The day begins with a delicate touch. The call to prayer sounds at sunrise. 5:00 or so.
Sonically, it’s gorgeous, but alien. It mingles with the tendrils of sleep that still linger like the leaves of a weeping willow around your back and shoulders, provoking an elision between consciousness and slumber.
Harvard has achieved tremendous market share here in Tunis. I have lost count of the number of tees and sweatshirts bearing Cambridge’s coat of arms, ostensibly a result of the institution’s successful partnership with multinational clothier H&M. On top of this: young boy in a green Pine Crest hoodie. Gaunt man on the side of the street repping ‘Nova. Dude on the beach with a Syracuse cap. Wesleyan but maybe he was just an MGMT fan. It doesn’t make any sense and never will.
Their president is nicknamed RoboCop because he insists on speaking Standard Arabic (“a language we don’t speak,” my friend Maha tells me) in a strict monotone and focuses on politics of law & order. Sounds like a good chap.
I still haven’t really figured out the cosmopolitan nature of this place. Tunis is marked by inequality, as so many world capitals are. You can dine in a bistro on the top of a luxury hotel and feel like you are in Paris or Houston and a block away you have a pack of wild dogs roaming a dilapidated street, as passersby look on indifferently. The hotel is protected by a security apparatus, metal detector included.
Many houses, especially in the leafy districts of La Marsa (where I’m staying), Sidi Bou Said, and Carthage, have these 3-meter tall white walls that fence in the property. It’s pretty isolating, inserting a clear demarcation between the communal and the private. This palace is mine; the trash-strewn street is yours, and mine only when I need it.
The N9 highway connects the aforementioned suburban districts to the city centre, covering some 20 km in about 15 brisk minutes. Much of it is surrounded by these polished modern office park type buildings. They are multinationals, state bodies, and local enterprises like car dealerships, restaurants, and gyms. Luxury apartments fit themselves in among side streets, as I found out when I shared a cab from the airport.
This commercial tract erected alongside the city’s main highway is not an uncommon occurrence. I recall Sofia and Athens that feature such a set up. It’s pretty soulless while also offering a strange juxtaposition with the dusty and unkempt vibe of the denser urban areas, which teem with people in uncosy surrounds.
I met three young people in the Medina on the first day. Two studying law, one an aspiring beautician. They are not positive about the direction of the country and want to join the ~50% of their peers who have left for the US, Italy, Germany etc.
We are about forty years removed from the invention of the PC. Fifteen from the iPhone. The consequences of these products are by now almost entirely non-theoretical. Countries have borders and languages, inextricable from quotidian considerations of Heimat and culture. The internet, as we know, does not. The dream of unabated movement of information and capital is instead capturing the hearts and minds of the third world.
I have been here for only a couple of days but have already observed multiple groups of local Tounsi conversing in a mix of Arabic and English. Grammar is local, accent too, but there seems an unquenchable urge to express oneself with the language of the internet. What I have noticed: the more ‘modern’ the concept, the more likely it is to be rendered in English. I have heard “Johnny Sins”, “messy bun”, “thicc”, and a slew of gripes at the post-modern realities we humans universally face living in the 2020s oddly served up for my consumption.
My friend Nour tells me expressing emotion is too severe in Arabic. Young Tunisians are more than at home with Hollywood, where they have seen us glibly say “I love you” to each other in an appropriately blasé manner. When I bring up that movies and television produced in Los Angeles are not real, I am brushed aside.
Skateboarding is obviously metaphorical. You watch someone throw themselves into the air expecting failure. They do it five times, ten times, never wavering in enthusiasm. They love it holistically. There simply can not be triumph without injury.
I stumbled upon the La Marsa Skate Park after a long walk on the beach that ended at Cap Gammarth. After returning from the Cap, I sat on a stone wall trying to clean my feet, enjoying the bliss of the sunny late afternoon soundtracked by Deepchord.
The dominant color of Tunis’ northern suburbs, especially Sidi Bou Said, is a marine blue. If you’ve ever been to Greece, it’s that color, but a shade or two lighter, its starkness lightened by a few degrees latitudinal difference. A new friend Chadha tells me the white buildings striped with this soft blue represent the idyllic tint of successful meditation. Nothing but the sea and the sky.
Directly in front of the skate park bleacher lies a rail of this color, two meters in length; standard height. Behind, a raised plateau, lip in parlance, 15 centimeters high, demarcated by a thick line painted red along its edges.
In this area, the spectator witnesses an elegant traffic. Skateboarders peddle back and forth, weaving organic patterns in a dynamic harmony. A trick is attempted, the sound of wheel on rail establishing a mode for the improvisation.
Presiding over symphony of sound and movement, the nexus of this sub-culture lies with a band of roughly elegant non-natives, who roam the premises swaggering in their baggy jeans, black Vans, and cigarettes tucked behind their ears. I know them not by name but by appearance: buzzcut Bradley Cooper, Jude Law with flaming locks of auburn hair, the flying Dutchman, Amelie in Tunis. How they all ended up here isn’t clear but their mission and their commitment to it, is etched into their very fibers.
Today is the day before the Grand Opening. It’s the last day this park will belong singularly to The Heads.
This place is pure vibe. A DIY refurbishment project pushed forward through a cloud of national cynicism by a gang who have chosen to be this place. It’s impossible not to feel this. The pride and optimism around this homespun culture is so thick in the air here you can taste it with the flick of your tongue.
The historical details follow: the place was created around 15 years ago when the local government decided to use the strip of land lying between La Marsa plage and Avenue Habib Bourguiba as a place for youth recreation, the so-called Complexe Sportif Marsa Jeune. But sadly the area began to atrophy, maintenance of public space being not a closely held principle in these parts. An enthusiasm to refurbish nonetheless emerged, and the gang were duly seeded.
They put in twelve hour days laying concrete; shaving anew the lips and edges on which their boards now find fresh purchase. They came here every day for six months, not that they weren’t before, of course, preserving and persevering and driving towards this cosmologically small but spiritually significant triumph of definite optimism. No small feat in a country where many feel history has ended.