Sometimes, Tunis tastes like a pickled lemon

A few rambles and a lament about Tunisia:

The Royal We

Tunisian Arabic is a strange beast.  It is almost totally different from Syrio-Jordanian Arabic and features almost an entire grammar's worth of words from French (principally), Italian, Sicilian, Spanish, and Berber.  Woman is not mar'a as in Arabic but mujer (with the pronounced j) from Spanish.  If you want tea, you don't say shai, it's only thé vert in these parts.  Both simple concepts like number (numero, not raqam) and complex ideas (ideologia, not 3aqeeda) are borrowed from European languages.  Unlike places like Lebanon and France, this linguistic mixing isn't frowned upon in Tunis; some are even proud of this aspect of Tunisian life.  Whatever the truth of the matter is (and I've gotten more jaded about Tunisia as I've gained a wider experience of life here), Tunisia likes to imagine it is an island in the Mediterranean, taking the latest styles from Paris and Milan and looking with a mixture of disdain and pity on the Arab east.

And so nearly everyone from the waiter and taxi-driver to the president is bi- or tri-lingual.  Myself, I am illiterate in several languages.  Eating lunch with a few Europeans and Tunisian, an intoxicated Tunisian who was attempting to impress an Italian woman, began questioning me about my language abilities.

"Do you know Greek?" "No." "Really, I speak fluent Greek."

"Do you know Italian?" "I can't speak it anymore." "Oh that's too bad.  I speak fluent Italian."

"Do you know Spanish?" "I can understand it." "Good. I speak fluent Spanish."

[there were several more rounds of this game]

I wondered whether he was the first one to be so important that he had to use the first person plural prefix (n-) on the first person singular (which is normal in Tunis).  The Royal He.  Then I made fun of him in pig latin to the other North Americans who ARE fluent in that wonderful language.

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Vegetable Curries Need Not Apply

One vast improvement on my travels in Egypt and Ethiopia is that I have a small, dungeon-ish kitchen here in Tunis and I can cook (if not bake).  I found a nice Sunday vegetable market a kilometer or two away and I've been going there to stock up for the week on amazing produce.  This naturally elicits lectures from my four roommates who think a young man should be eating large hunks of red meat, eggs, and tuna, often all together.  I offered one roommate a bowl of vegetable curry and he literally spit it out.  And I'll remind my readers that I once won a cooking competition.

Other enjoyable foods that get mocked in my home include iced coffee, grilled cheese, and balsamic vineagar.

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Drinking with Religious Minorities

Last Saturday, after Shabbat services, I went to the home of a Tunisian Jew for lunch and whiskey.  It was uncomfortable.  I love politics, but you can never make anyone happy when you talk about Israel/Palestine.  I care about the Palestinian homeland, but I also think that the anti-Semitism in the Middle East is pretty frightening.  I like the idea of a Jewish state, but I also think it should be a just and peaceful place for all of its inhabitants.  What I'm trying to say is that I frequently have trouble keeping my damn mouth shut, and this often gets me labelled a Zionist or an anti-Semite, which I've found are thrown around when you don't like what the other person is saying or what he or she looks like.  On Saturday, as one man bragged about how his son lives in a settlement in the West Bank, another made a comment that essentially translates to, "I wish we could just get rid of the Palestinians already."  I felt sick inside.  I obviously hadn't had enough whiskey.

When I was planning my research this year, I thought Tunisian Jews would be a really interesting case study on the Arab-Israeli conflict, as they are both Arab (by many definitions) and Jewish.  Maybe they're the voice that isn't being heard about Arabs and Jews holding hands, living side-by-side, and working together as Benjamin Disraeli envisioned?  Jews lived in majority-Arab countries for nearly a thousand years.  Why did Jewish lives in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq change so radically just because a completely separate group of their co-religionists founded a country and fought a few wars?  What I've found isn't encouraging in my hopes of Semitic brotherhood (remember, Arabs are Semites too).  As the Jews here in Tunis have faced increased persecution both from the government and their surrounding communities, most left for France and Israel, and the people that remain have grown bitter towards the country and people that no longer welcomes them. 

Tunisia has a wonderful facade of freedom, human rights, and religious and cultural diversity.  I can leave it to the screams from the basement of a certain building on a certain street to comment on the former issues.  As to the latter, they're a relic, show-and-tell for the rest of the world.  "There's no anti-Semitism here.  Look, there are some Jews!"  Shops in the souq sell key-chains with Hebrew letters, but the people that can read them are foreigners.

I've tried to make sense of what I've seen and heard about Jews and Palestinians here and in my travels around the Middle East.  Usually, what I'm thinking starts with "I wish..." because the present is just so profoundly unsatisfying and often repulsive.  I could write a hundred things I wish about diversity and understanding in the Middle East, but I think it could be essentialized as "I wish people would recognize their shared humanity."  I believe a more cynical version was uttered by my Uncle Sheldon at one point: "religious people ruin everything."

That's all for now.  Below is a picture of the Great Mosque at Kairouan on a stormy day.