Fire With Water

Remembering Mohamed Bouazizi on the first anniversary of his protest

This editorial inspired me and brought me to tears. It’s so easy to think of Mohamed Bouazizi as a man who could never have imagined the scope of the change his actions would inspire, but though I do think that’s true, it’s important to remember and honor the agency and conscious intent of his protest as well. A year after his self-immolation, our entire world is a profoundly different and better place. May we all be grateful.

Bouazizi had the kind of energy that was just awaiting a detonator. When it came, he protested by staging a public suicidal act. It was an act of violence (involving only self-harm) and non-violence which he deliberately displayed opposite the town’s seat of power, in a public street and in broad daylight.

Bouazizi intended his act of lunacy and courage to be a public signal of resistance and disobedience. It was live political theatre in which he tragically played out his own death with a message: for Tunisians to free themselves from their oppressive predicament was to resist or face his fate…

On this day, December 17, 2011, the Syrian National Council is deliberating in Tunis, a totally transformed capital where free speech and free and fair elections have demolished long-held stereotypes about Arab inhospitality to good government. In the elected Tunisian Constituent Assembly and the various independent commissions sit former political inmates and exiles. That is a subversion of the Arab power paradigm that only the word ‘revolution’ captures. That was unimaginable a mere 12 months ago…

All Arabs are breathing in the air of freedom which is expanding the appetite for equal citizenship. They are out of the tunnel. They are more comfortable with their ‘Arabhood’ than they were 12 months ago. For they have discovered that fellow human beings from Barzil to Sydney champion their struggles and applaud their courage and sacrifices, and some even stage their own protests inspired by the fervour and hope they have generated.