The outpouring of collective memory in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution corresponded with several anniversaries of the actors of the Tunisian left, including the Perspectives/Af?q movement and the Tunisian Labor Union (UGTT). Public events mourning the passing of influential figures accelerated the movement from former Tunisian leftists to release their memoirs to the domestic market as they began to talk openly about the years spent in Bourguiba’s jails from the sixties to the eighties in newspapers and on documentaries. In addition, testimonies delivered to the Tunisian transitional justice commission and shared on prime time national television have lifted the veil over this dark and silenced period of Tunisia’s past in efforts to address a shared collective trauma. Their experience has the potential to reshape the history of the recent past in Tunisia: for two decades, several dozen activists and leaders of the left were arbitrarily detailed and poorly treated in the state’s violent prisons, in addition to shorter sentences for hundreds of student protesters. Their imprisonments have dislocated families and continued to be silenced even after their releases, and their erasure from the national narrative has been symptomatic of the oppressive authoritarian state that provoked the uprisings of 2011. This paper will review the state of this “archive of trauma” and highlight the complex task of rewriting a history of the Tunisian left and a more inclusive history of the recent past in Tunisia that accounts for the social experience of imprisonment and torture, and the trauma of having to re-integrate life under an oppressive system without rehabilitation. The left in Tunisia contains a high number of highly-educated individuals (professors, journalists etc.) keen to share their stories, hence the availability of memoirs and written testimonies on which this paper will be based. This dimension of political transition is often neglected, corresponds to a growing academic literature on memory, violence and reconciliation in practice in the Middle East. This case will be discussed in relation to the Moroccan truth commission and the Algerian amnesty, and hopes to show how actors in the Tunisian public, civil society and political process see the potential that memory and history would play for a robust national transition.