I cried today. When you live your life as a permanent expat, going back home is always an emotional roller coaster. Catching up with my mother, always vigilant for any signs that something might be off. Meeting uncles and aunts who aren’t getting any younger. Spending quality time with my sister and her in-laws. Being there at that special moment when my niece found out she was admitted to med school. It all adds up, leaving you emotionally drained by the end of the week.
By the time the week was over, I was emotionally spent. But I didn’t cry. It wasn’t until I boarded the return flight to London and started reading about the Olympics closing ceremony that the tears came, and I couldn’t hold them back.
Paris, je t’aime
The 2024 Paris Olympic Games were special for many of us Tunisians. Of course, we aren’t French, but we do have that complicated love / hate connection with France that was forged by almost 80 years of colonialism. Paris is a special city that many Tunisians visit and love. There was a unique connection to the Paris Games.
The complex, interdependent relationship between the colonizer and the colonized was powerfully explored in the classic writings of Tunisian author Albert Memmi. His seminal essay, “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” originally published in French in 1957 as “Portrait du Colonisé précédé de Portrait du Colonisateur,” continues to resonate deeply in the context of today’s world. Memmi wrote:
The mechanism for destroying the colonized cannot but worsen daily. The more oppression increases, the more the colonizer needs justification. The more he must debase the colonized, the more guilty he feels, the more he must justify himself, etc. How can he emerge from this increasingly explosive circle except by rupture, explosion? The colonial situation, by its own internal inevitability, brings on revolt. For the colonial condition cannot be adjusted to; like an iron collar, it can only be broken.
Notre butin de guerre
Memmi wrote his book when Tunisia, along with many other nations, was emerging as an independent country. His grim perspective reflects the oppression and racism inherent in colonization. As a Jewish Tunisian, he deeply connected with his Tunisian identity but also recognized that he was caught between cultures. His view on this complex identity reflects the darkness of his time. He also wrote:
Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I now find myself between two classes; and I realized that, in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor.
I don’t share Memmi’s dark view. As an expat who has lived in France, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK, I find it deeply enriching to embrace more than one culture and to let diverse influences shape one’s identity. However, I do agree with Memmi when he wrote in his other classic, “La Statue de Sel” (“The Pillar of Salt”),:
Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep.
Today, some misguided Tunisians want to erase all vestiges of France’s colonial presence. Their favorite target is the French language. Post a video or text in French on social media, and someone will inevitably pop up to criticize the choice of language. It’s lazy thinking. I understand that the situation is indeed complicated by the uneven spread of the French language across different strata of Tunisian society, just as Memmi described. But to me, we should celebrate our diversity and the awesome fact that the average Tunisian can speak more than one language.
As the Algerian poet and writer Yacine Kateb famously wrote, “Le français est notre butin de guerre” (“French is our war booty”). It enriches us; how shortsighted it is to think of it as a burden.
Mixing it up on the Med in 550 BC
We tend to focus on similarities and class people accordingly, thereby undervaluing diversity. During my visit to Tunisia, I spent a few days in the village of Kerkouane (Arabic: كركوان), located in the Cap Bon region, less than 150 kilometers from Sicily. This village, home to an ancient Iron Age settlement, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The ruins of Kerkouane are widely viewed as primarily Punic in influence, as the village was abandoned after the First Punic War (c. 250 BC), offering an unadulterated glimpse into pre-Roman Tunisia.
Archaeologists had long suspected a dominant Phoenician presence at Kerkouane. However, a recent DNA study revealed a surprising twist. Hannah Moots and her colleagues genetically typed 12 individuals from the Kerkouane site and found that none of them were of Levantine Phoenician descent. Instead, there was a mix of Greek Sicilians and local autochthones. Their conclusion was that the village of 2000 was diverse, with Levantines perhaps being a minority who had integrated with the locals and lived alongside Greeks who moved there from Sicily.
