Some identities are worn like skin—naturally and effortlessly. Others are worn like armor that is too heavy, like clothing that constricts, wounds, and hinders movement. Mine long felt like that: multiple identities, learned in doubt, lived in tension, questioned in solitude. Today, I am trying to come to terms with them—not by simplifying them, but by fully embracing them in all their complexity.
I was born and raised in Tunisia before later settling in France. What was first imagined as a step became a prism through which I learned to reinterpret my history and my belongings.
In Tunisia, diversity is part of everyday life, yet it is rarely inscribed into the collective narrative. Black people have been present for centuries, rooted in the country’s history and social dynamics, and yet largely absent from the symbolic landscape. Marginalized in spaces of power, nearly invisible in media and cultural representations, they exist without being fully acknowledged.
This silence—more violent than explicit rejection—confronted me early on with a question many refuse to name: what space remains for a Black woman in a society that struggles to conceive of itself as plural? Moving to Europe did not erase this question; it displaced it, amplified it, and at times made it even more brutal, exposing my identities to new forms of scrutiny, suspicion, and fragmentation.
A National Identity of Variable Geometry
One of the deepest tensions I experienced concerned my Tunisian belonging. In Tunisia, national identity is built around a narrative that places Arabness at the forefront, perceived as the central pillar of culture and national pride. Africa—our geographical, historical, and cultural evidence—is often pushed to the background, almost as an embarrassing heritage, evoked more for its folklorized aspects than for its structural ties.
Growing up in this context meant hearing that we were the bridge between Africa and the Arab world, while observing that looking southward was avoided except through exoticism or condescension. Africanness was never fully embraced; it was tolerated but rarely claimed.
Within this framework, being Arab meant belonging to a relatively homogeneous reference model that valued resemblance and distrusted difference. To belong, one had to conform. And Black and Amazigh minority identities appeared as exceptions whose legitimacy had to be constantly justified.
When Otherness Becomes Daily Violence
It was within this identity landscape that I grew up as a Black woman. And I could never fully recognize myself in it, as everyday violence continuously eroded the very possibility of a serene identity. Ordinary, repeated violence chipped away at any chance of building a peaceful sense of self.
Later, the intensification of migration flows made the situation of Black Tunisians particularly precarious. The increased stigmatization of sub-Saharan migrants—widely rejected by much of Tunisian society—brought to light a parallel discrimination, long silenced, against Black Tunisians themselves. In this climate of heightened racialization, Black skin became a marker of suspicion, a daily burden assigned to those whose only “fault” was to inhabit it.
This reality revived old memories, especially those remarks disguised as compliments yet deeply humiliating: “You’re Black, but beautiful.” As if beauty had to apologize for coexisting with Blackness. As if being Black were, by definition, incompatible with dominant standards: light skin, straight hair, European features.
And when beauty is denied to us, sometimes our bodies are captured instead. How many times have I heard: “Black women are the best in bed.”
A sentence heavy with colonial violence, reducing the Black woman to a sexual function, a fantasy, a form of availability. A sentence that denies humanity, sensitivity, intelligence, dignity.
This symbolic, emotional, and bodily violence shaped an identity prison. And yet, it did not encompass the entirety of my experience.
Layers of Identity and Departure to France
I left Tunisia for France initially to study, as a natural continuation of an intellectual path still in formation. This departure was neither a flight nor an emotional rupture; it was a continuous movement, almost self-evident. What was meant to be temporary slowly unfolded into a lasting presence.
Staying in France never meant turning my back on Tunisia. On the contrary, it deepened the bond, made it more conscious and embodied. Between the two shores, I have never stopped circulating—in bodies, in memory, in language. This back-and-forth is not identity indecision, but a way of inhabiting the world in the plural, resisting the injunction to choose a single belonging.
It was in France that parts of me, previously obvious and almost silent, acquired new weight. My Arab-Muslim identity, lived in Tunisia as a spiritual intimacy, was projected into a European imaginary marked by suspicion, racialization, and security-driven narratives. I was no longer asked who I was, but what I embodied.
