Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

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Mizna Online

May 29, 2025

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

by Farah Abdessamad

Essayist Farah Abdessamad contemplates the layering of history atop history in a small Tunisian town on the Mediterranean coast, and the poetics of how memory and recollection sediment to become the future of the past—what we call our present. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2, Futurities, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

—Farah Abdessamad

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

Twelve miles south of Tunis, I inspect the graffiti on the decrepit house. Spray painted in black against a wall the color of young apricots, are the words “Naro” next to “H-Lif”—an abbreviation for the town of Hammam Lif. In capital letters these two words float. Naro, Hammam-Lif’s Carthaginian past; Hammam Lif, Naro’s Tunisian future. In a shadowless street off the polluted beach, they exist simultaneously and become something else: a world-image and a new spatial realm. These two names won’t leave me alone.

Unlike more elaborate mural art, this graffiti contained no signature and no date. The unknown artist strolled, stopped, and appraised the abandoned house’s surface in near collapse under the weight of bygone halcyon days. Everything here is in a state of near-collapse. It must have happened at nighttime, when the beach’s laughter, made of discreet courtship near the wave breakers and hard liquor drunk by the bottle, subsided. Lulled by the rolling waves, the young man—let’s assume a young man—looked around. Silence. Next, he took his can of spray paint and gave it a vigorous shake, muffled by a second-hand sweater he wrapped around it. Without much thought, he tattooed the names of his town. Hammam Lif first, then Naro, a spontaneous but necessary addition as if one couldn’t be inscribed without the other. A quick outburst. Intentionally or not, he mapped a sensory grid: that of the living and the dead. I stare at the evocation, just like he did. As quiet as a cat, he left the scene toward the train station and farther west, joining the towering shadow of Jebel Boukornine.

Graffiti is a public language; it captures a visual and symbolic mood when not a scream. Yet “[l]anguage is never simply a language, a tool, it is a reservoir of a people’s soul,” wrote Albert Memmi in The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon (1973); this prompts recognition. The young man who spray painted the words Naro and Hammam Lif didn’t do so to show off his drawing skills or compete with others over matters of style or engage in obvious social activism. H-Lif and Naro, by their two-word minimalism—the drawing holding the finality of a signature—conveyed something of a different order. It brought to mind another mural I had noticed two years ago at Hammam Lif’s train station after a decade-long absence. That one shows a teenager with headphones listening to a cassette that reads “please don’t kill yourself” in English. Nurturing and supportive slogans on this anti-suicide campaign include “Stay 4 the strangers that will love you” and “Life is always worth it.” A loving whisper to counter a desperate, silent scream. It hurts to think that for some young people the train linking Tunis to its southern banlieue might be an attractive final destination, a relief to end a painful existence. The mood of inevitable capitulation is challenged in this anti-suicide graffiti by the station that appeared after the Revolution, commissioned by a local youth organization. I wondered why they elected to write these messages in English as opposed to our dialect if the intended audience was local youth. The image carried a distinctive American feel with its textisms and Walkman from the 1980s and 90s, which brought to mind a third graffiti by the beach promenade depicting the American hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur on the sides of a run-down kiosk. English is a social language, an elsewhere, an abstract country, a narrative landscape, much like Naro is to Hammam Lif. A Hammam Lif graffiti resurrects Naro like others vow to avenge the death of Tupac: these alternative spaces exist only in our subjective longing, but their entanglement doesn’t end there. More than a mass of archaeological fragments, Naro is the site of powerful dreamscapes, upon which a graffiti artist extends the affective urge to hold onto the memory of the dead through time. Naro and Hammam Lif etched like the romantic blanket protecting a lover’s embrace; I got pulled in to examine what kind of longing they conjure.

It’s hard to chart with precision Naro’s timeline. The village and its people were part of Carthage’s expanding empire, which Rome razed to the ground in 146 BCE after three devastating wars. This genocidal campaign brutally erased most traces of Carthaginian culture, literature, and lifestyle, a sprawling civilization that stretched across the central Mediterranean for centuries. Victorious Rome incorporated and administered the territory as a province. The country, to which the Amazigh people are indigenous, changed hands countless times until being ruled by the Ottoman Empire and France before gaining independence in 1956. Hammam Lif, famous for its hot spring reputed to cure nasal ailments, sits where ancient Naro was and has grown from a modest fishermen’s village to a town of more than 40,000 people. At what point did the city cease to be Carthaginian, Arab, Ottoman, Vandals, or French to become something else entirely in our imagination?

