Double Absence
Exile, its strange, beautiful disfigurement. The experience of self-imposed exile, of estrangement and voluntary distance from the motherland—though that “voluntariness” was already coerced - remains a central part of my life, and of the North African Tunisian character in general. We have always been migrants by instinct. Whether we were Arabs of Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym who came to Tunisia, or Amazigh drifting between mountains, plateaus, and plains searching for pasture, or expelled Andalusians - we have always been a people in motion. Only the routes and the methods of wandering have changed. Instead of mounting a camel and turning westward, we board planes - if we possess the symbolic and financial capital - or we board a fisher boat, a dinghy, if we are destitute, stripped of any cultural or academic capital, without the accumulated wealth that escorts some people across borders in comfort. The experience of estrangement in the United States is not merely different from e...