Tuunis #2: RCD, DÉGAGE!

RCD, DÉGAGE!

Tweet

(“3” as I use it in transcriptions, represents the
tightening of the throat one hears when Kermit
The Frog speaks.)

May 4, 2011

The coming and going of guys in the room woke me. Course and quick shuffling on the dead linoleum, turning on and off the lights as they got their clothes on at 6:30a.m. and faces washed for work, off to the mdīna (“old city”) to suffer their dignity and sell cheap plastic jewelry or cigarettes all day. Brāhim with his cardboard box of trinkets, Şāliħ off to teach home design classes, I believe, and Bilēl, unemployed, still frozen on his pad on the floor. I rose at 7a.m. from the floor of the dingy apartment I shared—deciding to let my body adjust to the new schedule of this new country with a slightly later start—and am all the better for it.
I got a late start too to the interview with the semi-spokesman of the unemployed union. Sat waiting on the steps of the theatre for a half hour, dotted with red revolutionary graffiti in French and Arabic, the temporary wall around the construction project across from me splashed with the familiar slogan RCD, dégage! (“RCD, Get Out!” – RCD is the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique, or Democratic Constitutional Rally, the party of Ben Ali and his cronies, said to still haunt Tunisia under different party names). Called my contact, reset our meeting, and grabbed a seat at the fancy café of Hôtel International. Belkacem was his name, came running up to my bourgeois perch under the umbrella, sweating in the 11a.m. breeze and never taking off his sunglasses. We talked about some important stuff regarding the Leftists in Tunisia, the spread of committees for the diplômés chômeurs—those with college degrees and no suitable work to speak of—since the December/January uprising, and the protests in which the unemployed have been vital in organizing. Yet, we never finished the interview, as he scurried off heavily while spitting thick Tunisian dialect into his phone, telling me we’d finish tomorrow, and I didn’t get all of what he said, because of his Arabic accent in French, and my distraction at his sunglasses and badly rotted teeth.
After that, I met my thin, humble roommate Bilēl over at Bēb Bħar, the imposing gate to the mdīna standing alone in a square filled with cafés and a dribble of tourists in awful shorts and tank-tops. We meandered over to the sūq (“market”) and bargained down a pair of fake Adidas for me to about twenty Dinar. Walked a ways, and so far no sores on the bottom of my toes. A good start for these sneakers. Then onwards through the alleys of polished stone, and hanging bras, towels, and rolls of cloth, out past an old mesjid (“mosque”), and on to the Université Neuf Avril. There, I called Nasrin, the beauty I’d met a few days before, several times in the windy courtyard of the austere college and got only the boîte vocale, to my dismay. Met a couple leaders of student groups and other activists, told ‘em my mission in French, and we met again inside the office of the recently deposed school secret police, just inside the main door to the campus.
These kids were smart, and had a lot of analysis to give—albeit full of uncertainty—in response to my questions. They interrupted each other here and there, and all pulled out cigarettes and smoked in unison like young communists in Paris. Yet, none of them could offer too many confident statements about the future when I asked, which I guess few Tunisians really can at this point. Pretty militant and full of life they were, though, which was a breath of fresh air, after so much of the political staleness in people’s minds that I encountered while living in Syria.
One of the guys in the interview could understand my questions in French, but stumbled some when speaking French (no worse than me, certainly), and so responded in Standard Arabic, most of the words of which I was understanding, but I wasn’t able to put it all together into a meaningful statement. I guess I’m still at that level in Arabic. Shucks.
At one point, the girl to my left started to speak to me about student organizing in English with a British accent, and then POOF! They were all speaking advanced-level English. But then I would say something in Standard Arabic to the guy having a little linguistic trouble, and they would all start speaking and arguing in Standard Arabic. Same for French. Incredible.
Afterwards, I watched some videos of the revolution here in the capital that they had put together, and they all jumped at the chance to give me their contact info. One brown-skinned woman (3azza was her name, I think?) said she’d accompany me to Sidi Bou Zid when I go, the place from which the Tunisian revolution spread. That’s where she’s from, she said. Nice.
Then me and Bilēl wandered out of the spot, and I felt a huge lump in my throat and chest as if I was going to cry, and I felt tired, homesick, and pessimistic about this whole journalism thing, despite the great meeting. Back through the mdīna, and me and Bilēl grabbed some sandwiches in a hole-in-the-wall near Enīs’ internet shop, and I felt just fine again after eating. But, as I sat at Enīs’ cyber café making calls to City College to check for job options (not looking so great there), calling Dick Hull about NYU financing, and writing a letter in French pleading the Université Libre de Bruxelles to still let me apply despite my missing the deadline, the enormous weight I felt before returned, and I felt like crying.
The sky became grey and flat, and I went across the street, home to the fellas’ apartment, and called Mom for a little wisdom and relief. I did get some, but couldn’t bring myself to cook any shūrbit l 3adis (“lentil soup”) for the boys, as I’d planned. They cooked instead, and we sat around watching TV and talking simple Arabic, chowing down on macaroni. The weight left me, and I slept.