Jebel Boukornine, the mountain of “two horns” in Tunisian Arabic, looms over Hammam Lif as it did over Naro. The twin peaks crown the Gulf of Tunis, belonging to the topographical memory of Tunisois today, of Carthaginians yesterday. In the times of Naro, Boukornine’s limestone gave a pink hue to syncretic statues prized by Punic and Roman patrons. On its western peak, where animals were sacrificed and votive stelae placed to honor the gods and commemorate the animal offerings, rested a sanctuary consecrated to the cult of Punic divinity Baal, later assimilated to the Roman god Saturn. There, worshippers overlooked Carthage and the small villages around it. I imagine them, not more than five or six climbing the mountain with their loads to visit the temple’s attendants. Upon reaching Boukornine’s western summit, they rested on small benches made of wood and rocks. The breeze cooled their burning cheeks. The supplicants shared a piece of bread between them before washing their hands to proceed with the rituals. And when nighttime descended, they lit terracotta lamps and stargazed, huddling against the shadows.

I wandered near Jebel Boukornine one winter day. I went to visit the green and red painted sufi shrine of local saint Sidi Bouriga. A fire destroyed part of the building a few years ago. The zaouia had been renovated since, but it was closed that day. I followed the path leading to the mountain’s slopes that remain green despite the abundance of concrete and dust everywhere around it. The incessant car traffic muted; I paused to admire the expanse of the sea’s changing blue—a blush so warm and tranquil. Amid piles of plastic trash and unpleasant smells, I carried on the forested slopes until confronted with several young men who immediately hid their hands in their pockets when they spotted me. The mountain’s new guardians, I thought. I turned my feet and left visiting the old sanctuary for another day.

Like the graffiti artist’s infatuation, I too have often thought of Hammam Lif and Naro. I could not roam Hammam Lif without roaming Naro and this spatial collision created an illusion of permanence, the existence of a vague continuum giving way to a love of legends and a mythological resonance. Several months after my walk to Boukornine I encountered ancient Naro when I least expected it in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum opened a show devoted to medieval Africa. Among the exhibition’s stunning objects were Jewish mosaics from Naro excavated in the late 19th century. They testified from a place where multiple faiths coexisted from the 3rd to the 6th century. The floor mosaics represented several potent images including a menorah, a lion framed by floral motifs, and a large-scale date palm tree. I came to know that they had been unearthed in 1883 by Ernest de Prudhomme, a French Army Captain who proverbially dug his backyard and found a treasure: the most complete evidence of ancient synagogues in Roman Africa. Men under his orders unfortunately damaged many pieces due to inadequate excavation techniques and handling. The Brooklyn Museum acquired these historical objects in 1905, around the same year of the Young Tunisians’ founding, a decisive political movement mobilizing indigènes, promoting Tunisian emancipation and equal political consideration under the French protectorate.

In New York, I admired these vestiges and noted their familiarity despite not sharing the faith for which they were designed. I recognized in the lion the tales of the extinct North African Lion which once populated Tunisia’s forests and mountains up until independence. I visualized the many date palm trees lining the beachfront promenade of today’s Hammam Lif in their various states of desiccation, and in the mosaics the colorful tiles of our family home as well as the ostraca of a surviving past that pokes and gasps through the ripples of time.

That de Prudhomme found the remains of the Naro synagogue in his garden is rather uncanny. It emphasizes that soil is a stratum holding infinite secrets. History’s layers often mingle and argue like the daily pensioners glued to their plastic chairs in smoky, idle cafes amplified by the noise of a TV playing somewhere. These deposits sediment and superimpose, elbowing eras and events out of sight until they stubbornly spring back to view.

