Abstract :
They gathered outside, in the summer of 2013, at a public park in Tunis with yellow flyers attached to their arms that read Sayeb 15. They were demanding freedom for Wled al-15, a Tunisian rapper, who had recently been jailed after months of hiding for his song Bolicia Kleb, or “The Police are Dogs”. The gathering was among the first for Kalaam Charaa, a street poetry movement initiated by young Tunisian poets, which stresses the importance of poetry in Tunisian dialect, known locally as Tounsi. One young woman got up to read an original poem, but I had seen her somewhere before— she was Shams Radhouani Abdi, a popular socialist and feminist. Her voice low but powerful, she read her poem, “Prepare the Shroud”, in dialect: Prepare the shroud And if you still have more cloth, don’t forget To sew her a dream And to sew her a light in a dark night And to write her a poem and a love song enveloped by a sigh And to wipe the tears of her idea And to tell her, I’m still with you until the revolution comes You shut your eyes and open them And you find her resisting by your side Laughing and measuring and cutting, she tells you, Prepare the shroud
