why do i become silent when i am in Tunisia?
a long read on my return to Nabeul this winter
A group of people watch a scorpion unable to escape surrounded by a ring of hot coal, the scorpion stings itself out of rage and frustration, and the crowd dissipates. This how Albert Memmi’s Le Scorpion (1969) opens, in an ominous image that leaves the reader unsure if the scorpion stung itself accidentally, if the scorpion is dead, or if it survives its own sting.1
The novel is a collage of texts, people and places, and has four different types of fonts to indicate the different nature of these fragments, a compromise to Memmi’s original idea of having a book with different colors of ink. The plotless novel reconstructs the lives of Tunisians in the capital’s hara (Jewish ghetto in the Medina, old city) in the years following the country’s newly achieved independence. A parallel can be drawn in the depiction of a country where its people struggling to find their identity in a the face of change, people living at the backdrop of a nation-building project, that are subjected to change, as opposed to being agents of change, and of a brother attempting to find his missing brother, a Tunisian writer that has disappeared. All that he has to work on are the disconnected writings and clippings in the drawer of his brother’s desk. While I was reading Le Scorpion I felt like I was searching too, in part because for most of it, I was not sure what was going on. I felt like I was sitting in the living room with family and listening to multiple conversations happen at the same time, with the television playing in the background - overstimulated is an understatement. And yet, I was drawn to the stories, and to Memmi’s ability to bring forth different voices in the same book. I was reminded of the aspiration I had, that was to write a plotless novel around a summer I spend in Tunisia, showing the different voices that occupy our house and lassitude of the season.
Albert Memmi (1920-2020) and his family left Tunisia to France in 1956, just about when independence was declared. He wrote about Tunisia from France, and his continuous engagement with the homeland was the way that he returned, despite his complicated relationship to the country. While the novel is under the guise of fiction, Memmi had the habit of often projecting his subjectivities onto the character, and the cacophony of the four different voices in the novel can be interpreted as his own. Memmi was not afraid to contradict himself, in fact, he constantly did in both his fiction and non fiction writing that have contributed to the postcolonial literary canon. He constantly ruminated over his diasporic experience, about the contradictions of his Jewish, Tunisian, Amazigh and French identity, how he was a product of colonization because he understood everyone but belonged nowhere. When he did not fall into contradiction, he was contempt with the unsettled, with leaving readers to deal with the dissonances of his existence and his worldviews.
When Albert Memmi wrote in the Scorpio; “Je m’aperçois que je n’ai rien dit des autres retours” - “I realize that I did not say anything else about the other returns” I started thinking about my physical returns to Tunisia. I have only ever written about Tunisia from a distance, and this is no exception.
In previous writings, I have tried to convince you that every single one of my returns to Tunisia are embedded with deficits, decays and absences. That judgment, came out of the winter of January 2022, following the passing of my grandfather, Baba Abdelatif, and the following returns to Tunisia, in the summer of 2022, the winter of 2022, and the summer of 2023. Navigating my grandparents house in January 2022 made me well aware of Baba Latif’s absence, as I watched Mama Rachida live in a house that suddenly became way too big for her. I observed her silent grief, and it was in part my grief as well.2 I no longer recognized Tunisia anymore, in part due to Baba Latif’s absence, a previously stable figures of my return. I could not reasonably uphold the homeland that existed in my mind, since it materially no longer existed. The last months of my grandfather’s life aligned with Kais’ Said’s coup that froze the Tunisian government, and its ensuing consequences such as the spiraling of Tunisia’s economic and political crisis, which made so that his death and socioeconomic crisis that emerged, did so together. Since then, I have felt as though I was walking through to Tunisia as a stranger. My return was painful.
The eighteen days I spent in Tunisia have made me grapple with the judgment I made on deficts, decays and absences, as possibly being a bit too harsh. Is it really my place to qualify whether change is positive or negative? Qualifying change disrupts the ideal I set for myself, that is to return as if I never left. To ease my return, I would have to look at absence differently. Absence is presence so long as you remember what once was. I still do not know exactly how to not let absence haunt me. I need to change my mindset entirely. I would have to hope that the deficits, decays and absences would in turn could lead to something new, to a new beginning, one that is comparable to the fresh air of the early hours of the day. The smell of possibility.
