*names have been changed for security reasons. Sarah Adam, a Sudanese LGBT+ activist and filmmaker, was sitting in a public café in Khartoum, Sudan, when she got a call from Tunis. “We won third prize!”, her colleague shouted through the phone. “I went crazy”, she remembers...
A man walks out a men-only bar in downtown Tunis. Suddenly he looks extremely small. Next to him is an unusual sight in town, a mural encouraging women to be bold, fearless and self-loving. This feminist mural, the first of its kind in Tunis, features two...
Despite the conflict present in Libya since 2011, a rapid spread of entrepreneurship and startups among Libyan women has contributed to the effort to rebuild the state in the regions where peace has been established. Among these strong women is a young Libyan lawyer named Hala Bugaighis. Bugaighis...
On a late and cold Sunday evening in Tunis, it was too late to find a café that stays open long enough for two women to settle in for a long talk. When we met Tunisian street artist Sangoura, we went from one café to the...
As the people streamed into the Institut français in downtown Tunis to attend to the first queer film festival in Tunisia and the Maghreb their faces reflected everyone’s excitement and emotional turmoil. To have such an event take place in a country where homosexuality is still...
In Libya, three rival governments compete for legitimacy and control over resources in the power vacuum of a “stateless country”, amidst the deterioration of the economy and the judicial system. The United Nations-backed, internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), which struggled in 2016 to assert...
Art, culture, and civil society are aspects playing a part in the Yemeni conflict that are being overlooked in mainstream media. Just in June of this year, a new Yemeni media initiative emerged focusing on Yemeni art, culture, and civil society, and their role in building...
Tunisia has recently shown promising achievements, such as the new law against gender-based violence that was passed at the end of July 2017, making Tunisia the leading country in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region in women’s rights. However, the fact that the political...
When science and logic are used to debunk misconceptions, stereotypes, and to promote tolerance and open-mindedness, you might end up changing someone’s perceptions. This was the goal of Baha Lajmi and Fahd Baaziz, two 16-year-old Tunisian high school students from Soussa, when they started a YouTube...
As Donald Trump declared that transgender individuals would no longer be allowed to serve in the US military last week, in Rojava, Syria, the creation of a new and rather revolutionary military unit in the fight against Daesh (ISIS) was announced. This military unit, The Queer...
In Berlin, the opening of a new and most unusual mosque, the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque, has incited both support and outrage. What makes this mosque special is that both men and women pray together. This mixed mosque was founded and is led by the female imam...
Tunisia is, after Jordan, the second country in the Mediterranean area to be most affected by drought and dryness. Not only is it the smallest country in the Maghreb, it is also the one with the least reliable water resources. Aware of this problem and with...
Asma Othmani, a Tunisian singer, took an old traditional Tunisian song of the Mizwad genre called “Yama Lasmar Douni” (“Oh brown is bad”) and made a new interpretation of it adding a piece of spoken word called “Tounes Alwen” (“Tunis of Colors”) written...
Today is International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia, celebrated all over the world. In Tunis, Tunisia, there are two big events taking place that protest the existence of the article 230 of the Tunisian penal code, which criminalizes the LGBT+ community, as well as the all...
I met Sana Jlassi and Chouaib Brik, the masterminds behind Art Solution, the pioneering Tunisian association for urban culture and art founded in 2011, in the creative base of the association in Tunis. This space for creative expression and innovation, the Tag Store, made for a...
