Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  But to get back to the chewing gum and cigarettes. We children didn't care much for the cigarettes, but we did like the devilishly tasty chewing gum. We rarely got a piece, though, because the grownups kept it for themselves. Our only chance was to get involved in some illicit operation, like when Chama wanted us to go pick up a letter from her friend, Wassila Bennis. Samir and I knew that those letters were actually written by Wassila's brother, Chadli. Chadli was in love with Chama, but we were not supposed to know that. At any rate, Father and Uncle did not like there to be too much coming and going between our two houses, both because the Bennises had many sons and because Mrs. Bennis was a Tunisian of Turkish descent, and therefore extremely dangerous. A practitioner of Kemal Ataturk's revolutionary ideas,' she drove around unveiled in her husband's black Oldsmobile, just like a French woman, and wore her hair platinum-tinted and cut like Greta Garbo's. Everyone agreed that she did not really belong in the Medina. Still, whenever Mrs. Bennis went out in the old city, and she did go out often, she dressed according to tradition, in a djellaba and veil. Indeed, you could say that Mrs. Bennis led two lives - one in the Ville Nouvelle, or European city, where she paraded about unveiled; and the other in the traditional Medina. It was this idea of a double life which excited everyone, and made Mrs. Bennis a celebrity.

  To live in a combination of two worlds was much more appealing than living in just one. The idea of being able to swing between two cultures, two personalities, two codes, and two languages enchanted everyone! Mother wanted me to be like Princess Aisha (the teenage daughter of our King Mohammed V who made public speeches in both Arabic and French) who wore both long caftans and short French dresses. Indeed, we children found the thought of switching codes and languages to be as spellbinding as the sliding open of magic doors. The women loved it too, but the men did not. They thought it was dangerous, and Father especially did not like Mrs. Bennis, because he said that she made trespassing seem natural. She stepped too easily out of one culture and into another, without any regard for the hudud, the sacred boundary. "And what's so wrong with that?" asked Chama. Father replied that the frontier protected cultural identity, and that if Arab women started imitating European ones by dressing provocatively, smoking cigarettes, and running around with their hair uncovered, there would be only one culture left. Ours would be dead. "If that is so," argued Chama, "then why can my male cousins run around dressed like so many imitation Rudolph Valentinos and cut their hair like French soldiers, with no one screaming at them that our culture is about to disappear?" Father did not answer that question.

  Father, who was a pragmatic man, was convinced that our deadliest threat came not from the Western soldiers, but from their suave salesmen peddling innocent-looking products. He therefore organized a crusade against chewing gum and Kool cigarettes. As far as he was concerned, smoking a tall, thin, white Kool cigarette was equivalent to erasing centuries of Arab culture. "The Christians want to transform our decent Muslim households into a marketplace," he would say. "They want us to buy these poisonous products they make that have no real purpose, so that we turn into a whole nation of ruminating cattle. Instead of praying to Allah, people stick dirt in their mouths all day long. They're regressing to infancy, when the mouth has to be kept constantly busy." Father's insistence on the danger of cigarettes - they were worse than the French and Spanish bullets, he said - made me feel uneasy about keeping him uninformed about the activities on the terrace. I did not want to betray his trust. He loved me very much, and expected me never to lie. But, in fact, there were hardly any cigarettes around, for it was very difficult to get them. Neither the women nor the young men had much cash, and so their purchases were rare. The buying and selling of goods in the harem was controlled by the adult males. The rest of us just consumed what was there. We did not have the privilege to choose, to decide, to buy. So buying anything, even just cigarettes, mean that illegal money was going around. That was another reason why Father tried to track down whoever was responsible for the contraband.

  Since money was so scarce, to have a whole pack of cigarettes on the terrace was very unusual. Most of the time, the growups only had one or two, and then five or six people would be smoking them. That did not really matter because it was the ritual, not the quantity, that was important. First, you stuck the cigarette in a cigarette-holder, the longer the better. Then you took the cigarette-holder between two extended fingers, closed your eyes and took a puff, with your eyes still closed. Then you opened your eyes and looked at the cigarette between your fingers as if it were some magical apparition. Next, you gave it to the person sitting beside you, who gave it to the person next to her, until the entire circle had had a puff. Oh! I almost forgot about the silence: the entire operation had to be performed without making a sound, as if pleasure had paralyzed your tongue. Sometimes, Samir, Malika, and I would imitate the grownups, using a stick instead of a cigarette, but although we copied every little gesture, we could not imitate the silence. That was the only difficult part of the ritual, as far as we were concerned.