Or maybe least I should not write authoritatively, and leave enough space to fill the page with more words if I were to change my mind.
Return as a word is not enough to describe how return is a state of being, particularly when you live in diaspora and have a sense of belonging to multiple places, where your transient existence in and of itself is constantly defined by return. While I hope to expand return theoretically as an ontological experience, all I know for sure for time being is that return is concerned with rituals.
My returns to Tunisia always lead me to my (maternal) grandparent’s house in Nabeul whether I arrive to Tunisia by myself, or with my immediate family.3 The Monday I flew in from the UK and landed in Enfida airport in Nabeul, I caused a commotion in my grandparent’s house, mainly because my grandma, my uncle and his family thought I was coming the next day. My uncle, Khali Mourad picked up his friend along the way, so that he could keep him company in their one hour drive to pick me up. Two middle aged Tunisian science teachers greeted me at the airport, apologizing profusely for being late. They smelled like cigarettes, and I almost wanted to ask for one. But I didn’t. I think Khali Mourad starting smoking again after Baba Abdelatif died, a habit that he put down when his first child came to this world in 2007. In the hour-long car ride, I listened in on my uncle and his friend’s conversation, and they tried to include me in it, asking me what I study. I explained to them that what I study is a direct legacy of المستشرقين, the orientalists. My uncle’s friend was intrigued, and asked me about my opinion on many things, and what motivates my studies. I tried my best to answer, while running on a haze like fatigue, my body swayed and slightly jumped from the plotholes and uneven highway.
Khali Mourad and his friend complained about Tunisian youths that graffiti on the new tables that school brings in every year. Sometimes, the tables curse the families of the student’s teachers.
“This generation is so lost, so degenerate… I do not know where this country is going”. Khali Mourad sighs.
I wish I kept more track of Khali Mourad’s placement in the optimist-pessimist spectrum, so I could know if negativity is new trait of his, or if it had existed for years, and I just did not notice. My two earliest memory of Khali Mourad are from when before he was married. The smoke of his cigarette danced around the light lamp on his desk, creating abstract shapes in his poorly lit bedroom while he graded his student’s homework. He picked out leaves from trees that grew on the side of the road we walked back home from the beach and taught my cousins and I how to make whistles out of them.
His friend called his wife to ask her what was for dinner, and we shortly dropped him off to his house. Khali Mourad told me that they became friends back at the start of my uncle’s teaching career, about 27 years ago. They were both assigned to a remote village to teach, and they kept each other other company in their long drives back.
“You really get to know someone so well while driving”
I agreed with him. I did not say that to him then, but I do I get to know my uncle best while sitting in the front seat next to him. He breaks down his elusiveness, the same one that he inherited from my grandfather.
I entered my grandparent’s house from the backdoor that leads to the kitchen. Mama Rachida greeted me at the kitchen door, hugged me, and pointed me to the kitchen table, that had four different places of food ready for me.
Khali Mourad and his family live above my grandparents house, so shortly after I sat at the dinning table, my cousins, Yosr and Youssef, came to greet me. After dinner, Mama Rachida put a big bowl of mandarins in front of me;
“Have some [mandarins], and when you go to the living room, take this bowl with you”.
I was pealing what must be my fourth mandarins when I noticed that Yosr has been watching me intently, which lead me to ask her;
“Did you read days of oranges?”
She nodded, and did not say anything else, except for giving me a thumbs up when I asked her what she thought of the essay. Her and Youssef went back upstairs to continue revising for their exams the next day. I trickled into the living room, to find Tata Leila, Mama Rachida’s niece, that sleeps over on the nights where her daughters are out of town. A sudden wave of fatigue hits me, and I passed out in the ethnic wool blankets. I woke up from my aunt, Khlayla Monia’s kisses, as she greeted me good morning and welcomed me back home. In my half asleep haze, she told me her intention to “kidnapp” me from Mama Rachida, so we can spend a few days together at her house, and left for work.
