The Quiet Streets of Tunis
Watching the city on holiday
I arrived in Tunis just before Eid al-Adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice. It is a Muslim holiday commemorating a practical joke God played on Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his baby boy to show God his loyalty. God then subbed in a lamb before the hazing got out of hand.
Journalistically, this was not a great time to show up. It was rather like landing on the day before Thanksgiving and looking around for someone to interview. Much like Thanksgiving, consuming an animal is central to the holiday. Mostly in Tunisia this is a sheep, in keeping with the theme of the God’s prank. And much like Thanksgiving, everyone is back at the family house and nothing is open.
On Eid al-Adha Tunisians gather with their families, kill and clean their sheep, cook them up in all sorts of ways, and fill up on lamb dishes. I went wandering through town looking for sheep to look at, but mostly people were in their houses with their families, or in the front gardens grilling. There were few cars out, and it was fun to wander around in the normally busy streets. It was mostly me, a number of cats, and the occasional street corner lamb grilling.
Tunisians, being just like everyone else in the world, view family holidays with a blend of dread, inconvenience, and sincere sentiment. Holidays fill their places with love in all its forms — pleasurable, obligatory, comforting, confusing, tedious, and hopeful, but all behind closed doors. I did not spend the Eid with anyone’s family. In part, it is because I am a vegetarian, and it seemed not even a good idea to ask. I know somewhere out there is a good Muslim vegan engineering soya or seitan sacrificial lambs. I still want to meet that person and high five them, not just because I am vegetarian, but because I love watching our ideas of morality evolve and recombine. A veggie Eid al-Adha sounded glorious, and I told this to my friends as they headed off to their families. They laughed, but not without kindness.
I wandered around the streets on the Eid, looking at the building, the street cats (Tunisia is a city overrun by small, cute, feral cats) and the police and guards that seem to be everywhere. I can’t show you pictures of the police installations in front of the Ministry of the Interior, where Ben Ali’s regime did their worst torturing, because if they see you taking a picture a man who seems barely out of his teen years with an assault rifled strapped diagonally across his chest comes over and makes you delete them. It is not just Tunisia, this has happened to me in a few countries now.
There is more razor wire and barely-legal cops than there were when I was last here. This is because things are hard, and everyone is a bit afraid. Two opposition figures to the moderate Islamist government were shot and killed this year, Chokri Belaid & Mohamed Brahmi. Both assassinations brought thousands of people into the streets all over Tunisia, including in front of the old Interior Ministry building. The government is all but dissolved in response, and everyone is waiting for some kind of electoral magic to make it better. As an American, I have no good news for them. There is nothing magical about elections.
The other hard issue, the one everyone mutters about, is the same one that brought down Ben Ali in the first place. It’s the same problem that is pressuring governments from India to Greece to the Americas: there’s no damn jobs anymore. Unemployment is officially at 14%, though the CIA World Fact book puts it as high as 18.8%, with youth unemployment as high as 30%.
Driving along one of the wide beautiful, and basically empty streets heading to a rich northern suburb of Tunis, a local economics blogger who goes by MB explains the problem, saying “They get degrees and then they don’t get jobs, because jobs did not increase as much as the number of graduates.” She gesticulates with her hands, and we get honked at as we drift across lanes. Later she tells me over coffee that many people are trying to leave Tunisia.
In the mean time, police vehicles prowl crowded commercial streets. The night before Eid I stood, trying to cross the road in a busy commercial district while a police caravan rushed by. In the middle of the caravan were two identical white police vans, one after the other on the narrow street. Both their side doors were open, and identical men in black balaclavas with assault rifles held diagonally across their chests stared out from the open doors. They both caught my eyes, a few feet away, for a split second. I wondered where they were going, and why the police needed masks. I wondered if they were barely out of their teens.
Elsewhere, empty broad streets are dotted with massive unfinished buildings — the bad ideas of times that were imagined to be more prosperous than they actually were.
