my fieldwork starts at home and expands outwards

my research is derailed, as i struggle to find meaning in the places i leave behind

Imaginations of the future are a form of memory making, either informed by the deferred, obsolete, unrealized utopias of the past, or the rosy-colored lens seemingly removed from one’s current reality. Nostalgia is not just a longing for a place or time, but a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history, and progress more broadly. And yet, nostalgia is as much about the future as it is about the past; fantasies of the past, informed by the needs of the present, impact the imaginations of the future.¹ Feeling a sense of belonging to a place at a particular point in time is a way to project oneself into a possible future, even if that future is uncertain. My master’s dissertation research commences at the baseline of the assumption that nostalgia is not solely a yearning for a bygone era, it is a form of memory making, of forging belonging, rooted in a particular sense of time and space. My nostalgia for the places I call home is my way of creating belonging. The places I call home exist more in my memories than in reality.

I do not think I have a future in Tunisia, even though it is my country of citizenship, and where my entire family is. I would want to be optimistic that one day I would return, with the same optimism that my parents have maintained, in 30 years of living outside the country. But the irony of this aspiration is that once you leave, it is difficult to return. To fully return. Not just for a season. In advance, I want to ask for forgiveness for my pessimism, while acknowledging my privilege that the deficits in Tunisia do not impact my life as much as they do others’. But there is no future for me in Tunisia. Youth unemployment is high, and most young people are trying to leave legally or illegally for Europe. More so now than before, guilt overtakes me when in Tunisia. Guilt since I have started to wish that I was elsewhere and for the relief that overtakes me when I leave.

Things were not always like this. I used to imagine a future in Tunisia. I used to imagine a democracy. I remember, in 2018, just as I was wrapping up high school, I shared an ambition with my parents to open an Anglophone news outlet in Tunisia. I do not aspire for that anymore, but what I imagined is a publication that does not experience any censorship because the country where it is based would be a democracy. These dreams are deferred into an indefinite future. That is a result of Kais Saied, Tunisia’s populist president, who has been on a corruption campaign that has resulted in nothing more than his political opponents being thrown into jail without trial. It is becoming “illegal” to criticize the president. He has used the entire political spectrum as scapegoats for Tunisia’s economic crisis and has launched hate campaigns against sub-saharan migrants. Kais Saied is running for president for the second time, and since most of his opposition is in jail, he has a fair shot of winning. Since Kais Saied froze the parliament in July 2021, I have watched Tunisia undo all of its success following the revolution in 2011. Part of me wishes I recalled more of this decade that just passed. My nostalgia for pre-2021 Tunisia has been my way of asserting my belonging to my homeland. I experienced a time that was great enough to occupy this much of my time, and I fear that without my disjunctive memories, without my family and the houses that they live in, there is nothing for me to return to, but the dreams I have deferred.

I strongly believe that if you love something, you should critique it lovingly. My upbringing living in the diaspora meant that I used to romanticize the country. It was more than a place, it was an imagination I created in my mind. It had a basis in reality, the lovely weather and beaches, the typical white and blue color scheme, the greenery, the cheap food, and the happy faces of my relatives. But I can no longer romanticize Tunisia, and I do not think I should either. Climate change ruined the weather (summer becomes unbearable), Tunisia is not as green as it used to be, inflation has done so that everyone is becoming poorer in the country, prices are rising at concerning levels, and I watch some of my relatives become more bored and depressed as time goes on. I notice these changes because of my seasonal returns.

“How many times had I heard of the nostalgia of the diaspora? It often surprised me later that I never grieved for my shattered dreams even in those hostile situations.”
― Benyamin, Goat Days (2008), 172.

I cannot ignore how fortunate I am to be able to have a place to return to, in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This project, meant to interrogate home and (be)longing, has been in the backdrop of displacement, ethnic cleansing, killing, and unimaginable violence, which leads me to constantly recognize the privilege of my deferred dreams, my yearning, and my nostalgia. In some parts of Tunisia, water has been cut off since there has been a drought for the sixth consecutive year. My maternal grandmother’s house is one of the affected places, and when I stayed with her for a week, I cursed the Tunisian government for the inconvenience it caused me, depriving me of running water between 9 pm and 7 am every night. But I was under the roof of my maternal grandparents’ house, the place I have called home, taking up priority from my parent’s house.