My ritual of return also includes walking around the house, or maybe I shouldn’t qualify it as a ritual as much as it is just muscle memory, where I actively am looking for the very absences and deficits that I have (previously) qualified my return by. My walk is always prompted by the door of my grandparent’s bedroom, cracked wide open. Subdued by its quietness, I am transported to a unchanging place that feels imaginary in my mind, simply because my grandparents room is one of the few places I know that resists the passage of time.
I left the house from the front door, crossing through the brown tiles of the corridor. I descend the steps of the veranda, whose tiles I often transfix. The garden looked dry this winter, green used to be its dominant color, but now the brown soil took over my eyesight. The white wrong iron gates of the house were crackling. There were three orange trees in my grandparents front yard; two yielded sour oranges, and one yields sweet oranges, that I have not been able to bare the taste of since I was young. The two sour orange trees were gone, Mama Rachida said they died shortly after Baba Latif died, but I could have almost sworn that the trees were here last summer. The absence of those two sour orange trees means that I did not eat any oranges from my grandparents front yard this winter.
Once I have circumnavigated the house a few times, I feel more grounded. I finish the walk the place that started it. I paced around my grandparents room obsessively, as I always do. The room withstands time and space and only goes through minor transformations. The bedsheets change based on the season. But I was starting at my grandmother’s undone bed, and kept thinking of the the curves and crinkles of her bedsheets in the days to come. How much of her grief does she leave then and there, until she returns to her undone bed at night? Most of the day, the room is unoccupied, which is possibly what contributes to its surrealism. Mama Rachida lives in all rooms of the house except this one. She only sleeps in her bedroom. She migrates between the living room and kitchen, prays in the dinning room in between both spaces, and sews in her son’s old room. The bedroom knows about my grandfather’s absence, that is where he spent most of his days towards the end of his life. What once was filled with the sound of his radio and the chatter of the relatives that come in and out of the house is now embedded in silence. But visually, the bedroom is about the same as it used to be, except for my grandparent’s framed wedding photo, that moved from the vanity to Mama Rachida’s nightstand.
I barely leave my grandma’s house because I do not have friends in this city. My hometown is my hometown because that is where my grandmother lives, where my grandfather is buried, where my parent’s house is, but I have never really lived here, except for a brief six month stint in 2011. My hometown is a bridge between seasons, fall and spring, spring and fall, since it is where my family and I have spent my winter and summer breaks for as long as I can remember. When I am staying at my grandparent’s house in times during the year where nobody is here except for me, I occupy my afternoons by going on walks by myself. I started doing this in 2022, back when I was looking for physical emblems of a community that no longer exists, and trying to revive my photography practice. This time, I was not looking for anything, and I was trying to document the city either, so I just walked around aimlessly, until it felt right to turn and walk back home. I walked for forty minutes and reached the sea without intending to. I watched the sun set in the horizon, a man smoked a lonely cigarette by the shore, and a young couple hugged and kissed while watching the sunset. The whole city was empty since the previous night’s rain caused some flooding. The vacant sidewalks and carless roads made me feel, for the first time in a while, that the city was mine, and welcoming me in warm embrace.
I got back home when darkness has fully colored the sky. I sat in the corner of the couch that I have ritually spent every single one of my nights on, occupying this corner for long enough that Mama Rachida was calling it my corner. Shortly after getting comfortable in the thick winter duvet, Mama Rachida brought me a pipping hot chocolate, that was very bitter and thick in texture. I was drinking this concoction daily, despite the fact that I struggled to finish it. Since milk, coffee, sugar (and flour) were in shortage in the city, that the best alternative to a cup of coffee. We did not talk about Tunisian politics like we used to, there were more conversations about where to find these basic food necessities.
“But I make do with what I have” Mama Rachida reassured me, as she showed me a cake she made while I was on a walk because she was able to find some flour at the market.
Khlayla Monia came from home and sat at the opposite side of the living room couch. She noticed the mug I was drinking out of.
“Maman, why don’t you use the nice cups that you brought from Ivory Coast last winter? This mug is so ugly”
Mama Rachida rolled her eyes at her daughter, and asked “What is wrong with this mug?”
“It is ugly and old, I donated mine and got myself much nicer mugs”
“أنا نحب الماعون الزمني” “I like old tableware”
But زمني does not exactly mean old, it is about a thing being temporal, of a particular period, a living testament of a certain time, that no longer is. Mama Rachida knew the sentimental values of these mugs.
