Mohamed Bouazizi, and the rise of a new avant-garde



Mohamed Bouazizi

Sometimes the poetry you think you know can have an even darker more unimaginably abyssal side, and if it results in acts of self-immolation (as I believe it did in the case of Mohamed Bouazizi), verses and flames cannot be separated any longer. I believe a young vendor who "devoured literature and especially poetry" & set the course of the pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa initiated a new world avant-garde at the same time.

The cry of the end of the avant-garde in the postmodern world ends here, devoid as it now is of both its textuality & the cosy self-serving ideology of critics and theorists who've fed it for decades: of its hostility against real-time history. For all their iconoclasms, postmodernists continue to stay comfortably ensconced in ivory towers while the world crashes round them. From this point on all cultural works can't be apolitical any more. In fact, the very same political bureaucracy, nepotism and corruption that led to Bouazizi's martyrdom must now been seen in a very real way as mirroring the stodgy culture-badgering of state-sponsored writers & critics. Dictatorial theory and politics now look the same because of the potential for destructiveness they've always wielded.

Tactical media (primarily linked through Facebook and graffiti) combined with a sense of violated self-worth to form a new lyricism of struggle worthy of Pindar, Sappho, Tagore. The results have been nothing less than revolutionary. Words of the poet (& poetry lover), now absolutely inseparable, change from the safe metropolitanism of "official verse culture" into the very dirt under the street vendor's feet: and the vaunted disconnectedness between sentiment & language popular today, with all its critical appurtenances, must now be seen as built on the same institutionalized state surveillance and ideology that led to a poet-lover's death.

Is this exaggeration for rhetorical effect only? No. It's a necessary beginning & it's not as if we haven't seen national epics before or the beginnings of one. When the poetic heart of a street vendor caught fire it was the collectivism of a national epic, and the outrage of local pieties against ruling overlords, that fuelled it & set it on its eternal course. With outrage powerful enough to overturn dictatorial regimes, it's perhaps time also to cheer the end of a type of world-literariness that likes to destroy local sentiments, customs &, above all else, a collective imagination: the overthrow of the postmodern and perhaps the well-heeled and well-fed minions of globalization in all its forms. Poetry (except when it was joined to the human heart) was never able to topple the citadels.

A street-level avant-gardism such as Mohamed Bouazizi has inspired might run on the following principles: firstly, language must turn into tactics, and poetry hereafter into Internet poetry:

"INTERNET POETRY will be a beacon of hope: a symbol for a new and blossoming way to spread poetry and culture: INTERNET POETRY will carry us through the end of gatekeepers in poetry, the end of poetry as an obscured printed product, and the end of poetry as something people intentionally and successfully avoid:


print is dead: publishers are dead: academia is dead: borders is dead: literary journals are dead: ezra pound is literally dead";

secondly, Bouazizi's self-immolation is to be seen as a radical culmination (similar to a papal visit that brought down Communism in the 80s or Mandela's imprisonment), one caused by a sense of undeserved shame and Facebook activism;

thirdly, organized belief systems like the corporation or academy that haughtily cite any dictatorial regime (such as is found in Libya, Iran, Saudi Arabia) as another "end of ideology" & not take some responsibility for it will bear the same mark of guilt as the Tunisian tyranny that stilled the vendor's grief. Writers, activists, researchers impassioned by Bouazizi's martyrdom must lay down the pen & tag the walls and streets in the settlements, favelas and shantytowns;

fourthly, once wrested from the class of professional writers & critics discourse must stop looking like government policy and guidelines, and look more like what caused the Tunisian revolution in the first place: a tactical media created by an enraged poetry. And towards that end computers, handhelds, iPhones and other types of networks (even the radio) will always be the primary means of cultural transmission in a digital public domain. Since Bouazizi's poetry was a people's poetry, the overthrow was a collective effort: something that (in the words of the Internet poetry manifesto) people will no longer purposely avoid; and

lastly, a literary vanguard must form to bring about real revolution. Please note how the couplet-slogan has toppled the Egyptian tyrant! Here was a global political event materialized through poetry.