The matriarchs were seated in a large circle on the balcony overlooking the courtyard. There were at least fifteen of them, and I greeted them in turn. “Selem, ca va?” And a kiss on each cheek. I was then seated in the lower part of the courtyard next to the grandfather who had completed his undergraduate, masters’, and doctorate degrees in “electro-engineering” in the USSR.
These days, he did little electro-engineering. He spent hours gardening in a straw hat and watching his grandchildren play in the inflatable pool. We understood each other little—my French, Russian, and Tunsi being nonexistent, and his English and Spanish equally limited—but I felt comfortable in silence with him because of the ironic, knowing gleam that had stuck indelibly in his eye. A gleam revealing that he savored the nonsensical performance that is socialization, and maintained a permanent awareness of the irony of life in general. His eyes, when they spoke, said “I’m just here for the champagne too, kid,” or some such thing, and made everyone else feel silly for not having been silly in so long.
His was not a voluntary state of being, but a purely circumstantial one. That is, he did nothing of his own volition to achieve his awareness of life’s delightful, chaotic ironies. In fact, it was not an achievement at all. It was simply a truth he encountered, or was struck by, in the same way one is occasionally struck by the memory of an old dream upon walking into a room. You can’t remember how long ago you had the dream, but certainly something about this place, this particular order of things, this sequence of events and sensations you are experiencing right now, bears an undeniable resemblance to an encounter you—or some part of you—imagined long ago. Perhaps it was a product of old age, of electro-engineering, or of watching his grandchildren splash his children in the courtyard on a hot summer day, but by some stroke of happenstance, he became permanently delighted by the deep, wonderful well that is life’s banality.
The courtyard was in a beach city where I had been invited to spend the weekend with a Tunisian family. I was subsequently plus-oned into all activities, including, apparently, an extended family gathering. I was served black tea with mint and invited to choose from a dozen columns of finger sweets on a silver platter. Pistachio, almond, date, chickpea, honey, chocolate, sesame seeds, puff pastry. Each confection sliced with geometric precision and served on a thin slice of rippled wax paper. When I finished, another cousin brought me a tray of fresh strawberry, limeade, and hazelnut juices.
While sitting in comfortable silence with the electro-engineer, a young man—16 years old, I later learned—introduced himself as Yassine and told me that he had gone to Texas a couple of years back for a robotics competition. If it was ok with me, he would like to share his thoughts about my country.
Yassine was friendly, but wasted no time with flattery: “Excuse me, but you guys”—Americans—“don’t know how to enjoy,” he said. “I come home from school and have tea; I spend time with my family. It seems to me that you guys—excuse me for generalizing, but really—you guys give up your life just to work, and then when you do enjoy, it’s like this:” he shoveled invisible enjoyment obscenely in his face with both hands. “Everything, everything, the most, the most. What’s that? That’s not enjoying.”
He lamented our apparent belief that having the newest, tallest buildings correlates with social advancement. “It’s just the other way around,” he insisted. Indeed, just a few days earlier, an architect explained to me that the oldest buildings in Tunis—well over 1,000 years old—were made with thick stone bricks that keep them naturally cool inside during summer. They were also designed with excellent ventilation, generating fresh airflow with no electricity. The apartments surrounding the city center, by contrast, are littered with Parisian balconies and AC units that drip, drip, drop onto the sidewalk; sweating to combat their infernal design. Like pugs on oxygen. Rows of towers of shelters croaking, choking, hacking their way through summer. Hooked up to a technological lifeline that only needs to exist because some other, more fundamental design principle was abandoned a long way back.
In North Africa, most cities have a medina: the inner part of the city, designed like a labyrinth, with a mosque in the center. As I walk through Tunis’ medina, which remains the center of cultural life in the city, these are the things that stick out to me: brightly colored and intricately decorated doors, cats that outnumber people, narrow streets, bowls of shining olives, corners of accumulated litter, the immediate drop in temperature walking under the arched alleys protected from the sun.
The more I walk, the more my mind swirls around a passage by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, in which he writes:
I have found a curious confirmation that the truly Native [aspects of a place] can and tend to lack local color… in the Arabic book par excellence, the Quran, there are no camels… it was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to believe camels were especially Arabic; they were for him a part of reality, he had no reason to distinguish them. By contrast, the first thing a tourist or an Arab nationalist does is eulogize camels, caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was tranquilo: he knew one could be Arab without camels. I think Argentinians can see ourselves in Mohammed—we can believe in the possibility of being Argentinian without drowning in local color.
As I waded up to my nose in local color, I wondered whether I was truly fixated on the details a Tunisian, if they were attempting to capture the “authentic spirit” of Tunis, would excise. Or rather, which it would not occur to them to include at all. Non-details, so quotidian they become invisible. “A part of reality—no reason to distinguish them.”
In any case, one thing is certain: the things I captured on my camera are not what that make the medina the medina. Only when the tiles, arches, drainpipes, cobblestones, garbage, and balconies are boiled off, is the city’s fingerprint revealed. Its ridges, its intricacies, its roots, are not things but human relationships. To an outsider, this social core of the city’s “authenticity” is often a mere surplus. At once a je ne sais quoi and a je do not care. A conglomeration of living, eating, shitting beings who coincide with a built environment. “Population”: as incidental to Tunis’ concrete skeleton as an inextinguishable, God-given joy for life is to a Soviet-educated electro-engineer.
The fact that the fabric of a city is the relations of its inhabitants becomes tangible as soon as you try to photograph it. Mostly because you quickly realize how limited your view of the city is without “capturing” the residents themselves. An act which, as it turns out, requires a minimum level of social, cultural, and especially linguistic integration. Without the ability to interact fluidly with non-English speaking locals, the things I can tell you about Tunis with my camera are the same things that can be immediately detected and conveyed by any foreigner. Natural and architectural beauty, for instance. Inanimate objects; perhaps a cat or two. I could even make a sweeping statement about “the people,” the proud broadcast of someone who refuses to acknowledge the infinite contours of difference in any given place. But the real intrigue—human life and the networks that compose it—still feel impenetrable against my novice capacities with the local dialect. For the ability to visually capture those networks requires, if nothing else, the simple ability to ask for a photograph.
As I attempt to move from neutral into first gear on Tunisian Arabic, new doors will open. In many ways, they already have—like this presentation on restoration and greening projects in the medina that I photographed for one of the community organizers. It was too easy: as soon as I pulled out my camera, the kids flocked to it. “Moi, moi!” they shouted—“me, me!”—they all wanted their own headshot.
Upon finding out I’m from California, however, the vibe reversed completely and they proceeded to ruthlessly bully me, as the football team from their twelve-street neighborhood in the medina, l’Esperance, beat the LA Galaxy in the World Cup last month.
Vive l’Esperance, I suppose.
Until next time,
Lucas