Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  A week later, during our next session on the forbidden terrace, Malika brought up the question of slaves. Did you need to have slaves to have a harem? Samir said that it was foolish to even ask such a thing, since we did not have any slaves in our harem,. But Malika swiftly replied that there was Mina, who lived with us, and who was a slave. Samir retorted that Mina's presence among us was accidental. She had no husband, no children, and no relatives, and was with us because she belonged to no one and had nowhere to go. She was maqtuca, cut off from her roots, like a dead tree. Years before, Mina had been kidnapped from her native Sudan, somewhere south of the Sahara, and sold as a slave in Marrakech. Then she had been sold in one slave market after the next, until she ended up in our house as a cook. Soon after that, she asked Uncle `Ali to exempt her from housework because she wanted to retire to the rooftop and pray. There was too much noise and talk down in the courtyard. And so, with the exception of the winter months, when the cold winds came down from the land of the Christians, Mina would camp on the lower terrace, facing Mecca.

  17.

  MINA, THE ROOTLESS

  MINA CAMPED ON the lower terrace, facing Mecca, and was seated on an ageless sheepskin with a saffron-colored leather cushion from Mauritania supporting her back as she leaned against the western wall. Saffron was her color. Both her headdress and her caftan were golden yellow, and they gave her serene black face an unusual glow. She was condemned to wear yellow because she was possessed by a foreign djinni who forbade her to wear other colors. The djinnis were terribly willful spirits who would get ahold of people and make them follow their caprices, like wearing specific colors, or dancing to particular music, even in countries where dancing by women was considered improper. Traditionally, a respectable adult wore discreet colors and rarely danced, and never in public. Only bad or half-crazy, possessed men and women danced in public, said Lalla Mani, a statement which always amazed Mother. She would retort by saying that most of rural Morocco danced happily away during religious festivals, with long lines of men, women, and chil dren holding hands and jumping up and down until morning. And these same people still managed to produce enough food to feed us. "I thought that crazy people didn't do their work correctly," Mother would taunt, while Lalla Mani argued right back that when you were possessed by a djinni, you lost all sense of the hudud, or the frontier between good and bad, between haram and halal. "Women possessed by the djinnis leap high in the air when they hear their rhythm playing," she said, "and they shake their bodies shamelessly, with hands and legs flying over their heads."

  Mina remembered fragments of her native language from her childhood, but they were mostly songs which did not make any sense either to her or to anyone else. Sometimes, too, Mina was sure that the djinni drum music, played during the hadra, or dance possession rituals, was reminiscent of the rhythms she had known in childhood. Other times, she was not so sure. She could describe trees, fruits, and animals, however, that no one ever had seen in Fez. We would sometimes encounter these in Aunt Habiba's stories, especially when we crossed the desert with a caravan going to Timbuktu, and then, Mina would ask Aunt Habiba to elaborate. Aunt Habiba, who was illiterate, and who had gotten her information by listening carefully when her husband had read out loud from history and literature, would call Chama to her rescue. Chama would then rush upstairs and bring back Al-Idrissi, or other reference books written by Arab geographers. She would look up Timbuktu in the index and read pages and pages out loud, so Mina might get a feel for her childhood. Mina would sit quietly listening throughout, although sometimes she would ask for a passage to be read many times, especially if it was a description of a marketplace, or a neighborhood. "I might run into someone I know," she would joke, with one hand in front of her mouth, hiding her shy smile. "I might run into my sister or brother. Or I might be recognized by a friend from childhood." She would then excuse herself for interrupting the tale. Mina was magtu`a, old and poor, but she gave much warmth and hanan. Hanan is such a divine gift, it bubbles up like a fountain, splashing tenderness all around, regardless of whether or not its receiver is well behaved and careful not to stray outside Allah's hudud. Only saints and other privileged creatures provided hanan, and Mina had it. She never showed any anger, except when a child was beaten.

  Mina danced once a year, during the Mouloud festival, the anniversary of the birth of the Prophet, Peace and Allah's Prayers be Upon Him. At that time, many, many rituals took place all over the city, from the most official, but wonderful, all-male religious choruses held in the magnificent Moulay Driss' sanctuary, to the ambiguous hadra, or possession dances, which took place in the neighborhoods. Mina participated in the ritual organized at the house of Sidi Belal, the most renowned and effective of the djinni exorcists in the entire Fez region. Like Mina, he had originally come from the Sudan and begun his life in Morocco as an uprooted slave. But he was so good at taming the djinnis, that his owners went into business with him. Not just anyone could attend the ceremonies in Sidi Belal's house, either. You needed an invitation.

