Bourguiba's sons: melancholy manhood in modern Tunisian cinema

Abstract

For more than three decades after its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia was ruled by Habib Bourguiba, a self-professed secular nationalist who sought to hitch the wagon of the young nation to the train of European modernity both socially and economically. While his era was marked by laudable developments in the area of women's rights, his reign was autocratic. He gradually but steadily tightened his grip on power (proclaiming himself president for life in 1975) until he was suddenly deposed by a bloodless coup led by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in 1987. Sustaining a steadfast Westward gaze yet suffering from an enduring neopatriarchal hangover, Bourguiba's contradictions cannot be overstated, not least because they have never ceased to inform the psychodynamics of manhood in postcolonial Tunisia. Bourguiba's rule over Tunisia (1956–1987) produced a breed of men that might be aptly called Bourguiba's sons. Suspended in a state of mutability that is simultaneously cultivated and frustrated, they have been able neither to come to terms with the challenges of modernity, of which gender equality is part and parcel, nor to relinquish fully the protective shelter of traditional patriarchy, in which male supremacy is the grantor of psychosocial stability. Modern Tunisian cinema is abundantly invested in unravelling the ways in which Tunisian men are stranded in the pull of neopatriarchy, even while attempting timidly or defiantly to break out of its moulds. Recent films by, among others, Moufida Tlatli, Nadia Fares, Férid Boughedir and Nouri Bouzid draw a markedly melancholy portrait of manhood. The challenges of modernity – not to mention those of women's rights, and now of the Gay International and of sexual politics writ large – have cast a grim shadow on traditional dimensions of manhood, masculinity, and sexuality. Melancholy manhood is born when a loss or crisis of old conceptions of manhood has taken place but has not been accompanied with the parallel and adequate psychosocial and hermeneutic readjustment necessary for its resolution. Were Bourguiba's modernity not parachuted on an already entrenched patriarchal apparatus, but rather flown from within its rhythms, generations of Tunisian men and women might have developed the psychic wherewithal whereby to participate in it in ways that would surely redound to their own and others' benefits.