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 estrangement in Europe - it is different by entire epochs and orders of magnitude. I am not speaking comparatively, not in terms of ease or hardship or quality, but in terms of a deep, fundamental divergence.

In France or Italy, you will find Tunisians everywhere. Algerians everywhere. Moroccans everywhere. Africans everywhere. Your own orbit surrounds you. You can slip into a neighborhood or a ghetto, eat couscous, chorba, tajine:
devour your own identity on a small plate, trying to chew yourself back into “the homeland,” seeking a hidden safety you will, of course, never find after leaving. But at least you have the dignity of trying.

There, you wander through an ugly kind of estrangement - but you still possess escape routes: isolated Maghrebi pockets, a burst of raï music from someone’s phone on the Paris Métro, a perfectly enunciated Tunisian insult exploding from a man yelling into his phone at Milano Duomo.

You have hidden paths that let you feel like you are still you: if only temporarily, falsely, sadly.

Many will laugh at this, dismiss it as tedious lamentation about “place,” without understanding that place is you. That you, whether you love, hate, scorn, or pretend otherwise, are place. You are soil and dust and homeland. You are songs and mezoued and crooked dancing and shouting. You are incense, the call to prayer, Qur’anic recitation drifting from homes. You are football fields behind school buildings, the wide sebkhahs and scorching heat. You are birds and stars stretched across the night, and bitter red tea. You are your mother’s smile, your father’s shouting, your brother’s teasing. You are the rug you slept on half-naked through blistering summers, and the heavy wool blanket that wrapped you in freezing winters at the student dorm far from your family. You are late-night chatter, morning quarrels, the sputtering moan of your neighbor’s motorcycle, the foolish jokes of your friend at the neighborhood café with its scattered white plastic chairs.

But in North America - this continent of brutal cold and brutal individualism, where the individual is worshipped daily - the story changes entirely.

Here, you are completely uprooted. No one knows where your country is. No one knows your ethnicity or race in a land that sorts you instantly through the binary of race and ethnicity. No one cares what you love, what you want, what language you speak, what burdens or local or national wounds you carry, what your ambitions are, or why you are here in the first place. You are an immigrant: and there are thirty-five million of those here. Nothing exceptional about you.

Here, you walk utterly alone, with zero companionship - except the artificial kind, of course, which coats two-thirds of human relationships in this strange country - moving through cities built of steel and blood, sweat and subjugation, gray cities that spare no one and grind down everyone, citizen and immigrant alike.

You become, without realizing it, a hybrid worm, feeding off everything and anything. Breakfast becomes Thai, lunch Jamaican, dinner Chinese. And then you sleep: full of food, empty of identity.

Your exile here doubles itself. Your loneliness condenses, thickens in time and space until it frightens you. You love, but no one receives your love / no one cares / in this society of technology, transactional desire, and the endless catalogue of Tinder and Hinge profiles strewn along the edges of the digital highway, each offering disposable affection, disposable sex, disposable acquaintance.

You grow annoyed, and no one notices. You make a joke, and no one understands. You curse the world, and everyone smiles politely, as they are trained to perform a counterfeit version of humanity.

In time, you get used to it. It becomes part of you. And you mutter to yourself: Isn’t this everyone’s life here? They are all either immigrants, children of immigrants, or - at most - grandchildren of immigrants. Everyone has been emptied of who they are, reduced to exhausted robots chasing everything and nothing, forgetting the sweetness of poetry, the warmth of family, the beauty of love, and the exquisite agony of estrangement.

Everyone here is plastic, steel, asphalt, electricity.

And you, you are a sky releasing hot, irritating steam. A sea turned sweet. Food without salt or pepper. Fertile soil with no one left to plant it, no farmer to till it. A wretched migratory bird whose tongue was split in two, blood dripping onto cracked earth. A star whose glow has vanished, reduced to a cold lump of white stone. An old song no one understands until you begin to suspect it is the song that is barren. A love abandoned on the roadside, untouched. Rich black earth that no hand will gather. A wandering kiss lost amid the stench and chaos of crowded train stations, bursting with people, rats, and vomit.

Here, you are no one. A jinn trapped in a buried lamp for years with execution delayed, waiting to burst free - to conjure a new form, reclaim a lost dream, retrieve a wandering language.

But it never happens.