  The djinnis possessed slaves as well as the freeborn, and men as well as women. However, the djinnis seemed to recruit more easily among the powerless and the poor, and the poor were their most reliable devotees. "For the rich, the hadra is more of an amusement," explained Mina, "while for women like me, it is a rare opportunity to get away, to exist in a different way, to travel." For a businessman like Sidi Belal, of course, the rare attendance of women from high-ranking families was absolutely vital, and they came to his house, bearing expensive gifts. Their presence and generosity were appreciated by all as an expression of women's solidarity, and their support was much needed. The nationalists were against possession dances, declaring them to be against Islam and shari'a, or religious law. And since all the heads of distinguished families shared the nationalists' views, women attended Sidi Belal's hadra in total secrecy. Mina also attended the hadra in secrecy because Father and Uncle agreed wholeheartedly with the nationalists, but all the women and the children in the house knew about it anyway, and practically all of us had accompanied her. You always needed a friend to accompany you to a possession dance, because after hours of jumping and singing, you often fainted with fatigue. Since Mina was so popular, all the courtyard declared itself to he her friend. But indeed, beyond friendship, we all were irresistably drawn to the evidently subversive possession ceremony, during which women would dance away with their eyes closed and their long hair floating from left and right, as if all modesty and bodily constraints had been abandoned. Even we children would manage to get there, by threatening to tell Father and Uncle all about it. Blackmailing the adult women gave us a lot of power, and assured our right to participate in practically every forbidden ceremony.

  Sidi Belal's house was as big as ours, although it did not have our luxurious marble floors and lavish woodwork. The hadra would begin with hundreds of women, all elaborately dressed and made up, lined up in orderly fashion on sofas along the courtyard's four walls. Sitting arm in arm, the women would be clustered around their meriaha, or the woman who could not resist the rih, the rhythm which compelled her to dance. Sidi Belal himself would be standing in the middle of the courtyard, in a flowing green robe and saffron turban and slippers, surrounded by an all-male orchestra made up of drums, gueubris (lute-like instruments), and cymbals.

  The four rooms around the courtyard would be occupied by women from the richest families, those who had brought the most expensive gifts and did not want to be seen dancing, while the poorer women sat in the courtyard. Precious silver tea trays, with multi-colored Bohemian crystal glasses, and bronze samovars sizzling with steaming hot water, would be prepared in the four corners of the courtyard and in the middle of each salon. Then, we would be requested to not move anymore. The essential rule, valid for all ceremonies, religious or profane, was that everyone find a place and remain still, which was why we children were barely tolerated. Since there were usually ten of us children who snuck in with Mina, Aunt Habiba had i
nstituted a simple but inflexible rule: each child could select someone to sit close to, but if we stood up, started running around, tried to talk to other children, or refused to sit back clown after the third warning, we were shown to the door. I had no trouble with that rule, so passive and tranquil was I, but poor Samir never made it to the end of the ceremony. He could not sit still for five minutes in a row. Once, he even shouted insults at Sidi Belal as he was escorted by Aunt Habiba to the door. The following year, she had to fabricate a little turban to hide his locks, so that the master of ceremonies would not recognize him.

  At first, Sidi Belal's orchestra would play slowly, so slowly that the women would keep on talking to one another as if nothing was happening. But then, suddenly, the drums would beat out a strange rhythm, and all the meriahat would spring up, toss away their headgear and slippers, bend from the waist, and swing their long hair wildly about. As their necks swung from side to side, they also seemed to lengthen, as if trying to escape from whatever was squeezing them. Sometimes Sidi Belal, frightened by the violence of the dancers' movements and afraid that they might hurt themselves, would gesture to his orchestra to slow down. But often, by then, it was too late, and the women would ignore the music and carry on at their own impetuous speed, as if to indicate that the master of ceremonies no longer controlled anything. It was as if the women had freed themselves for once of all external pressures. Many would have light smiles floating on their faces, and with their half-closed eyes, they sometimes gave the impression that they were emerging from an enchanting dream. At the end of the ceremony, the women would collapse onto the floor, totally exhausted and half unconscious. Then, their friends would hug them, congratulate them, throw rosewater in their faces, and whisper secret things in their ears. Slowly, the dancers would recover and return to their places as if nothing had happened.

  Mina danced slowly with her head swaying just slightly from right to left and her body erect. She only reacted to the softest of the rhythms, and even then, she danced off of the beat, as if the music she was dancing to was coming from inside. I admired her for that and for a reason I still do not understand. Maybe it was because I always enjoyed slow motion, and dreamed of life as a quiet and unhurried dance. Or maybe it was because Mina managed to combine two seemingly contradictory roles - to dance with a group, but also to keep her own offbeat rhythm. I wanted to dance like her, with the community, but also to my own secret music, springing from a mysterious source deep within, and stronger than the drums. Stronger, and yet softer and more liberating. Once I asked Mina why she danced so smoothly while most of the other women made abrupt, jerky movements, and she said that many of the women confused liberation with agitation. "Some ladies are angry with their lives," she said "and so even their dance becomes an expression of that." Angry women are hostages of their anger. They cannot escape it and set themselves free, which is indeed a sad fate. The worst of prisons is the self-created one.

