Hella Feki’s Bed of Jasmine Uses Four Voices to Revisit Tunisia’s 2011 Revolution
Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday features excerpts from Bed of Jasmine, the French-language Tunisian novel by Hella Feki, in Rhiannon Lawrence’s English translation. The book turns the 2011 Jasmine Revolution into a multi-voiced narrative that includes a prison cell as one of its speakers, reframing the uprising through personal memory, fear, and political witness.
Asymptote’s latest Translation Tuesday spotlight brings readers into the opening of Hella Feki’s Bed of Jasmine, a French-language Tunisian novel that revisits the 2011 Jasmine Revolution through a deliberately layered structure. Rather than presenting the uprising as a detached historical account, the book gives it a human and architectural chorus: three individual voices and a prison cell together recount events that unfolded under state censorship and propaganda.
The excerpts published by Asymptote, translated from the French by Rhiannon Lawrence, center on Mehdi, a young journalist who has been arrested after filming the protests. His account begins in confinement, where he hears the unrest outside Tunis while awaiting interrogation and possible torture. The scene quickly establishes the novel’s method: history arrives not as summary, but as pressure on a body trapped inside a cell, with the revolution felt through sound, memory, and fear.