‘The Tunisian rap scene: an intersectional analysis of women rappers’

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Tunisian women rappers and shows how these artists have carved a space for themselves in the masculine musical genre of rap. This paper highlights the complexity of the issues depicted in female rappers’ songs. The article sheds light on the rappers: Medusa, Sabrina, Tuny Girl and Queen Nesrine. These female rappers defend women’s rights in their songs, while also stressing the multi-layeredness of Tunisian women’s lives and struggles. Their songs target multiple forms of marginalisation relating to sexism, poverty, corruption, classism, security, employment and law and justice. Despite their awareness of and resistance to male dominance, these rappers do not reduce Tunisian women’s problems to patriarchy. Rather, they emphasise the impact of the intersection between geopolitical and socio-economic issues on women and girls. This paper demonstrates that Tunisian women rappers use their art in order to expose women’s intersectional realities and the various challenges they face.

KEYWORDS:

• Women rappers
• Tunisia
• intersectionality
• rap

Introduction

Hip hop is a movement of protest (Spady 2013, 128). It began as a sociocultural emanation around 1974, and the associated musical genre developed in 1979 (Schloss 2009, 17). Hip hop is a culture and arts movement originally composed of four elements - break-dancing, graffiti, DJ music and rap - that emerged from African Americans’ experiences of political and historical marginalisation in the United States. Many have debated the precise origins of hip hop culture. Hip hop culture emerged from the African diaspora’s experiences, historical continuum and cultural expressions in North America and the Caribbean that collided in the Bronx, New York around the early 1970s (Tom 2016, 712). Hip hop is a celebration of urban ethnic art and culture.

Hip hop culture produced a new musical genre called rap. Rapping evolved from the rhythmic poetry known as rap music (Tom 2016, 717). Rap involves spoken vocals that feature rhyme, assonance, alliteration, imagery and wordplay. Rap uses urban idioms and/or street slang. Rappers are known for their preference for replacing singing with a rhythmic version of rhymed talking. Historically, the earliest precursors to rap are West African griot traditions in which rhythmic chanters reported news, kept genealogical records of families or praised kingdoms, all while usually accompanying themselves on a string instrument. This instrument is a chordophone played like a harp and is called Kora. Griots were travelling poets who used talk-singing but did not add criticism to their lyrical content. Their lesser-known West African contemporaries who played bolon performed talk-singing that was allowed to be critical. The bolon is a chordophone with lower register than the kora and played like an upright bass. This critical talk-singing came closer to prefiguring the sociocultural rap that emerged much later in the United States (Fonseca and Dawn Goldsmith 2021, 1).

By 1971, the word ‘rap’ was used to describe the rhythmic talking in albums. This rhythmic talking emerged from the streets, parks, public housing spaces and small clubs of the South Bronx in New York (Forman 2013, 95; Fonseca and Dawn Goldsmith 2021, 2). Rappers gave voice to people trapped in the underworlds of American life. The public emergence of the rapper represented the sudden eruption of brown and black voices onto the stage of American life. Invisible ghetto youth who were previously confined to the corners of the world could use this art to tell their stories, verbalise their frustrations, voice their complaints and let loose their dreams. Rap allowed its artists to claim a territory from which they were commonly excluded. These youth offered alternative visions of American life, seen from the perspective of the urban poor. In so doing, they introduced mainstream America to parts of the US that had suffered from years of racism, negligence and government misrule (Nava 2022, 11).

Tricia Rose highlights the value and importance of hip hop (Rose 2008, ix) and argues that rap music ‘brings a tangle of some of the most complex social, cultural and political issues in contemporary American society’ (Rose 1994, 2). Indeed, hip hop culture has offered a place for young people to begin to dialogue about social problems including poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, crime, depression, environmental degradation and the ongoing legacies of colonialism (Marsh and Campbell 2020, 11). In this regard, Murray Forman stresses hip hop’s focus on the oppression of and discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, particularly those who come from low socio-economic backgrounds (Forman and Guillard 2020, 214). Andrea Clay also stresses that American youth embrace hip hop as a means of articulating political sensibilities. Young people use hip hop in order to address and navigate the violence of institutionalised racism and classism (Clay 2012, 56, 94).

Sujatha Fernandes writes that young people turn to rap as a means to break the boredom of their existence (Fernandes 2011, 120). She emphasises that hip hop attracts youths who are racially discriminated against, economically marginalised and politically disenfranchised. For these young people, hip hop offers an activist space through which they can channel their sociopolitical critique. As a culture founded upon resistance, emancipation and revolt, hip hop has enabled youth to challenge common stereotypes (Marsh and Campbell 2020, 5) because it has the ability to give them a voice, disrupt power relations and cause trouble for hegemonic systems (Marsh 2020, 222; Shinhae Jun 2014, 3). Hip hop was an alternative counter-culture that raised its fists against the establishment (Shinhae Jun 2014, 6). Forman uses bell hooks’ notion of ‘talking back’ in order to illustrate rap’s politics of resistance (Forman 2002, 11, 13) because rap music has been a central factor in the circulation of cultural counter-discourses among black and Latino teenagers. Artists confront and refuse the systemic racism of American society (Forman 2002, 1) and use hip hop to represent their experiences (Forman 2014b, 301).

