Tunis, your ...

Tunis, your ancient isthmus that remains to this day.

Your languages and your lagoons.

Your vendors, your vertical mattresses and your rolled up carpets.

Your beautiful old Carthage, and your kittens everywhere.

Your hills and your seashore.

Your Sicilian neighborhoods, your Libyan relatives and your taxis going all the way to Algeria.

Your system of commerce that you rely on.

Your riverbanks and your embassies.

And your souks during winter when the sea in La Marsa is gray.

Your early mornings.

Tunis, your babouches, my dear babouches, leaving the ankles bare.

And your finest leather goods in my hands.

Your port and your interchanges.

Your bustling traffic, from the avenue of Tunis to the avenue of Salambo.

Your eponymous capital.

Your tales of a thousand and one mornings.

Your mosques and printing presses.

Your late nights.

Tunis, and your private schools.

Your medina where I don’t know how to walk.

Your hot chocolates like velvet and your milk chocolates as milk

Your synagogues elbow to elbow with the minarets.

Your real fruits. Your beets that aren't vacuum-packed.

Your cuccina, merguez and mutton. Your pasta and your couscous.

Your tourism and staged camel photos.

Your beach dogs that don't do stand-sit-down.

Your mopeds and your trailers.

Your artisans, your engineers, your grocers.

Your experts and expatriates.

Your egg inside the brick.

Your sea and mountain views.

Tunis, your mentality.

Tunis, your fast track to Canada.

Tunis, from which your migrants leave, Tunis from which the immigrants also flee.

Tunis in summer, the Mediterranean bled.

Your garbage that glistens in the evenings.

Your welders singeing their fingers.

Tunis Marseille and Nice in the distance.

Your palaces that need repair.

Your Bolts and your neighborhoods, pieces of one single apple.

Your Lac Zero, the starting point for a compass.

Your dancing boys.

Your cages and your birds.

Your pestered children.

Your blood-sucked meat.

Your dinars, your crisis and your omelets in place of mutton.

Your Ottoman manners and your Arabic that sounds like Italian.

Your lips of Berber poetry, your rap.

Your hips that turn away from your spine.

Your flat roofs, your satellite dishes, the moon in the company of stars, bird antennas.

Your houses with their holes, your verandas and your patios.

Your sweaters hanging like dates.

Your jeans as stiff as palm trees.

Your Rue du Regard and de l'Hiver.

And your dead-ends.

Your yellow doors and fluorescent sneakers.

Your stacked strainers.

Your garbage and your carcasses.

Tunis, your city caught between two lakes

Your damp houses.

Your rain, your water that doesn't go away.

Your merchant musicians who play their instruments without taking them off the wall, but invite you to join them.

Tunis, where one sells the same thing as the other, right across from the other.

Your beachside rave towns.

Your men whispering in each other's ears.

Your emotional men, your cafe friendships, your singing and dancing boys.

Your Hollywood-style Egypt.

Your Ministry of Interior that diverts traffic.

Your army of love, your tanks by "I Love Tunis."

Your gays and your lesbians and your legislation.

Tunis, your schools for the blind, whether to become a switchboard operator or a physiotherapist.

Your hands of Fatma around your necks.

Your toilet paper that's offered to us by hand.

Tunis and your neighboring Europe.

Your empty incense bowls.

Your smoky cafés.

Your independence and your revolution.

Your administrations on standby for tomorrow.

Your chickens at your children's feet in photos.

Your four sugars in one cup of coffee.

Your mothers and daughters hand in hand.

Your crumbling walls that create pre-Pangea atlases.

Your calls to prayer, to your faith even more than to God.

Your sidewalk roads.

Your bananas in blue bags.

Your winding medina and straightened streets that cut each other off.

Your railway tracks to cross as you leave the TGM.

Your Le Passage in the evening, the policemen escorting tourists.

Your police stations, interrogations in handcuffs and gags, bureau humiliation.

