tabouna — Tunisian style (and that's the problem)

In the countryside of Tunisia women make خبز الطبونة (khubz tabouna) on a daily basis. Which I may well have spelled wrong, because my Lang Arabic Lexicon seems to have omitted it — and besides, it's in idiomatic fellahi dialect. Generally not written at all.

And that was the problem, of course.

So. For about five hours a day, country women are mixing and kneading, letting rise and slapping down, and forming nice flat, round loaves of durum wheat bread about the size of the American dinner plate. They make about 15 loaves a day — a major enterprise, as far as I'm concerned.

The tabouna is outside, usually just past the women's courtyard. It's about four feet tall and at its base, around three feet wide, narrowing toward the top. The oven is made of baked earth, what we would call adobe here. It's blackened rim and interior attest to the multitude of loaves these ovens have had slapped onto their sides for baking. Yeah, the bread does not lie flat in the oven. Instead, it is sprinkled with cold water and bakes vertically — turned periodically — on the sides of the interior. The tabouna has first been filled with stones and kindling, and when the fire simmers down, it is the heat of the stones that bake the bread. Fifteen loaves take a long time. Every day.

And that's one of my favorite things in the countryside — the taste of freshly baked khubz tabouna.

So. I was thinking about this with great nostalgia and longing, on a flight from Paris to Casablanca, and upon arrival. I was with a belly dancer friend, and some friends of hers (male) were picking us up at the airport.

We get in the car. Both of us sitting in the back seat, of course. The guys are in the front. And I say in Arabic, just to make conversation, and because it really was true,

"I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat some khubz tabouna."

The car screeches, narrowly missing a camionette on the road. There are no lanes, or at least any lanes that anyone pays attention to. I hate driving around Casa. I just don't get it. But Moroccans navigate really well through it all, so what just happened?

The driver pulls over, and the two guys turn around and they're glaring at me.

"What did you say?" the driver asks in French.

So I repeat myself in Arabic.

They look at each other. They look back at me. They really heard right.

"You can't say that here," his front seat passenger says. I didn't remember their names yet.

"Eh?" I say in French.

"C'est interdit!" the driver says — it's forbidden.

I'm very very confused. My belly dancer friend is not really paying attention to any of this. She doesn't speak French, and she doesn't speak Arabic. But well wow, can she dance. She's come with me to find the source of one of her favorite dances, and to see how North African women interpret it. Right here, right where the dance was born. She also wants to see if she should study anthropology. This trip is a big deal for her, and I'm blowing it.

We're barely past the airport, and already something's gone terribly wrong. Ominous for the whole trip we're embarking on. A land rover heading south into the Sahara, looking for a library that may (or may not) have texts still written in tifinagh, the primordial writing system of the Amazigh, or Berber people. So I can see if there's a correspondence between the old writing system and Tamazight women's tattoo patterns. That's the goal this time round.

Morocco. We're in Morocco — not Tunisia.

I catch my bearings, and explain.

"In Tunisia, the women in the countryside make this wonderful bread. The oven is called a ta—"

"Stop!" they both say in unison.

"That word," says the driver, "means something different here."

"Means something different everywhere — except Tunisia," chuckles his buddy. The tension has passed. I'm a moron, clearly, and hadn't intended to be so crude.

I think again of what that oven looks like. Earthen, with a blackened rim. So organic (in the old sense of the word). You look inside and you're looking straight into — oh, I get it.

Just as they, haltingly, explain it.

Cunt.

I had just said that I can't wait to get into the countryside and eat hot cunt.

So much for my Arabic proficiency.

As may now be obvious, Moroccan dialect differs significantly from the Tunisian. And both of them are distant from the mainstream Arabic further east. But worse than that, my Tunisian dialect is fellahi — peasant style. It's like an anthropology Ph.D. candidate from abroad coming to the U.S. to study Appalachian land disputes, and learning English for the first time at the hands of hillbillies of West Virginia, as depicted say, in the movie Deliverance. And that's the English you speak.

Well, that's my Arabic. That's why people would cringe when I'd open my mouth at the Archives Nationales, and tell me to switch to French. That's why the head of the Women's Union in Baghdad hugged me crying her eyes out at the 'authenticity' of my my backwoods language skills. That's why the women of Dubai had a good chuckle at my expense.

Okay, so I've probably made the worst linguistic gaffe possible in the Arabic language. Does that mean shut up and never speak again? No. I figure, after that one, I can say anything I want. Letting people correct you is in part what anthropological fieldwork is all about.

I just wish I was better at languages. Switching dialects is such a pain. And so much of my research has been in the mountains of Morocco in the past ten years. But my language skills just don't want to switch over.

They think I'm North African, but have been living in France way too long (they have no idea just how bad my French is, I guess). Or, they're just being polite.

"Are you from Egypt?" someone asks. "Where are you from?" another inquires. Finally, finally someone recognizes the Tunisianisms I just can't let go of and nails it down.

"Aahhh," they respond, at the identified exotic dialect. Tunisia does not come first to anyone's consciousness, even in North Africa.