It is noteworthy that the genre that started in 1973 in the Bronx has since exploded into a nationwide and, later on, worldwide phenomenon (Komaniecki 2023, 235). At the end of the twentieth century, hip hop was spread abroad by a growing globalised entertainment industry that relied on the easy commodification of rap music (Tom 2016, 711–712, 717). Globalisation and human mobility have internationalised hip hop (Forman 2014a, 123, 125). As such, hip hop has been extensively globalised and indigenised in various contexts in the process of being incorporated into local languages and cultural forms (Mitchell 2006, 136). Today, hip hop has expanded globally and we see flourishing hip hop scenes in diverse global contexts (Forman 2013, 95; Fernandes 2011, 9; Fonseca and Dawn Goldsmith 2021, 6), including the Arab world where rap’s popularity has grown incessantly.

Unfortunately, though, the globalisation of hip hop has not changed one of its darkest features: misogyny. Despite the aforementioned merits, historically, hip hop has been about the reclamation of public space and that public space excluded women and girls (Marsh 2020, 229). The image of authentic hip hop is easily attached to performances of the hyper-masculine and ‘thugged out’ artist. Maintaining the ‘authentic’ persona, rappers’ lyrics are misogynist and encourage violence (Shinhae Jun 2014, 11). Hip hop’s heteronormative hyper-masculinity is marked by a wilful degradation and continual subjugation of women (Marsh 2020, 227). Rap, in particular, is a very masculine genre of popular music where traditional sex role stereotypes continue to predominate (Brownsworth 2001, 48; Cobb and Boettcher 2007, 3025–3026). The internationalisation of this musical genre has not ended its sexism since Arab rap is no better than its Western counterpart in this regard. Across the Arab and Western worlds, many male rappers present females as inferior to males and use derogatory images that objectify and sexualise women.

By accentuating women’s physical appearance and by depicting them as passive and dependent on men, many rappers present women in a condescending manner that trivialises and marginalises them. Indeed, many lyrical depictions of women celebrate a hegemonic masculinity that normalises violence against women and that honours the men who subordinate females (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). It is uncommon to find rap songs that portray women as strong, independent, brave, intelligent or equal to men. Many misogynistic songs portray women as strippers, sex-workers and tools to gratify heterosexual male instincts. Many male rappers threaten women with rape or assault and describe those who seem to ‘have forgotten their place’ as ‘bitches’, ‘sluts’, ‘whores’, ‘tramps’, etc. Based on this, abusing women both verbally and physically becomes a badge of honour for the men who sing misogynistic lyrics (Weitzer and Kubrin 2009, 5, 19; Beatty 2002, 29). This toxic masculinity that dominates the lyrics explains the frequent derogatory naming and shaming of women and the legitimation of sexist violence found in many Arab and Western rap songs alike.

As a response, a number of female rappers have decided to offer different representations of women, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East. Through their songs, these artists oppose the objectification, victimisation, exploitation and subordination of women. These female rappers are carving a new space for themselves in this male-dominated music field. Prominent names include Almas from the United Arab Emirates, Malika from Lebanon, Mayam Mahmoud from Egypt (a veiled rapper), Asayel Slay from Saudi Arabia (another veiled rapper), Rana Badr Eddine from Sudan, Linda Black Hard from Algeria, Soultana from Morocco and Medusa from Tunisia. Through their art, women rappers are countering stereotypical misrepresentations of Arab women. Widespread cliches associate Arab women with victimhood, weakness and a lack of agency (Tucker 1993, viii; Mabro 1991, 1; Nashat and Tucker 1998, xxxiv; Al-Hassan Golley 2003, xii; Kandiyoti 1996, 9; Ahmed 1982, 526; Tucker 1983, 322). The songs of Arab women artists reflect the wrongness of this discourse that reduces women’s problems to sexism.

In this study, I focus on Tunisian women rappers. The Tunisia-based researcher Reem Ben Rjab explains that Tunisian rap has been and still is men’s domain. Ben Rjab highlights the prominence of the term ‘whore’ in Tunisian rap songs and criticises Tunisian rappers’ employment of insults and metaphors in the form of contempt towards and diminishment of women (Bin Rajab 2018). Unlike many Tunisian male rappers, Tunisian women artists present an image of agency, strength and independence in their songs. Tunisian women’s rap represents a relatively recent phenomenon that rose to prominence especially after the revolution. While few women artists like Sabrina, who has been rapping since 2007, were immersed in this art before 2011, most of the other Tunisian female rappers emerged after the Arab Spring.

Although female artists came to Tunisia’s rap scene later than their male counterparts, their presence, art and activism are changing the world of Tunisian rap. In particular, women’s presence is changing Tunisians’ view of rap as an exclusively male musical genre. Despite its newness, Tunisian women’s rap is changing the dynamics of Tunisia’s rap scene. These women’s rap speaks to larger gender relations by reflecting the sexist hierarchies that continue to dominate their society. Rap also speaks to these women’s various attempts to resist subordination from an intersectional perspective. The female rappers covered in this study do not limit women’s suffering to patriarchy. Rather, they adopt an intersectional approach that reflects the multi-faceted realities of Tunisian women. Unlike the approaches that fixate on gender, these artists’ awareness of intersectionality enables their audiences to understand the complexity of Tunisian women’s lives and the challenges they face. In this paper, I follow an intersectional approach that allows me to analyze selected songs by Tunisian women rappers. My article demonstrates that these artists do not reduce women’s problems to patriarchy. I argue that Tunisian women rappers emphasise the impact of the intersection between geopolitical and socio-economic issues on women and girls.