Your cousins navigate the medina in wheelchairs.

And your public television and your volunteer sign language.

Your stuffed baguettes for your French sandwiches.

Your one-legged men who cut the second leg off their jeans and are offered tea by vendors.

Your cars on top of our toes.

Your bouquets of barrel clover and purple hearts.

Your grocery store cats curled up in the afternoon on top of the ice cream crates.

Your fingers zigzagging along their Huawei pins.

Your market vendors with audio recordings in their stalls, to draw in the crowds

to attract crowds, and avoid the grand harangue.

Your tagged walls or sometimes straight on a cactus.

Your cracked beauty, your mosaics.

Your grand old palaces, too heavy for their heirs.

Your white Greek walls where our shadows linger.

Your TGM that crosses the lake and traces along the fishing rods between the stones.

Your mustaches across men's cheeks, balustrades above their lips.

Your geometry in elementary school, in Arabic, and in high school, suddenly, different words for the same shapes, the same geometry in a second language.

Your flat roofs, your immense sun and your rare sundials.

Your bougainvilleas, your slums and your dried fruit.

Your boys who spit and sing.

Your sheep's head piñata with smiles and teeth still intact.

Your stale bread hung in plastic bags on the door, to be made into chicken feed.

Your appointments one hour after the appointed time.

Your ram fights, horns curled, where sometimes the champion is a championess.

I left Tunis amongst its trees.

With its palm trees that will become date dreamcatchers, to be hung in the market.

I preferred the date pit, which I inadvertently swallowed, to the golden-collared gandouras and the half-leather babouches.

As if memories are like recollections stuck in the throat.

I left Tunis with its bottled water, Safia or Sabrine.

I left the task to weigh down the banners and flags that are hung from balconies with water, in their lower corners.

The sun had returned, the vassal umbrellas, beached by the wind, on the ground like bridal lace.

Crossing the Mediterranean. A universal garage, cars being repaired with their hoods open, on the sidewalk.

I traded poetry, an unofficial translation, for a pit.

The pit—the hostage or the intruder or the wild child of the fruit.

I traded a pupil, that discreet and immediate printing press, which switches languages in the middle of the page, for a pit.

My iris is less round, almond-shaped, to better see things taper and gradually disappear.

I watched the sunlit vigils of cats on the edge of ice-cream crates, falling off and landing back on all fours, as with translation, when the tongue temporarily shifts its balance.

I watched the cats slip past the yellow wheels of the taxi buses.

I left the blue.

And the tousled solemnity of palm trees, at the foot of the grandiose official buildings and their wild resident street dogs.

It was a hot February, the guards would rather place their chair outside of the guardhouse.

I left the coastal tree, a tourist delight, and its disheveled feathery leaves, which shared its oasis-like glory with the cacti, to whom it conceded being potted, while retaining the pride of framing the wide avenues, a pride shared by both palm groves and the Champs-Élysées.

I climbed the gradually swollen trunk of the palm trees with my eyes, to the display of fireworks at the top.

The dry bark on the ground was like leatherwork, horse saddles without a rump.

I walked among the cars accustomed to avoiding one-eyed pedestrian crossings, with boxes on my [9] [10] shoulders.

The puddles mixed the sky with the spindle of branches on the ground, like fingers spread out.

I left the blenders that mix bananas and dates into a juice where small brown pieces rise up through the straw to be chewed, and I left the orange juicers, the citrus fruits piled up in their cart displays.

I saw the kitten, stiff from both death and the sun, on a windowsill.

I left Tunis, its palm trees, its slender daisies.

Crossing the Mediterranean. A universal garage, like two bodies sharing the same shadow.

I walked one last time through the alternating shadows of the palm trees, before returning to the birches, the plane trees.

I stood for a minute in front of the medina twins, a ginger cat, a brown cat, curled up,

and these cats knew of love deeper than I did.

