Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  But it was the radio incident that taught me an important lesson. It was then that Mother told me about the need to chew my words before letting them out. "Turn each word around your tongue seven times, with your lips tightly shut, before uttering a sentence," she said. "Because once your words are out, you might lose a lot." Then I remembered how, in one of the tales from A Thousand and One Nights, a single misspoken word could bring disaster to the unfortunate one who had pronounced it and displeased the caliph, or king. Sometimes, the sia_f, or executioner, would even be called in.

  However, words could save the person who knew how to string them artfully together. That is what happened to Scheherazade, the author of the thousand and one tales. The king was about to chop off her head, but she was able to stop him at the last minute, just by using words. I was eager to find out how she had done it.

  2.

  SCHEHERAZADE, THE KING,

  AND THE WORDS

  ONE LATE AFTERNOON, Mother took the time to explain to me why the tales were called A Thousand and One Nights. It was no accident because, for each one of those many, many nights, Scheherazade, the young bride, had to spin an entrancing, captivating tale to make her husband, the King, forget his angry plan to execute her at dawn. I was terrorized. "Mother, do you mean that if the King does not like Scheherazade's story, he will call in his siaf (executioner)?" I kept asking for alternatives for the poor girl. I wanted other possibilities. How could the story displease the King, yet Scheherazade be allowed to live? Why could Scheherazade not just say what she wanted, without having to worry about the King? Or why could she not reverse the situation in the palace, and request that the King tell her a captivating story every night? Then he would realize how frightening it was to have to please someone who had the power to chop off your head. Mother said that I needed to hear the details first; then I could look for escapes.

  Scheherazade's marriage to the King, she said, was not a normal one at all. It had taken place under very bad circumstances. King Schahriar had discovered his wife in bed with a slave, and, deeply hurt and enraged, had beheaded them both. To his great amazement, however, he discovered that the double murder was not enough to make him forget his ferocious anger. Revenge became his nightly obsession. He needed to kill more women. So he asked his vizier, the highest official in his court, who also happened to be Scheherazade's father, to bring him a virgin every night. The King would then marry her, stay with her that night, and order her executed at dawn. And so he did for three years, killing more than one thousand innocent girls, "till folk raised outcry against him and cursed him, praying Allah utterly to destroy him and his rule, and women made an uproar and mothers wept and parents fled with their daughters till there remained not in the city a young person for carnal copulation."' Carnal copulation, explained Mother when Cousin Samir jumped up and down and yelled for an explanation, was when bride and groom lay together in a bed and slept until morning.

  Finally, one day, in all the city, there were only two virgins left: Scheherazade, the eldest daughter of the Vizier, and her little sister Duniazad. When the Vizier went home that evening, pale and preoccupied, Scheherazade asked him what was the matter. He told her his problem, and she reacted in a way her father did not expect at all. Instead of begging him to help her escape, she immediately volunteered to go and spend the night with the King. "I wish thou wouldst give me in marriage to this King Schahriar," she said. "Either I shall live or I shall be a ransom for the virgin daughters of Muslims and the cause of their deliverance from his hands and thine."

  Scheherazade's father, who loved her dearly, opposed such a plan, and tried to convince her that she had to help him think of another solution. Marrying her off to Schahriar was like condemning her to certain death. But she, unlike her father, was convinced that she had exceptional power and could stop the killing. She would cure the troubled King's soul simply by talking to him about things that had happened to others. She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself. She would help him see his prison, his obsessive hatred of women. Scheherazade was sure that if she could bring the King to see himself, he would want to change and to love more. Reluctantly, her father gave in, and she was married that very night to Schahriar.2

  As soon as she entered King Schahriar's bedroom, Scheherazade started telling him such a marvelous story, which she cleverly left hanging at a most suspenseful part, that he could not bear to part with her at dawn. So he let her live until the next night, so she could finish her tale. But on the second night, Scheherazade told him another wonderful story, which she was again far from finishing when dawn arrived, and the King had to let her live again. The same thing happened the next night, and the next, for a thousand nights, which is almost three years, until the King was unable to imagine living without her. By then, they already had two children, and after a thousand and one nights, he renounced his terrible habit of chopping off women's heads.

  When Mother finished Scheherazade's story, I cried, "But how does one learn how to tell stories which please kings?" Mother mumbled, as if talking to herself, that that was a woman's lifetime work. This reply did not help me much, of course, but then she added that all I needed to know for the moment was that my chances of happiness would depend upon how skillful I became with words. With this knowledge, Samir and I (who had already decided to avoid upsetting the grownups with unwelcomed words, thanks to the radio incident) started training ourselves. We would sit for hours, silently practicing, chewing words, and turning them seven times around our tongues, all the while watching the grownups to see if they were noticing anything.

