In more than a dozen short stories included in The salt logsa diverse group of Tunisian the women relate their experience of political prison under the presidency of Habib Bourguiba and His name is Abidine Ben Ali.

Together, they overcome the silence, question the legacy of political oppression in the country, and apply a gender lens to the violations that continue to shake Tunisian aspirations for freedom and dignity.

Each chapter is written by a different writer, and women’s voices often reverberate and bleed from one story to another, alternating between fictional selves and testimonies.

In this way, the book forms a rhythmic compilation of sadness.

The salt logs struggles with the carceral experience both inside and outside the prison walls.

In these stories, political detention is seen as a collective disruption affecting families and communities.

But it’s also a personal, intimate, life-changing event, especially when the women themselves become possessed.

salt sores

The salt logs he quickly dives into a “real Tunisia” very different from the tourist clichés, a Tunisia occupied by towering figures such as informants and prison guards and endowed with an illogical landscape that requires careful negotiation.

In The girl who won’t grow upNouha Dimassi describes a girl raised without her imprisoned mother. In this story of sudden separation and uneasy reunion, the child tries to recognize his mother when she returns amid a lingering sense of alienation.

“It was the childhood of a motherless girl and an outcast from a society that either wanted to stay out of trouble with the state or truly believed that her mother was a traitor to her country,” Dimassi writes.

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“Memories are stubborn, they fade a little, only to reappear with determined cruelty,” she adds, capturing mixed emotions of guilt, alienation and resentment, and the consequences of state violence on family ties.

Women are often the caretakers and the familiar Tunisian quffa – a basket used daily to carry food from the market also associated with wedding ceremonies – becomes an embodiment of hardship, steadfastness and courage.

Often taking personal risks when visiting family members imprisoned hundreds of kilometers from home, the women carry their quffa full of food and memories. However, the quffa is also a symbol of abuse and bribery, as prison staff regularly harass visitors.

“My biggest concern was taking care of the quffa,” writes Hasna Ben Abid in Quffa of Hasna.

She describes a “basket of torment and pain” that she ends up spilling on the ground after a grueling journey before she has the chance to hand it over to her husband in prison.

Tears streamed down her exhausted face.

The collection also includes a poem, The Path of the Heart by Jomaa Ben Ali, in which a woman remembers her imprisoned father. It also evokes several evocations of prison life dealing with torture and rape, denouncing a crushing system of quick trials and arbitrary detentions.

It is also the case with other stories.

“The judge sentenced me to prison based on a search report that was completed half an hour before I appeared before him,” writes Najet Gabsi in Hot water.

“Our father had nothing to do with politics or its people, apart from the party he was forced to join, browbeaten by the local president to pay dues for all the adults in our family once a year and put a finger with ink on the ballot paper when the elections came”, writes Soulefa Mabrouk in her turn, on a democratic facade that Tunisians know all too well.

The Arab political prison as a literary genre

The salt logslike other narratives in prison literature, it engages with transgression, power, and violence. Because the stories are told from the perspective of women, they seek to break social taboos.

The book features the words of women from different parts of the country, aged between twenty and sixty.

They were encouraged to explore their experience and memories through a series of creative writing workshops, a collective experience also reflected in the book process with several editors and translators involved in the project.

“Women have either remained silent or been silenced for a number of political, societal and familial reasons, which include the imposition of patriarchal moral codes of shame, protection of family members, lack of confidence in their own power of expression, politics. state intimidation and the gendering of free expression and political protest to the invisibility of private space,” explains Brinda J Mehta in her introduction.

Salt has a double symbolism here – evoking both tears and flavor-enhancing spice. Through the act of writing, women relive their trauma, thus pouring fresh salt on their visible and invisible wounds.

Haifa Zananga, one of the book’s editors, spends time establishing who these women are and their challenges, such as overcoming their fear of writing and navigating French, colloquial Tunisian, and formal Arabic.

Zananga’s preface sometimes moves towards essentializing these women’s femininity and experiences, including through unnecessary stereotyping, for example referring to “a Scheherazade-esque storytelling atmosphere”.