It is noteworthy that this important topic has been disregarded by rap scholars. The studies that have so far been conducted on Tunisian rap have highlighted other themes, hence disregarding women’s contribution to this art. In this regard, Stefano Barone (2019) analyzes the representation of Tunisian social structure, especially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Zouhir Gabsi (2020) studies rappers’ use of language as a vehicle to claim the authenticity of their message and to expose political and socio-economic grievances. Ilyana Ovshieva (2013) focuses on the issues of identity in Tunisian rap music. Chamekh (2021) and Salzbrunn, Souiah, and Mastrangelo (2015) explore the topic of male undocumented migration seen through the prism of rap. Ghali (2022), Agatha Evangeline Palma (2014), Souad Halila (2015) and George Simon (2015) discuss the representation of revolutionary and transitional politics in rap.

It is true that the study conducted by Dervla Sara Shannahan and Qurra Hussain (2011) on masculinities in the Tunisian rap scene devotes two-and-a-half pages to the discussion of the misogyny of Tunisian rap. Yet, so far, no study has discussed Tunisian female rappers. Accordingly, this paper sheds light on the women rappers Sabrina, Medusa, Tuny Girl and Queen Nesrine respectively. The paper starts by discussing the socio-economic and geopolitical context that has affected the songs. Afterwards, it analyses each of the aforementioned artists through a focus on the diverse and multi-faceted issues they rap about. The discussion shows that all the chosen songs reflect the gendered impact of the juncture between socio-economic and geopolitical pressures.

Gendered socio-economic and geopolitical context

On January 14th, 2011, Tunisians toppled their then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who had ruled the country from 1987 to 2010. Tunisians were optimistic when they removed the Ben Ali regime. They thought that corruption would end and that prosperity would spread. Yet they were disappointed because poverty proliferated, unemployment became widespread and the Tunisian economy collapsed after the revolution. According to the Tunisian Institute of National Statistics, a third of Tunisian higher education graduates were unemployed (Chamekh 2021, 50). The National Survey on Population and Employment shows that there was a marked increase in the unemployment rate. The first quarter of 2019 recorded an estimated 637,700 unemployed persons out of the total working population. During the first quarter of 2019, the unemployment rate was estimated at 12.4% for males and 22.6% for females (Mbarek 2022). Furthermore, the loans that Tunisia borrowed have crippled the economy, reduced public spending and decreased Tunisians’ purchasing power. The IMF issued loans to Tunisia worth $1.74bn in 2013 and $2.9bn in 2016. However, these loans have not been efficient as economic growth has remained stagnant, while debt servicing to the IMF and World Bank has increased. In 2021, Tunisia’s total external debt amounted to $41.6bn (Un and Mukanganga 2023).

More to the point, the collapse of the Tunisian economy has made the poor poorer and has killed their hopes for economic betterment. Currently, poverty indicators are estimated at 15.2%. Yet there are substantial differences among the regions. The poverty rate in the Tunisian countryside is 26%. This rate is much higher than the general national average, and particularly higher than that of the coastal areas (Mbarek 2022). According to the World Bank, the spatial distribution of poverty shows that it is typically concentrated in the Northwest (28.4%) and Central West (30.8%) (World Bank 2019). What is worse is that the high living cost and the increase in the price of consumer goods have made many people live below the poverty line. Data of the Tunisian Association for the Rights of the Child show that 26% of Tunisian children live below the poverty line. Consequently, out of 100 children enrolled in the first year, only 50 of them make it to the last year of high school (Staff Writer 2023).

Indeed, Tunisian children have faced an unprecedented crisis since the revolution. Many primary school girls discontinue their education and become domestic servants as a result of poverty. In some cases, children themselves insist on leaving schools in order to help their parents. A 2015 report issued by the National Institute of Statistics stated that during the 2013-2014 academic year more than 112,000 students dropped out of school, of which 40.4% were girls. Several reasons explain the phenomenon of school dropout. These include parents’ poverty, poor education quality, inadequate facilities, overcrowded classrooms and the poor accessibility of schools. Distance from school represents a big issue for girls in the rural areas where girls’ safety and the long daily walks taken by female students in the morning and especially in the afternoon are common dropout reasons in remote areas (Ben Saied 2021, 485–488). Tunisian rulers have failed to provide a solution for this problem.

New rulers’ failure to solve these socio-economic issues and the multiple additional loans they have requested have made a huge number of Tunisians lose hope regarding the politicians of their country. According to Arab Barometer (AB) survey estimates, Tunisians’ evaluation of the government’s performance on economic issues has suffered a major setback since the revolution. Nearly 50% of Tunisian respondents rated the government’s performance in addressing unemployment and narrowing the gap between the poor and rich as ‘very poor.’ Moreover, vulnerability to poverty continues to be high as many of the non-poor remain at risk of falling into poverty (Kokas, El-Lahga, and Lopez-Acevedo 2021, 4, 9). The greed and bad governance of Tunisia’s politicians have played an important role in the country’s socio-economic problems. According to Transparency International, 64% of Tunisians considered corruption to be on the rise, while 30% of the population considered government employees to be among the most corrupt in the country. The same watchdog documented corruption in almost all sectors and administrations: the police, health services, education, agriculture and transportation (Chamekh 2021, 51).

This crisis has resulted in unprecedented numbers of irregular sea-crossings to Europe after the revolution as many Tunisians considered undocumented immigration their only solution. While paperless immigration used to be a largely male enterprise, the number of Tunisian women and girls who try to cross the Mediterranean by boat has soared since 2011. Although young men remain the dominant category of departees, an increasing number of women, children, infants and even entire families are joining them. A 2022 report on Tunisian irregular immigration has shown that 540 Tunisian women and 599 accompanied children arrived in Italy between January and November 2021, compared to 463 women and 435 accompanied children who disembarked throughout 2020 (Herbert 2020, 9). Unfortunately, European authorities criminalise and try to deport them when they catch them. In order to be able to detain and repatriate those who try to reach Italy by boat, the EU presents the mere act of crossing the border as a crime that needs to be combated (Kebsi 2020, 982). Despite this ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf 2006, 381) which has transformed immigrants into ‘crimmigrant[s]’ (Aas 2011, 331), Tunisians defy border militarisation in order to cross to the other side of the Mediterranean.