My history with this house precedes my consciousness. At the age of three weeks, I left this house with my parents and older sister, to take my first flight, to Nigeria. My maternal grandmother, Mama Rachida, spent most of the day crying. I was an incredibly small baby, and she was worried I would die during travel. She revealed to me that the day I left Nabeul for the first time, one of her best friends died. The first time I left Nabeul, I left my grandmother’s grief. In my last few departures, I have left Mama Rachida’s grief. ²I often wondered what she dreamt of, what dreams she had deferred, particularly on the nights where when I slept on her and my late grandfather’s bed. She insisted I slept in her bed because she wanted me to be comfortable, and she refused to sleep next to me because she snores.

But sleeping in my grandparents’ bed was a heartbreak I had not expected. I got sick on one of those nights, and I saw my two aunts and grandma hover over me, whilst I was drowsy, and feeling weak. I could barely string along the words they said to me. I was lying down on the same side of the bed as my late grandfather, Baba Latif, did and thought of the countless hours I spent by his side when he was bedridden, towards the end of his life. The next morning, I was feeling much better, but a sinking feeling of overwhelming sadness overcame me. I laid my head on the same pillow as he did. The last thing I saw before sleeping was my grandparent’s marriage photo. The first thing I saw upon waking up was that same photograph. Baba Latif was the last and first thing I saw before dozing off to sleep. Next October will be the fourth year without him in our lives. But the house is forever haunted by his absence. He is, among the reasons why this country is no longer recognizable since he was an integral part of the country I returned to, and the basis of my research on nostalgia. His passing made me realize my ability to live between the past, present, and future. I want to think that the memory of sitting on his bed next to him, discussing politics and history, lives forever. Every time I enter this bedroom, and hear his birds chirping, or the sound of news anchors, that very memory thickens and extends into the future. ³ But I do not think I can ever sleep on this bed again, without feeling paralyzed, to the point that my limbs were becoming part of the mattress.

“Mama Rachida, what did you dream of when you were younger?” I asked her one afternoon

“I wish I finished school. My dad had that old-school mindset, so he took me and my sisters out of school before we could finish our studies” Mama Rachida replied but quickly added “but my kids lived through my dreams, they all went on to university. I wanted one of them to be a doctor but that did not happen”

“But now one of your grandchildren [my cousin] will be a doctor” I added

“Exactly. So, alhamdoulilah”

I don’t know if she has forgiven her father for preventing her from completing her studies. But I guess Mama Rachida’s deferred dreams were transmitted to her children and grandchildren. My mother and her sisters had realized some of her dreams, and my cousins, sisters and I were to realize what else it was have remained. Many of us are realizing someone else’s deferred dreams without knowing. How fortunate are we to be able to do so?

It was difficult to discuss nostalgia with Mama Rachida, in part because I am not a fan of its translation; الحنين (al haneen) which relates more to the language of sentiments and affection. Some would go far as to say that nostalgia, as defined in Europe, does not exist in Arabic and that al haneen is more about missing being loved or the homeland, as opposed to a longing for home. ⁴ Al haneen does not evoke the pain and refusal of time as a linear construction, or the impossibility of return to the past.

When I discussed nostalgia with Mama Rachida, or the closest word to it at least, she revealed she is nostalgic for Sfax. She misses العشرة (al’eshra), which refers to companionship and community. She misses the years before she was married off at 18 to Baba Latif, which separated her from her siblings and the community where she grew up. In the early 1960s, the 228-kilometer distance between Sfax and Nabeul was much more significant, since Baba Latif and Mama Rachida did not own a car. She wishes she had gone to see her siblings more often, that she did not raise her kids away from her parents, and that she lived closer to them. I know these dreams have intensified, as all but two of her siblings died in the last four years.

I have never written anything about Sfax. In truth, Sfax is my real hometown, not Nabeul. It is the city where my father, his siblings, and all my grandparents were born and grew up. It is also where my siblings and I were born, in the same hospital, under the care of the same gynecologist. I was born in Sfax. It is my place of origin, but not my pole of return.

