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Document Type

Short Story

Abstract

This short story narrates the lived experience of a young, rural, Tunisian student confronting the intersecting oppressions of class, gender, and regional marginalization in her pursuit of higher education. Positioned as an arbiya—a term loaded with regionalist and classist disdain—the protagonist is marked as inferior within the urban academic milieu. Her daily struggles with poverty, hunger, and moral scrutiny reveal the precarious conditions under which many women students from rural backgrounds must survive. The dormitory space, far from being a refuge, exposes her to exploitation, judgment, and social surveillance. The story reaches its emotional apex when her lover’s urban bourgeois mother rejects her as an unworthy match due to her rural identity. Through this narrative, the story powerfully critiques Tunisia’s postcolonial modernity, where education fails to offer equitable mobility to all and regionalism operates as a persistent axis of exclusion.

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