Fatiha F.
For the first years of marriage, the bride perceives her life as a succession of pregnancies and later recalls these years as ones during which she was entirely devoted to her children and their problems: Kunt haida felwlad is a frequent sentence: ‘I was preoccupied with children.’ The mother-in-law emerges during these years as a beneficent supervisor whose assistance allows the household to function efficiently. Let us analyse the form of this assistance and its effect on the power structure of the domestic unit, focusing on the case of Fatiha F., a 45-year-old wife and mother married to a petit fonctionnaire whose job with the Ministry of Justice has required him to live in different parts of Morocco.
The Mother-in-Law’s Control Over the Household
The wife’s submission to the mother-in-law is required by modern law, which obliges her to ‘show deference towards the mother, father and close relatives of the husband’.11 Since Moroccan households are often deserted by males, the mother-in-law is the only person the wife has to confront daily. This submission is usually expressed in two rituals: the hand-kissing ceremony and the wife’s duty to call her mother-in-law Lalla (mistress).
. . . I did not tell the best of it at all, the hand-kissing ceremony. We [the son’s wives] had to kiss her hand twice a day, in the morning and after sunset. You kiss her hand on both sides of course. And we had to call her Lalla. When I sometimes forgot that hand, the world was turned upside down. She would engineer a whole show. She wouldn’t say anything to me directly to remind me of my duties. Oh no! That was too crude, not subtle enough for her. When my husband came home, she would attack him: ‘Do you know something’, she would say, ‘your wife is getting insolent. I have to put up with her insolence in silence because I love you and I don’t want to create problems.’ ‘Mother’, my husband would ask, ‘what did she do?’ ‘Son, today she forgot to kiss my hand at sunset. She is taking more and more liberties with the rules.’
Fatiha F.
These deference ceremonies express the allocation of power within the domestic unit. The symbol of that power is the key to the storage room where staples and food are kept. The person who has the key is the one who decides what and when to eat.
My hma was in charge of everything. She had the power to decide what to eat, the quality and quantity, and she had the key. I could not use food except with her permission. We did the cooking of course. But once the food was ready we were not allowed to touch it. She would come into the kitchen and distribute it according to her own set of prioritie spend nights making cookies. But we were not allowed to take any for our own use, not even for our own children. Everything was stored by her. I could not even have a cup of tea if I felt like it aside from ritual meal times. I had to beg her for a piece of sugar and some twigs of mint. [Moroccan tea is made of green tea, fresh mint, and sugar.]
Fatiha F.
Goffman identified several variables in the power structure of totalitarian institutions. One of them is that the managers of the institutions make it impossible for the managed to obtain simple everyday things such as cigarettes or a cup of tea or coffee without submitting to the humiliating process of soliciting permission.12 In the Moroccan household, besides begging for food, the wife must ask for permission and money to go to the hammam. (The hammam is a semi-public institution whose normal price does not exceed twenty cents.) On such occasions, bickering and subtle blackmail on the part of the mother-in-law may occur.
My hma was the treasurer, and a very whimsical one too. Sometimes I would go to her and express my intention to visit the hammam. However, before asking I would make sure that my husband had already given her the money for it. She would wait until I had prepared everything [it is a lengthy process involving the preparation of facials, homemade shampoos, and so on]. I would put on my jellaba, veil my face, and go to her. She would then change her mind and say, ‘Do you really have to go? Can’t you heat water and bathe here?’ I would take off my jellaba, take off my veil, and sit down without uttering a word, no protest. I could not protest. To protest you have to have somebody’s support; you have to have your parents’ support. I did not have that. So I thanked God for the fate He chose for me and shut my mouth.
Fatiha F.
The competition between mother and wife for the son’s favours is clearly institutionalized by the son’s duty to give his mother whatever he gets for his wife.
My husband could not give me a gift. Suppose he wanted to give me a scarf. He would say, ‘Fatiha, I would like to see you in a red scarf, it will match your complexion.’ I would answer that I would be very-happy to have one. He would go to the store, but he would have to buy four scarves – one for his mother, two for his divorced sisters, and finally one for me. He couldn’t give me the red scarf directly; he had to give them to his mother. She then chose what she wanted for herself and her daughters and gave me the last one. It could be green or black.
Fatiha F.
My husband could not come near me before going to greet his mother. Once he wanted to surprise me. He bought me a bra and hid it in his pocket before going to greet his mother. She noticed that he had something in his pocket and she laughingly took the bra out of his pocket and made fun of him: ‘I didn’t know you started using a bra, like a woman. She [the wife] has eaten your brain. You act like a crazy man now [to get things for the wife only]. Where did you drink it? [The reference is to witchcraft done by the wife to make her husband love her.] Did you drink it in the soup? Or was it discreetly mixed in your cookies?’