Lately, I have been theorizing on the difference between a pole of return and a pole of origin, to go as so far to think that the places where we trace our lineage may not always be the place where we feel that very wrenching feeling of departure and yearning. A pole of return inspires not only the past but the future. It is about those very dreams that we leave in particular geographies, knowing we can retrieve them at a later date. For that reason, Sfax is not my pole of return, I do not recover my dreams in my ancestral city, but rather, uncover the mythologies of my origins. Mythology is robust and stagnant in time. It is part of the stories we tell ourselves to remember a past that is greater than us, and that we may have not experienced. If a pole of origin is a Roman history museum, then on its contrary, a pole of return is a national history museum. One is filled with the ruins and statues of a past subject to excavation, stories subject to little to no reinterpretation, whilst the other, shapes narratives to answer the questions of who we are, who we were, and who we will be. A pole of return is play dough you mold with your bare hands. It changes through time, partially informed by the conditions of your return, and who you have become since the last time you were around. You change ever so slightly, which means that every time you return, the meaning of the poles of return inevitably change. When we return, we require different things from them. A pole of return is a place that can conform to the changes you require to make your return palatable A pole of origin will not adapt to your needs. You could rewrite mythologies, but that endeavor is futile for the most part. When I am in Sfax, I learn about the vestiges of memories of our extended families, particularly the elders. I find myself in old houses on wooden bench couches and in between fields of olive and almond trees, that no longer yield as much fruit due to drought.

Dad is napping on the living room couch of his parents’ house. This is the same room where he was born, almost fifty-three years ago. There was a time when it was the only room in my paternal grandparent’s house with air conditioning. Our bodies, would all be crammed in this one singular room, on the summer days where the heat would be unbearable. The afternoon rewards us with some melons and mint tea. Gone are the days of sporadic heat stripped of the forgiving breeze that Tunisia is known for. Every single summer day is a summer day of unbearable heat in Sfax.

To my father’s possible disappointment, I struggle to write about Sfax. I have tried to, a few times, but my essays remain unfinished. It does not help that in the last few years, my family and I no longer go to Sfax as much as we used to and spend most of our time in Nabeul, the city where my maternal grandparents’ house, and in Hammamet, where my parent’s house is in. I have associated return (and home more broadly) with the geographic area of my maternal side of my family, and elsewhere I have told you about the lives of my maternal grandparents, but my paternal grandparents have yet to make an appearance.

Baba Aziz is the patriarch of the Abida family. He is a stern but smiley man. A Capricorn. I fear that he may be developing dementia, and that is mainly due to his growing disorientation in the last few years. At times, he surprises me by how much he remembers of the past, but in other instances, I find myself growingly concerned by his difficulty in processing information, as it comes to him. Mama Fathia is my father’s mother. She is a quiet but sassy woman. A Scorpio. She has a great memory and a sharp mind. She often snaps at Baba Aziz’s memory lapses and blunders. Both my paternal grandparents spend a significant amount of time in our house in the summer months. Mama Fathia enjoys her time in our house, spent in the company of her kids and grandkids and Mama Rachida. She likes to listen to us talk, and once a few questions in, her quietness dissolves. Baba Aziz spends a lot of his time dozing off while reading the Quran on the living room couch. While we do try to talk to him, I do not think he enjoys being in our house for an extended amount of time. I wondered at times if he and I did not overlap in our boredom. I am also having an increasingly hard time drawing distinctions between boredom and loneliness. The boredom of loneliness. The loneliness of boredom. Boredom is isolating. Loneliness is boring. Boredom and loneliness project you backward, they suffocate your dreams.

One evening, Baba Aziz’s two siblings were meant to have coffee with us, but both canceled at the last minute without justification. My grandfather was not himself for days. By that point, he wanted to leave our house. His boredom did so that he wanted to be elsewhere. A feeling I am all too familiar with.

Somehow, my story of Sfax includes a family trip to Paris with my parents and siblings spent the first week of August. My father studied in Paris for two years. He was the only one of his siblings to study abroad, receiving a fully funded government scholarship to study in France, since he got the second-best highschool math grade in all of Sfax. My father returned to the streets of a city he knew thirty years ago and sporadically returned to since. We walked through the city, and I wanted to feel my father’s nostalgia, wondering if he had felt any at all. I do not think my father longs for the six years he lived in France, or at least the two years he spent in Paris. I know he feels deep gratitude towards the city, and what it gave him. That he can return with his wife and children years later, and experience the changes the city underwent together.

A version of Paris exists in my father’s mind that I will never be able to fully access, outside of his arguments with my younger brother, who often suggested alternate metro routes to what my father would use. The maps of Paris’ metro are still outdated in his mind. When we took the metro back home, and I sat opposite my parents, I would watch my face’s reflection on the window, right next to my parents’ face. I wondered. When will my face morph into my parents’?

“It is time for nostalgia” My father repeatedly said, summoning my attention, to share an anecdote of his late teen and early adult years.

