Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Have you been reading any of the advice columns on ways to deal with undifferentiated time in a pandemic? The columns with titles like “What day is today?”

Not knowing what day it is was one thing I dreaded before I retired, but I’ve developed my own systems. In today’s article, agricultural time suggests another approach.

Layli Foroudi writes at Sierra, “In the second half of January, I met a friend in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. He was agitated and said that he needed to go back to his hometown of Gabès. …

“He said he needed to plant trees. It was that time of the year, when temperatures are mild at night and cold in the day — the ideal climate for planting fruit trees. It’s known as the layali essoud. …

“In March, I followed my tree-planting friend to Gabès. A few days later, the country went into lockdown to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. And so, I became a guest in a ghabba.

“The word ghabba means ‘forest’ in Tunisian Arabic. But it also means a plot of farmland within an oasis. The ghabba that I passed my time in was a hectare of land (around 2.5 acres), much of it overgrown with reeds. …

“I didn’t look for a way to leave. I was ready to replace humans with plants, and the uncertainty [with] the work of making things take root.

“The Tunisian traditional agricultural calendar splits the year into unequal slots of time that indicate how crops behave and what activities to carry out. Layali essoud comes just after layali el bidh — the white nights from December 25 to January 13 when temperatures plunge in the night. ‘The plant sleeps, so it is the time to cut it — it doesn’t hurt them,’ explained Hassen Waja, a 74-year-old retired teacher. …

“In Gabès, dates came up often in my conversations with those aged over 50. … Back in the day, dates were the go-to food for breakfast or a snack, and Gabès-grown dates were bought in bulk by nomads because they travel well. …

“The demise of the local date has transformed the oasis, said Nizar Kabaou. … Since the 1970s, he said, Gabès has seen a 60 percent reduction in the surface area covered by date palms. …

“Now, it is the smell of sulfur that is a marker of home. … Since the 1970s, the region has served as a zone for the treatment of phosphate, a key natural resource for the country, used for the production of fertilizers — an irony given the devastating effect the industry has on local agriculture. …

“Cement and phosphate treatment plants [have] exhausted the region’s natural water resources. …

“Water comes every 40 to 50 days and costs three to five dinars per hour ($1 to $1.7), plus a five to 10 dinar bribe for those who want to skip to the head of the line. ‘Before the creation of the industrial zone, the oasis benefited from 750 liters of water per second — from a natural source. Now we are at 150 to 170 liters per second, with a pump. That is the ecological catastrophe that Gabès has undergone,’ said [one man]. …

“In some parts of Tunisia, people still count their days according to the agricultural calendar, though this is rare now. In Gabès, only the farmers still use it, said Waja, the retired schoolteacher. When Waja was a child, he said, ‘the oasis used to be life.’ …

“Ninety-five percent of the population of the Chenini Oasis were full-time farmers, according to Nizar Kabaou. Today, about 20 percent are. But 40 percent still practice agriculture in their spare time, and, in the past five years, Kabaou has seen a small renaissance of part-time oasis farming, which has only grown during the lockdown.

‘This period gives value to the old type of agriculture,’ he said. ‘To live, we need to do our own production. In situations like this, we need to be self-sufficient.’ …

“In Tunisia, the economic toll of the lockdown sparked protests in parts of the country where people were struggling to eat. This did not happen in Gabès, where the ghabba remained. ‘In Chenini, you never go hungry,’ said [farmer Zakaria] Hechmi, who still trades produce with his neighbors. …

“At the oasis, I [read] Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, In one chapter, a character describes two types of time. ‘Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death.’ Linear time, which is ‘able to measure progress towards a goal or destination, rises in percentages,’ was more favored by nomads and merchants. …

“When I arrived at my friend’s ghabba, only a portion of the land was still being used to grow fruit and vegetables. Gradually, we began to plant more and clear away reeds that hadn’t been touched in 25 years. No one had the time, and then we did.”

More at Sierra, here.