As husbands, sons, brothers and boyfriends risk their lives to reach ‘Hopeland’ (Obi 2007, 115), women are left behind. The female relatives and lovers who stay in the homeland endure the panic of separation, the fear of a drowning scenario, financial hardship when migrants cannot remit money, family dislocation and sexual repression as they wait for the return of their spouses or male family members (Kebsi 2022, 185–192; Kebsi 2023, 312). The surge in unauthorised immigration after the revolution has resulted in a large number of missed border-crossers. Since the summer of 2011, mothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, and brothers of about five hundred Tunisian migrants who disappeared as they were trying to reach Italy by boat are still demanding the truth about what happened to their relatives. Many families of missing migrants decided to self-organize in an association called La terre pour tous (The Earth for everyone). Many families strongly believed that their sons were still alive, eventually incarcerated in some detention centre or in some prison, registered under fake names and identities. Migrants’ mothers protested over the loss of their children and the government’s carelessness. The recurring question these mothers addressed to Tunisian and Italian authorities was: ‘Where are our sons?’ (Oliveri 2016, 155, 162). However, the Tunisian and Italian authorities did not do anything to either support these women or to solve the crisis that pushes young people to risk their lives on fishing boats.

Moreover, even the young Tunisians who have not tried to leave Tunisia by boat are suffering. The country’s crisis has made many youth resort to drugs and alcohol. Research has shown that alcohol consumption is becoming more and more common, especially among Tunisian adolescents (Zammit et al. 2022). Drug addiction rates have also increased among teenagers after the revolution, especially those in high schools. According to a study by the Tunisian Ministry of Health, the consumption of Ecstasy pills increased 7 times between 2013 and 2017, and the consumption of cannabis more than doubled during the same period (Chamekh 2021, 51). Comparative studies of the characteristics of consumers’ profiles between the pre- and post-revolutionary period have shown the upsurge of female consumers in Tunisia’s typically masculine drug world (Badri 2017, 5; Mabrouk et al. 2011). The women rappers I discuss in the next section of this paper rap about all these interlaced socio-economic and geopolitical issues.

The Tunisian rapper Sabrina

The first artist on whom this analysis focuses is Sabrina. Although many people think that Medusa is the first Tunisian female rapper, Sabrina is the first one as she started rapping in 2007 (Tele Tanbir 2018). Sabrina started rapping at the age of 15 years (SRF 2015). In her songs, Sabrina stresses her strength and determination to achieve her goals. She emphasises that her art is her source of strength (IFM 2020). Sabrina’s interviews show that she considers having a nice voice and a strong personality two indispensable conditions for success. Despite having these assets, she affirms the difficulty of proving oneself as a woman in the male-dominated world of rap (Sabrina YouTube Official Channel 2016b). Sabrina appears often on the following Tunisian radio and TV channels: El Hiwar Ettounsi, Al-Wattania, IFM Radio and Hannibal TV.

Sabrina is known for her criticism of male rappers. Despite the different attempts to silence her, Sabrina insists on criticising the Tunisian men who sing rap. For example, she mocked Walid Nahdi’s first attempt at rap and considered him incompetent (Tele Tanbir 2018). She also has criticised the male artists who disrespect and humiliate liberal Tunisian women. One of these is the rapper Balti who humiliated the Tunisian women who enjoyed sexual freedom, went clubbing and drank alcohol (Sabrina YouTube Official Channel 2016a). The male Tunisian rapper Kaffon objected to Sabrina’s criticism of men in her art, stressing that she needs to be ‘soft.’ Kaffon also criticised Sabrina for being too ‘masculine’ and for using ‘masculine’ movements in her performances. Sabrina ignores these sexist comments and stresses her strength because she started rapping before the revolution and even before Facebook and YouTube became popular in Tunisia (Tele Tanbir 2018), knowing that Facebook and YouTube represent the main channels through which Tunisian rappers present their songs to the public.

The title of the song I now discuss in this article is A’radhli, which means ‘meet me’ (Sabrina 2013). In the Tunisian dialect, this expression is used mainly in fights when a person wants to show that they do not fear their enemy. The full colloquial expression is ‘a’radhli fi doura’, which would be translated as ‘meet me in the turn.’ This expression originated in, and is commonly used in, the working-class neighbourhoods, which are full of small alleys. Fights are very common in these marginalised low socio-economic urban areas. Waiting for or ‘meeting’ someone in one of the small alleys is the best way to defeat them as they will not be able to see the person who intends to attack them before they take the turn. The person who hides in the ‘doura’ (turn) benefits from the seconds of surprise of the person who has just taken the turn without expecting the attack. This makes the attacker more likely to defeat the victim. All of this makes the expression ‘a’radhli fi doura’ symbolise fearlessness and indifference towards the enemy.