I am wondering if nostalgia is losing its meaning. My parents, knowing more or less what I am working on, have become increasingly interested in the topic. But in this case, my father wanted to show us where he studied, where he lived, and the metro lines he took. I think my father would have been a great historian. His capacity to remember, to revisit, and to repeat the past is commendable. He would be a better historian than I ever could have been.

I think the strangest day in Paris was one where we went in circles. We went in circles looking for the Islamic Art section at the Museum of the Louvre. We went in circles looking for my younger sister in a massive bookshop because her phone died. We went in circles in the metro lines because halfway on our way home, my siblings realized we had not taken the keys to the apartment where we stayed from our parents, who were still wandering about in Paris. We went in circles all day. It felt as if several realities were expanding simultaneously. That would be, one of the various ways I describe nostalgia. I don’t think it is sustainable to live this way.

I felt like I wasted my month in Tunisia that stretched between July and August. I could not get myself to do any fieldwork for my master’s dissertation. I could not get myself to ask my relatives what was their relationship with Nabeul and how they imagined their futures. The weather was hot and smoldering. I was around family, but I struggled to speak, to convey what it is that bothers me.

“You did not waste your month in Tunisia” My cousin Emna comforted me, on my last day in Tunis.

“You spent time in your parent’s house and grandparents’ houses, you saw your cousins, aunts, and uncles, went to Sfax, Nabeul, and Tunis, you had good food, you held my daughter in your arms, you got a slight tan, you observed people. The summer was not wasted,” she added.

I still feel like I wasted my summer.

I tried writing a short story that I have attempted to complete, every summer since 2020. Its latest edition from this summer, with the working title, 2008 is forever, revolves around a house once vibrant in the echoes of a large family, standing as a relic of the past, filled with patchworks of different eras, and faded traces of collective memory.⁵ Set in a decaying town, the main character, Ahlem, returns to her family’s summer house and reflects on the social, political and economic changes in Tunisia, that altered her experience of being home. She yearns for renewal in a house where both the past and the future seem unreachable. I realized, in this edition, that the story will have to be a novel, due to the impossibility of addressing all it is that I want to in a short amount of pages. I barely have time to write it, but I know how the novel starts and how it ends.

I wake up to the sound of the train approaching. Mama Mongia has repeatedly said this is the sound of renewal. A railway wagon rushing the tracks, making the house slightly tremble. My grandmother believes the four loud seconds where the train rushes in front of our house, is powerful enough to create a new world. I am unsure what new worlds she imagines in this part of town, how it could be created by rusty trains that often get into accidents, or the consistency of this sound and feeling in our daily lives. If there is a new world, we live furthest away from it. There is no new world in Mrezga. Equidistant from Nabeul and Hammamet, the cities where my childhood memories were made. I come here in exile from the possibility of renewal, to its next door neighbor, boredom. 

My eyes feel heavy. I feel myself drifting to sleep. The train passes again, its whistle cutting through the dawn. This time, the sound lingers in the shape of a thought I can no longer silence. An echo louder than anything I have ever known. I cannot return to old places expecting renewal. Renewal is about letting places go. 

Once I wrote that last sentence, it became clear to me that when I return home, I yearn for a feeling of renewal. And that I may be searching for renewal in the wrong places. I hope that if I ever complete 2008 is forever it will be a meditation on the impossibility of truly returning to a past that no longer exists. I hope it captures the quiet grief and the miserable beauty of what it means to be caught between worlds - geographically, temporally, and emotionally. I hope my dissertation captures that too, on what it means to be bifurcated between geographies and temporalities, and the larger challenge it poses - how can we feel at home anywhere if home is larger than just a place, a set of memories, or a collection of people?

1. The Future of Nostalgia (2008), Svetlana Boym.

2. A few new people have recently joined this substack so I will refer you to the essays on this blog about centered grandparent’s house and that also touch on my grandparents’ house and other works elsewhere. Nabeul, Mon Amour , days of oranges , october reminds me of my late grandfather , waiting for the world to end and why do i become silent when i am in Tunisia?

3. I recorded a podcast episode with Beth where they mentioned the concept of a thickening memory, which I have since thought about quite a bit. I hope to share that podcast episode soon on this substack.

4. L’Arabe Confus (2024), Sofiane Si Merabet.

5. The novel is called 2008 is forever because 2008 would be the year when the house was built and after a hotel near the house that blasted the same 2008 hits playlists for a decade until it went out of business in 2020. I might change the title though I am not sure.