“Yesmine, what do you think of this mug?”
“I like these mugs, it brings back good memories”
I cannot remember a time of my life in my grandparents house without these mugs. My grandmother’s kitchen’s cabinet might be the other part of this house that withstands change. The white mugs with either green or orange squares remind me of the winters and summers my family and I, alongside my cousins, aunts and uncle have trickled in and out of the house. It is of a time where we were all more connected, or at least it felt that way, since life was much simpler. Those where the days before we knew what a revolution is, before we knew our taste of dignity and freedom might be short lived, before we knew the ache of grief, before I knew the torment of nostalgia.
Khlayla Monia invited Mama Rachida to our sleepover right when we were about to leave the house.
“I can’t come over, you have Al Jazeera on all day, and it breaks my heart. My eyesight is barely holding it together, I can’t be crying, it is bad for my eyes” Mama Rachida replied.
“How could I not have the news on? There is a war, people are genocided, the least we can do is follow what is happening” Khlayla Monia reponded
Khlayla Monia and I kissed Mama Rachida goodnight, and drove to Mrezga, a city seven minutes away from Nabeul, where her house and my family’s house are.
Khlayla Monia lives out the values and ideals she aspires for, and has been that way since she was in highschool, thirty something years ago. She started wearing the hijab at the age of 17 under Habib Bourguiba’s regime, that had practically banned the hijab in public spaces. My grandparents were against her choice, since they were worried about her safety - hijabis were often harassed by police on the street. She found herself interested in Islamic resurgence movement in her teenage years, that had similar principles to the Muslim Brotherhood, but established a Tunisian identity. She, alongside her peers at school, were defying societal norms by embracing the hijab, under government that had cracked down on modesty. At university, she became aware of global issues of transnational solidarity through the student Islamist organizations, as their weekly meetings were not just to learn about the Quran and Shariah. Then president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali quickly banned these Islamist groups a few years into his presidency, not because of the content of their ideology, but rather due to the fact that they became a real threat to his power, as they were gaining popularity all across college campus, and in public opinion. The activism in Khlayla Monia’s college years culminated on the 8th of May 1991, where protests sparked across university campuses in Tunisia to eliminate the police that spied on students and reported to the government. That day, she witnessed the police shoot her friend and die at the nurse’s office. The following month, the police looked for her late husband Abdelkarim (then they were just friends) and he was then imprisoned for a year and a half. From 1993, Khlayla Monia and Abdelkarim abstained from any involvement in politics, until the Tunisian revolution in 2011.
She is a walking revolution, because she believes in change, and fundamentally believes in freedom. I understand much of her activism from her college years and after the revolution as not solely being about Islamic values, but the right to enact one’s beliefs and set of values freely, a right that was not a given over the authoritarian governments of Ben Ali and Bourguiba, that sought to control and dictate how everyday Tunisians practiced religion, among many other things. 4
She returned to the silence she knew for a decade following Kais Saied coup in July 2021, as many outspoken people against the current regime, Islamists and other political affiliation, have been jailed in the last two years, under the guise of being opponents of the state. Khlayla Monia’s house used to also be a hotspot for discussions about Tunisian politics, where I would often meet important people in politics without realizing. This winter, Al Jazeera’s coverage of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians was a constant background sound. The war followed her to her kitchen, with her phone playing commentary videos from Facebook. In the evenings, she fell asleep on the couch to news anchors. She reminded me of my mother when I would gently nudge her to relocate to her bed.
We did not spend our whole time together in her house, we had our afternoon coffee at a café decorated with fake flowers where the waiter sprayed some floral perfume to maintain the mood every twenty minutes or so. I watched Khlayla Monia’s eyes fill with tears, as she told me she wants to start writing again.
“You know, when Abdelkarim was imprisoned by Ben Ali’s government, we wrote each other letters, love letters actually, and they were written so beautifully that the guards of the prison, who would have to read them because of censorship, would look forward to reading the letters”
I asked her why she stopped writing. She told me she couldn’t. That she may have possibly missed the window for the intensity of her loss. That she now found herself forgetting the details of the weeks that led to his death. I was not present for any of it. I only know the stories from my cousins.