Through the use of this expression, the rapper asserts that she is brave and does not fear anyone. This bravery is clear in her scathing critique of politicians in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Like many other Tunisian women who went to the streets over the post-revolutionary years in order to protest politicians’ dishonesty, lack of transparency and failure to solve the country’s crisis, Sabrina condemns the government officials and considers them useless rotten fruits. She accuses them of corruption and of stealing the budget as she raps: ‘Don’t believe the corrupt state.’ By indicting the theft of the new rulers, she exposes the carelessness about and neglect of the people in whose names they speak. Sabrina tells the new rulers that they are not any different from the previous dictatorial regime. She echoes the stance of many Tunisian women when she raps that the previous regime was, sadly, better than the post-revolutionary governments. This is why Sabrina says that people ‘regret Zine.’¹

Furthermore, Sabrina exposes the marginalisation of Tunisian youth after the revolution. The song tells us that poverty, unemployment, misery and corruption have made many of them embark on dangerous boat journeys towards Europe, hoping that they might improve their financial situation and find jobs there. In response to the unprecedented rise of deadly sea-crossings after the revolution, Sabrina addresses both the European and Tunisian authorities as follows: ‘Open the gate of Carthage, or even of Nefidha!’ Carthage is a synecdoche for the Carthage airport, which is the biggest airport in Tunisia. Nefidha represents a small airport. Sabrina deplores the death of Tunisian youth in the Mediterranean. Her use of the imperative represents a call for borderlessness. By asking the EU and Tunisian governments to open borders, Sabrina advocates allowing people to travel safely, not on cramped boats that are likely to sink.

It is noteworthy that the Mediterranean Sea represents the world’s deadliest border (United Nations Website 2017). Sabrina’s song reflects a strong awareness of the push factors that make young people risk their lives and travel to the unknown. Sabrina underlines the lack of opportunities and governmental assistance as she tells her audience: In Tunisia, ‘unemployment and poverty will not make you happy.’ Sabrina highlights the issue of classism, which is prominent in Tunisia. Sabrina raps ‘we never live in Ennasr.’ Ennasr represents one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the whole country. In talking about this chic area, where only wealthy people can reside, Sabrina unveils the social divides between the country’s few rich people and the vast majority of poor citizens. This inequality leads to what Hakim Aderrezak calls ‘leavism’ (Abderrezak 2016 , 69): the persistent desire to cross the Mediterranean towards Europe in search of a better future. Since 2011, an increasing number of these leavists has become pregnant women and adolescent girls. Even those teenagers who do not cross the border and leave the country geographically strive to leave it mentally by consuming drugs in order to forget its problems. The humiliation resulting from financial hardship pushes the young to adopt an escape strategy through either leaving Tunisia without visas or engaging in alcoholism and drug addiction. This is evident in Sabrina’s song when she says: ‘A bottle and half the youth are stumbling’ and ‘the rest are sniffing white powder.’

The diversity of the problems mentioned in this song shows us that the issues of women in the rapper’s country cannot be reduced to patriarchy: unemployment, poverty, classism, corruption, coercion and the inability to move freely in this supposedly global village due to one’s nationality are all problems that torment Tunisian women. The variety of geopolitical and socio-economic pressures that Sabrina has raised in her song testifies to the intersectional aspect of subordination. These various issues prove that Tunisian Muslim women’s oppression cannot be reduced to local sexism and male domination.

The Tunisian rapper Medusa

Medusa is another Tunisian Muslim rapper whose songs reflect the intersectional forces which Tunisian women have to face. Medusa is the artist nickname of Boutheina El Aouadi. Medusa is from the coastal city Nabeul. Medusa became a hip hop fan at a very young age. At the age of 10 years, she started break-dancing. Later on, her hobby became one of her two jobs. Medusa started writing poems that became her own songs. She started her career in Tunisia and continued it when she moved to France to work as an IT engineer. Currently, she is both a rapper and data analyst. She is also a mother to a little daughter. Medusa is the most famous Tunisian female rapper in the West, and her immigration to France has played a role in this international fame. Medusa is determined to create a balance between her two jobs. In the Tunisian context, Medusa is lucky because her family strongly supports her interest in rap. Her brother was the one who taught her break dance first. Later on, she continued break dancing with a group of dancers in Nabeul’s Neapolis Cultural Centre.

This is not very common in Tunisia because Tunisian society considers rap a ‘masculine’ music and does not tend to encourage women to get involved in it. In her interviews, Medusa acknowledges the negative stereotypes that prevail about female rappers in her country. Yet her experience overseas has made her aware that rap is a very masculine field all over the world, not only in Tunisia. Medusa emphasises the importance of her family’s disregard of these sexist stereotypes. Although there are Tunisians who consider women rappers ‘bad women’, Medusa’s family encouraged her to pursue her dream. Medusa is lucky in this regard compared to other Tunisian female rappers because her uncle is a rapper and her brother is both a rapper and breakdancer (Djilali 2019). After giving birth to her daughter, Medusa insisted on continuing her career in music. Her aim is to challenge the patriarchal expectation that the women who dare enter the masculine rap world stop rapping after having children. Medusa emphasises the importance of women’s presence in this field and underlines the need for female rappers throughout the Arab world. She also emphasises that motherhood should not stop mothers from pursuing their goals and dreams (Sky News Arabic 2023).

In this study, I now explore Medusa’s song Hold ON (Medusa 2013). In this song, the feminist rapper Medusa throws light on a variety of socio-economic and geopolitical problems that torment Tunisians, including women. Similar to Sabrina’s ‘Aradhli, Medusa’s Hold On reflects Tunisians’ dismay about the outcomes of the revolution. The song stresses the regression that Tunisians have witnessed in the post-revolutionary period. Medusa emphasises the disillusionment of the families of the martyrs who lost their lives as they were fighting the Ben Ali police force. These martyrs died in order to achieve freedom. Medusa’s rhetorical question: ‘Where is the freedom for which activists struggled?’ shows that the goals of the revolution have not been achieved.

