Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  One grownup camp said that the harem was a good thing, while the other said that it was bad. Grandmother Lalla Mani and Chama's mother, Lalla Radia, belonged to the pro-harem camp; Mother, Chama, and Aunt Habiba, to the anti-harem one. Grandmother Lalla Mani often got the discussion started by saying that if the women were not separated from the men, society would come to a halt and work would not get done. "If women were free to run about in the streets," she said, "men would stop working because they would want to have fun." And unfortunately, she went on, fun did not help a society produce the food and goods it needed to survive. So, if famine were to be avoided, women had to stay in their place at home.

  Later, Samir and I had a long consultation about the word "fun" and we decided that, when used by grownups, it had to do with sex. We wanted to be absolutely clear about that though, and so we took the matter to Cousin Malika. She said that we were definitely right. Then we asked her, standing as tall as we could, "What is sex, according to you?" Not that we did not already know the answer, we just wanted to make sure. But Malika, who thought we knew nothing, solemnly pushed back her braids, sat down on a sofa, took a cushion in her lap like grownups do when they are reflecting, and said slowly, "The first night of the marriage celebration, when everyone goes to sleep, the bride and groom stay by themselves in their bedroom. The groom makes the bride sit down on the bed, they hold hands, and he tries to make her look at him straight in the eyes. But the bride resists, she keeps her eyes down. That is very important. The bride is very shy and frightened. The groom says a poem. The bride listens with her eyes glued to the floor, and finally she smiles. Then he kisses her on the forehead. She still keeps her eyes down. He gives her a cup of tea. She starts drinking it slowly. He takes the cup away, sits near her, and kisses her."

  Malika, who shamelessly manipulated our curiosity, decided to pause right there at the kiss, knowing that Samir and I were dying to know where the groom actually kissed the bride. Kissing on the forehead, cheek, and hand meant nothing unusual, but the mouth was indeed another story. However, we decided to teach Malika a lesson, and instead of showing our curiosity, Samir and I started whispering to each other, oblivious of her existence altogether. Showing total disinterest to your speaker, Aunt Habiba had recently told us, was one good way for the weak to take power: "To speak while others are listening is indeed the expression of power itself. But even the seemingly subservient, silent listener has an extremely strategic role, that of the audience. What if the powerful speaker loses his audience?"

  And sure enough, Malika immediately resumed her dissertation on what happens on the bridal night. "The groom kisses the bride on the mouth. Then they both lie together in a big bed, with no one looking." We did not ask any more questions after that. We knew all the rest. The man and the woman take off their clothes, shut their eyes, and the baby follows a few months later.

  The harem makes it impossible for men and women to see each other, so everybody proceeds with their duties. While Lalla Mani was praising harem life, Aunt Habiba would be fuming; you could tell by the way she kept readjusting her headdress even though it was not slipping. Because she was divorced, however, she could not contradict Lalla Mani openly, but had to mumble her objections softly to herself, and leave it up to Mother and Chama to voice dissent. Only those who had power could openly correct others and contradict their views. A divorced woman did not have a home really, and had to buy off her presence by making herself as inconspicuous as possible. Aunt Habiba never wore bright colors, for example, even though she sometimes expressed the wish to try on her red silk farajiya again. But she never did. Most of the time, she just wore washed-out gray or beige colors, and the only make-up she used was kohl around the eyes. "The weak have to be disciplined so as to avoid humiliation," she would say. "Never let others remind you of your limits. You can be poor, but elegance is always there to be grabbed."

  Mother would begin her attack on Lalla Mani's views by tucking her legs in under her on the sofa, straightening her back, and pulling a cushion onto her lap. She would then cross her arms and stare straight at Lalla Mani. "The French do not imprison their wives behind walls, my dear mother in-law," she would say. "They let them run wild in the local souk (market), and everyone has fun, and still the work gets done. In fact, so much work gets done that they can afford to equip strong armies and come down here to shoot at us."