As the authors of the study conclude, the rich culture of the Mediterranean is the result of these intricate networks of interaction. In fact, each of the four coastal sites they examined — in Tunisia, Sardinia, and central Italy — turned out to be heterogeneous, hosting a mix of individuals from across the Mediterranean. The far-reaching benefits of coastal mixing didn’t escape the notice of Moots et al. They wrote:
We also suggest that there is a connection between the trend of increasing local heterogeneity and shifts toward modern Mediterranean population structure, indicating that the genetic impacts of mobility were not isolated to port cities, but extended, at least to some degree, to populations inland from the coasts. In The Making of the Middle Sea, Cyprian Broodbank notes, “[w]ithout denying the likelihood of various constellations of social, cultural and other identities, early Mediterranean history instead comprises an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of webs of people and practices changing within and between places.”
As an aside, the Kerkouane site was only discovered in 1952 and has since been the focus of numerous excavations and studies. The local museum is a gem, even though the ruins themselves may seem somewhat unimpressive compared to other archaeological sites in Tunisia. However, I’m not posting any recent photos — the site feels too depressingly abandoned. Tunisia is still grappling with the aftermath of chronic mismanagement following the Tunisian 2011 revolution. History is still in the making.
Food unites us
The value of diversity may be a cliché, but what unites us as humans is equally powerful. My colleague Nick Talbot , Executive Director of The Sainsbury Laboratory and Trustee of the Halpin Trust, recently introduced me to a remarkable project in Oldham, Greater Manchester, where the non-profit organization Northern Roots is bringing communities together through one of the most fundamental connections we share: food. They have transformed 160 acres of stunning green space in the heart of the city into the UK’s largest urban farm and eco-park. This space, which once physically divided communities, now unites them through community gardens and food festivals.
This initiative is incredibly inspiring — bringing communities together through urban farming and food. As Nick wrote:
Basically, there are two separated communities; one is predominantly Bangladeshi and Indian and the other is white working class English and also Roma/Traveller community. Between the communities is a green space and a local group started a project called Northern Roots, which started as a community gardening scheme. Based on a shared love of gardens and food, it has blossomed into something pretty special, with food festivals between both communities celebrating ethnic cuisine from each community and lots of volunteering. Now they are trying to expand into bee-keeping and urban farming, but all based on community leaders ideas and very much driven by the local communities. It is an oasis in among the streets there, which are so run down.
Here’s the link to @NorthernRootsOL They deserve all our support.
I cried today — La grande célébration de notre humanité partagée
It was the mixture of family emotions and the never-ending drama of the escalating conflicts around the world, all compounded by the relentless drive of some to act, to do something about it despite the long odds, and to fight the tide of hatred and division, that primed me to crack. When I started reading about the Paris Olympic Games closing ceremony, I was deeply moved. This is what The Guardian newspaper wrote:
“Humanity is beautiful when it comes together,” said theatre and opera director Thomas Jolly of his stadium show celebrating “respect and tolerance” in a fragile world. He called the Games and the closing performance “a unique opportunity to share, reconcile, and repair.”
“Humanity is beautiful when it comes together.” I hope these simple words will move you to tears as they did me.
Postscript — What happened to the far right?
Have you noticed how quiet the far right has been during the Olympic Games? As French sports writer and broadcaster Philippe Auclair noted in The Guardian: “They thrive on anger and division. What to do when everyone else, regardless of nationality, gender, age, religion or lack thereof, color of skin, and — yes — political inclination, is having such tremendous fun? If they had joined in, they would have betrayed themselves.”
Auclair’s spot-on column further highlights this paradox:
The paradoxical problem of the (far right) patriotes is that they cannot rejoice in the success of their own country. Surely, the love shown to Paris and to France by the rest of the world for putting on such a show should swell their hearts with pride? But no.
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to everyone who inspired this post. This article was written with assistance from ChatGPT.
This article is available on a CC-BY license via Zenodo.
Cite as: Kamoun, S. (2024) I cried today — Humanity is beautiful when it comes together. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13318892