By exposing the games and corruption of politicians, Medusa demonstrates that Tunisia’s new rulers are not any different from its previous dictator in terms of selfishness and greed. The aggravation of levels of corruption in post-revolutionary Tunisia epitomises a faltering system of governance, which should under normal circumstances combat all sorts of corruption. What this feminist rapper says about trust, doubts and reliability reflects the relationship between Tunisian citizens and their new governments. Like Sabrina, Medusa is saying that the Tunisian people have been duped and used by the politicians who have only wanted to benefit themselves, neither the country, nor the poor. As a result of these unfulfilled aspirations, Tunisians’ frustrations have heightened as their trust in state institutions diminishes.

Moreover, Medusa’s song features recurrent references to ignorance. Medusa’s repetitive mention of this problem stems from the link between poverty and both illiteracy and discontinuity of education. Poverty is the main factor responsible for this discontinuity as many poor parents make their children leave school in order to start working and helping them financially due to price hikes. Another serious issue addressed in the song is the big problem of drug addiction amongst Tunisian youth. Medusa mirrors the sheer scale of drug addiction and the way Tunisian authorities have been turning a blind eye to this problem. Like Sabrina, Medusa sings: ‘the Tunisian people consume drugs since poison has been infiltrated.’ Medusa’s use of the term poison reflects the fear of many mothers whose teenage children have become drug addicts. Many of those who use drugs are schoolgirls.

Medusa’s song presents Tunisians as victims of destitution, corruption, marginalisation, alcoholism and drug addiction as a consequence of the continuous failure of successive governments to address their needs in an environment plagued by theft and greed. Similar to the intertwined problems depicted in Sabrina’s song, the interlaced issues presented in Medusa’s rap reflect the intersectional nature of oppression, which cannot be limited to patriarchy. Both rappers show that many socio-economic and geopolitical factors enter into play when we talk about the marginalisation of the women who live in a poor Muslim-majority country like Tunisia.

The Tunisian rapper Tuny Girl

Like the other female rappers studied in this paper, Tuny Girl confronts the male chauvinism of the rap world. People have looked down on her and advised her to leave this ‘men’s field.’ Despite this sexist opposition, Tuny Girl has expressed her determination to continue rapping and exposing the difficulties women rappers face. Tuny Girl has sung against the Tunisians who have humiliated and disrespected her as well as those who have asked her to stop rapping. Tuny Girl equates her art with Girl Power (Shems FM 2012). Tuny Girl raps about her love for rap in her collaboration with Lady-f; their song LoudTonix.me highlights the passion these two women artists have for rap (Sudan Music 2018).

Tuny Girl has participated in various other collaborations. These include: Ahla Bik fi Dakhelia/Welcome to the Ministry of the Interior with X-Mastario, Je t’aime mais/I Love You But with Patchita, Never Gonna Give Up with Chabba King and Matonkorch/Don’t Deny It with Lady-f, Dweleb with Marwene Nordo and On Zlatan with Pryns Missile. Tuny Girl also has a number of solo songs. These include Khaterni Tofla/Because I Am a Woman, Celibataire/Single, Saboura Kahla/No Information, W Ken ‘Ejbebk/Even if You Dislike It and Tji Tloum Te’dher/You Cannot Blame Them. Tuny Girl’s songs reflect an intersectional understanding of women’s realities as they link women’s suffering to poverty, authoritarianism, corruption and gender inequality. These songs also criticise hypocrisy, bullying, misogynist gossips, friends’ betrayal and envy. All the songs and collaborations of Tuny Girl are available on her Facebook page as well as on her YouTube channel as these are the two main platforms that Tuny Girl has used to present her art to the public, in addition to a very few interviews on Tunisian radio channels like Shems FM (Shems FM 2014).

Tuny Girl’s rap mirrors her strong awareness of intersectionality. This is clear in her song Khaterni Tofla whose title means ‘Because I am a woman.’ In this song, Tuny Girl mixes French and Arabic. Although this song tends to focus mainly on sexism, its video clip shows that the song is aware of patriarchy’s intertwinement with political issues. In fact, we see pictures of a battered woman in addition to pictures of Tunisian women who participated in the demonstrations that led to the overthrow of the dictator (Tuny Girl 2012). One of the signs a female protestor holds says: ‘Liberate activists.’ This was a message to the police regime that imprisoned, tortured and persecuted those who called to topple the then-dictator, and many of these were women. In this sense, Tuny Girl repeats the same argument that has been made by Tunisian feminists about the inseparable link between democracy and women’s rights (Ben Achour 413; Nouira 2017, 12).

Moreover, the video clip features feminists and female activists who participated in many demonstrations after the overthrow of the dictatorship in order to preserve women’s gains in the civil rights arena. Fundamentalists wanted to overturn these rights. Yet Tunisian women and human rights activists resisted and refused any regression in terms of women’s rights (Tchaicha and Arfaoui 2017, 99). Some of the signs held by the women featured in the video clip say: ‘I am a woman, not half a woman.’ This is in direct opposition to the calls to legalise polygamy, which Islamists wanted to achieve in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Many Muslim feminists equated extremists’ attempts to legalise polygamy, which has been banned in the country since 1956, with women subordination. These activists refused to share their husbands with second wives. These feminists refused to be seen as half wives and half women. Just like these demonstrators, Tuny Girl refuses the regression in the rights of Tunisian women and stresses the need to preserve women’s gains in the legal arena. The video clip shows another sign that says: ‘The Personal Status Code Is the Constitution of Tunisian Women.’ This message reflects Tunisian women’s fear of losing the rights guaranteed to women in the Personal Status Code.