The ancients distinguished between memory and recollection. In the same way, we differentiate History from collective and mythological narratives, and all of these from personal histories. According to Saint Augustine, born in Romanized North Africa, “the time present of things past is memory.” In other words, memory is the present of the past. Recollection, on the other hand, entails the act of piecing together fragments, a determination that leads to a form of realization. Collective and primordial memories may not concern our existence directly but they frame a mental geography. I, as the embodied form of the present, was not present during the birth of oceans and the sky, nor during those cataclysmic events—plagues, wars, natural disasters, famines—that still haunt the collective human consciousness. Yet as a historical being, I live through my personal memories in addition to those I have inherited, what German scholar Reinhart Koselleck referred to in Sediments of Time as a tension between “experiential space” and “expectation horizon”. And crucially, memory cannot be apprehended without forgetfulness and erasure.

Little has survived Roman wrath to teach us about how Carthaginians philosophized history and human existence. They believed that the soul survived from its physical incarnation. In other societies not too distant from Naro, the dead underwent trials to be accepted into an afterlife; a moment often recounted as a voyage, a crossing of rivers. Forgetfulness grants passage to a new life in exchange for the past: the dead must relinquish the memory of those that attach them to the material world. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting that “the dead are those who have lost their memories”—or, perhaps more accurately, traded. While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

* * *

After encountering the laconic graffiti signage of H-Lif and Naro, I head back to the beach. The sea is calm and the scent of rotten garbage tickles my throat. Public benches have been smashed into pieces. Sea-facing restaurants and kiosks have shut, except for one with an empty freezer placed like it were part of a garage sale. Wild grass and trash have covered the area where sand used to be. I tiptoe between shards of glass and plastic bottles, baby clothes and broken toys, and dry balls of Posidonia oceanica, a common underwater seagrass, rejected by the sea. Famished flea-infested dogs and litters of emaciated cats haul leftovers of leftovers. Sand was harvested to embellish touristic beaches south, as if this place’s constitutive components were destined to elect one of two imposed choices: to leave or surrender. Following a heavy storm in 1981, ill-advised authorities installed large wave breakers which trapped marine currents, occasionally turning the sea a dangerous tint of green. Stagnating waters have mixed with sewage; it is too toxic to swim there now. When I was little during summer visits, my family rushed to secure a spot on the beach before it got crowded. This was before the sea turned into an irreversible poisonous pond where harassed and beaten-up asylum seekers go to die, trading their own memories for a one-way passage. At night, we would gather on white plastic chairs sinking into the cold sand, drinking sodas drunk on our stupid happiness.

From the beach on a clear day, I can make out the Byrsa Hill of old Carthage and the elevated village of Sidi Bou Said, the Tunisia of social media influencers and hashtags, a vista that often feels like it belongs to a different country. Located north, both of these spots twinkle at night. Wish you were here, they tout to me, from my there on the other side of the Gulf of Tunis. Large ships anchor in the port of La Goulette—to France, Italy—they pass by until they make a turn and disappear in the far distance. Sometimes I think the ships and their passengers might pity this neglected town and its people who dream of visas they can’t obtain to travel abroad and escape (is visa-fantasizing an early form of memory-trading?). Work, lack of work, life is ghali—expensive. The Tunisia I know, the one of Hammam Lif, is left to old people, kids, and women, to it-was-better-before and look-at-these-young-women-now (always young women). A dirty dot, a stain on the polluted coastline along with Rades’ eyesore of an industrial zone. The old casino is collapsing despite multiple renovation announcements. The empty mansions have stayed behind while patrician families have opted to live elsewhere. The Bey’s winter residence is crumbling, the site reeks of urine. Cinema Oriental closed a while ago and the bakeries are sometimes half empty amid cyclical flour shortages, which have worsened in recent years. And not just flour: lines of caffeine-deprived people in front of the few shops selling ground coffee. But there’s fricasses, pizza, lablebi, and more and we’ve blessed a new dictator to replace the one we had deposed. The town’s characters ignore that they live on borrowed time as each new day starts following the same musical score. The streets bask in nostalgia, a dangerous affliction that infects people sitting, waiting, queuing in between a constitutional coup, an economic crisis, and news of arbitrary arrests. Those working in Europe and Canada front their exchange rate-enabled wealth. They don’t share stories of racism and hardships beneath their hard-won euros and dollars.