May 8^th, 2011

Woke at 7am, eyes embarrassingly heavy at this hour, which is a slovenly one for my new up-and-at-‘em-at-daybreak schedule. Because of the heavy dinner last night prepared by Kefi’s wife Ħannān, had trouble getting out of bed. But, I got my shower on (I thank the universe), got my kriya on, then wolfed down a breakfast of baguettes and jam and café au lait from the low table in Kefi’s arab-style living room with cushions on the floor. It’s pretty high living in the care of this man who I only met yesterday. I’m amazed how far some money one saves while an immigrant, working as a cab driver in Philadelphia, will get one in this destitute little town of Menzil Bou Zian.
We sauntered in the sun, out through the decrepit concrete portal around Kefi’s property, and hopped in the car with smiling Fādil, Kefi’s brother—or cousin?—who really knows great sayings and expressions in English, and we sped out of Menzil Bou Zian alongside the old French train tracks. As we cruised along, Kefi, his eyes peeking out slightly from under the brim of his eternal baseball cap, told me in his high, joyful-sounding voice, about his illiterate father, who started fighting the French occupation in 1946 as a young man. He told me how many great rebels against French colonization came from this town, this area, this little peach pit at the middle of this country ripe with radicalism—yes, radicalism. It’s that popular liberating impulse that can force off the hand that squeezes the throat of a society. But, be very careful about equating “radicalism” as I use it with the blind, angry, Islamophobic word which much of the mainstream American media uses to frighten us about the world beyond our borders.
The land spreading out around our car was semi-arid, and flat, but for tiny bare mountains of brown and grey off in the distance. The sky was frighteningly clear.
We drove a long way, picking up a motley crew of simple Tunisian hitchhikers, and dropping them off along the way, and after a long stretch of kilometers along the highway, now surrounded by feeble agriculture, Fādil dropped us in the middle of Sidi Bou Zid. It’s interesting how I had a preconceived notion of Sidi Bou Zid, this small town where Muhammed Bou Azizi burned himself alive in protest, sparking a revolution, as being a place physically mangled by poverty. Yet, it looked like simply another dull town of the interior, save for the revolutionary spray paint graffiti in Arabic, French, and English on the white walls of the town.
I talked to Kefi at a café about general problems of corruption, regional favoritism of the past regimes, and the absolute lack of any industry or commerce development in the area, while I composed interview questions in French. I thought I would be pushing for interviews with local bureaucrats, but Kefi unceremoniously grabbed three young guys from the café, and we embarked upon a great trilingual discussion. In hindsight, of course I wanted to talk to the regular unemployed people of this town, not some fat administrator behind a desk.
The young men, two of them former students of tourism who commanded the basics in English, seemed on the edge of tears from frustration at the state of things, one of them looking the whole time as if he’d just been beat in a fight. They talked about the corruption that remains, the etbē3 (cronies) of the old regime who hang on in the provincial administration, the lack of any job prospects. “Anyone who can help, come! We need help… from America, OK? From anybody. I have dreams. I have no hope,” said the beaten young guy with thick beard scruff. When asked if they thought the revolution would bring something better, something that lasts, to Sidi Bou Zid, they winced like I’d just put a finger in their would. “No,” was the answer in short. “Moi, j’irai en France” (“Me, I’m going to France”) said the only one of them who had some means to escape.
Afterwards, Kefi and I checked out a local minister’s office, burned from the inside out yesterday by unknown assailants. Black wings of soot on the walls spread out from the windows. Beside us, an aging taxi driver, seemingly out of nowhere, recounted to me from his car window his days with the Tunisian secret police in the 1980’s. He had been trained by—guess who—the CIA. He showed me the lapel pin that signified his unit, given to him by America’s bravest torture trainers. He seemed to have little fear of reprisal as he spoke. Either he had resigned to the inevitability of future punishment, or his acts had already been recognized by past victims.
We took a bit of rest and fruit juice in Fādil’s tidy, gardened home just down the street. Then, headed out, we toddled down the main avenue, approaching some old cats standing out front of a dry cleaners. After intense conversation that I understood little of, they pointed us to a local police office smashed and disheveled and burned by marauding shebēb (young men). Within, the bookcases were overturned and sat in piles of ash and black water. The entrance door was dark with soot. The quietly outraged family living above the station came down and told us how they had averted an attack on their home upstairs only by firing a gun when the vandals approached. Several acts of arson and vandalism in one small town in one day. Who did this? Do they work for somebody? The beginning of a counter-revolution terrorist movement?
Then the long, hot drive along the cracked road back to Menzil Bou Zian.
After a nap and a meditation, I headed over to a sha3bi (popular/working-class) coffee shop, men and only men shriveled like prunes laid out to dry on its terrace. I drank tea and smoked a disgusting hookah that burned my throat with Kefi, Fādil, and other local fellas who sat around smiling at this foreigner who struggled like a baby with their dialect. I learned some great expressions in the Tunisian idiom, though, like “Just when 3idi is getting married, the grain goes bad,” meaning that sometimes the rarest of misfortunes will happen at the worst moments, and be ready for it. Then, I did the briefest, most concise interview hitherto with Fādil, in English. He gave me a lot more specific information about the people in the area, but in the end, he said he too was almost hopeless for real change post-revolution. “Maybe, maybe, after the elections [in July] we’ll see change,” he closed, wincing.
The sun taking its last purple-orange breathes over the dry and deserted avenue at the center of town, I walked over the barren railroad tracks behind the café, talking in French with a café waiter about racism in the U.S., the gravel crunching under our feet, and I went to the half-built house of Kefi’s brother to use internet. I spoke with Kefi’s brother—pious, curious, a bit hard-headed—and a few hijab-sporting women with light skin and piercing faces about religion, in my uncomfortable, tedious Arabic. We argued about the assassination of Bin Laden, they said he was a great leader, and I spoke to my mother about this place on the phone.