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.

The novel Yalo by Elias Khoury begins with Daniel al-Abyad, a member of a marginalized ethnic community in Lebanon and former member of a Lebanese militia who is being interrogated on suspicion of rape and physical assault of numerous men and women. During this interrogation process, Daniel, also known as Yalo, endures severe torture while being forced to write a confession of his crimes. His life history is explored during this act of writing and we learn that for Yalo, physical violence and torture had become a way of life aimed at subjugating and coercing another, mainly, the enemy as a means of self-preservation. This paper will examine the invention and sublimation of the self through the act of writing. Khoury relies upon the Classical Arabic literary themes present in the One Thousand and One Nights yet breaks from the tradition as his protagonist becomes unsure and unstable of himself and his life story as he undergoes graphic torture. Like Scheherazade who must tell a new story to King Shahryar to prolong her life for an additional day, Yalo’s captors demand that he rewrite and retell his stories and confessions each day. In the course of writing his confessions, it is revealed that at first, Yalo has no real understanding of his past yet as the novel progresses, these forced examinations of himself and his conduct provide him with a clearer sense of his history. Yalo presents his story as though he is merely a spectator of his life through the use of the third person. His inability to articulate his thoughts in order to produce an acceptable confession is reminiscent of Elaine Scarry’s statement on intense pain for it is “language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject.” By the end of the novel, Yalo is rendered speechless after having been seated on the so-called “throne.” After this experience, Daniel, now speaking on behalf of Yalo, acknowledges the brutality of the torture methods used on him, and finally accepts his fate, using the first person and stating, “I can only congratulate you on your original methods of torture and your ability to extract a suspect’s confessions, as if you were extracting his soul.”