On Track

I went to the national library by myself this week and it was awful. You are only allowed to "request" five books per day. I had already scoped out which books I was going to check out, so I filled out the forms and waited as the librarians retrieved my books for me. Three of my five book requests were "rejected," which surprised me, but I still had two books that looked promising, one about French rulers in Tunisia before independence, and another about the rise of the Neo-Destour party in Tunisia. I opened the latter to find that it was heavily censored. Pages, entire chapters, were missing from the book, all about religious and racial troubles in Tunisia. Still, I noted some passages of interest. I then took a look at the book about French rulers, which was entirely toothless. It talked about tax policy and the backgrounds of the rulers, but spoke practically nothing about the ruler's connection with the Tunisian populace, which was a real shame. I went up to make copies of the books and was told that I wasn't allowed to copy the first book, and they took it from me. I filled out a few forms to make the copy and handed it to the photocopy station attendant, who was seated at a desk lazily doing nothing much. I smiled, was instructed to go downstairs to pay for my copies, which I did with a little trouble, and returned with my receipt. At this point I expected the attendant, a small hooded woman, to take the book into the copying room and copy it, but instead she simply sat and smiled. I went into the lobby and waited, checking up on the copying station every ten minutes or so. After about an hour, I went up to the desk again. The small old lady had been replaced with a rather tall man in a green sweater. I asked him when my copies would be ready, and he replied, "No. You give the copies yesterday, the attendant come in the morning." I assumed he meant that the copies would be ready tomorrow, but I knew I wouldn't be able to manage making another trip, and the information I had really wasn't crucial to my research, so I decided to just leave them at the library. A very dissappointing day.
I have been unable to get in contact with Abdelwahab Meddeb, so I had to schedule another interview. My aunt recommended a friend of hers who was very familiar with Bourguiba, the ex-president of Tunisia, and an important figure in my research. So, we set up an interview with him for today. My aunt and I met him on the corner of a street near nothing in particular, as far as I could tell. We picked him up and began driving to his office. I had prepared a sheet of questions for the interview, with the headline "Bourguiba as a ruler." He looked at the paper, misread the title and asked, "Bourguiba as a liar?" I was worried that he had been offended by this simple misreading and quickly corrected him. "No," I said, "Bourguiba as a ruler." He laughed and said, "He was a liar! All politicians have to be liars." I smiled, relieved. I talked to the guy for a bit about my project. I mentioned the name of Franz Fanon, to which he replied, to my surprise, "Fanon? I knew Fanon." I was stunned, he continued, "I used to work with him in a hospital for two years." I couldn't believe my luck. Not only had this fellow known about Fanon, he actually knew him! We also spoke briefly about Meddeb, before coming to a stop at his office. We spoke a bit and he brought up some great points about the Tunisian-Algerian situation. We talked about history and the theories I'm looking into and I feel that the guy knows what he is talking about. He explained to me that the crux of the issue is tribalism, and that tribes had been the prime mechanism for political movement on the barbary coast for hundreds of years. I feel that this is the direction my research is going to take. When I told him about the Bibliotheque National, he simpl said, "That is a foolish library," and told me that my greatest resource would be the internet. It has been a wonderful day considering the past week of crappy library luck.