My mother gave birth to me at the dawn of an autumn when everything was falling.
So I too fell into the lap of the world.

My father took me, whispering the basmala in my ear:
“All of life for my firstborn daughter.”

And we all returned to a small house attached to a rural school in a peaceful South.

I grew up there…
I discovered the world from the kitchen window overlooking the schoolyard,
and through my mother’s dreamy smiles.

My mother taught me many things,
but I had to wait six whole years to learn, by chance, the color of my skin,
when the daughter of our new neighbors shouted, “Black! Black!”

Those were my first steps in the city,
my first steps away from the village,
and the first of the great discoveries of my life.

I am Fatma Zahra…

My village is home to about fifty families, most of them my relatives—or at least I imagined a certain kinship with them—and a single school above which the national flag flies. Without it, we would have had no connection to what was happening four or five kilometers away from us.

There, we shared the same color, immense dreams—though different from one another—the love of the land, and a hope suspended in the lines of open palms resting upon the palms of grandmothers who read life and the future.

I would extend my hand to Aunt Zouïda; she would say with great confidence and firmness:
“You will grow up far from here, and your voice will be the voice of us all.”

This sentence would bring immense joy to my mother’s face, and she would add:
“Without a doubt. If you study and dream of the big cities, you will reach them. Think beyond thirst and heat, and of how much our stories need something to soothe their dryness.”

Our conversations in the kitchen, while she braided my hair into many plaits and reviewed my lessons with me, resembled the great debates of a revolutionary party—with one difference: my mother made me believe in revolution before the comrades did.

We held tightly to one another from the beginning, and I clung to her even more when I came home questioning the neighbor’s daughter’s remark: what had troubled her about my color? Does black have other synonyms? She had uttered descriptions I had never heard before… Was I truly different from her? At that age, I had no definition of difference—except that the feeling of safety in the village seemed the opposite of the strangeness that settled in my heart when “Khawla” pointed her finger at me in a swift gesture, in a deliberate act of stigmatization whose meaning I only understood and deconstructed years later.

That moment was decisive in my life, and perhaps the next phase could be titled: Redoubled Effort.

That is what I understood from my mother’s answer, as she held my hand and looked into my eyes with a sternness I had never seen before. She spoke of the link between our color and slavery at a certain time, and of the necessity of resisting and working hard to change that narrative. Her words were very simple and, at the same time, heavy for a six-year-old child to bear.

She did not know in detail the great abolitionist movements or their activists. Her speech invoked neither scholarly terms nor theoretical definitions. But one thing in her words was certain: we were born free, and we must defend that freedom in a society that still chews over the fantasies of master and slave.

She thus built her own discourse without academic references; she did not know bell hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, who nevertheless affirm that one of the essential conditions of survival is permanent resistance.

That is why this sentence by Audre Lorde always brought me back to that moment whenever my family drew me into some competition—academic excellence, meticulous care of my school uniform, good grades, the way I ate, walked, spoke, the prohibition against complaining or crying:
“We were always forced to be stronger than anyone around us, not because we wanted to, but because survival required it.”

I worked relentlessly in class; I was the well-behaved child in the neighborhood and at home. I excelled in my studies, led the school radio, and was nicknamed “the brown presenter,” then “the little brown girl in the pink smock” that covered half my small body, carrying a schoolbag heavier than myself.

I protested the behavior of my science teacher, “Abdel Nasser”: he used to ask our classmate Sihem to sing after she had wet her pants. I was then called “the brown lawyer.” And so, little by little, that color began to stick to me.

It was both irritating and a source of pride, in a way that is still difficult for me to explain. But I know with certainty that I decided, in one way or another, to protest.

And since writing is a “march of protest,” I turned this text into a banner that I carry in the street, at home, in bed, in the kitchen, in airports, cafés, police stations, and border checkpoints; at family gatherings, at school and university; at the breakfast table, at the hairdresser’s, in the mosque, in organizations, and in all relationships… even in love.

My presence as a minority in the spaces I occupied was exhausting at first. For example, at the beginning of each school year, I counted the number of Black students in high school and then at university—a number that decreased as the years went on. In meetings and demonstrations, I did the same, and I felt discouraged whenever we were few, or when I was alone.

Until the day that illusion was shattered by a police baton during a protest a few meters from the governorate headquarters of Sfax. One of them “disciplined” me, beating me violently and shouting:
“Since when do slaves lead demonstrations?”

It was a decisive moment…
And representing my people became a duty, not a choice—even if I am alone.

I even came to regard my presence in those spaces as an unavoidable political duty, especially after discovering Crenshaw’s writings and her analyses of the intersections of paradigms of domination that a Black woman may experience—convinced each time that we are capable of dismantling and overthrowing them, and that they carry within themselves the seeds of their own resistance as oppression intensifies.

I carried the burden of my skin… and as a communist, that of my people; as a daughter of the South, that of the rugged land and the village well that dried up, even though we drowned it in tears. And with the queer family, I understood that the body has a particular salt in the eye and in the soul.

Thus I came to understand several meanings:

Resistance: opening the door each day while swallowing the bitterness of vigilance, and stepping out with a straight back, in opposition to fear and hesitation.

Hope: Khawla, with her accusing finger… I reopened the story and the wound with her twenty years later when we became friends; she then became a steadfast ally.

The story of “I” becoming the story of “we” in a true moment: when three women from three different families, regions, backgrounds, and ideologies place their fingers on the same wound and weep—women who are founding a project against weeping and against defeat.

Protest: this text.

Narrative: my mother… and other women who chose to walk with faces stripped of humiliation and filled with dignity.

The body: nothing… except the shorthand of raising a forearm to protest or to embrace.

Colors: no color speaks of commitment more than the color of blood and revolutions.

Victory: continuous resistance… a radical form of giving life true meaning.