“We have learned to be faithful in our descriptions of events and other people; and we tried to avoid making a heroic figure of ourselves at the expense of others,” Zananga writes, recalling the workshop process.

Women who wore so-called sectarian attire faced a range of consequences, from petty insults and humiliation to being prevented from accessing or keeping public jobs.

All writing is an act of fabrication and subjectivity, and in many ways the book can be approached as a meta-narrative about language and why writing matters.

Writing in this context wants to be principled: to amplify political resistance and uphold a certain degree of moral integrity. No voice is given to female guards or informants.

The collection wants to set a record, bear witness and oppose depersonalization and the fear of forgetting.

As an act of remembrance and self-affirmation, testimonies like these can indeed contribute directly to a transitional justice process of truth-telling, reparation and healing.

Nawal el-Saadawi demonstrated this potency in her Memoirs of a women’s prison about his time behind Egyptian bars in 1981.

Fatna el-Bouih also wrote about enforced disappearance during Morocco Years of lead in Talk about darkness.

While women’s activism subverts traditional norms of conformity and submission, their writing is also significant in interrogating who becomes an outcast or an outlaw in an authoritarian regime, which The salt logs do what.

However, the stories contained in the book can be uneven, with their terse, vignette-like format often preventing more complex character development from occurring, as well as deeper exploration of key themes such as forgiveness, grief, and dilemmas.

In their eyes, the writers superbly illustrate the absurdity of dictatorship, its scale and destructive power.

Beyond these women, we think of today’s urgent transnational solidarity, from Alaa Abd el-Fattah to countless Palestinians arbitrarily held in Israeli prisons in inhumane conditions.

The question of why someone is arrested is as haunting as the torture chambers that words can feel inadequate to describe, even decades later.

An inventory of Tunisian state repression

Against the background of the political prison narrated in The salt logs it is the strengthening of the dictatorship in post-independence Tunisia, which created categories of citizens and labeled some enemies from within.

Dissent must be suppressed, even more so when there are affinities with the political Islam involved or other challenges to the secular doctrine of the state.

The salt logs often recalls the impact of Bourguiba’s Circular 108, which banned Tunisian women from wearing the hijab in public schools, universities and public administration in 1981, when the Islamist party Ennahda was founded.

This secularist policy was also implemented during Ben Ali’s regime.

Women who wore so-called sectarian attire faced a range of consequences, from petty insults and humiliation to being prevented from accessing or keeping public jobs.

Far too many were also detained following sham trials.

The stories in the book also recall the removal of subsidies and the resulting brutally suppressed bread riots of 1983 and 1984, which left 100 people dead. But The salt logs it is not only about Tunisia’s pre-revolutionary history.

More than a decade after the 2011 revolution, the autocratic rule of Kais Saied has reawakened the worst tendencies of the former regime.

A year after unilaterally suspending parliament in July 2021 under a state of emergency, Saied enacted the controversial Decree Law 54 to combat online disinformation, a measure widely perceived as an attempt to intimidate and prosecute critics and to further stifle free speech.

State harassment of Ennahda figures has since continued, extending to other political opponents and human rights defenders, including the recent arrests of politician Abir Moussi, lawyer and journalist Sonia Dahmani and prominent anti-racist activist Saadia Mosbah – a new wave of women political prisoners.

Dahmani was sentenced to two years in prison at the end of October this year on charges of “incitement to hatred”.

In the midst of such significant setbacks, The salt logs is a timely contribution to remembering and combating democratic reversals. On the Wayside by Mounira Ben Kaddour Toumi offers a reflection on political violence and consent. She writes about the 2011 revolution:

“For the first time I had a sense of belonging and I felt a real pride to be part of this people and this country. I realized that silence in the face of oppression and injustice was not cowardice, but extreme tolerance and forgiveness, and that being satisfied with little was not a sign of weakness, but of love for the country.”

Fear may have returned to Tunisia, but perhaps not for long.

“My country didn’t have a revolution to bring back the idols,” notes Khadija Salah.

Salt Journals: Tunisian Women on Political Imprisonment is published by Syracuse University Press