like this one, of the
old port in Bizerte, north of TunisAPARTMENT:
In mid-October, I moved into my apartment in a neighborhood in between a nouveau-riche neighborhood and a working-class district outside downtown Tunis. I live in the upstairs floor of a villa and though it is more expensive then I'd like, it has a garden and plants and 3 balconies of various sizes (so lots of natural light), I like it. I signed the lease on my birthday, and then had some initial problems with the landlords: i.e., the apartment needed a deep cleaning (aka, i took apart the fridge and washed all of the shelves in the bathtub). It was a dirtiness that you don't notice from a cursory glance. In any case, the landlords ended up paying for a cleaning lady to scrub everything down (and in a reassuring display of good faith, gave me 15 TD when she had asked me to pay her 25 TD - I just made up the difference).
LESSONS:
I am still taking Arabic lessons every day, studying both MSA and Tunisian Arabic, with 2 difference professors. It is exhausting to learn a language, especially when I have had so many responsibilities lately: finding and moving into an apartment, cleaning it, buying stuff that it lacks, cooking for myself, washing my laundry, and in general trying to keep up with the world. My favorite relaxation lately has been to read a Vanity Fair that my neighbor Penny brought when she visited with my mom recently and to watch Al Jazeera English on my satellite. In terms of quality of reporting, I think that AJE has outpaced CNN to join the ranks of BBC World. Some of you may know that I interned briefly for AJE while at Georgetown, so maybe I am a little biased.... Yet AJE has more reporters in the (still largely uncovered) developing world than *any other international news organization*. Basically, up to now, AJE reports on the developed and developing worlds for a largely developing world audience. When inevitable bias is detectable (as it always is), I appreciate where AJE's sympathies lie.
MOM's & PENNY's VISIT:
(Sidi Bou Saïd)
Never have two women alone caused some much havoc in Tunis. Actually, this is an example of hyperbole (preparation for eventual GREs) I really enjoyed my mom and Penny, despite the fact that they were more friendly than I ever allow myself to be with random people - especially men - who try to help us find our way or buy things. Together we spent one week in Tunis, during which we witnessed from an Arab/African/Muslim country the ascent to the presidency of a man with partial black and Muslim heritage (or, more importantly I think, with a partial heritage from a developing country). It was pretty amazing: the next day, a Tunisian woman I know sent me a congratulatory SMS and several taxi drivers said to me, "Meenik anti!? Amrika?? Mabrouk!" "Where are you from? America? Congratulations!"
One taxi driver declared to me that he had stayed up until the early morning hours watching the election results. Karim's mom told me that she and her kids stayed up until 5 AM watching Al Jazeera. I felt like the words of Michelle Obama really jived with my experience: something like, for the first time in my (young) life, I (am aware of the state of affairs &) am truly proud of my country.
Now, every time I turn on the French news, or AJ Arabic, or Al Jazeera English, I hear Obama's name, see his picture and ads for upcoming documentaries about him. Comparisons are especially being favorably made between Obama and JFK - and, most importantly for Tunisians, a link is being made to JFK's alleged support of the Palestinians. It begs noting that in February of this year, Obama declared that the Palestinians were suffering more than the Israelis and he was thoroughly criticized afterwards. Though the Taliban has declared Obama to be a terrorist like Bush (they have to to keep operating, right? nothing serves to unite people more than a common enemy), there seems to still be some excitement about the grandeur of the election outcome and the message of change. We shall see.
The first weekend my mom & Penny were here, we traveled to the Northwest of Tunis, which is really beautiful, with Larry Michalak, an American anthropologist living in Tunis, whom I interned for last year. He drove the car and served as an unofficial tour guide, as he did fieldwork in the NW, especially in the city of Jendouba, on markets in the 1960s - research that he has continued ever since and is currently turning into a book.
Together we visited Dougga, the city of Roman ruins:
We also visited Le Kef, a city built into a mountain, with a beautiful fortress and a mosque dedicated to the holy man Sidi Makhlouf;
Aïn Draham, where the houses have red-pointed rooftops since it does sometime snow; & Tabarka, a city on the mediterranean surrounded by mountains, where they have great seafood. The last day, we passed through Fernana, a small town with a local Sunday market, which had completely changed since Larry visited, and Bizerte, a coastal town North of Tunis with a beautiful old port.
The second week, we traveled to the South, driving in one day from Tunis to Djerba, an island off the Southeastern coast, passing through the Roman ampitheatre, El Jem. Our driver, Muhammad, had to park the car on a ferry for us to get across, and it rained and rained our entire trip there. The following morning, mom & I walked to the beach where the rain and sun produced a long rainbow.
We started off early to visit the medina of Djerba (which was still plagued by the unusual weather), where I bargained in Tunisian Arabic with the vendors and purchased a green and blue scarf. That day we drove from Djerba through the countryside on our way to Matmata, traveling through Medenine and Metameur, home to ksours (grain recepticals for nomads) and several old berber villages,
many of them abandoned in favor of more modern housing. Matmata is perhaps my favorite part of Tunisian and also home to a Star Wars scene in a bar (I don't really like Star Wars so I'm not quite sure what this scene is). I don't so much like the trogladyte house where the scene was filmed, which is now a hotel, but I love the landscape: Matmata is rolling hills and mountains covered with rocks and patches of green running off in the valleys. It is truly unlike anything I have ever seen. From Matmata, we drove to Douz, the 'gateway to the Sahara.' In Douz, we rode camels (and a horse cart) into the desert and watched the sunset. Our guide, Bilgacem, told me his family was nomadic during several months of the year and that the local school was set up to accommodate this living pattern.
