Fiction and fact are intertwined in intricate ways in the Tunisian novel that I analyse in my presentation: Kamal al-Riahi’s al-Ghurillā (The Gorilla, 2011). Being published shortly after the Tunsisian uprising it reflects the multi-medial uprisings of winter 2010/2011 by turning to different sections of society as ‘communal narrators’ and including diverse genres such as dreams and TV commercials to escape a patronizing auctorial narrator. The maze-like narrative centers on Sāliḥ, nicknamed ‘al-Ghurillā’, a disadvantaged black Tunisian who climbs the clock tower in downtown Tunis and refuses to come down. He provokes harsh reactions by the authorities and draws crowds of onlookers who at the end of the novel rebel against the treatment al-Ghurillā received. The polyphony of narrative voices and techniques leaves room for doubt since the accounts are partly contradictory in their describtion of al-Ghurillā’s coming of age. This unreliability is paired with news accounts which seem to verify the oddity of the black body chained to the tower. The multilayered narrative gets yet another twist through the epilogue, tellingly entitled “January 14th 2011”. In this, the (fictionalized) author describes the last stages of the novel’s production in the middle of the Tunisian uprising, only to morph into his protagonist growing fur and beating his chest in protest, gorilla-style. The protest on the content level is thereby likened to the factual uprising on the streets. Furthermore, part of this epilogue has been published in the New York Times as a separate eyewitness account of the uprising. It will be the aim of my presentation to disentangle the strands of the narrative and to shed light on its various layers. Part of my analysis will be to highlight differences with regards to levels of empowerment between the fictional epilogue and its factual or documentary version. Further questions to be addressed are: why the discussed author writes in a situation of political turmoil and how these moments of turmoil provoke various written results.