It suffices, when providing a horizon to a dead end, to be in twos, like lushly lining a boulevard with palm trees.

I walked through the medina, its maze-like palm-less streets.

I walked and saw the courtyard cats, with a hen.

The mopeds, village bicycles.

I looked at the old paintings of queens, a bit Saharan, beauty marks on their cheeks,

earrings on their lobes, and scarves tied into diadems.

I left the minarets that I still called bell towers, the flat roofs and the satellite dishes, with roofs so flat that they sometimes looked, to my Western eye, like chopped-off houses.

Our gaze, the cloak that hides things from us.

I left the lovers on the porch, like two birds, and the pétanque balls, rounded up against each other.

I left the long necks of the hookahs, like flexible flutes.

I left the mosaic walls and floors, variegated antiquities.

I left the crazy sense of color, the sense of kindness, of the habit of hanging a bouquet of empty bottles on one’s handle, for someone poorer than oneself to collect and earn a free dinar.

I left the palm trees of Central Park and the colonial Parisian trees of Lafayette.

And the two sumptuous centenarian trees on Place de la Monnaie.

If we are moons seeking each other, I walk here in Tunis like I do in Paris.

I watched the palm trees fade away and begged for the plane to chew through to my stomach - for me to become the pit in the sky.

I pursued my dream on foot, through the medina.

Just like in a dream, when you think you're seeing a cat, but it's a man who steps forward.

The dream caught my attention, like someone returning from a shopping trip with two bags in their hands.

I was following my own dream.

As one man sees another pass by with a heavy cart, he stops what he was doing for a second, to push the cart that the other is pulling, for a few meters - and then the man -

resumes what he was doing.

The day dawned in my dream, just as the abaya merchant lifted the plastic sheeting off his mannequins in the morning.

And I set off.

I dreamt that, as soon as daylight broke, I stepped out of a house, for a walk.

It was ‘a’ house in my dream - not the house.

I was walking out of a house, but all the doors were THE DOOR - not just one.

Just like, in a dream, signposts don't attach to the ground. The Mona Lisa up in the air.

The chair by the door - guarding yet prohibiting the room behind it. - the door doesn't await a particular person to open it, but a moment, until suddenly it is: the moment.

I kept walking, discovering my dream as I went forward, and the dream took the shape and outline of the sky and the ground.

The braille door, to be read with one's hands - like some deaf people can read with their mouths.

In my dream, I saw the mosque selecting and arching beams for its volatile worshippers - not like in Paris, where cathedrals bristle with gargoyles, and with pigeon spikes on these gargoyles, that harm both the pigeons and the gargoyles.

Sometimes, between two doors, my dream provided a bench, directly attached to the wall, as if nailed there just before I passed through, and so I knew: it was time to sit down.

I walked through my dream as if my eyes were open, under closed eyelids.

The yellow door.

And I didn't know what the door meant, but I knew for sure that this door was: THE YELLOW DOOR.

And that I had to go through it.

Since, in a dream, every door is already a castle.

I was experiencing my dream, as if I were writing something in the morning that I had actually read the day before.

And my dream saw me passing through it.

My dream, like a great photographer, was at the ready, watching me go by. And I could see my dream's yellow eyes, like two precise flashes, that would yield a black photo.

I understood now: it wasn't that I was discovering my dream, but that it was being constructed as I went along. And like the bench nailed to the wall, the doors would fall down before me

as I approached them.

The door in the shape of the monument of which it is the door to.

In my dream, I was looking into a room from the outside, through the window, but at the same time I was a man behind the door, who I was watching, and whose knees were sticking out.

The door that conceals a room smaller than the door itself, with a thousand instruments inside.

And then I was off, but every few steps I'd turn around to check: the night was following me.

Soon the sun would set in my dream, like the merchant unhooking the coats and shopping carts he had hung up in the morning.

And when night would descend in my dream, the day would break on earth.

And I would walk.