Emna Rmili-Weslati’s novel al-bāqī (Leftover, 2013) revolves around the male narrator Ibrahim, a leftist Tunisian political prisoner under Ben Ali’s dictatorial regime for many years. Once released, he transforms into an opportunist, as he reflects upon the validity of his ideological sacrifices and decides that they were worthless. Unable to recover from the trauma of his daughter Amal’s death and his failed relationships with Ahlam and then Salma, he questions his existence as a man with no principles. Ibrahim views himself as a lost man with many faces and no values and has violent physical reactions to his self-loathing. The trauma and violence of his imprisonment, the loss of his child and his failed amorous relationships contribute to rendering the narrator a soulless man and a party-line journalist. Despite the consistent attempts of Salma to empower Ibrahim after he is released, she fails as his desire for a peaceful existence overpowers his rebelliousness. Nekhili-Weslati wrote her novel prior to the Tunisian Revolution of January 2011 however; it was not until 2013 that it was published. Drawing on the representations of the two narrators Ibrahim and Salma, I argue that dictatorship creates a socio-political void and imposes violence in a society, which becomes insurmountable to individuals especially to men, as it depletes them of their senses of self and attacks their masculinities. Through a close examination of al-Bāqī, this paper explicates the fall of the male empire due to trauma, violence and the lack of freedom on one hand. On the other hand, I contend that women are made to resist oppression and continue their rebelliousness throughout the novel, as they face Ibrahim’s helplessness. Making use of Homi Bhabha’s ideas in Nation and Narration (1990) from which he correlates the ambivalence of modern society found in narratives and how nations are built through cultural representations, I interrogate the construction of the pre-Revolutionary Tunisian nation through Rmili-Weslati’s narrative. I argue that Ibrahim represents the Janus-faced discourse of the nation—which Bhabha refers to—by being a leftist political prisoner then once freed transforming into the dictatorial national discourse’s bearer through his words as a journalist.