The Outlandish Traveller Guide: Snapshots of the Least Remarkable Landmarks. (Part two)

Spoiler: 

There is nothing outlandish in these pictures; actually, most of them are the very usual pictures you will find on travel blogs, even less exciting than many other articles written by others. 

If there’s anything or anyone out-landish here, that will be me, the person who took the pictures, in the sense of being a foreigner, a non-native witness of the scene.

You may recognize a few landmarks (like the Golden Gate Bridge, or Jamaa Lefna) but every time, something in them is undermined that you will not be able to recognize them without reading the caption. Sometimes its the wholeness of the scene, sometimes the angle from which the picture was taken.

There are people, animals, signs, but really, it’s all about places. All elements here are landmarks, but they are the least remarkable landmarks, so unexceptional that they seize to be landmarks at all.

All pictures were taken by my own camera, (sometimes a mobile phone). Very few of them were taken by other people, but all of them, without exception, were taken using my own devices.

Part 2: Animals:

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?


W.B. Yeats

The lines above, taken from Yeats' "Leda and the Swan", describe the lovemaking (or rape) scene between Leda, one of the beauties of Greek mythology, and a swan, which happens to be no one other than the infamous Zeus, the greatest seducer and rapist mythology has ever known. 

Mythology tells us Zeus, who is unable to conduct love affairs of equals and who happens to have a taste for women that he should not get involved with, will sometimes approach his victims after shapeshifting into an animal. 

The result of the union will be Helen of Troy, and maybe it is not a coincidence Zeus chooses to transform himself into a swan.  

Though the animal kingdom is often depicted as inferior to our own world, it has not always been like that. It interferes and crosses ways with the human world in every imaginable way. Art, mythology, literature, philosophy and a walk down the street will tell us so.

Squirrel in the grass. Syracuse, April 213.

A squirrel having a conversation with Nijmeh Ali. Niagara, May 2013.

Lonely seagull. San Francisco, March 2011.

Turtle on a rooftop. Marrakech, July 2012.

Seagull. San Francisco, March 2012.

Black bird. Houston, April 2011.

Big snake (anaconda?) Houston Aquarium, April 2011.

You cannot actually see it very well, but this is a white tiger. And a real one. Houston aquarium, April 2011.

Panthers. Washington DC zoo, March, 2011.

Proud flamingos. Washington DC zoo, March 2011.

Cat on a doorstep. Rabat, March 2009
.

click here to see part 1

Tunisia's National Women's Day

This post originally appeared on Sharnoff's Global Views.


In the middle of the political crisis in Tunisia, Tunisian women, celebrating their national day today, seem to be caught in the middle of a situation that does not look like a celebration. Besides facing the threat of conservative political forces, a lot of issues remain unsolved, for women’s issues cannot be isolated from the country’s larger challenges. In the middle of the economic crisis, women are not spared, as they constitute an important fork force, a great section of which is unacknowledged in official documents. The deficiency of the democratic institutions in the country also makes the ground shaky below women’s rights.

The official story claims that the history of women’s rights in Tunisia starts in 1956. However, if we want to contest the idea of the ‘Bourguibian woman’, which has grown into something close to a myth, several other factors can be discerned.

On 13 August 1956, the Code of Personal Status was promulgated, making unilateral divorce (or repudiation), polygamy and child marriage things from the past. This is when 13 August becomes Women’s National Day, cutting off that date from what has preceded it.

Tahar Haddad’s book, Our women in Sharia’ and Society, published in 1930, and explicitly calling for women’s emancipation through education and participation in the workforce, is a truly avant -gardist  document with regards women’s rights in Tunisia. The book earned Haddad the antagonism of the Tunisian traditional population and scholars, and banishment from scholarly circles at the time. The Zeitouna, now standing for the moderate aspect of Tunisia’s traditional background, has not always shown support for modernizing projects, especially if they were related to women’s emancipation.

Women’s participation to history is complex and embroiled with political disputes of various political forces. The most notable women militants like Fatma Haddad and Fawzia Bouzgarrou have belonged to different, even rival, ideological and political currents, but have nonetheless contributed to the creation of a relatively coherent women’s movement, despite being part of existing political parties.

Perhaps what characterizes pre-independence women’s movement in Tunisia is that unlike feminist groups in some other Arab countries that burgeoned among upper classes, Tunisia’s early women’s movement mostly flourished through the efforts of middle class citizens who connected easily with the labor movement in the country. In the early fifties, even rural women became part of the struggle, something that is quite unusual for a country that had not yet obtained independence, and where rural areas were relatively isolated from public life.

For further reading:

Secularism and State Feminism: Tunisia’s Smoke and Mirrors

Women’s Rights an Affair of State for Tunisia

The Outlandish Traveller Guide: Snapshots of the Least Remarkable Landmarks. (Part One)

Spoiler: 

There is nothing outlandish in these pictures; actually, most of them are the very usual pictures you will find on travel blogs, even less exciting than many other articles written by others. 

If there’s anything or anyone out-landish here, that will be me, the person who took the pictures, in the sense of being a foreigner, a non-native witness of the scene.

You may recognize a few landmarks (like the Golden Gate Bridge, or Jamaa Lefna) but every time, something in them is undermined that you will not be able to recognize them without reading the caption. Sometimes its the wholeness of the scene, sometimes the angle from which the picture was taken.

There are people, animals, signs, but really, it’s all about places. All elements here are landmarks, but they are the least remarkable landmarks, so unexceptional that they seize to be landmarks at all.

All pictures were taken by my own camera, (sometimes a mobile phone). Very few of them were taken by other people, but all of them, without exception, were taken using my own devices.

Part 1: Inside and out of airplane windows:

The brain is wider than the sky,

For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include

With ease, and you beside

Emily Dickinson

The human race had dreamt of flying throughout its entire history; there’s barely a work of imagination that does not call this dream to mind. But once it succeeded in making the first flight, the human race developed new phobia: the fear of flying. 

Having a window seat may work very well if you are claustrophobic, but not when you have fear of flying.

Still, a window seat is a great thing, and flying for the hundredth time will always be as fascinating as the first time.

 Turkish airlines. Destination: Amman. June 2013.

Air France. Destination: New York. January 2011.

Turskish airlines. Destination: Jordan, May 2012.

Turkish Airlines, landing. View of Istanbul. May 2012.

Jet Blue. Flying to Boston. March 2013.

Jet Blue. Flying to Boston. March 2013.

Jordanian airlines. Flying back to Tunis, July 2013. What you can see below is an amazing haze hovering over  a completely clear sky.