On Tunisia Then and America Now

By: Caitlin Cassidy (Lab Fellow 2017–2018)

I spent the summer of 2009 in Tunisia, right before the beginning of The Jasmine Revolution, or, as many of the Tunisians I know prefer to call it Thawra Al-Karama, or Dignity Revolution. The day the news of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation broke in the United States, I received a Facebook message from a Tunisian friend. It read: “We are going to get rid of Steve.”

I spent my first weeks in Tunisia wondering who in the world Steve was. The name cut sharply through the sea of Arabic surrounding me. Who was this — American? — so many hushed conversations seemed to revolve around? I spent hours scrolling through Google search results yielded by “Steve + Tunisia” and came up with nothing. When I finally broached the subject with Med, a Tunisian college student I’d come to know and trust, he explained, “Steve is the alias the Tunisian youth use for President Ben Ali.” Whenever speaking critically about Tunisia’s then-president in public, in order to be discreet and avoid any trouble, many young Tunisians had come to refer to him simply as Steve.

The city of Sfax, Tunisia / Photo by Caitlin Cassidy

Since the day I received the Facebook message, I have closely followed the events, still unfolding, in Tunisia and across the wider Arab World with an ever-evolving mix of excitement and concern. I have remained in close touch with many of the Tunisians I met in 2009 and have conducted, over the course of the last eight years, a series of interviews with them about their country’s and the world’s rapidly shifting social and political landscape. So much has changed. And so much has not.

In the wake of the 2016 US election and all its reverberations, I am struck by the parallels between Tunisia in 2009 and America today. I am struck by how closely the conversations I have today with people in the US (and across political orientation, age, socioeconomic status, etc) echo those I shared with Tunisians in 2009 — by how nearly even the language we use to speak about what’s happening in our country today matches that of Tunisians then. I find myself compelled to ask: What can we learn from the Tunisians? From the young people, in particular, who came of age in a time of domestic social and political upheaval? What can we help one another understand about the individual’s civic duty — to oneself, one’s country, and communities beyond and how best to effect positive, lasting change?

The following are three snapshots of life in Tunisia in 2009, 2010, and 2011, in that order, shared with me by three different Tunisians between the ages of 19 and 25, who have asked to remain anonymous. All three texts are verbatim and have not been translated; they were received in English.


Caitlin Nasema Cassidy was born in a suburb of Boston and raised between there and the Arab world. She is the daughter of seven-sea-sailing hippies Tom Cassidy Jr., the eldest of a large Irish Catholic family, and Joan Kelley, the youngest of a Lebanese and Syrian family. Caitlin fell in love with the performing arts early in life, and grew up studying acting, piano, voice, and dance after school. She received her BA from Georgetown in government and Arabic, and was a recipient of the Theatre and Performance Studies Department award for Excellence Across the Performing Arts. Upon graduating from GU, she journeyed to London, where she earned a master’s degree in acting from East 15 and completed a residency at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Caitlin has designed and implemented theatre-based curricula in Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Puerto Rico, served as Language and Culture Fellow with AMIDEAST, and devised performance for UNESCO’s World Theatre Conference as well as India’s International Theatre Festival. Caitlin has performed at Williamstown, Chautauqua, Berkshire Playwright’s Lab, Disney World, Lincoln Center, The Lark, and Playwrights Horizons, as well as with Epic Theatre Ensemble, Pig Iron, The Civilians, Synetic, and Noor. She is Co-Artistic Director of LubDub.Theatre Company.

Caitlin Cassidy is one of ten Lab Fellows, selected in the spring of 2017. Read more about the .

The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics

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Harnessing the power of performance to humanize global politics. Website: https://globallab.georgetown.edu

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