I awake in the void of night. Everything is dead and quiet except my breath, my beating heart, and the blades of the fan. My roommate Didier grunts, and rolls over. I slide my feet onto the dirty linoleum and feel my way to the cool marble courtyard.

Suddenly, the call to prayer cuts through the darkness. Alone, it dominates the early morning. The time is now 3:00 am, and today begins the month of daylight fasting called Ramadan. My landlord said I must be done with my day’s consumption by 4:00 am: water, food, everything. I gorge on a bowl of peaches and milk, followed by a heavy tanjeen bidajaaj. Chicken omelette is my sahur.

Dawn breaks across the sky, gray then purple, as I wash my dishes in the sink. The heat steadily begins to climb from the 75’ cool of night. I feel confident, at peace, and ready to join communal struggle. This whole city, this whole coast, this whole culture defined by one language, will take itself into the desolate landscape of hunger. To read their holy book, to taste the palette of poor, to measure their worth. That’s the surface, but the depths are teeming with meaning.

“Saha,” Nasser said yesterday, explaining one benefit of a month’s fasting. Health. 

I am in his taxi, his livelihood, careening through the last day of morning coffee, cigarettes at noon, or sips under the sun’s zenith. Not eating during the day and gorging during the night for 30 days doesn’t seem healthy to me, but I also have been known to drink beer. In Nasser’s yellow chassis, the rising sun starts to roast us passengers. Nasser winks at me when I attempt to roll down the broken window. He is still talking, pointing out local delights such as the hadiqa Belvedere, the post office, the famous coffeeshop, an old, rich American house, the Frenchville, Avenue De Estats Unis. Nasser’s hands roam as drives, drawing a portrait of the future, when we return from America, Italy or France to stay with him in El Omrane.

We speak classical Arabic, FusHa, and he the Tunisian dialect, but mostly French. He must struggle to understand us and use words and grammar familiar to us, the pale strangers from greater Europe. Imagine learning Shakespeare’s English and then enjoying the hospitality of Los Angeles’ burros. On the other hand, imagine a foreigner stumbling with Old English, reliant on a stilted, formal language reserved for romance and haughtiness. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.When we stop, I am sweaty, intent on an icy liter of water, knowing tomorrow I will deny this thirst.

“Asdiiqa’” Nasser says, waving his hand, refusing my dinar. Friends.

My colleagues and I argue, he wins. He can afford this generosity, but barely. What can I do for him? Nasser has invited us into his home repeatedly, shown us wrinkled, moldy and precious baby pictures of his family, and taught us culinary words. He explains the architecture of our neighborhood - once a squatters’ illegal haven - with pride. He is gracious beyond his means and genuine beyond my experience. I catch his eye as the door slams shut, fitting awkwardly in the door. I buy my last coffee, and savor it’s caustic bitterness on my way up the stairs of The Bourguiba Institute.

“Ramadan mabrook,” Andrea says to me as I enter our classroom on the first day of the fast. He is a small man, with a thick scrub of black hair wrapped under his chin and on his head. The teacher calls him Einstein. He’s an intense Italian studying Chinese and Arabic in Naples, a linguist with a strong interest in comparative religion, aestheticism, and value beyond money and possessions. He wears a golden foot earring, preferring decks and rails to jet engines. I like him. My colleagues are mostly Italian now, with two Japanese and a Taiwanese. 

My begging stomach grumbles as we methodically work through a text about sub-Saharan migration to the north. Fleeing repression, disease, economic crisis, war, these destitute masses struggle for years. Many in vain. Police beatings, thousands of miles, desert crossings, desperate voyages, dead sons: nightmares for a dream. 

I am imaging my head as an empty, dusty warehouse with beams of light stabbing through worn holes in the roof, when a quick “intadhara” from our ustadha snaps me back: attention. She begins recounting a horrific tale from the docks of Tunis. A woman’s body was found in a cargo ship in 2007, trapped inside a forgotten refrigerator. An autopsy revealed she had been in the domestic coffin since 1989. Hope of providence, Italy, dead eighteen years.

