Although she is only in her sixties, the deep wrinkles in Mabrouka’s face appear to have been carved by a longer time.  She sits cross-legged on a shabby carpet near a clay brazier in the middle of a small room, her long gray braids lying on her chest.

With a trembling hand she takes a sip of tea.  “This simple life is better than the throne they are all fighting for. Do they think money can compensate for the loss of my martyred child?”

Although she is only in her sixties, the deep wrinkles in Mabrouka’s face appear to have been carved by a longer time.  She sits cross-legged on a shabby carpet near a clay brazier in the middle of a small room, her long gray braids lying on her chest.

With a trembling hand she takes a sip of tea.  “This simple life is better than the throne they are all fighting for. Do they think money can compensate for the loss of my martyred child?”

A year after the revolution, her son’s status as the first martyr of Bouziane has brought her and her other family members very little apart from useless recognition.

“I heard about my son’s death while I was picking olives with some women in a nearby village. The news totally struck me and I felt that my legs and arms were paralyzed and that something sharp was tearing up my guts.”

Her son, Mohammad Amari was killed on December 24^th, during confrontations between protestors and security forces.  A bullet went through his back while he was trying to save Shawqi Nasri, the second martyr in Bouziane, a town of 6,000 people and part of Bouzid State in central Tunisia.

Mohammad’s brother, Hassan, speaks angrily about the events that killed his brother. “My brother is neither a nationalist nor a progressive as some political parties are claiming. Our revolution was spontaneous, driven by the suffering we are still living in.”

Mabrouka says her family wants Mohammad’s killers to be prosecuted instead of being, as she claims, used as examples to romanticize the martyr issue.

A cheap gesture

Shortly after Mohammad’s death, his father, Sheikh Bashir, was summoned to former president Ben Ali and escorted to Tunis by a National Guard patrol.

“His only question was about my son’s martyrdom,” he remembers solemnly. “He promised to find a job for one of my children as soon as possible.”

Bashir is still waiting for the government to employ one of his ten children, or at least serve justice to his fallen son, whose death appears to have been in vain, as the family still lives in poverty and exclusion.

Wrath day

Outside Amari’a house, the slogans written on the walls still narrate the story of a young man whose death—as the first in the confrontations with security forces— was an impetus to the revolution.

Ziad, a young local sitting in a café filled with cigarette stubs left by unemployed regulars, remembers Amari. “He was martyred three days after successfully passing the teaching discourse – after being rewarded the teaching certificate.  No one expected that protestors would be shot at,” Ziad remembers.

A year after Amari’s death, the young people of Bouziane commemorated his death under the slogan “Wrath Day”; a wrath perpetuated by ongoing unemployment, marginalization and yet to be realized revolutionary promises.