming pools, are unlikely to be sold quickly. Which investor would buy before matters settle down? Which entrepreneur would buy such a palace as a private residence when the reason for the sale is that Tunisia has become such an inhospitable place for displays of great wealth?
And even if all the palaces were sold, what impact could one-off sales have given the scale of the structural problems?
The speech, therefore, says more about Tunisia’s current predicament than was probably intended. It conveys President Marzouki’s feel for the sentiment in “the street” and his no doubt genuine desire to make his presidency participate in the country’s sacrifices.
However, it also displays other characteristics. There is, obviously, the sense of a country on the brink, which is perhaps why the President wants to dramatise his willingness of decisive intervention. But the intervention he is in fact proposing also reflects two aspects of the old regime he fought against: a presidentialism that transcends – even bypasses – political process and a sense in which the action is all symbol but with little practical effect.
Perhaps there is no other way. If so, the predicament is uncannily similar to a play written by another Tunisian bearing the same name (although transcribed as Marzougui).
The play Ismail/Hamlet won the Best Dramatic Text prize at the Carthage Festival of 1998 and has been showing again over the past year (though not in Tunisia). It features a man called Ismail, a corpse-washer, who likes the nickname Hamlet given to him by a friend, even though he does not understand what it means.
The play is a monologue by a man whose father was driven to death by a wealthy Turkish bath-owner who then married his mother and, later, the girl Ismail coveted. The monologue, repetitive, sardonic, heavy, takes place while Ismail is washing his stepfather’s corpse.
The monologue rambles because Ismail is caught in a vicious circle. He is aware of the immediate stagnation of his life. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he is trapped by inaction; unlike Hamlet, however, he dreams not of overturning tyranny but simply of replacing his stepfather as despot.
I give this account as commentary not, however, on Tunisia’s President but on his own analysis that, if the Tunisian street continues to demand its rights in the way it is, it will not be a new order that is born but the corpse of the old that is washed away.
ranierfsadni@europe.com