I am standing in the hall afterwards, saddened by the story, imagining some kind of justice. Can I help with a story? I reenter the classroom to the Italians fluttering about. I inquire with my eyebrows, the fast is really depleting me. Immanuel explains, a baby bird is stuck in the rafters between the windows. They are painted shut, the bird is young, and has filled the small crevasse with shit. I ask for a plastic bag, wrap my hand in it, and grab the bird. He’s warm, feisty, and small in my hand. Black eyes, white head, sharp beak. Eagle.

I plant him on the windowsill, he gets a puddle of water and a crushed Sablito cookie. He barely moves, weak from his captivity, and ends up falling into a lower crack. Like the refrigerator woman.

The bell rings, and I pick up our grammar exercises with a heavy, malnourished hand. It is easy to get discouraged with Arabic. From English, it is quite a leap. The subtleties often obscure my understanding. Hafila is bus, hafla is party. Do you want to go to the Ramadan bus? Or board the downtown party? Adjectives follow nouns, subjects follow verbs. Many times my sure grasp of a conversation is ripped asunder by a later conversation. I’ve accepted the road will be long.

Arabic is nearly a mathematical language. At times, it is beautiful. Words are developed into nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs from primordial syllables. These jidher, roots, are usually three consonants. Keeping their order, first-second-third, these consonants morph into  different concepts with short and long vowels. Kitaab, book. yaktubu, to write. Kutub books. Maktoob, it is written. It’s similar to the English words bake, baker, bakery. Often concepts like sedentary turn into civilization, or village becomes country and indigenous. Sam means poisonous, but Samy is another name for sublime. Call me Ismaeil, the direct translation of my full name, a Hebraic derivative for the name of God.

To read Arabic is to assume. The consonants are written, the short vowels which can drastically alter the word, are not. These must be divined, or already known. In Tunisia, road signs along the highway are often after the exit: one must know the road before you go there. This is the Arab mentality, to me.

I cannot speak Arabic. I can blunder, stab in the dark, and understand a bit. Sometimes, a small question will pull me up short, a simple answer elusive. On the other hand, we’ve covered environmental pollution and transnational migration in class. My Arabic is useful here, oddly, between me and fellow colleagues - it is our common language. I’ve told and understood jokes in Arabic, and get the general idea of Al Jazeera Arabic. 

Shwaiya, shwaiya. Slowly, slowly.

I watched a storm rip open the sky last week. A welcome break from studying. My friend Dora and I were on her roof, under an umbrella, enjoying the petrichor. A party simmered below. White lightning crackled across the purple haze of night. Thunder boomed five, six seconds behind thebarqa flashes. I tried explaining the difference between the speed of sound and light in Arabic, to calm Dora’s fears. She smiled at my attempt, rolled her eyes at my pronunciation, and then wrinkled her nose.

“There are problems in my country,” she said sadly. The deluge was carrying pungent refuse down the street. It could be worse, she explained, telling a story of a massive flood that took cars and dogs with it, swamping basements and entire neighborhoods. 

“I don’t have an identity,” Dora said, black hair a gorgeous contrast above a white gown. We are sitting on the same roof, my first bowl of leblebi between us, scraped empty, and are talking about language. She translates patents back and forth between English and French, and cannot understand me when I speak the words I have learned at school. Mostly the fault of my heavy, alien tongue, she is also a French girl with Tunisian genes, a new type of pied noir.  Primary schools teach in FusHa and then switch to French during middle school and never look back. The street teaches them leja Tunsii, Tunisian dialect, and FuSha is reserved for the religious or media professionals.

To her, this diversity is a loss, descendant from colonization.

I tried to explain the power behind her roots, failed. Where I come from, diversity is special, coveted and a source of pride. As soon as I thought “melting pot,” I stopped talking and listened, without ever agreeing. My jealously smoldered. Being able to speak three or more languages, having pieces of European, African, Arabic and Islamic heritage, this is power. To have such riches is to have the world. But looking into Dora’s eyes, maybe the world has a price. 

“It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether,” wrote Edward Said in his book Reflections in Exile. He spent most of his life stateless, and was introduced to me as the most essential Arab intellectual. 

“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land,” wrote Said. “The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”