  Then, before Lalla Mani could gather herself together for a counterattack, Chama would present her theory about how the first harem got started. That is when things used to get really bad, because both Lalla Mani and Chama's mother would start screaming that now our ancestors were being insulted, our sacred traditions ridiculed.

  Chama's theory was actually quite interesting, and Samir and I loved it. Once upon a time, she argued, men fought each other constantly. There was much needless bloodshed, and so one day, they decided to appoint a sultan who would organize things, exercise sulta, or authority, and tell the others what to do. All the rest would have to obey. "But how shall we decide who among us shall be this sultan?" the men wondered as they met to ponder this problem. They reflected very hard and then one of them had an idea. "The sultan must have something the others do not have," he said. They reflected some more, and then another man had another idea. "We should organize a race to catch women," he suggested, "and the man who catches the most women will be appointed sultan."

  "That's an excellent idea," the men agreed, "but what about proof? When we all start running in the forest to catch women, we will get dispersed. We need a way to paralyze the women once they're caught, so we can count them, and decide who is the winner." And that was how the idea of building houses got started. Houses with gates and locks were needed to contain the women. Samir suggested that it might have been simpler just to tie the women to trees, since they had such long braids, but Chama said that in the old days, women were very strong from running in the woods just like men, and if you tied two or three of them to a tree, they might uproot it. Besides, it took too much time and energy to tie up strong women, and they might scratch your face or kick you in some unmentionable place. Building walls and shoving them in was much more handy. And so the men did.

  The race was organized all over the world, and the Byzantines won the first round.' The Byzantines, who were the nastiest of all the Romans, lived close to the Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they never missed an occasion to humiliate their neighbors. The Emperor of the Byzantines conquered the world, caught a huge number of women, and put them in his harem to prove that he was the chief. East and West bowed to him. East and West were scared of him. But then, centuries went by and the Arabs started learning how to conquer territories and chase women. They became very good at it and dreamt of conquering the Byzantines. Finally, Caliph Harun al-Rashid had that privilege. He defeated the Roman Emperor in the Muslim year 181 (A.u. 798), and then went on to conquer other parts of the world. When he had gathered one thousand jarya, or slave girls, in his harem, he built a big palace in Baghdad and put them in it, so no one would doubt that he was the Sultan. The Arabs became sultans of the world, and they gathered more women. Caliph Al-Mutawwakil gathered four thousand. Al-Muqtadir managed to round up eleven thousand.2 Everyone was very impressed after that - the Arabs gave orders, the Romans bowed.

  But while the Arabs were busy locking women behind doors, the Romans and the other Christians got together and decided to change the rules of the power game in the Mediterranean. Collecting women, they declared, was not relevant anymore. From now on, the sultan would be the one who could build the most powerful weapons and machines, including firearms and big ships. But the Romans and other Christians decided not to tell the Arabs about the change; they would keep it a secret so as to surprise them. So the Arabs went to sleep, thinking that they knew the rules of the power game.

  At this point, Chama would stop speaking and jump to her feet, in order to dramatize the story for Samir and me, all but ignoring Lalla Mani and Lalla Radia, who would be crying
out in protest. Meanwhile, Aunt Habiba would be twisting her mouth., so that you would not see that she was smiling. Then Chama would raise up her white lace qamis, so as to liberate her legs and leap onto an empty sofa. She would stretch out in a sleeping position, bury her head in one of the huge cushions, push her rebellious red hair over her freckled face and declare, "The Arabs are sleeping now." Then she would close her eyes and start to snore, only to spring up a moment later, look around as if she had just come back from a very deep sleep, and fix her eyes on Samir and me as if she had never seen us before.

