My Tunisian Mother...

... is one of the most amazing people I have ever met in my life. She's a strong, independent, single, adventurous, feminist, atheist, race-sensitive, NGO-supporting, fine-arts loving, Arab woman. And proud of it.

"Sois-toi meme" (Be yourself). It's one of the first things she tells me. We are driving back from the airport while she is explaining to me that I shouldn't worry about adapting to Tunisian culture. What's more important, she says, is that you are yourself. "For example," she recounts, "I love to travel. But I wont travel to Saudi Arabia. They make women covered themselves there - totalement. I dont wear la voile (the veil), it's like a prison."

I'm a little surprised. And definitely intrigued.

Where to begin to describe Mab, my Tunisian mother? She's certainly a product of the 60s/70s women movement in Tunisian, similar in some respects to the hippie/female empowerment trends in the US. She lives in a small flat outside of the capital. It's a simple apartment, without very much furniture but decorated with rugs and paintings from her various travels. An interior designer in the US would say everything clashes, but I love her house because its like snippets of story from her various travels around Africa. "Je vive tres simple" (I live very simply), she tells me, as if she has too much to do in life to be worried about accumulating furniture that collects dust.




Technically she lives alone. But not really, because she's always hosting youth from around the world in her house. Right now she sleeps in the living room because she only has two bedrooms in her flat -- one for me and one for a student from Mali. But she doesn't mind, she says, "quand je suis avec les jeunes, je reste jeune" (When I'm with the youth, I stay young)

Last weekend we went to the center of the city, where we visited the fair trade business that she helped finance. She wanted to go discuss an idea that she had with a friend: a week long camp for young, poor artists in Tunisian. To inspire them. She loves to support the arts - painting, drawing, musicals. We spent 30 minutes in her friend's gallery, looking at a painting that depicted a woman inside a wine glass, musing about it's symbolism as we drank Tunisian tea. We have a system: she speaks in English, I respond in French. Sometimes we switch back and forth within the same sentence, and people on the street pause, trying to piece together our conversation. But it doesn't bother me. I'm too busy listening to her talk about any smattering of subjects: Shakira, the veil, Obama, racism in Tunis, poverty, the environment,verses in the Quaran, tennis, her jewish friends, abortion, government quotas, and her favorite Senegalese authors.

I often sit in the living room, her makeshift bedroom, attempting to read books in French while she does work on her computer, listening to the news in Arabic on the TV in the background while the blue and yellow curtains from Mali flutter in a doorway. But my concentration doesn't generally last for long, because we both like to talk instead of focus our tasks at hand. And I now have a bedtime routine -- I always make sure to stop by the living room, because inevitably she has already fallen asleep, book in hand, so I turn off the TV, gently shut the door, and unplug the lamp. It's my small attempt to try to give something back.

She's truly inspiring. Her sense of self, her curiosity about the world, her lack of dependence on material things, her emphasis on interpersonal relations, her desire to make a difference -- a real difference.

I couldn't ask for a better Tunisian Mother.