On Tunis

Be sure to reqd the post below. Here are some quick thoughts on Tunis before I head to the train to go south.

The city is too big for the people living in it. This is an entirely unjustified and mostly irrational statement I am making but I can't shake the sensation. Everyone speaks French in and out of the tourist areas, and all the street signs and literature is in French and Arabic. The city nouvelle, built in the fifties by the French who didn't feel welcome in the medina, is well laid out and orderly, in its design. THe buildings are taller than those in Athens; giving the city the height and stature of a major city. But it doesn't take long to realize this city is not operating at that plane.

There's a fairish amount of foot traffic, but not enough to fill the streets. The cars pile up in traffic, but not enough to fill the streets. The cries of street vendors rend the air but not enough to fill the silence. You quickly realize the city is declining, collapsing on itself. No part that I have seen bears traces of any kind of regular maintenance. It has a forlorn kind of beauty, but that betrays the underlying morbidity of the city itself. Unlike most big cities, where I can get some kind of a sense of the life that exists beyond the mere people, here when a person passes, in his wake is only the scent of vitality. Nothing about the city itself, the buildings, the streets, signs...nothing indicates things would change that much if the people left. That is, the city is like a coral reef, swarming with fish of different colors. But the little polyps buidling the reef died a long time ago. The buses and the cars are the just residents of a skeletal grandeur, the corpse of a city that history ought to have buried or enshrined, but has been left to be slowly ground into dust by those living inside it.

Difficult to convey, but I had to give it a shot. I have never been struck as strongly by the sense coming from the city around. Only echoes of what should be exist. It's not even mournful; the city's passing was so long ago, it has ceased being tragic and now is just an inscrutable phenomenon.

I doubt this sensation would last a long time, but I won't be in Tunis long enough to discover. Note that I only refer to the French city, built outside the Tunisian core, the bustling medina, which, by all accounts, remains vital.

Right then, I must run to make the train. Wish me luck and be sure to read the below post to get last night's sentiments.