When the Virgin Mary stepped into a packed square from the nearby church Saint-Augustin and Saint Fidele, Halq al-Wadi, also known as La Goulette, in Tunisia, about fell in the night.
Carried on the shoulders of a dozen churchgoers, the statue of the Virgin was greeted with cheers, ululations and a passionately waved Tunisian flag.
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Hundreds of people – Tunisians, Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans – had gathered for the annual procession of Our Lady of Trapani.
Sub-Saharan Africa was a major source of the participants in the procession and the Catholic Mass that followed.
Isaac Lusafu, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told Al Jazeera, “The Holy Virgin is who brought us all here today.” “Today the Virgin Mary has united us all”.
As people prayed and sang hymns in a large, tightly packed square just outside the church gates, the statue moved in a circle. A mural of the famous Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who was born in La Goulette, was all under the watchful eye of the area’s eminently fictional home, where thousands of Europeans lived.
A melting pot
Sicilian immigrants brought the Catholic feast of Our Lady of Trapani to La Goulette in the late 1800s in order to provide for the city’s poor southern European fishermen looking for a better life.
Immigration to Tunisia from Sicily peaked in the early 20th century. The statue of the Virgin was left, and almost everyone who had been fishing, along with their families and descendants, has since returned to Europe. Every year on August 15, the statue is carried out of the church in procession.
Tunisian journalist and radio host Hatem Bourial described it as “a unique event.”
He went on to describe how, in the procession’s heyday in the early 20th century, native Tunisians, Muslims and Jews alike, would join Tunisian-Sicilian Catholics in carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary from the church down to the sea.
Participants would ask Mary to bless the fishermen’s boats there. According to Bourial, many residents yelled “Long live the Virgin of Trapani,” while others threw their traditional red cap, the chechia, into the air.
As well as its religious significance – for Catholics, August 15 marks the day that Mary was taken up into heaven – the feast also coincides with the Italian mid-August holiday of Ferragosto, which traditionally signals the high point of the summer.
Silvia Finzi, a Tunisian born in the 1950s, described how many La Goulette residents would declare the worst of the punishingly hot Tunisian summer was over after the statue was brought down to the sea.
According to Finzi, an Italian professor at the University of Tunis, “the sea had changed once the Virgin had been taken down.”
“People would say ‘ the sea has changed, the summer’s over’, and you wouldn’t need to go swimming to cool down any more”.
Exodus from Europe
The first European immigrants began to arrive in La Goulette in the early 19th century. After Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, their numbers quickly increased. More than 100, 000 Italian immigrants were reportedly present in Tunisia at their highest point in the early 1900s, which is estimated to have included primarily Sicilians.
In the decade after 1956, when Tunisia gained its independence from France, the vast majority of its European residents left the country, as the new government pivoted towards nationalism.
The Vatican and Tunisia reached an agreement in 1964 that gave the government control of the majority of the country’s now largely deserted churches so they could be used as public buildings. Additionally, the agreement put an end to all public Christian holidays, including the La Goulette procession.
For more than half a century, August 15 was marked only with a Mass inside the church building, and the statue of Our Lady of Trapani remained immobile in its niche. The date remained significant for La Goulette’s severely depleted Catholic population, but it largely ceased to be significant for the community as a whole.
Nostalgia
In 2017, the Catholic Church received permission to restart the procession, initially just inside the church compound. The procession left the church property this year, but it only made it to the square outside when Al Jazeera arrived.
Young Tunisian Muslims with little connection to La Goulette’s historical Sicilian population were many of the attendees.
A major reason for this is undoubtedly the high status accorded to the Virgin Mary in Islam – an entire chapter of the Quran is dedicated to her.
Other participants’ hints of nostalgia for La Goulette’s multiracial and ethnic past.
Rania, 26, told Al Jazeera, “I love the procession. “Lots of people have forgotten about it now, but European immigration is such an important part of Tunisia’s history”.
Un ete a La Goulette (A Summer in La Goulette), a 1996 movie, is a film Rania, a student, has become a source of love for her.
The movie is an ode to La Goulette’s past, featuring dialogue in three different languages, and haunting images of sunlit courtyards and shimmering beaches.
Directed by the renowned Tunisian filmmaker Ferid Boughedir, it follows the lives of three teenage girls – Gigi, a Sicilian, Meriem, a Muslim, and Tina, a Jew – over the course of a summer in the 1960s.
The film ends, however, with the start of the 1967 War between Israel and a number of Arab states and the exodus of nearly all of Tunisia’s undocumented Jews and Europeans.
New migrations
Sub-Saharan Africa’s population has increased, and Tunisia has seen a rise in new migrant communities.
The majority of these newcomers, who are in the thousands, are from Francophone West Africa. Many come to Tunisia in search of work, others hope to find passage across the Mediterranean to Europe.
Many of Tunisia’s sub-Saharan migrants are Christians, who are subject to widespread discrimination, making up the majority of Tunisia’s church-going population.
A mural in the La Goulette church, which was inspired by Our Lady of Trapani’s feast, reflects this fact. Painted in 2017, it depicts the Virgin Mary sheltering a group of people – Tunisians, Sicilians and sub-Saharan Africans – under her mantle.
Passports are everywhere in the air around the Virgin in the mural. These represent the documents that immigrants threw into the sea in order to avoid deportation, according to the church’s priest, Father Narcisse, who is from Chad.
The mural highlights the fact that the Madonna of Trapani, once considered the protector of Sicilian fishermen, is today called upon by immigrants of far more varied backgrounds.
The deep connections between the two Mediterranean shores were highlighted by this celebration, according to Tunisian Archbishop Nicolas Lhernould, in its original form. Tunisians, Africans, Europeans, locals, migrants, and tourists are among the more diverse groups that are present today.
“Mary herself was a migrant”, Archbishop Lhernould said, referring to the New Testament story which narrates Mary’s flight, together with the child Jesus and her husband Joseph, from Palestine to Egypt.
He argued that “we are all migrants, just passing through, citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world” from a Christian point of view.
La Goulette’s spirit
Little Sicily, an area known for its clusters of apartment buildings in the Italian style, was once located in La Goulette. The vast majority of these structures – modest buildings built by the newly-arrived fishermen – have been torn down and replaced, and little more than the church remains to testify to the area’s once significant Sicilian presence.
Only 800 Italians from Tunisia’s original immigrant community were left as of 2019 totaling 800.
Rita Strazzera, a Tunisian born to Sicilian parents, said, “There are so few of us left.” The Tunisian-Sicilian community meets very rarely, she explained, with some members coming together for the celebration on the 15th August, and holding occasional meetings in a small bookshop opposite the church.
Little Sicily’s spirit is still present, though not completely gone. Old La Goulette echoes in both film and memory, and Strazzera told Al Jazeera in other, more unexpected ways.
“Every year, on All Saints ‘ Day, I go to the graveyard”, said Strazzera, referring to the annual celebration when Catholics remember their deceased loved ones.
“And there are Tunisians, Muslims, people who may have had Sicilian parents or Sicilian grandparents and who have visited their graves because they are aware of what Catholics do,” said one of the mourners.
According to Strazzera, “there have been many mixed marriages, and more of them are visiting the graves every year.” When I see them, it’s like a reminder that Little Sicily is still with us”.
Source: Aljazeera
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