There's that French expression:

petit pays, petit esprit

The French always used it in reference to Belgium, but I could see it in the look in their eyes. Small country, small spirit. Everyone underestimates Tunisia. Even now.

We're still in the car on the road to Casa. The ice has clearly been broken. What are you studying they ask, and I explain.

"We're Berber," the driver says.

"My grandmother has those tattoo patterns," the passenger says. His name is Aziz, I learn, finally. "She has those symbols on her hands and face," he says — having always taken them for granted before.

"We're going up to the mountains," his cousin the driver says.

"It's Eid. Come with us," says Aziz.

And so, we abandon the library at the edge of the Sahara (whose manuscripts it turns out, have long since disappeared) — and after picking up the tzaddik at the airport the next day, we all head up the winding dirt roads of the Middle Atlas mountains.

The women are baking bread when we arrive. It smells swooningly good.

I keep my mouth shut.

At least, about the bread.

Every moment goes swimmingly. A perfect fieldtrip, and perfectly unanticipated, given the rocky start. With lasting friendships made and kept, even now.

"So. What do you think?" I say to the bellydancer.

"You made it all look so easy," she says. "I could never do that."

Which is exactly how I feel about her dancing.

mary poppins meets fatal attraction and other adorable stuff

When R was very little, her sitter brought over one of those sweet little Disney films to watch together. It was around the time when she was seeing movies for the very first time. And even as a small child, she was apparently paying close attention to the tube.

I came home ready to take her out in her stroller, maybe to the park, maybe just a walk. She loved being zoomed along the bumpy hills, and she had particular favorite bumps for her zooming. Her great desire at the time was to learn how to fly, and she thought that if I pushed fast enough, she might lift off someday.

But not this time. When I went upstairs to collect her, I found that my precious daughter had made herself a collar from part of one of my shoes, and had wrapped it around her neck.

"Ladies don't go out!" she proclaimed, and refused to go out into the world.

Her plan, like in the movie she was watching, was to not leave the house until she had had puppies. Lady and the Tramp did that to her after one viewing.

Now, maybe that's adorable to somebody, but I had never seen Lady and the Tramp before. So R and I sat down and watched the movie together. In this revolting little horror movie, 'Jim Dear' gets 'Darling' an adorable puppy. 'Darling's face is never shown until the end of the movie, after she's given birth to a child. These are the humans in the movie. Then there are the dogs...

R kept her eye on the female dogs. She paid no attention to the males. There was Lady, who as we have seen, is supposed to stay inside. And there was the sultry Peg — the seductress of the streets (played by Peggy Lee), who ends up at the Pound, about to be euthanized any minute for roaming free on the streets with the boys. Great message to little girls: good girls stay inside; bad girls go out in the streets and get themselves murdered. Even a three year old can get the message in one viewing.

But just in case little girls have missed it, there's Mary Poppins to the rescue. This time, it's the mother who's out on the streets. Horrors! And her children are in desperate need of a nanny. Good nanny stays with the kids. Bad mother is out on the streets. No one ever remembers just what mother is doing out there, but guess what — she fighting for women's right to vote. Bad mommy learns her lesson, however, and at the end of the movie, she tears off her suffragette banner, turns it into a kite, and stays home. Problem solved. Lesson learned.

Around the same time, I happened to see Fatal Attraction, which was all the rage scaring men half to death. But the real horror of the movie is this: Fatal Attraction is just another repackaging of the Lady and the Tramp / Mary Poppins motif — but for the older set, just in case the message didn't get through when we were little girls.

Here too, there are two main female characters — the good woman who stays at home, and the bad woman who goes to work. And here too, vivid, and graphically explicit, the evil working woman gets her due — this time (if I remember it correctly) she is done in directly by the sweet homemaker herself.

Scary movie, yes, but not because Glen Close is terrifying. No, scary movie because it's no different from the lesson little girls can get from horror shows like Mary Poppins and Lady and the Tramp. But it's these latter movies (the adorable ones) that are all the more frightening than films like Fatal Attraction — precisely because we don't notice what they're doing to our precious daughters!

R gave up her longing to fly — but she found another passion: After the Lady and the Tramp fiasco, she started analyzing what she saw on the tube. She was still three at the time. Suddenly, she refused to watch Sesame Street, proclaiming that it was "just for boys." There were no girl-puppets for her to identify with, and worst of all, Big Bird was a cheat.

Big Bird a cheat?

"Big Bird has pink legs, but he's still a boy," she complained. She was incensed by this. It was a real betrayal. Even the color pink had been usurped.

At the moment, my daughter is trekking the Gobi Desert, so I guess she survived Disney. She still pays close attention to the tube. And when she sits me down and orders me to watch, I do just that. Strange as it may sound, I learned my outrage by my daughter's side. She did not, as convention might have it, learn her outrage from me.

say something about veils...

Here's something I'm actually pretty angry about. There, I said it out loud. I'm angry about my great-grandmother's veils.

My dad spent decades scouring the earth for Judaica. To rescue it and give it a home. Not our home, mind you. But something more permanent. A place where these fragmented treasures of our People would be (or might be) preserved this time forever.