He told me he liked the desert because it was silent and calm. When I asked how he had captured the camels, he told me that they had been taken very easily when they were young males and that they had come to live with his family, carrying tourists out into the Sahara and carrying his family's belongings during their nomadic months. The female camels are left in the desert with the baby camels he told me, and the male camels can eventually return to them. From Douz we crossed through the Chott El-Jerid, a huge salt lake that is dry in the summer and was holding water when we crossed through, maybe because of the recent rains. We stopped in Tozeur, where we spent the night in a hotel and arose early the next morning to visit the local "arts & traditions" museum, which was itself a beautiful house.
I love the museum's displays on women's wedding clothing and jewelry, on pre-industrial food making, on weapons, and especially their small art gallery, which holds a few beautiful and strikingly un-Orientalist paintings and in general really beautiful works of art. After our hour-long visit to the museum, we took the 4x4 to the medina of downtown Tozeur,
where we bought dates (deglet nour, the best of the many kinds). We didn't buy anything else, aside from "sand rose" rocks, because Tozeur was so incredibly expensive. Penny wanted to buy a scarf in a store in the Tozeur medina just like the one I had purchased in the medina in Djerba. I asked the vendor how much the scarf was, and he told me 22 Tunisian dinars (about $19). I told the man in Tunisian Arabic, "I bought this scarf in Djerba for 5 dinars. Wallah (I swear to God!)!" His expression became inattentive, and he told me, "No, sorry." I was surprised - no bargaining at all? "How about 7?" I asked. He said no, he could sell it for more. I know that Tozeur attracts a lot of tourists, but I was surprised. Perhaps this medina is almost exclusively for tourists and not for Tunisians, unlike the medina in Tunis. Or perhaps it is because I invoked God...
After Tozeur, we sped back to Tunis (about 500 km) through the holy city of Kairouan (also transliterated as Qayrawan), which is the site of the oldest mosque in Africa. The Great Mosque of Qayrawan is beautiful and enormous. Last year, I took a picture of a blue door outside of the mosque, closeted between carpet shops, and it was so beautiful that I framed it and gave it to my mom for her birthday. Unfortunately, when we arrived at Qayrawan it was after 5 PM, and so nearing one of the times of prayer when Muslims may come to the mosque to pray - so we couldn't enter the enormous courtyard and look around, which is unfortunate since Qayrawan is the only mosque I've been to in which a non-Muslim can see the prayer room (this is a particular policy in Tunisia, not in Islam). Anyway, Penny & my mom & Muhammad and I climbed up to the roof of a next door carpet shop, and there we got a breathtaking view of the mosque in all of its enormous grandeur. Afterwards, we drank unsugared mint tea and my mom bought a long red Berber carpet for our family room.
In Tunis, we returned again to the medina, which both my mom and Penny loved.
I have to admit that I also love the winding streets and the interesting wares, though the constant calls of vendors makes me uncomfortable - not so much for the sometimes inappropriate phrases they use (who knows who taught them) but because I know that we three women have some strange power here in Tunisia: women from the developed world using their capital to buy from a particular few in the considerably poorer developing world. I also must say that I feel uncomfortable because I know that some of their wares are fake, and that they will tell me that they are not, and that I may accuse some honest men of lying while I believe others who aren't truthful. As one man once told me when I was with Karim, trying to buy a leather purse which he had offered to me for 20 dinars (about $17):
"Sometimes, I'll be honest with you, some tourists come, let's say some Japanese tourists, and I'll treat them to some tea, and I'll show them the purses and tell them they are authentic handicrafts made by women in the South, and they will pay $400 (that’s right, dollars). They’re happy and so am I.”
I was talking to my tutor Nour about this, and we both decided that perhaps it didn’t matter if we didn’t know that what we bought was in fact made in a factory in Asia – we invest lots of objects with ideas about them and about ourselves that are only subjectively true. Isn’t that the basis of brand marketing, of almost all advertising? [As an ad exec that I am tutoring told me, “We brought a fresh approach to advertisements in Tunisia – we want to sell ideas, not just products. We don’t want to prove that the product is the best, we want to portray ideas that people feel like they want to live with.”] I still don’t like buying something that isn’t what I think it is though, especially since the handiwork of women is often so labor-intensive and so undervalued – anytime that it is valued, I’d like to participate in its valuation.
In any case, that was mom and Penny’s trip to Tunisia. I have to study an Arabic dialogue now, so I’m going to finish my update tomorrow. Inshallah I will again have internet. Keep your fingers crossed!
Btw, here is a great blog from a fellow Georgetown grad named Dorothy. My friend Emmie sent me the link and it really is great – check it out at http://dvoorhees.blogspot.com/
More to come this weekend.
Love,
Laura
Posts
1 comment:
Beautiful. I'm glad to hear that you are settled yet still adventuring!
Post a Comment