This sort of incident is a favourite subject for playwrights in Morocco. One of the most despised personages in the popular theatre is the mother-in-law.
In a traditional setting the mother’s involvement with her son is not limited to material things. It goes so far as to prevent his being alone with his wife. A husband and wife cannot be together during the day without being conspicuously antisocial.
The social space in a family dwelling is centred on one focal room, al-bit al-kbir (the big room). It is here that everything happens and that everyone is encouraged to spend most of their time. Individual privacy is vehemently discouraged. One of the accepted gestures for showing dissent within the family is to refuse to come to this communal room, to shut oneself off in another room. Leaving the communal room right after dinner is considered especially rude in traditional households. It is therefore ‘natural’ for the mother-in-law to use this custom to keep her son with her for as long as possible.
‘Often late in the evening, I felt very sleepy, but I could not leave the communal room to go to sleep in mine. Neither could my husband, even if both of us were dying of fatigue. We still had to sit there with her and wait until she decided to go to bed. Then we would run to ours. I could not retire to my room before her. We could not close our door in her face.’
‘And what if it is your husband who takes the initiative to go to bed?’
‘Impossible. He can’t. You want her to explode? When he used to come very early to the house after work, she would turn to him and say, “Why did you come home so early? Isn’t there any fun in the streets? Aren’t there women in the streets? Aren’t there amusements? Cinemas? Why do you have to come home so early? Men should not be always near their wives. It is a very ugly habit.” Often we go to sleep and I can hear her roaming around the windows, trying to listen to our noises, in case I was trying to tell him what happened during the day. I was not crazy enough to tell him secrets, knowing that she was spying on us. One day I forgot to shut the window properly. So when she leaned on it, the door fell ajar under her weight.’
‘Did she ever try to join you in bed?’
‘Not in our own house, but when we were invited to go somewhere, we spent the night together in the same room.’
Fatiha F.
When the couple decides to leave the extended family, they often seek a government transfer as an escape if the man is a civil servant, thus hiding their desire for privacy under a legitimate cloak. The wife perceives
the government’s decision to transfer the husband to another locality as an opportunity to recover some power over her life and her husband, and the mother-in-law perceives such a decision as a plot against her.
My husband was busy trying to get us out of there [the extended family, which included the father, the father’s brother’s family, and two of his sons’ families]. He was lobbying to have himself transferred to another part of the country by government decision. It was the only solution compatible with his obedience and respect for his mother.
He lobbied so well that he got his transfer. He was ordered to go to Fedala. But he had to disclose the news to his mother. One day he decided to talk to her. He told her that he was forced by the government to go to Fedala [forty miles away] and that he had no choice but to follow the government decision if he was to keep his job. ‘Are you joking?’ she said. ‘You don’t have to leave us. You can commute. Many people commute. It does not seem to kill them. Don’t think about leaving. That’s out of the question.’ He then came to me and said, ‘Fatiha, look. Do you want to leave this house at any cost?’ ‘Yes’, I said. ‘Listen’, he said, ‘this is our only chance to escape. I am not going to wait any longer. I am going to speed up the transfer decision. I am going to rent a room, any room. I do not want to hear you complain about how ugly that room might be, or how rough life is going to be for us. And it is going to be financially tough for a long period. Are you ready to put up with that without complaining?’ ‘Any slum’, I whispered, ‘will be a palace for us alone.’
He came one day very late and managed to isolate himself with me and whispered, ‘Start packing. We are going to leave very soon. I will announce it at the last minute, so as to take her by surprise. Start packing very discreetly.’
I can’t tell you what I felt then. I lost my appetite. I lost my tongue. It was both joy and fear. Have you ever experienced joy and fear together? I fasted for two days. I could not eat with that secret inside me. I did not know anymore how to behave, how to walk, what to say. He left the house and left me alone. Instead of packing, I went and opened the carpet, which was rolled in a corner. I took my precious drapes [used only during festival days] and hung them on the door. When he came home that night he looked puzzled. He came to me and whispered, looking at the drapes and the carpet, Fatiha, are you crazy? What does this mean? I told you to pack.’ ‘It means’, I answered, ‘that I don’t know anything about your decision, that I am out of it.’ I was scared his mother would discover that we were plotting. I did not let him down, really. But it was the only possible and sensible thing to do, although it seemed then as if I was letting him down. ‘I don’t know anything’, I kept repeating to him. Poor thing, he was left to face his mother alone.
The following day he came in shouting at me, screaming in a voice so loud you could hear from the mosque. ‘Fatiha, you have to pack immediately. These dogs in the government have ordered me to spend the night at Fedala. I do not have the right to refuse anymore. Immediately! Do you hear, Fatiha?’ ‘But’, shouted his mother from her room, ‘where will you spend the night? You have a family. They can’t treat you that way. You can’t stay in the street.’ ‘Mother’, he said, ‘they have foreseen everything. They made it impossible for me to delay the transfer decision any longer. They provided me with a house and a truck to transport the luggage. The truck is coming within the hour.’