I come from a museum family, in which no object —excuse me, artifact— is really personal. History has taken so much from us, my mother would say. We were robbed by the Expulsion, the Inquisition, the Holocaust. And so, my sibling, the museum, got all the attention. History was not our own to be kept, held or savored just in our tiny fragment of a family (or anyone else's family either). It must be preserved — institutionalized — as yet another symbol of the heritage that we collectively lost. Preserved for all to treasure equally. Not for any of us to keep for ourselves.

And so, my great-grandmother's veils, when they were eventually uncovered in my nona's house, went straight to the museum. I only got to wear them once, but I remember how beautiful they were, how delicate, and exactly how complicated it was to wear them. Somewhere, I know there is a picture of me in her veils. But clearly I was not to be entrusted with them beyond that momentary loan.

Besides, my research interests were primarily among Muslim populations (or nominally Muslim, anyway). I keep thinking that perhaps I wasn't worthy of keeping the family veils. I was studying, perhaps, the wrong tradition! The Bukharan veils were all that was left from that particular line of the family. Maybe my parents were right to have them incarcerated. So they could be put on display on a mannequin every five or ten years for little Jewish school children to gawk at for a second or two before moving on to the next exhibit.

My dad collected everything. But he wasn't materialistic about any of the stuff he 'rescued.' What he treasured were the stories they could help uncover. Each object, each bit of junk held a piece of the puzzle. And if you were a good researcher, you could find enough bits of junk to be able to see the whole picture. He was, in his way, an archaeologist of of our fragmented history. And when he died, his apartment became my own excavation site. And it's now my job to find homes for all the remaining orphaned bits of unclaimed culture. And I became the curator of my dad's leftover homeless treasures.

At some point along the way, I started to collect some pretty nifty veils. My travel-veils, I call them. My favorites are the Egyptian ones with all the beaded sparklies on them. They're the closest thing I've found that feel like my noni's veils, though nothing's very close. And when I wear my veils, I feel at home, and safe, and linked up to a line that goes back through time, a thousand years, or two, or three, or longer.

"History is always now," my mom always said. And wearing those veils, well, I can feel it. But truth be told, I really don't like museums very much. It's not just the sibling rivalry. I'd just rather wear my history than stare at it through glass.

running away together — dordogne

It's not like either of us never went anywhere — though I thought she had me beat in this regard. Her fieldwork took her to what I thought of as the ends of the earth. although for her, it wasn't really all that far — just inaccessible. My own favorite spot was in the deep Sahara, and she would have joined me there in a heartbeat if I had asked. And I had agreed to Jerusalem (with great misgivings) because she wanted us to surprise a friend...

But most of all it was when she was with me, living with me for however short a time it might be, that she said she was most at home. She said she could stop acting, pretending, trying. She could just BE. Her room was always waiting for her chez moi.

We talked of running away together... well she did — I was quite happy where I was. I just wanted her to stay right there with me, forever. But she missed her grouchy little dog. And she had a dream. To be honest, she had many dreams. This was only one of them.

We would buy a village (yes, a village) in Dordogne. One of those medieval towns without amenities (like indoor plumbing or reliable electricity, although this latter did actually matter). One of those places that foreigners were already beginning to snap up. Or a country estate, for starters. And we'd build a Retreat Center for Anthropologists, far from the distracting eye of their home universities. A place where they could write. And think. And talk. And yes, I know, there are plenty of these spots all over the place... That doesn't matter. This was her dream. Her village. Her escape.

I looked at properties online, and found some fabulous deals. I looked at the pros and the cons:

Pros: Be with her. Write.
Cons: Leave SF. The heat.

Trading my house for someplace in rural France? I would have done that for her and her dream. I think. Even knowing that it was only one of her dreams. Her dream with me in it. Our dream. There were others.

And then (you probably guessed it): She got ill. Or rather, she got diagnosed. And well, while life does not stop after diagnosis (although to be sure, it can), it doesn't stay the same either.

Her specialty, after all, was Healing and she was an expert in this regard. And what I found so validating to my own worldview was that it wasn't too much later that she no longer gave a damn about healing anymore. Although she tried it, of course, on one last trip, to South America. It didn't help, or not for long, anyway, and at long last she was ready to go.

Now, as is abundantly clear, I do not have a spiritual bone in my body, so it's not like I'm wishing her a Dordogne afterlife. I know at the end she let go of that dream and most of the others as well. She did care about one thing and one thing only, and in this she was well satisfied.

She said she knew how to die. She just didn't know how to live anymore. I asked to see her. Just say the word and I'd be there. She said 'No' again and again. And then at last, she was ready.

It was the end of the semester, and I was about to give Finals, when she said 'Come!" — and I thought, great! As soon as I finish up the semester I'll fly out. My passport was renewed. The ticket could go on a credit card.

And then, she was gone.

I still think about running away to Dordogne. There are some great deals still to be had, especially in this economy. A village would be nice, for all of us. Or a country estate, for starters. It's so much closer to my fieldwork. And I could drop in on that friend in Jerusalem (despite misgivings).

Pros: Be with her. Write.
Cons: Leave SF. The heat.


In Memoriam — Memorial Day, 2008 —
Rest in Peace, sweetie.
You, and your little dog, too.