“By these measured words… the good man is convinced.” So says the young protagonist of Maïssa Bey’s novel, Surtout ne te retourne pas (English title: Above All Don’t Look Back), after telling a story to maneuver her way unchaperoned onto a bus headed for an Algerian metropolis. Her accomplishment lies in a shrewd understanding of how to manipulate language and different forms of power to her advantage. This paper explores this further by analyzing the narrative strategies of women’s quotidian dialogue, where they—in subtle ways—assert novel forms of agency through clever deployment of their voice. In current, broader literary scholarship, ‘voice’ has become a forceful image of self-expression for women (e.g. ‘finding a voice’); however, using ‘voice’ as a metaphor advances it as a sign often privileged over the speaker herself. I propose instead to analyze voice as a speech act and narrative discourse which will consider the socio-political and ideological conditions where speaking happens, thus privileging the female speaker over the gesture of speaking. Two rising Maghrebian francophone authors, Maïssa Bey, an Algerian novelist, and Nadia Chafik, Moroccan, deploy the voice as a forceful and subtle speech act for asserting agency in novel ways. Both authors also cite real events as inspirations for their texts. I develop a theory which accounts for the constructive power of fictional discourse and testimony as that which asserts what journalistic accounts cannot/do not. Furthermore, with a focus on the performative aspects of narrative dialogue, I deconstruct how speech-acts enter and manipulate daily socio-cultural-linguistic codes; this analysis recasts the ways that women in these novels assert agency. While their dialogues honor particular codes in language (e.g. deference, respect), the ensuing actions require approaching the speech-act differently, discerning the ways that female characters manipulate speech inventively to result in a desired act. Thus, the subtler forms of agential assertion are explored through an analysis of the creative manipulation of speech and storytelling.

This paper examines the interplay of public and private, personal and political, in the life of one Tunisian public figure, Radhia Haddad. These threads are intertwined in Haddad’s story (as narrated in Arabic as part of a collection of oral histories in 1993 and her memoirs published in French in 1995) as her political activities built upon family networks, and much of her public action focused on the family. Active with the nationalist movement prior to independence in 1956, Haddad is most know through her service as the first president of the National Union of Tunisian Women from its foundation until 1972. Her writing is framed within the nationalist project and is intertwined with her relationship to Bourguiba and his wife. Her political education and activism was profoundly influenced by her family; her brother, husband, and father-in-law were all nationalists, and her participation in women’s associations was facilitated by familial ties to Wassila Bourguiba. As a representative of Bourguiba’s government, Haddad helped extend the reach of the one-party state into the personal and intimate lives of many Tunisian women. Yet despite Haddad’s nationalist credentials and ties to Bourguiba, he forced her to resign from the Women’s Union and the Destour Party in 1972, subjecting her to a defamation campaign and charges of corruption. Haddad’s retrospective testimony about these events is written in conversation and tension with official narratives. I propose to frame her self-presentation in relation to accounts in the contemporary press (largely controlled by Bourguiba and the Destour Party), as instances of overlapping or competing testimonies. On the one hand, descriptions of her activities with the Women’s Union echo the party goals and developmentalist frameworks regarding the nature of women’s contribution to the nation, and the specifically liberal iteration of women’s citizenship. On the other hand, Haddad utilizes the space of her memoir to absolve herself from responsibility in Bourguiba’s authoritarian practices, painting herself as one of its victims. In this respect, Haddad’s insistence that he was manipulated by factions within the presidential palace and presents her demotion and persecution as irrational, and substantiates Ben Ali’s rhetoric that Bourguiba’s senility made him incapable of governing. I hope to combine historical methodologies with a theoretical perspective informed by textual studies and literary critique in the reading of these testimonies.

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.

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s fictional account of the end of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life in the short story “By Fire,” depicts the social and economic contradictions leading to the main character’s misery and eventual self-immolation. At several moments in the narrative, Jelloun juxtaposes first nature (ecological processes) and second nature (social processes), in a way that highlights the “unnaturalness” of Bouazizi’s social and economic situation, in particular his inability to labor. The narrative very briefly, but significantly, transcends the social in order to observe laboring ants or birds, effectively contrasting the differing claims made by passing characters that Bouazizi’s situation is somehow “natural.” Yet what does the form of this fictional account depict about the “naturalness” of the social situation depicted? In making such a contrast between the natural and the social, it is difficult to understand how the social could begin to approach the natural or transcend the social situation depicted. When the situation appears impossible to transcend, the effect could be that the characters appear as social products of an inevitable or natural force. Georg Lukacs in his essay “Reportage or Portrayal” discusses the effect of the form of reportage used as a creative method in literature, in that the outcome is seen as a “finished product, not a moment in process and development, in constant and vital interaction with its preconditions and consequences…. (53). In this type of literature the resulting effect is that the main character is mostly static, incapable of resistance and eventually completely objectified by the system. Though “By Fire” clearly does not aim to be literary reportage, there are aspects of the narrative that incorporate Lukacsian “reportage” stylistically. If fiction is different from non-fiction in that it is free to imagine change or redemption, how effectively does Jelloun do so in this short story?