The Re-creation of the Self in Political Revolutions in Italy and Tunisia

Even if the waste of a failed revolution is thrown into the dumpsters, it still cannot be said that the revolution has been forgotten. Something in us is caught up in it.

—M De Certeau, The Capture of Speech

Politics and revolutions are awakening, having occupied the streets in the Arab and Western worlds in the last several months. Even if we are not sure to what ends these movements will bring, we are certain that something of us is caught up in it, and that these collective experiences will change the demonstrators’ perceptions of their being in the world.

This article examines how the participation in political revolutions has to be understood as a practice of self-making, which is to say as a collective and individual experience that inevitably re-creates and subverts boundaries within the self and the body. Drawing on in-depth interviews and a blog project with two women, K and F, who have participated in political revolutions (F in Italy in the 1970s, and K in Tunisia currently), we will look at how such political experiences have changed their perceptions of the self, the body and the other. Despite the historical and social differences between the Italian and Tunisian contexts, we found out that both our interviewees conceive their political participation as breakdown of a society of domination, and re-creation of their being in the world. In fact, the experience of revolution clearly divides their bodily awareness of the reality in two phases: an anaesthetized perception of the self, and a new understanding of the world and of the other, subsequent to the political activity. We argue that this fracture is due to the central role that the body plays in political involvement and self-identity.

The Body as the Subject of Politics

The political engagement of our interviewees is grounded in what Giddens (1991) calls “life politics,” a kind of politics which “links self and body to systems of global scope” (214). Since the student and feminist movements in the ’70s, women’s bodies have become sites of political interaction and re-appropriation. The problem of ownership and freedom of the body is a crucial issue to K and F, too. They feel the need to question the control their society imposes on their bodies, searching for a new space of autonomy and identity. K argues that a political change toward a democratic regime in Tunisia cannot be achieved without women’s freedom, which she defines as the choice to decide over their sexual life and body. F has also conceived of the ’70s political movements as a way to escape the cultural coercion of her family and of society, as she puts it:

In those years, I was at stake for the first time. The political slogan “I am mine” was a big discovery. It meant that you could decide for yourself, without any other power telling you what to do – the men, the state, the church.

K’s and F’s political engagement could be thus considered as a new discovery of themselves and a form of resistance to the control of their societies over their bodies. However, rather than conceiving K’s and F’s stories as mere resistance, within an ideological-political discourse, we aim to focus on their choices, their particular paths, their interpretations and their ghosts. Lock (1998), for instance, suggests that many women’s responses to medical power are grounded in pragmatism, rather than in simple resistance. We believe this is true also for K and F. They integrate politics within their lives, establishing what could be meaningful to them, and what they really want to make with it. To both of them, doing politics has been a practice of self-making through the medium of the body.

The Body as the Medium of Politics

The body has a crucial role in mediating our perceptions of self and our being in the world, as many authors have aptly suggested, collapsing the traditional dichotomy between body and mind (Csordas 1990; Green 1998). In F’s and K’s experiences, the strong connection between body, self and perceptions is evident. Both K and F divide their bodily perceptions of the world in two phases: the society of oppression, a kind of anaesthetized society where everything is facade and the self is denied, and the new political world, perceived as “real” and “mine.” This feeling of reality is due to the function of the body, which is the medium of their political participation, and makes possible the re-appropriation of self and changes their view of the world. F states:

The political experiences were helpful to build what I am today. Today I feel I am more myself. If there wasn’t this act of breaking, the courage or maybe the thoughtlessness to leave, to break these ties for a certain time, to refer to a group fighting for a change…I wouldn’t be what I am today.

Moreover, the political participation changes also their perception of the world and of the other. K remarks that since she got involved in the Tunisian movements through social networks, her perception of the other—the other’s body and pain—has changed. As she describes, she has started to feel close to others’ bodies:

Today I have a more physical sensation; I feel I am closer to this or that family. I don’t know, I feel close to people, it is like what has happened to them, is also happening to me. It’s a more personal feeling, it’s not just a story I’ve heard, I am at stake. Maybe it’s that many people have died in this revolution and before, too, and now I feel so close to their bodies.

The revolution thus changes not only the perception of the reality K is living but also the experiences she has lived. The bodies, which K has previously denied, become part of the reality of her pain. She recognizes these bodies as physically close, as being like her, as part of a group of people fighting for their rights and freedoms.

Reinventing the Body

The notion of the body that has emerged from K’s and F’s stories is similar to what Pandolfi (1996) calls a “nomadic body.” K’s and F’s bodies are reinventing themselves in a space of migration, in a nomadic space. K has moved to France from Tunisia, F has moved to Turin from Southern Italy. Physically far from social and familiar subjugation, from a tradition which they seek to deny, the body is naked. And then, it is dressed again, with new self-identities and political spaces. Yet, the process of dressing and reinventing the body is far more complex. The fracture with the society of oppression and the new forms of resistance are limited by the memories of their bodies. K questions the concept of freedom in a conservative society, where she feels tied to rigid social and cultural norms. F explains how she could mediate with her past, only after having denied it and having recreated a new self. Once she was sure about whom she was, she could finally accept to “be gray, not be afraid to mediate, to deal with the reality as it was, trying to change it but also being in it, not denying it.”

Francesca Meloni is a PhD student in Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, conducting a research on undocumented youth. She is originally from Italy, where she has studied anthropology. She has worked on refugees and human rights in Italy and Ireland.

Marouane Tlili is a computer scientist and MA student in international relations. Originally from Tunisia, his main areas of interest include social economy, anthropology of the self, self-managed groups, globalization and resistance, bio-politics and social movements in North-Africa.