The Tunisian family code represents the legislative text that departs the most from Islamic norms in both the Arab and Muslim worlds. It secures many important rights and liberties for Tunisian women. For instance, this family code guarantees equal divorce rights for men and women. It also bans a guardian from marrying off a woman without her permission. Since 1956, the Personal Status Code has eliminated husbands’ practice of repudiation. Since then, it has also outlawed polygamy (Kebsi 2022a, 2022b). In addition, the code granted women the right to work, open bank accounts, start a business and child custody (Arfaoui and Moghadam 2016, 640–641; Grami 2018, 25). The rise of Islamism after the revolution made many Tunisian women fear a de-criminalization of polygamy and an imposition of sexist sharia law. For this reason, hundreds of women took to the streets in order to express their opposition to the Islamization of family law. Just like these protesters, Tuny Girl does not want the women of her country to lose their acquired rights. Good governance, democratic rule, the autonomy of the judiciary and a national fight against the mounting religious extremism are essential criteria to achieve gender equality.

In addition to condemning the patriarchal ideology of Tunisia’s new rulers, Tuny Girl exposes the economic profit that Islamist politicians want to achieve when she raps: ‘Flat minds/Souls that have been bought with money/They want you to stay at home waiting for a stupid husband.’ These lyrics can be understood at two levels. At the personal micro-level, Tuny Girl complains about men’s superiority and patriarchal gender roles. At the deeper macro-level that can be inferred from the video clip that emphasises the photos of the Tunisian women who led the revolution and who continued the fight against sexism in its aftermath, these lyrics can be read as a criticism of the corruption and hypocrisy of those who adhere to political Islam. Indeed, the leader of the Islamist party Rached Ghanouchi advised Tunisian women to stay at home in order to create more job opportunities for men. The solution which Ghanouchi found for the country’s unemployment problem immediately after the revolution was to send females back to ‘their kitchens’ with the promise that men will be able to marry them once they have jobs. In Ghanouchi’s view, this proposal will allow Tunisian society to hit two birds with one stone. First, this suggestion will allow the jobless male workforce to find jobs. Second, it will solve the ‘problem of spinsterhood’ because it will enable males to have the financial capacity to get married and pay for their wives’ expenses. Many Tunisian women were infuriated by Ghanouchi’s backward proposal, which reflects the intersection between patriarchal, political and economic adverse forces. Chanouchi and many other Islamist leaders have enriched themselves after the revolution instead of benefiting the people. Here again we see an intersection between political and socio-economic pressures. The next section of the analysis elaborates further on these problems, especially in relation to Islamists’ greed, corruption and hypocrisy.

The Tunisian rapper Queen Nesrine

Queen Nesrine is another female rapper whose art mirrors a strong awareness of women’s intersectional issues in post-revolutionary Tunisia. She is also another artist who has faced difficulties and opposition to her entrance into the rap world due to her femaleness. Like her female counterparts in Tunisian rap, Queen Nesrine stresses her resistance to sexist stereotypes regarding women rappers (Queen Nesrine 2013a). Despite the challenges, Queen Nesrine has participated in some collaborations with Tunisian female and male rappers. These include the following songs: My Liberty with Mouna, Injustice with Mehrez, WTF!!! with Linko and Next Level with Wael Jen (Queen Nesrine 2013b). Queen Nesrine’s feminist songs are endowed with a heavy political consciousness. Like those of the previously discussed artists, Queen Nesrine’s songs offer a scathing critique of the post-revolutionary governments that ruled the country after 2011. They highlight disillusionment with the outcomes of the revolution. Like Sabrina and Medusa, Queen Nesrine’s rap shows that drugs and undocumented immigration have become youth’s main exit strategies from an unfair system that benefits corrupt politicians and disadvantages the people who rebelled against the previous regime. Queen Nesrine’s feminist criticism links Tunisian women’s problems to destitution, social injustice, patriarchy, the continuity of coercion and politicians’ lies and greed.

In the following, I analyze Queen Nesrine’s song Fi Mkhakhna Differenti, which denotes: ‘Our brains are different.’ This title means that ‘our mentalities are different’ (Queen Nesrine 2013a). Queen Nesrine’s song is characterised by the same dismay that we have seen in other artists’ songs. Like Sabrina, Medusa and Tuny Girl, Queen Nesrine echoes Tunisians’ dissatisfaction with the dysfunctional governments that ruled the country post 2011. Queen Nesrine laments: ‘Nothing works/Sometimes everything stops/What we wanted did not happen.’ The sense of malaise that pervades this song is exacerbated as Queen Nesrine continues singing: ‘Your brain is regressing: Bring the spade and start digging.’ The visual imagery Queen Nesrine uses in this line equates life in Tunisia with death. She tells her audience that digging one’s own grave is better than living in her country. The deathscape painted in this line is heightened as the artist tells us that ‘people breathe. Yet they are dead.’ This deathlike atmosphere intensifies when Queen Nesrine explains that ‘Tunisia is regretting/You are alive, not living.’ The distinction between being alive and living reflects the despair, helplessness and dejection that Tunisians feel. This despair reaches its peak when Queen Nesrine says: ‘We are dead inside/Skin just covers us/We buy the smile every day with a ten-dinar note from the drug dealer.’ The visual imagery of the skin covering citizens’ cadavers and giving the illusion of continuous life conveys the crisis of many Tunisians whose only way out of psychological and financial misery is drugs.

