aslama/salut/hi
I’ve been in Tunisia for two months, and have spent a little more than a month of that time in the capitol city of Tunis. My mother is Tunisian, and her whole family lives here, but I grew up in the US and never learned Tunisian dialect (a mix of Arabic, Tamazight, French, Italian, surely some other languages). I feel the loss of cultural knowledge very acutely -- my inability to speak in my mother’s native language feels like a lifetime of missing a key to another home.
Spending time in Tunisia and learning the language and history is my response to the ways that cultural transmission are erased in the process of immigration, my feeling of responsibility to my own history.
But, I’m also here because I love it here. I feel very blessed to trace my roots to this place and this culture, so full of richness, beauty, and contradiction.
I’ll be keeping track of some thoughts and observations and plant knowledge in this space. The things I write about follow my eye and my passions. I studied architecture at Barnard College, work as a designer and design educator, and consider much of my work in the context of the city. I am also a plant fiend and avid student of ecology and horticulture, and the ways that human life is entangled with plant life. I am always trying to balance my love for social ecology and the messiness of humans in close proximity with my need to be in wild space and in solitude. Sometimes my greatest joy is the hybridized nature of patches of overgrown city, the ways that plants and non-human animals adapt and overwhelm human modifications of landscape. The negotiation between settlement and wildness is the idea behind wild urbanism.
