Mohamed Bouasisi: the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated on 17 December, 2010 in protest against the corruption of the Ben Ali regime. Bouasisi’s suicide would soon become a symbol. He was martyred. And his martyrdom marked a founding moment of the Arab Spring.
Self-Immolation has an incredible history. So too does fire.
Gaston Bachelard writes that “Fire smolders in a soul more surely than it does under ashes” (13). Fire: “…from the sight of the great blaze of fire shining against the night sky and extending out over the broad expanse of ploughed fields.”
Boehme anticipates Bachelard: “Our life is as a fire dampened, or as a fire shut up in stone” (Incarnatione).
For Norman O. Brown, “The choice is between partial incorporation and total incorporation (integration). Participation (playing a part), or fusion. Total incorporation, or fusion, is combustion in fire” (Love’s Body, p. 176). Love is all fire (179). “To be aflame at every point. To be alive is to be burning.”
Of course, Bouasisi was hardly the first martyr of the Arab Spring. Before him there was Bradley Manning. Manning’s leaked classified diplomatic cables exposed a range of illegitimate dictatorships in Northern Africa, Western Asia and the Middle East. The publicized cables made formerly repressed private sentiments publicly recognizable. Popular unrest soon translated into fervorous revolutionary upheaval.
Manning's motivations stemmed from his disenchantment with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A wave of democratizing energies sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, prompted by the US military’s policy on closeting gay soldiers.Manning: secret progenitor of the Arab Spring.
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