shahireh sharif

A few months before Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian president for 23 years, flee the country I visited Tunisia (you can see my pictures here).

Now the army is in the streets and a state of emergency is declared in the country, but all seemed calm during my visit. I tried to relive the experience of the country in order to remember my encounters with Tunisians outside the tourist areas. But could not identify any sign of imminent widespread rallies. I am not sure what signs I expected to have seen. Don’t think there would had been banners reading “watch out, things are about to explode”, but perhaps a trace of anger, discontent or criticism in conversations or even a lukewarm political debate initiated by a taxi driver. On the other hand, maybe what I experience was the calmness before the storm or maybe spotting repressed hints is not as straight forward as I expect or I managed to misread the signs or... 

So many places in Tunisia reminded me of Iran that I knew as a child. Some of the current images of the widespread unrest in Tunisia remind me of the revolution in Iran. I wonder if there are going to be more similarities. 

I studied my pictures from Tunisia, amongst my photos I found a couple of shots (including the one above) related to every day’s life of people with images of Ben Ali in the background. They might even have a somewhat “historic value”! (See the other picture on //sharp-pencils.blogspot.com/2011/01/timber.html)