In this time, I return to Albert Memmi’s words in this moment, when he wrote;
« Nous passons notre vie à oublier, à essayer de ne pas penser à cette angoisse fondamentale, à essayer de recoller les morceaux… »
« We spend our life forgetting, trying not to think of this fundamental anxiety, trying to stick together the pieces…»
What will remain once memory fades? I am finding myself once again reacquainted with my fear of forgetfulness, I want to remember everything. I know my efforts in doing so will be futile, but just like the smell of cigarettes that sticks on my fingers, I will at least catch a whiff off of a fraction of what I want to recall.
In the same way I fear my forgetfulness, I fear Khlayla Monia’s too. I told her she needs to write.
We talked about feminism for some time, and I can’t remember what exactly.
“I think I am becoming more and more of a feminist as time goes on, I worry I might be getting radicalized” Khlayla Monia chuckles
Khlayla Monia and I have become closer along the years, and I think it is because of the same ideals for global liberation against oppressive structures despite our understandings coming from different places. Outside of the experiences of being Arab women, her viewpoint comes from her university activism, working in grassroots women’s rights organizations, and from the difficulties and loneliness of widowhood, whilst mine derives derives from reading theory
I watched her dimples reappear, which brought me relief that she has been healing from the loss of her husband and her father, who both died in the same year. I refrained from asking too many probing questions when I stayed with her, and made a mental note to bring up some topics of discussion some other time.
Here, we return to Memmi’s Le Scorpion, towards the end of the book, when two people are talking about their experiences with writing;
« Il me declara tranquillement qu’il en était content en effet; mais qu’il n’ecrivait plus […] qu’il ne voulait pas passer son temps sur des travaux de forme, qui finnissent par occuper complètement l’esprit »
“He declared to me calmly that he was indeed happy about it [a poem]; but that he no longer writes anymore […] he does not want to spend his time on working on form, that finishes by entirely occupying his mind”
In this quote, Memmi might want to bring attention to the absurdity of focusing on form, and writing something so well that you decide to never write again. It made me think about the anxieties I have had in the past, where have felt that it is not worth writing and putting my words out if it its outcome on the reader is not emotionally haunting. I had half a mind of not sending you anything this month, because I am experimenting with the echos of winter break, and the conversations that strung along my time there. But here I am, writing the longest letter so far, because I know that despite the fact that whilst I may not be happy with this piece in years to come, I will have something archived and saved, that I can return to (as if I never left). Prose has become a major preoccupation when writing with newsletter, and that is in part the result of how I arrived at nonfiction - what brought me to it was poetry.
I often find my writing style being affected by what I was reading around the time of writing. In this case, reading a dialogue heavy plotless novel, where so many voices occupied the page, did so that this letter is the different voices of people I was around during my week in my grandmother and aunt’s house. Most of what I have written here is what I remember, and what I wrote down on my notes app. In the last few years, I have been documenting the lives of my relatives in a time where change is the only constant, whether better for worse. I do it to remember the version of the people and places I love. And to remember more broadly
The illustration of this piece is a painting I did earlier this month while I mentally conceptualized the structure of this piece. In the bottom left is an orange tree in juxtaposition with the sea, a scene that does not exist. I painted it while watching the waters of the Gulf. Birds fly throughout the purple sky and there are a few suns in the sky, some colored in black, one fully black, and others not. At first, I wanted to call it “under decaying suns”, in reference to the dying suns I painted. My parents pointed out my rudimentary painting skills, my mom told me it reminds me of the paintings I brought her back from kindergarten.
When I gave them the above explanation, my father observed “ You painted the apocalypse”.
I thought I might have too. But the sun feels slightly different every time I return to Tunisia based on the season, sometimes it feels like Tunisia in itself has changed enough that I am under a different sun. Maybe I should rename it to “the two constants”, that is the orange tree and the sea. The places I love exist in endless versions, some I know, and some I will never get to know. Ultimately, these versions could leave me estranged or bring me comfort, but every time I return to Nabeul, I found myself in between these two poles of being. There is a difference between being in a place, being to a place, and being of a place. I would like to be of a place but I feel that my diasporic condition constrains me to being in a place, mainly due to my privilege of being able to leave when the country becomes unrecognizable. In writing about home, I can reach the state of being to a place, because at least my words will connect me to Nabeul, even if it in a small microscopic way.
