François, a Frenchman in his late 20s, tells me that his Tunisian neighbor—an old man living with his family in the residential heart of Tunis’ medina—had recently thrown a large piece of brick at them from his terrace at three in the morning. His French “expat” friends, migrants in Tunisia like myself and François, laugh at this description of madness that had already been ascribed to this Tunisian neighbor. Some of them were present during the recounted event. Someone adds that François had thrown a house party, put on loud music, and the party had run late into the night during a weekday.

I try to imagine the look in the eyes of the old Tunisian man—tired from the lack of sleep, worried about his children or grandchildren who probably have to go to work or school the next morning. I ask François if maybe he should have kept the music low, and he tells me, “But the old man could have come and asked us to shut down the music!”

In my head, I know immediately that the old man could have never knocked on François’ door to ask the music to be turned off. But François doesn’t know this, because he doesn’t know what it means to have been colonized.

I wonder if François knows that he knows what it means to have been a colonizer; that he inherited this knowledge, like his skin color and his French passport? It makes François complain that “Tunisians don’t speak well in French,” blaming them for his inability to communicate with them. It makes François sabotage the beautiful name of the Tunisian woman who comes to clean his home twice a week, all the while giggling and with no apology in sight! Maybe François reasons that he doesn’t need to apologize because his day job involves “empowering Tunisians” with French government-sponsored grants to set up small enterprises. Instead, Tunisians should be thankful for François’ presence—so his light-hearted giggling tells us!

I imagine the heavy weight of François’ light-heartedness falling onto the Tunisian neighbor. In what words would this old man have spoken to François, knowing that his accented French would be ridiculed and his desire for residential calm laughed upon because François probably pays ten times the old man’s rent for the large serviced house he rents in the same medina?

The French colonization of Tunisia began with the 1881 Treaty of Bardo, which authorized French military occupation, restricted beylical rule, and reorganized the ministries of justice and finance to promote French settlers’ interests. A French Resident General took authority in diplomacy, defense, and taxation, and “buttressed an illiberal system of rule by law, not rule of law,” as Laryssa Chomiak writes. This rule by law system was inherited by post-independence Tunisia, first under the regime of President Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and later under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011). The revolution of 2011 was a result of the inequalities that such a persisting illiberal system had made stark, including regional disparities in economic and social opportunities and outcomes, poverty, and humiliation. After more than a decade, the system remains, policed not only by the Ministry of Interior, but also by the French who should have theoretically left in 1956.

Every time I write “colonize” in the past tense, I wonder how past this past is. I watch hundreds of Tunisians walk past the Embassy of France on a square ironically named Place de la Independence in the heart of Tunis; I watch them shrink under the gaze of the thickening security that blocks all the roads that border the building. The streets where Tunisians called out for freedom and dignity during the revolutionary protests of 2011 are also the streets where Tunisians have stood in humiliatingly long queues, day after day, to be given a chance to get a French visa. I have known families who have paid their month’s income for yet another visa application that will be rejected by a François. I see them stoop under the suffocating weight of Frenchness as they bend to clean restaurant tables after serving yet another French tourist who comes to their country visa-free.