“A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present,” noted French intellectual Maurice Halbwachs in The Social Frameworks of Memory. I find this helpful to approach Naro’s shape-shifting nature. Naro’s ability to stimulate a reflection on the concept of time—both a physical place and a delineated periodicity—and the poetics of time. Naro has become a salve to soothe daily humiliations, an incantation to fight the static of the present. Naro is not a door for cultural supremacy or racist genetic theories. Rather, it is a revolution in the sense of circling back to a rumination—a poking question mark that gives way to mysterious ellipses.

In our mind, the graffiti artist’s and mine, Naro is enveloped in a magnetic aroma of fresh fish, baking ovens, and a sticky, generous sea. The village enjoys stillness during napping hours once men have returned to shore with their morning loads of tuna, octopus, and cuttlefish. Children play on the beach and admire the boats going and leaving the port of Carthage. They dream of trading across the Mediterranean Sea one day in these agile ships, of encountering different lands, of worshiping Melqart in the various temples dedicated to him in Gades and Malta. Borders are malleable here. A grandmother scolds a child, who dirtied their cotton robe when drawing fish on the wet sand with his friends. A little girl shrieks and runs away from bees.

Naro means “fire” in the old and extinct language of the Carthaginians, a connection also found in Arabic today. Fire is light, an emergency signal, a symbol of arrivals and homecomings at sea. It brightens crevices, fear, and human ignorance while projecting diffused shadows against the walls of our caves. Fire is a sun, a raging luminosity, an abundant summer and the warmth of a home during winter. Uncontrolled and unchecked, fire turns aggressive, tempestuous, and incandescent. As such, its cathartic release produces alchemical alterations. Intimate fire nourishes the feeble glow of candles one brings to vigils to remember the dead, to honor their memory, and to stay alive, together, through the night.

Gaston Bachelard had warned about fire’s magnetic allure and dangers in Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). “In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away.” But fire is an avatar of Tunisian pleasure and pain; we feel it in the burning of our tongue induced by our spicy cuisine and acknowledge its presence in the combustion that killed fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which has since left us feeling a little lost. Maybe it can guide us out of our maze.

On the pale apricot wall, the unknown artist—a warm presence by now—drew an invisible bridge between Naro and Hammam Lif, two interconnected worlds that exist within and for each other’s eyes. The gesture might be brushed off as an insignificant spasm, yet the suggestion of this portal is the mark of someone who longs, dissents, and resists. The beach’s sand glimmers under the sun, the trees stretch their opulent palm leaves, parasols dot the vista with wondrous colors. Every able-bodied resident has donated a day annually to clean the city. Giggles rise from the emerald sea. Fresh seafood grills on the promenade and ice cold citronade refreshments. A ferry bound for Carthage, Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa arrives at the pier. Those who disembark head for the casino, where children and adults listen to a captivating old storyteller. They will spend the rest of the day at the new spa at the bottom of Boukornine. In the city center, cinemas show the latest arthouse and experimental films in the mornings. Art galleries opened in two of the old seaside mansions. One of them, Africa House, specializes in contemporary art from the continent, offering year-long residencies to African artists who play chess and dominoes with residents during lazy afternoon hours. During winter, a fashion show takes place inside the casino with a dedicated prize awarded to the best fripes. Secondhand clothes sellers pick their models long in advance and compete for the best tailors in town. The bells of church Sainte-Marie sound on Sundays. The synagogue that was transformed into a children’s library has reverted to its former status and the children’s library has moved to a large annex. The children gather there, then volunteer on the public farm to take care of the horses, donkeys, and sheep. They tease the plump cats on their way. The trains come on time and service Tunis and other destinations every seven minutes. One season follows another—marked by scents of geranium, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, and verbena. Herbalists have set up kiosks near the spa. The market is buzzing with gossip and well-wishes. Couples cruise the sea in sail boats while others hike Boukornine for a more panoramic view. There’s a concert later tonight. I stand by the pale apricot wall and strike three knocks against the house’s blue door.