Sparring with the Mauritanian

Every so often, I pick a sparring match with my Mauritanian friend — I make a point of creating that difference between us. And though we talk for hours, those long conversations can end over some trifle: he protests, or I do, we hang up — or remind each other afterward that we did — and more often than not a veiled rancor lingers between us, never quite settled.

I follow him closely: his writings, his analyses, his critiques of social and political reality. In his difference I find what draws me to keep reading him, to stay in touch. I confess that, in some way, I was the one who pushed him to write — just as today, in another way, I push him toward hesitation, or toward stopping altogether. I often take him to task over his subjects: he inclines toward Gaza and the Al-Aqsa Flood, while I want him to write about his own country, Mauritania — or at least about Helsinki, Finland, where he now lives.

And so the tiffs, the taunts, the tussles of ideas between us never end, despite how differently we belong. I, for one, belong clearly to no current. I drift and waver, here and there: I am with neither these nor those. Sometimes I do not know where I am going, nor until when, nor even where I am. My Mauritanian friend, meanwhile, stands on solid ground with his Arab nationalist, Nasserist position — clear and unflinching.

As for me, I am the shapeshifter who moves between Islamism, nationalism, patriotism, humanism, and communism. What I read in the morning, I belong to; what I belong to in the evening, I renounce the following morning. That is me, the chameleon, the ever-turning — and that is my sparring and my contrariness with my Mauritanian friend, steadfast in his clarity.