  But the grownups never noticed anything, especially on the courtyard level, where life was very proper and strict. Only upstairs were things less rigid. There, divorced and widowed aunts, relatives, and their children, occupied a maze of small rooms. The number of relatives living with us at any one time varied according to the amount of conflict in their lives. Distant female relatives would sometimes come to seek refuge on our top floors for a few weeks when they got into fights with their husbands. Some would come to stay, with their children, for a short time only, just to show their husbands that they had another place to stay, that they could survive on their own and were not desperately dependent. (This strategy often was successful, and they would return home in a stronger bargaining position.) But other relatives came to stay for good, after a divorce or some other serious problem, and this was one of the traditions Father always worried about whenever someone attacked the institution of harem life. "Where will the troubled women go?" he would say.

  The rooms upstairs were very simple with white tiled floors, Whitewashed walls, and sparse furniture. Very narrow sofas, upholstered with multi-flowered peasant cottons and cushions, were scattered here and there, along with easily washable raffia mats. Wet feet, slippers, and even the occasional spilled cup of tea, did not produce the same excessive reactions up here as they did downstairs. Life upstairs was so much easier, especially since everything was also accompanied by hanan, a Moroccan emotional quality that I rarely have encountered elsewhere. Hanan is hard to define exactly, but basically, it is a free-flowing, easygoing, unconditionally available tenderness. People who give hanan, like Aunt Habiba, never threaten to withdraw their love when you commit some unintentional minor or even major infraction. Hanan was hard to come by downstairs, especially among the mothers, who were too busy teaching you to respect the frontier to bother with tenderness.

  Upstairs was also the place to go for storytelling. You would climb the hundreds of glazed steps that led all the way up to the third and top floor of the house, and the terrace which lay before it, all whitewashed, spacious, and inviting. That was where Aunt Habiba had her room, small and quite empty. Her husband had kept everything from their marriage, with the idea that should he ever lift his finger and ask her to come home again, she would bow her head and come rushing back. "But he can never take the most important things away fr
om me," Aunt Habiba would say sometimes, "my laughter and all the wonderful stories I can tell when the audience is worth it." I once asked Cousin Malika what our aunt meant by "an audience who is worth it," and she confessed that she did not know either. I said maybe we should ask her directly, but Malika said no, better not, because Aunt Habiba might start crying. Aunt Habiba often cried for no reason; everyone said so. But we loved her, and could hardly sleep on Thursday nights, so excited were we at the prospect of her Friday storytelling sessions. These gatherings usually ended in great confusion, because they lasted too long, according to our mothers, who were often forced to climb up all those stairs to fetch us. And then we would scream, and the most spoiled of my cousins, like Samir, would roll on the floor, and shout that they did not feel sleepy, not at all.

  But if you did manage to stay until the story ended, that is until the heroine triumphed over her enemies and crossed back over the "seven rivers, seven mountains, and seven seas," you were faced with yet another problem: you were scared to go back down the stairs. First of all, there was no light. The switches to the stair lights were all controlled by Ahmed, the doorkeeper, from the entrance gate. He turned them off at 9 P.M., to signal that everyone on the terrace was going in and all traffic ought to be officially stopped. The second problem was that a whole population of djinnis (demons) was out there, lurking in silence and waiting to jump out at you. And last, but not the least, was the fact that Cousin Samir was so good at imitating the djinnis that I often mistook him for the real thing. Several times, I literally had to feign passing out to get him to stop from posing as a djinni.

  Sometimes, when the story lasted for hours, the mothers did not appear, and the whole house fell suddenly silent, we would beg Aunt Habiba to let us spend the night with her. She would unfold her beautiful bridal carpet, the one she kept carefully folded behind her cedar chest, and cover it with a clean white sheet and perfume it with orange-flower water, special for the occasion. She did not have enough cushions for all of us to use as pillows, but that was not a problem, as we did not care. She would share with us her huge, heavy wool blanket, turn off the electric light, and place a big candle on the threshold at our feet. "If by any chance someone needs to go urgently to the toilet," she would say, "remember that this carpet is one of the only things I have which reminds me of my previous life as a happily married lady."

  So, on these graceful nights, we would fall asleep listening to our aunt's voice opening up magic glass doors, leading to moonlit meadows. And when we awoke in the morning, the whole city lay at our feet. Aunt Habiba had a small room, but a large window with a view that reached as far as the Northern mountains.

  She :knew how to talk in the night. With words alone, she could put us onto a large ship sailing from Aden to the Maldives, or take us to an island where the birds spoke like human beings. Riding on her words, we traveled past Sind and Hind (India), leaving Muslim territories behind, living dangerously, and making friends with Christians and Jews, who shared their bizarre foods with us and watched us do our prayers, while we watched them do theirs. Sometimes we traveled so far that no gods were to be found, only sun- and fireworshippers, but even they seemed friendly and endearing when introduced by Aunt Habiba. Her tales made me long to become an adult and an expert storyteller myself. I wanted to learn how to talk in the night.

  3*

  THE FRENCH HAREM

  OUR HOUSE GATE was a definite hudud, or frontier, because you needed permission to step in or out. Every move had to be justified and even getting to the gate was a procedure. If you were coming from the courtyard, you had to first walk down an endless corridor, and then you came face to face with Ahmed, the doorkeeper, who was usually sitting on his throne-like sofa, always with his tea tray by his side, ready to entertain. Since the right of passage always involved a rather elaborate negotiating process, you were invited either to sit beside him on his impressive sofa, or to face him, duly relaxed on the out-of-place "fauteuil d'Franca," his hard, shabby, upholstered easy chair that he had picked out for himself on a rare visit to the joutya, or local flea market. Ahmed often had the youngest of his five children on his lap, because he took care of them whenever his wife Luza went to work. She was a first-rate cook and accepted occasional assignments outside our home when the money was good.

