(There’s far too much to write about the first week, and my posts aren’t coming in any particular order, but will be more thematic than chronological.)
Tunis is crawling with the scrawniest, most emaciated and hostile cats you’ve ever encountered. My Tunisian host family says people frequently turn their pets out onto the street where they multiply beyond imagination, scrounging among the junk piles and litter heaps dotting the city. Sometimes when we turn a corner, one of the frightened creatures scurries past us and into a thicket of brilliant pink bougainvillea flowers overhanging the white stucco walls and sky-blue doors characteristic of Tunis. We call “qahtoos, qahtoos” (the Tunsie word for cat), but they never come to us, and instead hiss at our futile cat-calling.
People often ask me what it’s like to be a foreign woman in the Middle East. I can give only my impressions. In Jordan, I experienced curious stares more than verbal harassment; my friends who have lived in Egypt say the cat-calling there is intense. In Tunis, people stare at us openly, usually without intent. Men sometimes greet us women in English or Spanish, but most often in French, the language of their former colonizers. “Bonjour, madame.” Or my favorite: “Ooh, la la.” I’m not kidding. Some of it is friendly, some of it feels more like teasing, and occasionally it is threatening. Most of the time, it melds with the sensory-overloaded street, the noise of taxis, vendors, and the call to prayer. What I can’t ignore is the unsettling, hissing cat-calling. Tsss, tsss. Pshtt. Pshtt. A lanky Tunisian guy lingers in a doorway, leveling his gaze at us; occasionally they follow us for a few paces. (Lest anyone conclude cat-calling is somehow distinctly “Middle Eastern”, it’s a cross-cultural phenomenon. Just think of the American whistle up and whistle down in a woman’s direction; you’d know it if you heard it.)
For one of my classes at U Chicago, we read a bit of French micro-history which wryly makes the age-old connection between women and cats. In this story, two young apprentices work long, grueling hours in a bakery and suffer at the hand of the cruel baker’s wife, a vindictive woman who treats her pet cats better than the apprentices. One night, the apprentices climb the wall up to the baker’s bedroom and howl like cats; they repeat this sabotage night after night until the baker, enraged by the sleep-deprivation, constructs a gallows and hangs all his wife’s cats. In this way, the apprentices had their revenge on the baker’s wife.
Back to Tunis. I don’t appreciate being hissed at and propositioned as if I were one of those deranged animals slinking along the street. But then there are times when no one cat-calls and I think I must not look good that day. Sometimes I wonder if the overt, public, ahem, appreciation of women isn’t somehow related to the warmth and – for lack of a better phrase – touchy-feeliness in this country. Women often walk arm in arm, and male friends will sometimes hold hands. Men and women display affection in public, arms encircled around one another’s waists or brushing arms and legs while seated in conversation, looking into each other’s eyes. People greet one another alternating cheeks with a kiss-in-the-air. “Asalema, shnee-hwelik? Lebays?” (“Hello, how are you, fine?”) “Lebays, alhamdullilah, ou enti?” (Fine, thank God, and you?”) Lebays. Perhaps this behavior surprises you, considering the American media stereotypes of the Middle East. Today when I walked past a Tunisian mother with two little girls in tow, one of them looked up at me with wide, adoring eyes and whispered to her mother, “Shoof, Eurobiyah,” (“Look, a European woman.”)
Tunisia, with its many languages and Mediterranean sensibility, is certainly the most European of the Middle Eastern countries I’ve visited. And yet, despite all the European influence, it is distinctly, well, Tunisian. It’s tempting to wrinkle our noses at the post-colonial nostalgia for Europe, or to be annoyed with the expectation that as a foreigner, I should speak French, not English. The language, the croissants, the evening meals at 10pm – none of its makes Tunisia any less legitimately Tunisian or connected with the Middle East. As I write this, I’m hunkered down in a corner of a bustling, cosmopolitan café in Sidi Bou Said, wondering at the mingling of cultures in here. Hardly anyone wears the hijab (veil), which makes the entrance of a one young woman all the more unusual: she turns more than a few heads with her chic, white, lacy hijab and wrapped and draped smartly from head to toe in what’s sure to be designer. Unlike the more traditional male-only cafes which line the streets near my home-stay, in this café, no one cat-calls.
Tonight the taxi driver dropped jasmine petals into our hands as if he were paying us a peaceful gesture that somehow makes up for the cat-calls.
