This paper will address the issue of space in Fadilah al-Shabbi’s al-Adl (Justice) and Fathiyah Hashimi’s Maryam tasqut min yad Allah (Maryam Falls from the Hand of God), two representations of the Tunisian capital written in the final decade of Ben Ali’s rule. Like many authors working in countries peripheral to the world literary system, these writers are in the paradoxical position of being both consistently recognized as important literary figures in their home context of Tunisia while receiving little attention in the rest of the Arab world and beyond. For the most part, their works remain untranslated, and their choice of Arabic over French has undoubtedly served to restrict their novels’ potential for circulation. While it is regrettable that these works have not been read more widely, the limited readership of these texts allows us to interpret their content as a direct, if abstract, challenge to the Tunisian government designed for an unquestionably localized audience rather than foreign consumption. Al-Shabbi’s al-Adl, written in 2005 and banned for three years by Ben ‘Ali’s government before it was available to the public, is a merciless political invective veiled only by its use of direct allegory taken from traditional modes of storytelling; it is an accusation targeting both the State’s symbolic strategies of surveillance and its failure to bring justice to its people. Al-Shabbi, the cousin of revolutionary poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, uses the space of the city to show the severe restrictions of lived authoritarian rule. In Hashimi’s 2009 Maryam Falls from the Hand of God, the novel turns around a dialectic of division between a restricted outside space of protests and police crackdowns in Tunis and an equally claustrophobic inside space (a literal brothel). The text’s heterotopic spaces - the brothel, a cemetery, a shantytown, and echoes of saints’ shrines past and present - are sites that simultaneously represent, invert, and contest the real localities of contemporary Tunis. Tunisia’s police state before the political transformations of 2010 is depicted through the dual tropes of claustrophobia and agoraphobia; though the line of demarcation between outside and inside remains intact, both spaces bear the marks of prison and the text’s significance lies in the subtle forms of dissent embedded in its inscribed spatial relations. This presentation will include diagrams of the internal spatial dynamics of the texts crucial to the analysis.