Ides of March

Dougga, central Tunisia, March 15, 1980.

I don't know when I started writing Memory of Trees. It contains a scene I first wrote about in 1977 and another in 1986. But the book as a whole may have begun to take shape the day I took this photograph. I was standing in a Roman theater in a ghost town in central Tunisia's farming region, once famously called the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. It happened to be the Ides of March, the anniversary of Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C.E. I was a college student living in Tunis that year, and I went with a bunch of friends on a day trip to see this out-of-the-way place where the Comédie-Française still staged plays in the summers.

The winter rains had made the landscape green, but the wind was wickedly cold. The next day in Minnesota would be my dad's birthday, so he was on my mind, too, and I was thinking of his view of mostly snow.

Later, when I began to know that I was writing a long story about my family's farm in Minnesota, this photograph became a guiding image. It pointed to our long agricultural history, going back to Roman times, Bible times, and the origins we call Eden.

Dougga was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

 

Comments

[Philip]

What a lovely photo, and quite a story too. I've seen pictures and plans of some of the ruins of Dougga, but this view gives a better sense of place. I hope it has retained its peacefulness thirty years on (or maybe it wasn't all that peaceful back in 1980 either, what with the wind and the summer shows). I wonder whether those are fig trees on the hillside below the theater.