Machtat of Kerkenah: An Empowering Motherly Continuum and Cultural Heritage – 5in10 with Souhir Zekri
Souhir Zekri holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and currently teaches at the Higher Institute of Digital Engineering of Tunis (University of Tunis). Her main research areas include life writing theory, motherhood and gender studies, the Italian Diaspora in Scotland, and spatial theory. She also writes short stories and first-person testimonies in relation to gender and harassment. In the academic year 2025–26, Souhir is a MECAM Fellow, working on her project on traditional women singers in Tunisia.

1. How do you explain your work to someone who may not be an expert in the same field of inquiry and comes from another geographical context?
My work is about a category of women singers called Machtat who perform during traditional wedding ceremonies. I have noticed that this phenomenon is mainly located in seaside towns (the Sahel region of Tunisia) and in two Tunisian islands: Kerkennah and Djerba. These women’s role is not limited to singing and praising the bride or supervising the party. In fact, depending on the regions, their job also consists in dressing and ornamenting the bride, besides other rites like announcing money donations. I have also noticed a difference between regions who are losing this tradition and others who succeed in preserving it, so I wanted to work on this discrepancy and focus on the way gender is valorised through community building.
2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey? What were formative encounters and challenges?
What intrigued me at the start of this academic journey was the documentary Echoes of Machtat (2025), produced by Maram Neiri, a Master’s student at the Superior School of the Audio-visual and Cinema of Gammarth in Tunisia, for which I had supervised the English translation of its subtitles until its completion and success. This documentary marked and touched me because, in its work on Mehdia, it contextualizes particular aspects of the bride’s rite of passage, the mother-daughter relation and the feminine community within a Tunisian traditional event and ritual based on the work and role of these women singers. Neiri’s documentary was produced in 2024 and won a prize at a contest organized by the Goethe Institute of Tunis. My first interview with Neiri in July 2025 was fruitful as she was/is helping me understand the lives and tasks of the Machtat. She will also be putting me in touch with some of the Machtat she met for my future fieldwork interviews in November 2025. Additionally, I will be analysing her documentary as a preliminary source for my project. On the other hand, Noura Chelly, an ethnomusicologist from Kerkennah whom I interviewed during my research, announced the disappearance of this tradition. I was dismayed at first because Kerkennah was my focal point, but the idea of past versus present helped me resume my work more serenely…until the next challenge!
3. How does your work relate to imaginations of the future, and how does it address questions of disparities?
My work explores imaginations of the future by examining past and present traditions in both Kerkennah and Mehdia, building upon tension between these two temporalities to understand the social and geographical circumstances that contribute to their preservation or gradual fading. The futures I imagine are inclusive and tolerant towards alternative oral and feminine histories and modes of storytelling. The latter belong to neglected or forgotten Tunisian regions and require further studies and research. At this point, the questions of disparities come to the forefront: gender, social and regional discrimination should be considered and tackled through projects which shed light on marginalized women and valorise certain job categories in order to deconstruct prejudices accumulating around them.
4. What is the role of humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval? And what may be the task and the public of a scholar?
I think humanities and social sciences seem to have lost ground in times of AI and other technological advances and seem to be less valued politically and academically speaking. However, the ethical issues that they address and which also constitute their essence are more crucial than ever. Human qualities such as intellectual integrity and academic transparency are reflected in the individual scholar’s objective endeavours to document the circumstances of political crises, wars and genocides. Their task is also to do more fieldwork in order to complement their theoretical and archival research. This would allow to build a bridge between academia and the non-expert or lay audiences and to raise their consciousness as a form of sustainable continuum.
5. Can you recommend a book, text, film, or exhibition that effectively addresses questions and imaginations of the future while dealing with inequalities in interesting ways?
I recommend the Tunisian exhibition of Dream City, which takes place in the Medina of Tunis. In addition to reviving and refurbishing forgotten or neglected, unknown venues and old buildings of the Medina, the exhibition also addresses social and gender inequalities through various artists. Two examples which left a strong impression on me were the aestheticized visions of urban landscapes, which criticized pollution and the destruction of nature, and an exhibition of Palestinian emblems such as the olive tree and its derivatives exposed in an equally emblematic old Medina building. Imaginations of better futures are made possible through consciousness-raising and exposing injustices and their consequences, whether aesthetically or through more raw and blunt means.
Citation: Machtat of Kerkenah: An Empowering Motherly Continuum and Cultural Heritage – 5in10 with Souhir Zekri, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.12.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/63021
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (December 4, 2025). Machtat of Kerkenah: An Empowering Motherly Continuum and Cultural Heritage – 5in10 with Souhir Zekri. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15a0u