The anti-privacy structure of Moroccan society facilitates – indeed, almost requires – the mother-in-law’s intervention in her son’s physical intimacy with his wife. Recognizing this, we can understand the reasons for the Moroccan prejudice against old women, cursed as ‘masters of intrigue’. It is the structure that determines everyone’s roles and leaves specific outlets for the individual’s cravings and wishes. It is the structure that is cruel not the mother-in-law.
The triangle of mother, son, and wife is the trump card in the Muslim pack of legal, ideological, and physical barriers that subordinate the wife to the husband and condemn the heterosexual relation to mistrust, violence and deceit. Young people demanding love-marriages not only create tremendous conflicts with their parents, but also almost always guarantee conflict in their own marriages.
A young man raised in a misogynist society will tend, unless he is lucky enough to undergo a radical cultural revolution, to manifest a fear of women in his relation with the wife he has chosen and may even desire to love. And although many material things have changed dramatically in Muslim societies, there has been no cultural upheaval at all. All attempts to bring about serious breaches in traditional ideology or to abandon traditional cultural models concerning the family are denounced as atheist deviations (given the religious character of the Muduwana, an extension and incarnation of the shari’a), as bida’ (‘innovations’, the connotation being negative), and as betrayals of asala (authenticity).
A chasm has therefore been widening between the necessities imposed by modern family life and the patterns that are supposed to shape relations within that institution. Although the economic and spatial foundations of the traditional family (based on sexual segregation) have suffered severe shocks with the integration of the Moroccan economy into the international market, we may none the less expect neurotic attempts to freeze traditional superstructures, to preserve the traditional patterns and concepts that govern family relations. The result is conflict, tension, and break-ups among young couples, exactly because they are trying to build something different from the stifling sexual relations idealized by tradition.
The higher the aspirations, the greater the psychological cost. By examining the changes that have occurred (in particular in the spatial dimension), we can identify some of the current conflicts between men and women that result from this gap between the shifting infrastructure and the rigid ideological superstructure.
8
The Meaning of Spatial Boundaries
Muslim sexuality is territorial: its regulatory mechanisms consist primarily in a strict allocation of space to each sex and an elaborate ritual for resolving the contradictions arising from the inevitable intersections of spaces.1 Apart from the ritualized trespasses of women into public spaces (which are, by definition, male spaces), there are no accepted patterns for interactions between unrelated men and women. Such interactions violate the spatial rules that are the pillars of the Muslim sexual order. Only that which is licit is formally regulated. Since the interaction of unrelated men and women is illicit, there are no rules governing it. Those people now experiencing sexual desegregation are therefore compelled to improvise. And whereas imitation is possible, creation is far more difficult.
Boundaries are never established gratuitously. Society does not form divisions purely for the pleasure of breaking the social universe into compartments. The institutionalized boundaries dividing the parts of society express the recognition of power in one part at the expense of the other.2 Any transgression of the boundaries is a danger to the social order because it is an attack on the acknowledged allocation of power. The link between boundaries and power is particularly salient in a society’s sexual patterns.
Patterns of sexual dangers can be seen to express symmetry or hierarchy. It is impossible to interpret them as expressing something about the actual relation of the sexes. I suggest that many ideas about sexual dangers are better interpreted as symbols of the relation between parts of society, as mirroring designs of hierarchy or symmetry which apply in the larger social system.3
The symbolism of sexual patterns certainly seems to reflect society’s hierarchy and power allocation in the Muslim order. Strict space boundaries divide Muslim society into two sub-universes: the universe of men (the umma, the world religion and power) and the universe of women, the domestic world of sexuality and the family. The spatial division according to sex reflects the division between those who hold authority and those who do not, those who hold spiritual powers and those who do not.4 The division is based on the physical separation of the umma (the public sphere) from the
domestic universe. These two universes5 of social interaction are regulated by antithetical concepts of human relations, one based on community, the other on conflict.
Membership of the Two Universes
The Public Universe of
the Umma
The Domestic Universe
of Sexuality
The believers. Women’s position in the umma universe is ambiguous; Allah does not talk to them directly. We can therefore assume that the umma is primarily male believers.
Individuals of both sexes as primarily sexual beings. But because men are not supposed to spend their time in the domestic unit, we may assume that the members are in fact women only.
Principles Regulating Relations Between Members
The Umma
The Family
Equality
Reciprocity
Aggregation
Unity, Communion
Brotherhood, Love
Trust
Inequality
Lack of Reciprocity
Segregation
Separation, Division
Subordination, Authority
Mistrust
Communal Relationship
A social relationship will be so-called ‘communal’ if and so far as the orientation of social action is based on subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together.6
Beyond the Veil Page 14