Just when I got use to the old structure, it had to be replaced with a new one.
People have emerged from their homes and now eat and drink at cafés during the day.
A once empty street is now populated with hundreds of people.
People are no longer sleeping during the day.
Including myself.
Now I spend time in cafés drinking lots of coffee.
Bad habit.
Bad!
…
The weather has cooled a bit.
It’s beginning to feel like Fall.
My windows are closed along with the shutters, taking away any light I once had coming into my room.
I have a big wool blanket covering my bed now.
A big wool blanket with a picture of two lions on it.
It has also been raining.
Raining, raining, raining.
As I walk to school I say to Allah, “Please don’t let me slip and drown in the gutters.”
He’s a good listener.
I pass a street sweeper who patiently waits under a tree until the rain stops.
Then the wind picks up.
I continue to wonder if this is what a hurricane feels like.
Yesterday it flooded in downtown Tunis when we got off the TGM.
My shoes got wet and I had soggy feet.
I looked dead.
My sister told me that seventeen people died from the floods in southern Tunisia on Wednesday.
It goes with the saying: when it rains, it pours.
…
This week has been quite sleepy.
Stories become less exciting when you study versus travel abroad.
Days become messy and blend into one clump.
Everything that was once new and exciting is now second nature.
Oh I live in such a beautiful neighborhood.
Yeah, it’s okay now.
Whitewashed walls, blue shutters, pink flowers.
I’m so spoiled.
…….
On Thursday we went to downtown Tunis for the Tunisian national film festival, which began on the 23rd and lasts until the 26th.
We stood in a crowded street and waited outside the Hotel Afrika.
We were surrounded by the stereotypical French movie buffs.
Cigarette smoke passes between us and finally we’re in.
We went to see Amreeka.
An old man was sitting in front of me, blocking the French subtitles.
It was a good movie though, heart-warming.
A moment later and I was back home in bed by 10pm.
……
On Friday we were dropped off at a mall in La Marsa by our academic director.
The four of us were there to observe the gender roles.
What did professor mean by “gender roles” and how were we going to find it in a shopping mall with so many different types of people around?
I don’t know, but I was about to find out.
Now that school has begun, few young people were shopping.
From the people I did see, I grouped into certain categories:
Slimy men: the men on the streets who have nothing better to do than group together and catcall.
Traditional working women: the women who may or may not wear the hijab while in public places. They go from point A to point B without distraction. They are commonly running errands while on break from work.
Businessmen: the men who wear tailored business suits with gelled back hair and huge sunglasses. They’re always on their cell phone.
The Westerners: the easy-to-spot Europeans with their Italian and French fashion snobbery.
There was nothing major to pick up from the whole experience.
No huge differences in gender roles.
People would go to the mall to shop like they do everywhere in every culture.
-Many people would shop solo.
-Many people would shop in groups of two or more.
-Many people would buy things.
-Many would browse and leave with nothing.
There was nothing major that men did that women didn’t do and vise-versa.
This made me wonder, why would professor want us to examine gender roles when it didn’t seem like there was any major things separating men from women?
Back in the classroom I found the answer.
Professor asks, “You saw men grouped together, right.”
“Right?”
“Sitting around doing nothing, right?”
“Indeed.”
“What about women, do you see them in the mall sitting around doing nothing?”
“Nope.”
I had an epiphany.
This has been an answer to a question I have had for years.
(Sometimes our most basic questions are so simple that we never think to explore them or to even make sense of them. Sometimes we’ve lived with our questions for so long that we don’t even see them as questions until we find the answers unexpectedly.)
Here, and everywhere else in the world (so it seems), public places are filled with men sitting around.
Where are the women?
They’re somewhere, they do exist.
This has to do with ownership and who owns what.
Do I hear tradition?
Women own the house. Men own everything outside the house.
After decades of gender role change, ownership of space is still similar to how it always seems to have been.
Around that same time a pen was placed to a piece of paper.
Public space:
Men feel they own it and that they belong to it. Women feel that public space is theirs to use temporarily.
Women go from point A to point B with things to do and people to see.
In between women commonly feel this public space is hostile and don’t make eye contact with anyone they are surrounded by.
But men continue to catcall and women continue to care less.
Private space:
Women feel that they run the household and do a majority of the chores that tradition has bestowed upon them. Men feel that they use this space temporarily.
Women make household rules and expect others to follow them.
…..
As much as we believe that tradition is a thing of yesterday, we need to think again.
Tunisia is becoming more traditional and is looking for their own form of Islam.
When one culture in the world becomes more liberal, a culture somewhere else in the world is becoming more traditional.
Modernization does not necessarily mean liberalization.
……
As for today, the only thing that happened is that I got my finger stuck in the door.
It hurt and I cursed.
But no understood me.
Later, I saw my grandma when I came home and greeted her by asking how she was.
That’s as far as I got before she kept talking and I had no idea what she was saying.
It was then when I realized that I didn’t know how to say, “I don’t know.”
So I said “Shwaya shwaya.”
We smiled, then I realized I don’t know how to say goodbye.
So I smiled again and hesitantly walked away.
I’m so rude!
Oh the joys of language.
…..
I like making my own things.
Such as my accent.
I speak English with an accent heard nowhere else in the world.
When I talk with my sister I wonder if she wonders where I am from.
My own world, I guess.
Chao….ciao.
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