Willed from the bottom up: the postcolonial turned revolutionary

‘You must go back into history, that history of men damned by other men,’ Frantz Fanon heralded half a century ago in The Wretched of the Earth, a revolutionary text par excellence. Until recently, the global context we all live in tried very hard to discredit both revolution and the possibility of revolution. And then came the 2011-Arab Spring, an event in the Alain Badiou sense of the word, a rupture that saw the mere suffering victim become the ‘active, determining subject of judgment’. This suffering victim would fight to the death on behalf of the hapless multitude to claim his worthiness. Today, we set out to celebrate, commemorate, and reflect upon the event while thinking through The Wretched of the Earth, itself celebrating its golden anniversary. It is to its programme of complete disorder, in fact an overturning order, often against the odds, that we turn today to speak about how the national consciousness in the Arab world rose to claim radical change, a change where both the will in general and the general will of the people rejected once and for all the repressive collectivism that had trampled individual liberty for a long time. Indeed, it was in the name of ‘dignity for all’ that a will-in-the-making was born. In the process, it brought about an end to the passive, pathetic subjectivity of a whole people. I hope it is no exaggeration to say that nobody foresaw what was coming, not even the most enlightened of people at home or abroad. Indeed, on a dull, cold winter day, 14 January 2011, suddenly, the Tunisian people rose against tyranny. Shortly after, the event would pave the way for other uprisings in the Arab world, an Arab world thought to be incapable of aspiring to and achieving freedom. Still, the question remains: What made postcolonial Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, spearhead the first revolution of the twenty-first century? What were the causes beyond the socio-economic explanations, themselves insufficient for facing this crucial moment in history, when men and women exerted themselves to meet the challenge of toppling a coercive regime and emancipate themselves from mental and physical oppression? We must ponder the dimensions, both political and subjective, of this incredible tour de force in order to understand the reality on the ground. It is this double approach of ‘ye are many, they are few’ that I intend to privilege here. In the process, I will strive to answer the question: How can postcolonial men and women avoid falling to the level of ‘victims’ and seek to prove themselves as ‘immortals’? It is in this sense that Mohammed Bouazizi and Co. are said to claim a new humanism. That post 1/14 Tunisia is no longer hemmed in and constrained, but freely thinking and moving through space and time, is an open acknowledgement to a democracy from below; a democracy developed by the will of the people. To accomplish this new beginning, Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world cannot go back to the past but would have to ‘let the dead bury their dead.’ The new Tunisia must ‘criticize [itself] … continually … deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of [its] … attempts.’ Put differently, the new Arab world must ‘criticize [itself] … continually’, Rossana Rossanda observes, ‘ … deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of [its] … attempts.’1 Addressing these inadequacies and weaknesses is certainly a challenge of the first order.