In this displacement, my identities—Black, Tunisian, African, Arab-Muslim, woman—revealed themselves in their full density. They coexisted like archaeological strata, layered and alive, each carrying memory, wound, and resistance. Some resonated with one another; others stood in tension, mapping an intimate geography made of friction as much as anchoring.
I was learning to carry them all, even when they pulled in opposite directions. And it was precisely in France, in this frontal collision between the intimate and the external gaze, that I grasped the scale of this identity dissonance. One scene returned almost mechanically:
— Where are you from?
— From Tunisia.
— Really? I didn’t know there were Black people in Tunisia…
Each time, it was a sharp blow—a brutal reminder that my very existence contradicts the reassuring categories of the dominant gaze. This sentence is not innocent: it carries the idea that I cannot be Tunisian because I am Black, that Arabness is imagined as white, that North Africa cannot be African except symbolically.
In the French gaze, my presence becomes an anomaly.
In the Tunisian gaze, it was a silence.
Thus the tension is constructed: invisibilized at home, hypervisible elsewhere, but never recognized in the totality of my being.
Searching, Understanding, Writing: Facing Fragmentation
Faced with these fractures, I sought to understand. The social sciences became both refuge and weapon. The history of slavery in North Africa, theories of racialization, intersectionality, African and Afro-descendant feminist thought gave me frameworks to relocate shame and pain outside the purely intimate—to inscribe my individual wounds within a collective and political memory.
My training in linguistics profoundly shaped this perspective. Studying language means learning to detect silences as much as words, hierarchies embedded in discourse, the way power inscribes itself in categories, accents, designations. Linguistics taught me that words never describe the world innocently: they produce it, organize it, sometimes exclude it. Understanding this allowed me to deconstruct dominant narratives and create spaces where other voices and meanings become possible.
Understanding allowed me to breathe.
Understanding allowed me to name.
Understanding allowed me to reclaim my dignity.
Today, I refuse the forced choice. I refuse to be fragmented, rendered readable only at the cost of erasing parts of myself. I am Black and Tunisian. I am African and Arab. I am Muslim and a citizen of the world. I am multiple—and it is precisely in this plurality that my strength resides.
Along this journey, writing imposed itself as both passion and necessity. I write often, almost instinctively, especially when the world becomes too heavy to carry. Writing helps me endure, cross moments of fracture, transform pain into something thinkable. Yet this intimate gesture belongs to a collective history: in Black and feminist traditions, writing is an act of resistance, a way to survive and to transmit.
Writing is refusing invisibilization; it is reclaiming narratives long confiscated, distorted, or denied. It is also, from a linguistic perspective, interrogating language itself—bending it, détourning it, inhabiting it differently to inscribe experiences that dominant words struggle to hold. Writing becomes a space of agency—a place from which to act, to define oneself, to reclaim power over one’s history and identity.
Speaking thus becomes an act of resistance. Refusing silence becomes a way of living. I write for those who were forced into silence, whose voices were disqualified, who were pushed toward erasure or concealment. Because invisibilization is violence. Because speech is a conquest. Because our borders, when told by those who cross them, can become horizons.
Conclusion: Making One’s Territory
For a long time, I believed my identities were cracks to be filled, contradictions to resolve, zones of discomfort to silence. Today, I know they are sites of thought, creation, and resistance. What is called tension is not weakness: it is movement, a living space where memories, inheritances, struggles, and possibilities intersect.
My very existence shifts borders—between Africa, the Arab world, and Europe; between racial otherness and Tunisian identity; between feminism and citizenship. It unsettles fixed narratives, closed identities, and exclusive belongings, reminding us that identities are not essences but trajectories.
This tension is no longer a fracture to repair. It has become a space of transformation. I am not seeking a pure, smooth, reassuring identity; I am seeking meaning, freedom, and justice. I have stopped searching for a place where I am authorized to exist fully. I have chosen to make my plurality a power, and my borders a territory.
Writing today means refusing to let those borders become prisons. It means inhabiting them, naming them, opening them. It means affirming that margins can become centers, that silence can be broken, and that speech can mend what history has fragmented.
In the territory I build through words, I am neither excessive nor marginal: I am legitimate.
Fatma Ben Barka Messaoudi
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