This mysterious land offers up a number of curiosities, not the least of which is the influence of Western civilization.
The Tunisians watch our movies (American movies, that is…), listen to our songs, and digest our pop culture. In fact, most middle school or high school Tunisian students are obsessed with Michael Jackson, his music, the movie “This is It,” a phenomenon which I believe was brought about by his death this past summer.
This dollop of Americana is only the icing on the cake which is Western influence. This cake, of course, is French culture. The majority of Tunisians can hold a simple conversations in French (though this becomes less likely the futher away from Tunis you go), and many are completely fluent. Most signs are written both in French and in Arabic. As the former colonizing power, France has signed a number of agreements with Tunisia which makes it easy for workers to move between the two countries. When you listen to Tunisians speaking in Arabic, they throw in French words in every other sentence. Tunisians can choose to do their shopping at local markets or at French-owned supermarkets.
Even the cities have a Western influence. The majority of cities in the Maghreb (which comprises Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) have two parts: a medina and a ville nouvelle. The medina is the Islamic part of the city. It’s usually encompassed by a huge circular wall, with many many tiny streets, medersas (Q’uranic schools), and mosques inside. It’s an impossible maze, but at the same time there’s little chance of getting lost, because you end up going in circles. This is completely different from the ville nouvelle. The villes nouvelles were built outside the medina by the French during their colonization of the Maghreb. There are grands boulevards, streets in a grid pattern, order, administrative buildings, praticality.
In this vein, I celebrated Halloween by going to a fabulous cabaret with 3 French people and 3 Tunisians. This cabaret could have been anywhere in the world, judging by the fashionable clothes, the high prices, the inordinant consumption of alcohol, women dancing in very small skirts…the only thing that marred this globalization fantasy was the musicians playing along to a woman singing Arabic songs. I had never encountered this Tunisia before, where the jet-set came to frolick and pretend for one night that they were rich and beautiful anywhere else in the planet. I just hadn’t expected to find a Tunisia that was so, well, Western.
Overall, I think this anecdote says it best. One of my seventh grade students asked me recently, “What does ‘Oh my effing god mean’?” Um…fortunately, another student jumped into my stunned silence. “It just means, ‘Oh my god!’” Yes, let’s go with that explanation.
Tunisians take Western culture as something that is cool and novel. However, ultimately to understand it, they have to remove what they don’t understand, or what might be offensive.