  "The Arabs finally woke up a few weeks ago!" she would say. "Harun al-Rashid's bones have become dust, and the dust has melted with the rain. The rain ran down to the Tigris River, and off to the sea where all big things become tiny, and get lost in the fury of the waves. A French king is now ruling in our part of the world. His title is President de la Repub- lique Francaise. He has a huge palace in Paris called the Elysee and he has, oh surprise, only one wife! No harem in sight. And that single wife spends her time running in the streets, with a short skirt, and a low neckline. Everybody can stare at her ass and bosom, but no one doubts for a moment that the president of the French Republic is the most powerful man in the country. Men's power is no longer measured by the number of women they can imprison. But this is news in Fez Medina, because the clocks are still frozen in Harun alRashid's time!"

  Then Chama would jump back to the sofa, close her eyes, and bury her face in the flowered silk cushion again. Silence.

  Samir and I loved Chama's story because she was such a good actress. I would always watch her closely to learn how to put movements into words. You had to use the words, and at the same time make the gestures with your body. But not everyone was as entranced with Chama's story as were Samir and I. Her own mother, Lalla Radia, was at first appalled, and then outraged, especially at the mention of Caliph Harun alRashid. Lalla Radia was a literate woman who read history books, a skill she had learned from her father, a famous religious authority in Rabat. She did not like people making light of caliphs in general, and Harun al-Rashid in particular. "0 Allah!" she would cry, "Pardon my daughter, for she is attacking the caliphs again! And confusing the children! Two equally monstrous sins. Poor little ones, they will have such a distorted view of their ancestors, if Chama keeps this up."

  Lalla Radia would then ask Samir and me to sit near her so she could tell us the correct version of history, and make us love Caliph Harun." He was the prince of all caliphs," she would say, "the one who conquered Byzance and made the Muslim flag fly high in Christian capitals." She also insisted that her daughter was all wrong about harems. Harems were wonderful things. All respectable men provided for their womenfolk, so that they did not have to go out into dangerous, unsafe streets. They gave them lovely palaces with marble floors and fountains, good food, nice clothes, and jewelry. What more did a woman need to be happy? It was only poor women like Luza, the wife of Ahmed the doorkeeper, who needed to go outside, to work and feed themselves. Privileged women were spared that trauma.

  Samir and I often felt overwhelmed by all these contradictory opinions, and so we would try to organize the information a bit. Grownups were so untidy. A harem had to do with men and women - that was one fact. It also had to do with a house, walls, and the streets - that was another fact. All of this was quite simple and easy to visualize: put four walls in the midst of the streets and you have a house. Then put the women in the house, and let the men go out: you have a harem. But what would happen, I ventured to ask Samir, if we put the men in the house, and let the women go out? Samir said that I was complicating things, just at the moment when we were getting somewhere. So I agreed to put the women back in and the men back out, and we proceeded with our inquiry. The problem was that the walls and everything worked for our harem in Fez, but did not work at all for the harem on the farm.

  6.

  TAMOU'S HORSE

  THE HAREM ON the farm was housed in a gigantic T-shaped one-story building surrounded by gardens and ponds. The right side of the house belonged to the women, the left to the men, and a delicate two-meter-high bamboo fence marked the liudud (the frontier) between them. The two sides of the house were in fact two similar buildings, built back to back, with symmetrical facades and roomy arched colonnades which kept the salons and smaller rooms cool, even when it was hot outside. The colonnades were perfect for playing hide-and-go-seek, and the children on the farm were much more daring than the ones in Fez. They would climb up the columns with their bare feet, and jump down like acrobats. They were also not afraid of the frogs, tiny lizards, and little flying animals that seemed to leap out at you non-stop whenever you crossed the corridors. The floors were paved with black and white tiles, and the columns were inlaid with a rare combination of pale yellow and dark gold mosaic that Grandfather liked, and that I have never seen elsewhere. The gardens were surrounded by high delicate wrought-iron grilles with arched doors that always seemed closed, but we only had to push at them to get out into the fields. The men's garden had a few trees and a lot of neatly kept flowering shrubs, but the women's garden was another story altogether. It was overrun with strange trees and bizarre plants and animals of all kinds, because each co-wife claimed her own little plot of land which she declared to be her garden, where she raised vegetables, hens, ducks, and peacocks. You could not even take a walk in the women's garden without trespassing on someone's territory, and the animals would always follow you around, even under the arches of the paved colonnades, making a terrible racket which contrasted sharply with the monastery-like silence of the men's garden.

