Tunisian artisan clay dolls and Nouri Bouzid’s Poupées d’argile

This article examines the sociocultural significance of clay dolls in postcolonial Tunisia (a French protectorate from 1881 to 1956), and in the film Clay Dolls (2002) by Tunisian auteur filmmaker Nouri Bouzid (born in 1945). Clay dolls and terracotta statuettes in many African countries are much more than just playthings for children or commercial objects sold to tourists and shipped worldwide. They have an important sociocultural significance that links them to folklore, fertility and initiation rites. The most prominent production site of clay dolls in Tunisia today is located in the village of Sejnane and its surrounding area where clay dolls have been made by women for centuries. Bouzid’s Clay Dolls focuses on human trafficking and child labour by telling the stories of young Tunisian boys and girls who are sold into servitude to rich bourgeois families in the Tunisian capital. Clay Dolls is a call for social justice. The film details the physical and mental exploitation of children who are forced to produce clay dolls, procure unpaid labour, and inexorably end up either getting raped and/or prostituting themselves against their will. The clay dolls they sell in their home villages symbolize the destruction of their innocence as these children, and in particular girls, are forced to grow up and act like adults in a mostly hostile and dangerous environment. Clay Dolls is a New Realism-inspired film that breaks with traditional stereotypical character portrayals such as the oppressed, subdued Arab woman (the character Rebeh) and the virile Arab man (the character Omrane). Girls (Fedhah) and women (Rebeh and her friends) are neither playthings, nor weak, powerless individuals as commonly portrayed in Arab films.