African Winter

Roy Forget, "African Winter", 2013, Oil on Linen, 54 x 81 cm

"African Winter" is a piece I painted after a trip to Tunisia in early May of this year.  In a local bus, returning to Tunis after 5 days in the seaside village of El Haouaria (also known for its falconry), I saw many walls, most of them separating sidewalks from the empty fields behind, and some strewn with tags and graffiti.  Often, names of bus stops were simply written on the walls by hand, in arabic as well as in the latin alphabet.  Throughout the trip, I noted the different tags in a little moleskin that I have been scribbling in for two years (strange how tourists always like to pretend to be Hemingway), as the bus rolled through the highway, with passengers coming and going.

The "African Winter" graffiti was painted on different walls several times, and as we entered each successive town on the way to Tunis, on the walls, there were white drawn squares with numbers in each painted on the walls in the center of town.  It was a curious thing, we weren't sure what it was and why.  We learnt later on that the numbered squares were in fact related to the recent elections that took place in Tunisia, each square was the space provided for a campaign poster for each candidate.  They are concrete visual representations of Tunisia's efforts at representative democracy.

Back in Tunis, the depth of history that is North Africa became evident again.  Anyone visiting Egypt will not be too surprised by the many thousands of years of human civilization that simply exists there.  In Tunisia, Tunis and Carthage, archaeological sites like Dougga, have the same sort of layered history, little bits of this and that simply surface or disappear haphazardly in the fabric of one's journey through the land.  The Numidic civilizations that were present before the founding of Carthage, the fall of the great Punic Capital, the centuries of Roman rule . . . all of it comes and goes and one finds it in this sort of fade in fade out manner, like old graffiti tags continue to be seen behind the layers of newer graffiti on a wall.

So, this is a tribute to this land called Tunisia, to its beauty, its history, and to the courage of its people who started this crazy adventure, which began two years ago, that we call the Arab Spring.