  Besides the farm's main building, there were adjoining pavilions scattered about. Yasmina had the one on the right. She had insisted on it, explaining to Grandfather that she had to be as far away from Lalla Thor as possible. Lalla Thor had her own self-contained palace in the main building, with wall-towall mirrors and colorful woodwork on the ceilings, mirrors, and chandeliers. Yasmina's pavilion, on the other hand, consisted of a large, very simple room, with no luxuries. She did not care about all that, as long as she could stay away from the main building, and have enough space to experiment with trees and flowers, and raise all kinds of ducks and peacocks. Yasmina's pavilion also had a second floor, which had been built for Tamou after she fled the war in the Rif Mountains to the north. Yasmina took care of Tamou when she was sick, and the two became close friends.

  Tamou came in 1926, after the defeat of Abdelkrim by the combined Spanish and French armies. She appeared early one morning over the horizon of the flat Gharb Plain, riding a Spanish saddled horse, and dressed in a man's white cape and a woman's headdress so that the soldiers would not shoot at her. All the co-wives loved to describe her arrival at the farm, and it was as good as the tales of the thousand and one nights, or even better, since Tamou was there to listen and smile and be the star. She had appeared that morning wearing heavy silver Berber bracelets with points sticking out, the kind of bracelets that you could use to defend yourself if necessary. She also had a khandjar, or dagger, dangling from her right hip and a real Spanish rifle that she kept hidden in her saddle, beneath her cape. She had a triangular-shaped face with a green tattoo on her pointed chin, piercing black eyes that looked at you without blinking, and a long, copper-colored braid that hung over her left shoulder. She stopped a few meters from the farm and asked to be received by the master of the house.

  No one knew it that morning, but life on the farm was never going to be the same again. For Tamou was a Riffan and a war heroine. Morocco was full of admiration for the Rif people., the only ones who had kept on fighting the foreigners long after the rest of the country had given up, and here was this woman, clad as a warrier, crossing the cArbaoua frontier into the French Zone all by herself to look for help. And because she was a war heroine, certain rules did not apply to her. She even behaved as though she did not know about tradition.

  Grandfather probably fell in love with Tamou the first minute he saw her, but he did not real
ize it for months, so complex were the circumstances surrounding their meeting. Tamou had come to the farm with a mission. Her people were stranded in a guerrilla ambush in the Spanish Zone, and she needed to bring them aid. So Grandfather gave her the help she needed, first signing a quick marriage contract to justify her presence on the farm, in case the French police came looking for her. Then Tamou asked him to help her bring food and medicine to her people. There were many injured, and with the defeat of Abdelkrim, each village had to survive on its own. Grandfather gave her the supplies and she left at night with two trucks, rolling slowly down the side of the road, with the lights out. Two peasants from the farm, posing as salesmen, rode on donkeys up ahead, scouting for trouble and signaling back to the trucks with torches.

  When Tamou returned to Grandfather's farm a few days later, one of the trucks was loaded with corpses, covered with vegetables. They were the bodies of her father and husband, and her two little children, one boy and one girl. She stood silently by as the corpses were unloaded from the trucks. Then, the co-wives brought her a stool to sit on, and she just sat there watching as the men dug holes in the ground, placed the corpses inside, and covered them with the earth. She did not cry. The men planted flowers to camouflage the tombs. When they had finished, Tamou could not stand, and Grandfather called Yasmina, who rook her arm and led her to her pavilion, where she put her to bed. For many months after that, Tamou did not talk, and everyone thought she had lost the capacity to speak.