Tunisian trip recollections (part one)

Driving the I-10 from Los Angeles into Arizona, heading from the desert watered to look like paradise and into the desert as it really is, in doing so stirs up these old memories I'd putten away and forgotten. For example, if you ignore the windmills and the road signs in English just outside of Palm Springs, it's just like the ride through southern Tunisia heading into the Sahara.

I think about being packed into a rickety minivan with several other people heading for the same city. The driver was a happy old man who smiled and waved at us. As always there was a merry casette mix tape of loud Tunisian folk music playing, louder and louder. Later I would buy two or three of these in the airport and then a few years later leave it in the stereo at Renate's, the comic book collective I volunteered at. People loved to sing in Tunisia; in the minivan the men hummed and moved their hands.

I was travelling with someone, and he took care of all the communication, because for one, he could speak French and I could not. And secondly, it was difficult for me to speak to men in that place, as friendly as Tunisia was. It is not a difficult country for women to travel alone in, and the place is barraged with thousands if not millions of European tourists every year. But they liked to yell, "Japanese!" at me.

It was also the kind of relationship now where I realize that men who are boys like to pretend that they are men, and they like to reassure you and show you how things are going to be and assure you that they will protect you, but they are just as confused and unsure of themselves as you are. It's a burden young girls place on men sometimes, and it creates all sorts of stress and confusion as these boys, or maybe it was just this one boy, tried to fill out the spaces and be that kind of man for me. At the time I was too self-centered and weak to notice this, and that's why things turned out the way they did much later on.

The women sat in the back, smiling at me but not saying anything to the men. They were very polite though, and said only as much as they had to. They did not always wear veils; even with veils they were carefully made-up, and I felt a secret connection to them. I wanted to speak to them, but again, I could barely get by in French and of course I could not speak Arabic. Many people there spoke German very well and English, but it was always the men, and if the women could, they did not offer to do so right away.

The tourist towns were full of vacationing tourists from France and Germany. There were many older European women who went around with very handsome young Tunisian men. Later at the airport I would see the men kissing the women and giving them bouquets of flowers; the women, suntanned and happy, looked so vivacious and full of good memories. The spark was back in their eyes. Perhaps it was about money, but there was some wonderful thing that the men had given back to these women; companionship, perhaps lovemaking. It was the special thing that someone like Jenna gives to people, fill out the empty holes and needs that we do not always get by default.

The bazaars were full of baby camels, Tunisia t-shirts, rugs, and water pipes. Every day sunburned tourists in scanty clothing gathered there to go shopping. We went there together, that boy trying to be a man and I, and I would hold his hand and let him talk.

A gigolo pounced on us and took us to tea, speaking in perfect German, speaking of how he loved German women, how he could get a place to stay in the town even cheaper than our hotel, and how he could arrange a tour for us into the desert with camels and berbers. I remember being incredibly shocked at how handsome these men could be; cologne and dark skin and good hair. In speaking, the gigolo was also willing to share with us tidbits of his life. He preferred life here in this tourist town to life in the countryside. Here things were exciting, they happened, and he enjoyed the fun German women whom he would escort to the disco. He was an honest peacock, and very good at what he did.

Later we were stranded for a time in the town where they filmed the desert scenes in Star Wars. The sand people's houses were the underground homes of the Berber minorities. This was a huge selling point, and we arrived late at night at one of these towns; the hotel had a big "Star Wars" sign, and crawling down into the tunnels was a charming experience. The doors were rickety and wooden; we lay down on the bed, dirty and exhausted. The beds were comfortable but medieval, and the bare wires led to a naked light bulb flickering against a cracked mud wall. To our chagrin we could hear every movement and word of the couple staying in the room next door.

The next day we tried to catch a ride to the next town, but the way things work there is that you have to sit in a private car and wait until it fills up. The town's only tourist attraction were these hotels and the Star Wars deal. It was wealthy from all the tourist money, and there were huge four story homes with satellite dishes. We wandered up and down the narrow streets, got lost, then drank endless cups of tea with the men lounging around. Not many people could speak French; a confused British tourist couple bumped into us but they were heading in the opposite direction. The woman wore the shortest shorts I'd ever seen, and her legs were blindingly white. We all felt out of place, yet we were so in place in the mechanics of the town's economy.

Through the whole process the boy who was not really a man but trying to be one, well he was guiding me around, herding me here and there. It was a very stressful experience for the both of us. I think it gave him a sense of purpose, which he guiltily enjoyed, but he had also fallen in love with a headstrong and independent woman, so it just added to the confusion. Relationships are always about the push and pull of what you like, then what you are not supposed to like but guility like, and all these random explosions of personalities and experiences that are so unpredictable. He could never understand me, none of them could, although, unfair as it was, I had an easier time understanding him.

It was the first time I experienced Ramadan. The mullahs calling out from high mosque towers, the frenzied activity of people selling clothes, one of the Ramadan traditions. At sundown the restaraunts were packed with people eating ferociously, breaking their fast. It was a time of families, and we both felt suspiciously lonely, because there was a lot of coming and going and hugging of people who had known each other for generations and whose families knew each other for generations. All day long the stores were closed and everything was a ghosttown, but at night everything everywhere erupted into life.

At times like those I wished feverishly that I had been born Muslim or Jewish--a very weird thought, right? Because they had so much ritual in their religion, and as my Jewish friends in college told me, ritual was such an important part of believing. Even the Muslims and Jews I knew who did not seem to believe so much, who went to trance parties and wore miniskirts and smoked and drank, they still had wonderful rituals and parties and songs. They celebrated their holidays with a joy that I felt lacking in my own holidays.

And yes, it's so strange that driving through Arizona would stir up so many thoughts about those times. There was a lot about Tunisia that really wasn't that different from Arizona, and it would surprise a lot of people. I still cling to the idea that most people have basically the same desires--the desire to love and be loved, the desire to see new things. It's just so interesting that we turn out in such a way that we all feel we are so strange and different...