The I in Mashta: A Journey through Women’s Voices, Rituals, and Memory in Tunisia

By Souhir Zekri

In November 2025, at the beginning of my fellowship, I conducted an interview in Mahdia with the sisters Habiba and Basma, who both work as mashtat. What began as an interview soon became a lively and informal gathering between women, touching on questions of respectability, the importance of the mother-daughter relationship, and the economic contradictions of the mashta’s work.

The mashta, literally “hair comber” in Arabic, is the name given to traditional women who sing ancient folklore songs of blessing and praise (also to express the emotions of the mother) and take care of the bride at Tunisian weddings, mostly in coastal areas like Mahdia and on islands like Kerkennah. The wedding is a gendered ritual which marks the passage from one social status to another; namely, that of a virgin who becomes a married woman and potential mother. It is also a community event which often gathers people of the same origin, binds the fates of two families, and displays the rites and customs of a particular region. As an entertainer who dresses and praises the bride, the mashta turns into a symbolic maternal figure who supports and preserves the feminine community surrounding her. This central character also has potential for women’s empowerment, in spite of her economic difficulties, and can help preserve an intangible Tunisian cultural heritage and identity.

The mashta thus stands at the intersection of women’s labor, motherhood, cultural transmission, and community. Her changing presence also raises questions about what happens to these forms of knowledge when the traditions that sustain them begin to disappear.

When I met Maram Neiri, a former student of mine, on the street two years ago and we hugged, I would never have thought our fates would become intertwined in such a beautiful and productive manner. She asked me to help with the translation of her autofictional documentary Echoes of Machtat, which won first prize at the tenth edition of Ciné Par’Court, and I rediscovered the Mahdia wedding in a different light.

This encounter became the starting point for The I in Mashta, a multimedia project exploring the mashta tradition in Mahdia and Kerkennah through photographs, recordings, videos, interviews, creative writing, and academic research. The title reflects the project’s auto/biographical approach and its attempt to give voice to the mashta herself, with as little intervention or interpretation of her words, thoughts, and songs as possible. It also comes from a poem I wrote in Tunisian as a tribute to the mashta as a figure of Tunisian heritage and culture. The title of the poem came to me in English, as a play on the non-existent letter “I” in the word mashta.

As a mother with a hauntingly traumatic pregnancy and delivery, and as a Tunisian woman and scholar, I have always been interested in gender issues, motherhood in particular, in terms of the role they play in women’s identities and experiences. I was touched by Neiri’s documentary and started noticing other aspects of Tunisian weddings, whether it was the support network provided by the mashta during the difficult separation of mother and daughter or the feminine fears of an emerging sexual maturation in a conservative society. The wedding therefore became an important space for thinking about how ideas and experiences of femininity, marriage, sexuality, and motherhood are shared between generations of women.

With my father’s Kerkennah origins, I take pride in and have a deep interest in valorizing the rich heritage of these islands and increasing their visibility, but my link to Mahdia initially started with a colleague/friend to whose wedding I was invited. I was allowed access to the heart of this public and intimate ritual by wearing the traditional outfit and attending the “Henna”, the bride’s party where the mashta was present. Kerkennah and Mahdia are important to my project because of the preservation of the mashta tradition in Mahdia and its waning presence in Kerkennah, and the interesting alternation between past and present narratives which results from this contrast and gives coherence to my research. I also think that a comparative study of the mashta’s roles and functions between Mahdia and Kerkennah would benefit the cultural, ethnographic, and folkloric histories of both locations, and that of Tunisia more generally. It also raises a broader question: why does such a tradition persist in one place while becoming less visible in another?

My research developed through fieldwork in Mahdia and Kerkennah, including interviews and conversations, photographs, sound and video recordings, and participation in wedding celebrations. The first interview was conducted in November 2025 in Mahdia with Habiba and Basma mentioned above. The second interview took place after the end of my fellowship, in July 2026, with my friend Roua in El-Ataya, Kerkennah. It was shorter, but included a rich series of songs performed by Wassila, a Kerkennah mashta, including songs praising the bride and songs about the difficult separation between mother and daughter, told from the mother’s perspective. These encounters were complemented by earlier studies of women performers, North African music, and culture.

This specially designed online blog is meant to be a multimodal journey, a live but fragmented archive which seeks to preserve the idea of “collage” through an aesthetic composition made of various “materials.” But instead of concrete paper, cloth, or wood glued on a surface, this type of collage is made up of six hyperlinks which lead to an exhibition of photographs, videos, creative and academic texts, as well as voice recordings. The digital format reflects the subject itself: the world of the mashta is transmitted not only through words, but also through voices, songs, images, gestures, and performances. This exhibition brings together fieldwork and research materials in different forms in order to respectfully share the content and information gathered. Rather than offering a single interpretation, the project places these different materials alongside one another. In an autonomous and unrestricted spirit, the reader/viewer is allowed to build their own journey, to narrate their own story, navigating through the various hypertextual elements and discovering their themes and visual components in the order of their choice.

As they move through the project, readers/viewers may watch a video of Habiba, a Mahdia mashta, describing how money is split between the singers, then look at a drawing of her made by my father, then read one or two interview extracts which complement her portrait. They can then look at photographs of Kerkennah and Mahdia landscapes while listening to recordings of mashta songs in my own voice or in the voice of Wassila, a Kerkennah mashta. They can also read a fictional short story about a Kerkennah writer or an “autoethnographic essay”, that is, the story of the meta-community created by the project itself through the various people I met and re-met, discovered and appreciated during my journey and fieldwork. The project therefore also tells the story of the relationships and encounters through which the research developed.

For the more academically minded, various tools and fields of research are exposed as photographs or summarized in the Fresh Ethnographer’s Toolkit, with past studies on women performers and North African music and culture commented upon. A visit to the Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes replaces the tedious reading of ethnographic jargon, and a few links give access to Mahdia weddings or Kerkennah events on YouTube and Facebook. The project ultimately asks what can be preserved when an intangible cultural practice begins to change or disappear. Recordings, photographs, and testimonies can preserve traces, even when the social world surrounding the tradition is changing.

Most importantly, this blog attempts to pay a modest tribute to these Tunisian heroines, these women who keep fighting to maintain their status and dignity as artists, mothers, wives, and women in a conservative society which paradoxically disrespects and values them. Their sometimes contradictory position—as performers, workers, maternal figures, and guardians of cultural memory—is at the heart of this project.

I invite readers/viewers to enter The I in Mashta and explore its voices, images, stories, and encounters, following their own path through the project.

Acknowledgements: I am deeply grateful to my dearest friends Maram and Roua, who provided precious fieldwork help to the shy Souhir in me; to Omar Khlifi, the kindest and most professional of graphic designers; and to all those who shared my thoughts and encouraged me during dark and bright moments. This project would not have materialized without you.

About the Author:
Souhir Zekri holds a PhD in English Studies from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (Scotland) and currently teaches at the Higher Institute of Digital Engineering of Tunis (Tunisia). Her main research areas and publications include life writing theory, women’s fiction, spatial theory, and gender studies, in addition to creative pieces in the field of Medical Humanities. Her book Metaphors of Motherhood in Marina Warner’s Fiction and Short Fiction was published by Routledge in 2025.

Citation: Souhir Zekri (August 25, 2026). The I in Mashta: A Journey through Women’s Voices, Rituals, and Memory in Tunisia, im TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. 25.08.26, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=67815

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