June, Week One: Arrival Scenes
Anyone who has ever read a classic ethnography, colonial-era novel, or some form of travelogue (Heart of Darkness comes to mind) will know what I mean when I say I romanticize the arrival scene: the weary (typically Western) hero or heroine, after journeying some days, weeks or months plagued by seasickness, swatting flies and cutting through dense jungle, lips cracking with thirst and mirages in the desert, and threatened by fevers, thieves, rapids, wild animals, or quicksand, finally arrives at some frontier outpost. There was a time when Tunis might have been a distant outpost, but no longer. The transit from the Paris airport to the Tunis airport seemed like one contiguous, placeless space; as we passed the duty free shops and onto a bus, I felt that I hadn’t arrived anywhere yet. We had merely hopped from one ubiquitous, anonymous space to another, but that’s how airports are.
In 2008 I studied abroad in Jordan with a group of American students. Before my trip, I read widely about the country. When we arrived at the Amman airport, a solemn Jordanian met our group at the gate to take us to the hotel. After we loaded our luggage onto the bus, this silent man, who only told us his first name, proceeded to sit next to me on the bus and ask me all about myself. Having been (mis)lead to believe that it would be improper for me to converse with Arab men, I tersely answered his questions, glancing nervously out the window and fumbling with my backpack – only to discover the following day that he was the director of the study abroad program.
This time, I hoped, there would be less faux pas, but the more I travel abroad, the more I see that each place and each encounter has its own dynamic. As soon as we boarded the bus for Tunis, some of the advanced Arabic students took a voluntary language pledge to speak in Arabic as much as possible. Being unable to converse in Arabic with some of my fellow American students was only the beginning of my culture shock. Feeling the numbness of exhaustion, I leaned my head back against the bus seat and awoke only when our bus lurched up a long hill and pulled into the Hotel Sidi Bou Said parking lot. There we caught our first glimpse of the sleeping city flickering below in the darkness, and beyond, a thin sheet of glass gleaming still and austere in the moonlight. It was the Mediterranean. Beyond that were some purplish-black hills. And beyond that was darkness and sleep.
Living in a foreign country makes even the most mundane occurrences new and exciting.
Thinking we only had a few moments before the train departed, we rushed through the subway doors, pushing past a couple of disgruntled Canadians who cursed us for running over their toes with our luggage; we nearly tripped over a man and woman protectively crouching around three dogs wrapped in blankets. Stepping gingerly over the agitated dogs, I searched wildly for an open seat and squeezed between a large suitcase and the train window. The other American students with me had scrambled onto the train, only to find that it was not about to leave but had been sitting in the station some 45 minutes. The car was dusky and stale. The people looked at us with indifference, and the air was heavy with the hushed whispering and the panting of the dogs. The heat was a shock to my body. Only a week before I had been in chilly, windy, rainy Chicago.
Now I was with some two dozen American students headed to Tunis, Tunisia to study Arabic for the summer. That morning – or was it the morning before? - our flight in Washington D.C. was delayed over two hours, so we had missed our connection in Paris. This gave us a 12 hour layover in Paris. Though exhausted and sleep-deprived, our hearts leapt at the chance to explore the city. We spent the next couple hours frustrated and carting our luggage around the airport trying to figure out how to get from the terminal to the trains to the city. After some minutes, the train doors closed and we lurched forward into the darkness of the subway tunnel. Just as suddenly, we shot out of the tunnel, into the white hot daylight. The crumbling outskirts of the city streamed past: broken tenement buildings, and waves of colorful graffiti rising and falling along the track walls. Then darkness again; then into the light. The sunlight hitting the metal track looked like mercury, climbing higher and higher as the train plunged forward through the countryside. Another train passed in the opposite direction, rocking our train. The train sped along gently and the conversation buzzed pleasantly. I was being lulled to sleep.
In the sunlight on the window glass, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. So this is the tourist gaze, I thought: Seeing one’s own querying expression reflected in train, car, taxi, and bus windows; the sensation of seeing oneself; one’s own gaze suddenly looking back. Millions of people travel by public transportation every day, most from necessity, yet being on the train in France was something serendipitous, mysterious.
When we reached our stop, we pushed off the train and into a damp, crowded tunnel, up some stairs and into the blinding daylight. The first thing I saw as I emerged from the tunnel was a café; then we stood stupidly in the middle of the sidewalk. Frankly, I felt I had surfaced in a Hollywood backlot; this couldn’t be real. And then we turned to the right and there was Notre Dame. Had I been planning this trip, maybe it would have felt more real. Had I slept more the previous week, maybe it would have felt real, less dreamlike. We moved as in a dream, hesitantly, gazing around us. Because we only had a few hours, most of us planned to follow the Seine River from the Cathedral to the Eiffel Tower, which turned out to be a longer walk than we expected. Along the way, I kept thinking about all the history of the place.
A café or two later, a friend and I stretched out on the lawn beside the Eiffel Tower, basking in the sunlight. The weather was as perfect as you can imagine. Near us a group of French-speaking people reclined on blankets, with a spread of wine and cheese before them. I lay on the earth, enjoying the still, blue expanse above. Tunis can wait until tomorrow, I thought.
