A night in Tunisia

The fish restaurant glowed in the alley. The door opened, a man slipped through hanging beads. Calamari sizzled, plates clattered. A lute player sat like a relic against the whitewashed wall, singing of love and country and God hovering somewhere beyond the coast. The waiter, a corkscrew dangling from his pocket, was sweaty and quick. A boy rushed in with a bag of what appeared to money, but turned out to be baguettes. Old men sat cross-legged. Tablecloths were dotted with cigarette burns; they looked like tiny islands on a white sea. The men whispered and laughed, they sipped rose, they breathed in the fish, the grit and the smoke, happy to be out for another evening in their worn blazers, a trickle of cash in their pockets. They clapped for the lute player.

A few streets over, above a market closed for the night, a blogger known as Mr. Yahyawi sat in the gray light of a computer, evading government censors. He typed with abandon, his hair as kinetic as the circuitry he navigated to escape the firewalls and break out into the ether with messages of torture and political repression, and all those things not discussed in fish restaurants. He hop-scotched through cyberspace, taping into proxy servers, disguising his electronic footprint. Sometimes the government, often cited by international agencies for human rights abuses, tracks him and fries his computer with a virus. He writes in French and Arabic. His motto is: We live under a kingdom, not in a democracy. About 800 people visit his site each day. That's not many, but he's too obsessed to ponder numbers. He will be posting long after the lute has fallen silent and the waiter has showered and gone to sleep.

"The gateway to progress," he said, "is when people start expressing themselves."

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Tunis