  According to legend, the all-male orchestra at the hadra ritual was supposed to be all black. These musicians, said the legend, had come from a fabulous empire called Gnawa (Ghana), which stretched beyond the Sahara Desert, and be yond the rivers, all the way down south, into the heart of the Sudan. When they had come north, they had brought with them no luggage but their enchanting, irresistible rhythms and songs, and their preferred city in Morocco was Marrakech, the open door to the desert.

  Everyone said that Marrakech, also known as Al-Hamra, or the Red-Walled City, had nothing in common with Fez, which was located too near the Christian frontier and the Mediterranean, and was swept by too many bitter cold winter winds. Marrakech, on the other hand, was deeply tuned to the African currents, and we heard many wondrous things about what it was like. Not many in our courtyard had seen Marrakech, but everyone knew one or two mysterious things about it.

  The walls were flaming red in Marrakech, and so was the earth you walked on. Marrakech was blazing hot, and yet there was nearly always snow up above it, shining on the Atlas Mountains. In ancient times, you see, Atlas had been a Greek god living in the Mediterranean Sea. He was a Titan fighting against other giants, and one day he lost an important battle. So he came to hide on the African shores, and when he lay down to sleep, he tucked his head into Tunisia and stretched his feet as far as Marrakech. The "bed" was so nice that he never woke up again, and became a mountain. Snow visited Atlas regularly each year for months, and he seemed to be enchanted to feel his feet trapped in the desert, and twinkled to passersby from his royal captivity.

  Marrakech was the city where black and white legends met, languages melted down, and religions stumbled, testing their permanence against the undisturbed silence of the dancing sands. Marrakech was the unsettling place where pious pilgrims discovered that the body was a god too, and that all the rest, including reason and the soul, and all their authoritarian priests and earnest executioners, could fade and disappear when the drums slit the air. People danced in Marrakech, travelers said, when their differing languages did not allow them to communicate. I liked the idea of a city engrossed in dancing, when words failed to create links. That was what happened in Sidi Belal's courtyard, I thought, when the women, renewed with the strengths of those ancient civilizations, danced out all their invincible desires. The djinnis came from faraway alien territories, entered entrapped bodies, and started speaking foreign languages to them.

  Sometimes, someone would spot a white drummer in Sidi Belal's supposedly all-Gnawa black orchestra, and then the honorable ladies who had paid for the ceremony would complain. "How can you perform Gnawa music, and sing genuine Gnawa songs, when you are white like an aspirin tablet!" they would shout, furious at the lousy organization. Sidi Belal would try to explain to them that sometimes, even if you were white, Gnawa culture could rub off on you and you could learn its music and songs. But the women were adamant - the orchestra had to be all black and foreign. The blacks in the orchestra had better speak Arabic with an accent too, otherwise they might be nothing more than local blacks who could play drums. Thanks to centuries of travel and trade across the desert, there were hundreds of local blacks living in the Fez Medina who could have posed as distinguished foreign visitors from the prestigious Empire of Ghana. Local blacks simply would not do, either, because even if they could fool the women, they surely could not fool the foreign djinnis. And that would have defeated the entire ceremony's goal, which was to communicate with the djinnnis in their mysterious languages. Was not the dance a leap into alien worlds? In any case, too, the women preferred having a genuine Gnawa orchestra, because they did not appreciate the idea of some local guy from the Medina ogling them while they were absorbed in their dances. They preferred to perform in front of strangers, who knew nothing of the city's laws and codes. It was therefore lucky for all concerned that Sidi Belal's orchestra usu ally kept silent when not playing, so that the question of accent did not often arise.

  Despite all the excitement surrounding the annual ceremony at Sidi Belal's house, most of the time Mina's life flowed by unnoticed. She shared a tiny room on the top floors with three other elderly slave women - Dada Sa`ada, Dada Rahma, and Aishata. All had already been living in the house long before even Samir's mother and mine had moved in. Like Mina, they did not have any clear relationship to the family, but had drifted in when the ban on slavery was enforced by the French. "It was only when the French made it possible for the slaves to file suits in courts to recover their freedom," Mina would say, "and when the slave traders were given prison sentences and fines, that slavery finally stopped. Only when the court steps in does violence end."'

  Once freed, however, many female slaves like Mina were too weak to fight, too shy to seduce, too breathless to protest, and too poor to return to their native lands. Or else, they were too unsure of what they would find once they were back there. All they really wanted was a calm room to stretch out in and let the years roll by. A place where they could forget about the senseless succession of days and nights, and dream of a better world
in which violence and women walked separate paths. But while Dada Sa`ada, Dada Rahma, Aishata, and most of the other female relatives who lived on the top floors kept to their rooms, Mina thrived on the terrace. Since she never divulged any secrets (and in fact, hardly talked at all, except with us children), her presence did not inconvenience anyone either. Not the young men sneaking up there to catch a glimpse of the girls next door; not the women climbing up to burn magic candles, or, even worse, to smoke sinful, very-rare-to-find American cigarettes stolen out of Zin's or Jawad's pockets; and not the children hiding in the forbidden olive jars.