That doughy, waxen face of Ben Ali that greeted sweaty Europeans at arrivals, jolted dosing drivers awake on main roads and reflected the glassy sunlight on street corners back into the eye of the onlooker, will be hanging limp from billboards across Tunisia.I have never been comfortable with photographs on my walls due to that back-of-the-neck-shiver feeling, that the people in them are staring at me. Yet this is a feeling the Tunisian nation has lived under every time they drove their moped through town, walked to a shop to buy 20 Mars cigarettes or to pick up a tin of harissa. This is more than the sense that the pasted-up faces of your Vogue cut-outs will tut in disgust from your bedroom wall when you trim your toenails and blow your nose. Ben Ali's clammy little hands, either adjusting invisible cufflinks, comically clasping or jovially waving at passers-by comes with a secret handshake, not a glassy stare. Podgy hands that gesture a waving reminder: 'I'm here, and I saw you'.
Today in Tunisia, the portrait that wall-papered the nation was laid on the road, throwing down a gauntlet for drivers- daring them to speed over the dictator's face. Youths watched, egging on every car to accelerate over the ex-president, and his milky wrists. When one car hesitates, the crowd heckles and groans. Their disappointment is short-lived as a following car makes sure the tyres really press into the image, pausing as the wheels make contact and beeping in celebration as the car moves forward. On the 15th January 2011, the image that was once obligatory wallpaper, became the people's carpet.
WORTH A WATCH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KBfJFgYwd0
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