  Our house gate was a gigantic stone arch with impressive carved wooden doors. It separated the women's harem from the male strangers walking in the streets. (Uncle's and Father's honor and prestige depended on that separation, we were told.) Children could step out of the gate, if their parents permitted it, but not grownup women. "I would wake up at dawn," Mother would say now and then. "If I only could go for a walk in the early morning when the streets are deserted. The light must be blue then, or maybe pink, like at sunset. What is the color of the morning in the deserted, silent streets?" No one answered her questions. In a harem, you don't necessarily ask questions to get answers. You ask questions just to understand what is happening to you. Roaming freely in the streets was every woman's dream. Aunt Habiba's most popular tale, which she narrated on special occasions only, was about "The Woman with Wings," who could fly away from the courtyard whenever she wanted to. Every time Aunt Habiba told that story, the women in the courtyard would tuck their caftans into their belts, and dance away with their arms spread wide as if they were about to fly. Cousin Chama, who was seventeen, had me confused for years, because she managed to convince me that all women had invisible wings, and that mine would develop too, when I was older.

  Our house gate also protected us from the foreigners standing a few meters away, at another equally busy and dangerous frontier - the one that separated our old city, the Medina, from the new French city, the Ville Nouvelle. My cousins and I would sometimes slip out of the gate when Ahmed was busy talking or napping, to take a look at the French soldiers. They dressed in blue uniforms, wore rifles on their shoulders, and had small gray eyes that were always alert. They often tried to talk to us children, because the adults never spoke with them, but we were instructed never to answer back. We knew that the French were greedy and had come a long way to conquer our land, even though Allah had already given them a beauti ful one, with bustling cities, thick forests, luscious green fields, and cows much bigger than ours that gave four times as much milk. But somehow the French needed to get more.

  Because we lived on the frontier between the old city and the new, we could see how different the French Ville Nouvelle was from our Medina. Their streets were large and straight, and lit by bright lights in the night. (Father said that they squandered Allah's energy because people did not need that much bright light in a safe community.) They also had fast cars. Our Medina streets were narrow, dark, and serpentine - filled with so many twists and turns that cars could not enter, and foreigners could not find their way out if they ever dared to come in. This was the real reason the French had to build a new city for themselves: they were afraid to live in ours.

  Most people walked on foot in the Medina. Father and Uncle had their mules, but poor people like Ahmed had only donkeys, and children and women had to walk. The French were afraid to walk. They were always in their cars. Even the soldiers would stay in their cars when things got bad. Their fear was quite an amazing thing to us children, because we saw that grownups could be as afraid as we could. And these grownups who were afraid were on the outside, supposedly free. The powerful ones who had created the frontier were also the fearful ones. The Ville Nouvelle was like their harem; just like women, they could not walk freely in the Medina. So you could be powerful, and still be the prisoner of a frontier.

  Nonetheless, the French soldiers, who often looked so very young, afraid, and lonely at their posts, terrorized the entire Medina. They had power and could hurt us.

  One day in January 1944, Mother said, King Mohammed V, backed by nationalists all over Morocco, went to the topranking French colonial administrator, the Resident General, to make a formal demand for independence. The Resident General got
very upset. How dare you Moroccans ask for independence! he must have screamed, and to punish us, he launched his soldiers into the Medina. Armored cars forced their way as far as they could into the serpentine streets. People turned to Mecca to pray. Thousands of men recited the anxiety prayer, consisting of one single word repeated over and over for hours when one is faced with disaster: "Ya Latif, Ya Latif, Ya Latif!" (0 Sensitive One!) Ya Lat f is one of the hundred names of Allah, and Aunt Habiba often said it was the most beautiful one of all because it describes Allah as a source of tender sympathy, who feels your sorrow and can help you. But the armed French soldiers, trapped in the narrow streets, surrounded by chants of "Ya Latif" repeated thousands of times, became nervous and lost control. They started shooting at the praying crowds and within minutes, corpses were falling on top of each other on the mosque's doorstep, while the chants were still going on inside. Mother said that Samir and I were barely four at the time and no one noticed us watching from our gate as the blood-soaked corpses, all dressed in the ceremonial white prayer djellaba, were carried back home. "For months afterward, you and Samir had nightmares," she said, "and you could not even see the color red without running to hide. We had to take you to the Moulay Driss sanctuary many Fridays in a row to have the sharifs (holy men) perform protection rituals over you, and I had to put a Koranic amulet under your pillow for a whole year before you slept normally again." After that tragic day, the French walked around carrying guns with them in plain view all the time, while Father had to ask permission from many different sources just to keep his hunting rifle, and even then, had to keep it concealed unless he was in the forest.