In this regard, Queen Nesrine criticises the coercive anti-drug law that sentences those who are caught consuming narcotics to one year in prison in addition to a fine. The law imposes a minimum sentence of 5 years in prison on repeat offenders (Human Rights Watch 2016).

According to Queen Nesrine, a free country must not imprison its youth for drug consumption, especially given the lack of governmental support for marginalised people: ‘If it were a country of freedom, they would not put you in jail for smoking weeds.’ While many Tunisians, especially Islamists, consider drug consumption an act of juvenile delinquency, Queen Nesrine considers it a normal escape from the crisis in which Tunisians live. Therefore, she calls for reform through drug decriminalisation.

Queen Nesrine transmits the voice of the jobless university graduates who become addicts when she demands: ‘I want a job.’ The song shows that citizens’ inability to see any light at the end of the tunnel makes them resort to drugs or illegalised immigration: ‘I am going to Pisa/I want a solution, but I’ve never found a way/I want goodbye, I want freedom and money.’ Like Sabrina, Queen Nesrine refuses the police crackdown on those who travel to the EU by boat. Like her, she advocates freedom of movement. As a result of the surge in irregular immigration after the revolution, Italian authorities have been working with the Tunisian government in order to curb the unwanted ‘waves’ of Tunisian border-crossers. Queen Nesrine explodes: ‘Fu** the police and fu** the law.’ Echoing the suffering of many Tunisians, Queen Nesrine expresses her fury as follows: ‘I cannot live in this country at all.’

Queen Nesrine holds her country’s new rulers accountable for the misery that pushes Tunisians to risk their lives on deadly boat journeys. She mocks politicians’ incompetence as follows: ‘Fu** a country whose president is a clown.’ Like other Tunisians, Queen Nesrine finds politicians’ inefficacy ridiculous, especially because ‘nothing can be fixed.’ For her, ‘it is the end, Tunisia is fu**ed up.’ Queen Nesrine emphasises Tunisia’s fragility, instability and inability to defend itself against foreign forces. She considers its politicians responsible for this ‘shitty situation.’ Queen Nesrine exposes the freedom lie that is wrongly attributed to Tunisia’s only ‘success story’ in the Arab Spring and points out the gap between rhetoric and reality.

The terrorism that has plagued post-revolutionary Tunisia is one of the main areas where we can see this gap. The religious party Ennahdha strives to distance itself from the Muslim brotherhood, hence presenting itself as a ‘moderate’ Islamist party. Nonetheless, the truth is far from what Ennahdha claims. In fact, this religious party has been relentlessly accused of doublespeak and of conniving with Salafi groups to transform Tunisia gradually from a secular state into an Islamic one (Gana 2013, 25). Feminists, in particular, have accused Ennahdha of having a hidden agenda of Iranian-style Islamization. Like many Tunisian feminists, Queen Nesrine points accusing fingers at the Islamist party. She indicts them for encouraging the radicalisation of Tunisian youth and sending them to the ISIS-controlled territories. More than 6000 Tunisians joined ISIS (Human Rights Watch 2019). Tunisia became the biggest exporter of fighters to ISIS as a result of the wave of religious fundamentalism that swept the country after the removal of Ben Ali. This extremism scared Tunisia’s feminists, moderate Muslims and religious minorities. Like many Muslim feminists, Queen Nesrine criticises Ennahdha’s Islamization project, exposes its lies and accuses it of smuggling Tunisians to Syria. Queen Nesrine mocks Islamists’ hypocritical discourse as follows: ‘This is permissible, and this is not permissible/You send Jihadists to Syria for money.’

Ennahdha party has been denying these accusations for more than a decade. In July 2022, Ennahdha’s leader Rached Ghanouchi was investigated on terrorism charges. Tunisia’s anti-terrorism unit questioned him on suspicion of terrorist financing and money laundering through a charity association. Ghanouchi was interrogated in connection with sending jihadists to Syria and Iraq. Although Ennahdha party continues to dispute all the terrorism charges and describes them as being politically motivated, a big section of the Tunisian people believes Ghanouchi and his allies were responsible for the thousands of Tunisians who joined ISIS (Sky News Arabic 2021). Ultimately, all the themes I have discussed so far demonstrate the variety of geopolitical and socio-economic issues tackled in this song. The complexity of these problems indicates Queen Nesrine’s intersectional understanding of the maladies that plague Tunisian society and of the challenges that Tunisian women face in their everyday lives.

Conclusion

To sum up, the analysis has shown that Tunisian women have carved a space for themselves in the masculine musical genre of rap. This paper has highlighted the complexity of Tunisian women’s realities and the need for an intersectional understanding of their lives. The article has shed light on the Tunisian rappers Medusa, Sabrina, Tuny Girl and Queen Nesrine. These female rappers defend women’s rights in their songs while also stressing the importance of good governance, social justice, democratic rule and the provision of fair economic opportunities. Their songs show the entanglement of Tunisian gender politics with socio-economic and geopolitical problems. Women rappers emphasise the multi-layeredness of Tunisian women’s struggles. Their lyrics target multiple forms of marginalisation relating to poverty, classism, corruption, sexism, social justice and the human right to movement. These interconnections demonstrate that the rights of women in Tunisia cannot be separated from the rights to employment, safety and security. The studied artists try to call for gender equality and the empowerment of women through the songs they present to the public. Despite their awareness of and resistance to male dominance, they do not reduce Tunisian women’s problems to patriarchy. Their songs belie those who erroneously reduce Tunisian Muslim women’s marginalisation to their religion and culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Zine is the short name of the dictator who was overthrown.