Why do I become silent when I go to Tunisia?
I do not think it is silence that fills my experience in Tunisia. The silence comes from a deeply rooted urge to observe and document when I return. I once worried that Tunisia made me passive, but I become an active listener and viewer to everything when I return.
The scorpion stung itself in a position of entrapment. It did not necessarily know that had it waited a little longer, maybe the people deriving pleasure from its suffering would set it free. Or maybe, the scorpion was aware of the theatrics and played along with it, fooling the people watching into believing that it lacks agency. I understand Memmi’s opening imagery of the scorpion as a reflection his choice of departure. He did not stick around Tunisia to see if independence would be inclusive of Tunisian Jews, and because of the uncertainty of the times, he decided it was best to leave. His self-exile is the way he stung himself, but he still returned by writing.
The judgment of decays, deficits and absences was the way I metaphorically stung myself and hot coal I surrounded myself by. I was somehow killing a part of myself when I returned to Tunisia. I kept going back to the same spaces and doing the same things hoping my disillusionment would fade away, and instead found myself grieving even the smallest things. My silence in Tunisia was mourning a possible future where I would not be returning as if I never left, because I would have never left in the first place. I was grieving the fact that even in my own home, I am temporary.
In future returns, I probably will remain be silent. But I am writing, and I am writing because silence is not the end goal. If I am engrossed by change, I should at least document it.
Albert Memmi was a French Jewish Tunisian writer and essayist that escaped the labor camps during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. He is most known for his first novel La Statue de Sel (1953) (The Pillar of Salt), and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) published in the time of many national liberation movements, its preface was written by Jean-Paul Sartre. The Colonizer and the Colonized is often read in conjunction of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks and Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. In 1995, Memmi said of his own work: "All of my work has been in sum an inventory of my attachments; all of my work has been, it should be understood, a constant revolt against my attachments; all of my work, for certain, has been an attempt at...reconciliation between the different parts of myself."
I have written on the grief of being in my grandparent’s house in my grandfather’s absence in a photoessay for the Gazelle “Grief Across Transient Spaces” and the essay for the Markaz Review “Nabeul, Mon Amour”
My previous post, Days of Oranges, is the origin story to how my maternal grandparent’s house become a place of return, that I place higher than our house. I thought about it a lot because I wrote it right before going back home.
In the cultural contexts of Tunisia in the 80s , wearing the hijab is a stance against the status quo due to the perpetuation of postcolonial modernising policies. President Habib Bouguiba’s policing regime (r. 1959 - 1987) encouraged a “modernised” way of life, where mosques operated on a limited basis, fasting was discouraged in the name of productivity and modest clothing was cracked down on. The regime would often harass women who wore the hijab, took them to jail, and banned them from entering university, municipalities and administrative buildings. For that reason, state feminism in Tunisia, while undergoing major westernizing trends, left many women unable to manifest their piety, resulting in unsafe conditions that affected their day to day lives. Ezzine El Abidine Ben Ali (r.1987-2011) gave presidential pardon in May 1988 to Islamists, and in the subsequent months, hundreds of other Islamists accorded pardon, as part of Ramadan amnesty. The organization found itself able to organise, reunite and operate under somewhat normal conditions, since they were able to convene in universities and mosques. Ben Ali’s mercy towards Islamist was short lived. After Ennahda candidates won the majority of the elections in 1989, thousands of Islamists were sent to jail, their books were banned, communications were censored, and the universities were monitoring Islamist activity. Islamists were systematically persecuted by Ben Ali’s regime, despite being given some level of freedom at the beginning of his reign, and both his monopolisation of religion and surveillance of citizens contributed to the blurring of the private and public sphere. Civilians lived in a constant state of terror during Ben Ali’s crackdown of the “opponents” of the regime, which were mostly members of Ennahda as well as some leftists. People lived in the fear that the police would enter their homes at any moment and forcefully question them until they denounced their relatives, friends and neighbors. The crackdown of Islamists entered the sphere of their private lives, as their houses, occupational spaces and their relatives were searched, harassed and detained.