  The chewing gum and the cigarettes had come to us via the Americans who had first landed at the Casablanca Airport in November 1942. Years after they had left, the Americans kept coming up in our conversations, because everything concerning them was a mystery from beginning to end. They had appeared from out of nowhere when no one had expected them, and had surprised everyone during their short stay. Who were these strange soldiers? And why had they come? Neither Samir nor I, nor even Malika, could unravel these mysteries. All we knew for certain was this: the Americans were Christians, but they were very different from the usual ones who kept coming down from the North to give us beatings. Believe it or not, the Americans did not live in the North, but on some faraway island to the West called America, and that was why they had come by ship. Opinions varied as to how they had gotten to their island in the first place. Samir said that they were fooling around in a boat off the Spanish coast one day, when a current caught them and took them across. Malika said that they had gone there looking for gold, lost their way and decided to settle down. In any case, the Americans could not walk places like everyone else, but had to fly or go by ship whenever they got bored or wanted to visit their Christian cousins, the Spanish and the French. They could not have been very close cousins, though. The French and the Spanish were rather small and had black mustaches, while the Americans were very tall with devilish blue eyes. As Hussein Slaoui, the Casablanca folk singer, described, they scared much of the city's population when they landed, because of their combat uniforms, shoulders twice as broad as those of the French, and the fact that they started chasing women immediately. Hussein Slaoui called this song "Al-`Ain az-zarga Jana b-kul khir" (The Blue-Eyed Guys Brought All Kinds of Blessings), and Aunt Habiba explained that he was being sarcastic, because the Casablanca men really were quite upset. Not only did the Americans chase women whenever they spotted one from the docks, but they also gave them all kinds of poisonous gifts, such as chewing gum, handbags, scarves, cigarettes, and red lipstick.

  Everyone said that the Americans had come to Morocco to beat someone, but Samir and I did not know who. Some said they had come to beat the Allemane (Germans), those warriors who were after the French because they did not like their hair color. It seemed that the French had called on the Americans to join in the war, and help beat the Allemane. But the problem with that explanation was that there were no Allemane in Morocco! Samir, who traveled often with Uncle and Father, swore that he had seen no Allemane in the entire kingdom.

  But at any rate, everyone was very happy that the Americans had not come to make war on us. Some even said that the Americans were very friendly and spent most of their time playing sports, swimming, chewing gum, and shouting "OK" at everyone. "OK" was their salute; it was the equivalent of our Salam alikum (Peace upon you). In fact, the two letters o and k stood for longer words, but the Americans had a habit of shortening their sentences so they could get back to chewing gum. It was as if we greet
ed one another by saying a brief SA instead of spelling out Salam alikum.

  The other intriguing thing about the Americans was that they had blacks among them. There were blue-eyed Americans, and there were black Americans, and this surprised everyone. America was so far from the Sudan, the heart of Africa, and it was only in the heart of Africa that blacks were found. Mina was certain of that, and everyone else agreed with her. Allah had given all the blacks one big land with thick forests, gushing rivers and beautiful lakes, just below the desert. So where had these black Americans come from? Did Americans have slaves, like the Arabs in the past? Believe it or not, when we asked Father that question, he said yes, the Americans had had slaves, and those black Americans were definitely Mina's cousins. Their ancestors had been captured long ago, and taken in boats all the way to America to work on big plantations. Things were different now, though, Father said. Now, the Americans used machines to do the work and slavery was most decidely banned.

  However, we could not figure out why, unlike the Arabs, white and black Americans did not mix and become just brown skinned, which was what usually happened when a population of whites and blacks lived together. "Why are the American whites still so white," asked Mina, "and the blacks still so black? Do they not intermarry?" When finally Cousin Zin gathered enough information to answer her question, it turned out that indeed, Americans did not intermarry. Instead, they kept the races separate. Their cities were divided into two medinas, one for the blacks and one for the whites, like we had in Fez for the Muslims and the Jews. We had a good laugh about that up there on the terrace, because anyone who wanted to separate people according to their skin color in Morocco was going to run into severe difficulties. People had mixed together so much that they came in hues of honey, almond, cafe au lait, and so many, many shades of chocolate. In fact, there often were both blue-eyed and dark-skinned brothers and sisters in the same family. Mina was really stunned at the idea of separating cities according to race. "We know that Allah separated men from women so as to control the population," she said, "and we know that Allah separated the religions, so that each group could conduct its own prayer, and invoke its own prophet. But what is the purpose of separating blacks from whites?" No one could answer that one question. It was one more mystery to be added to the rest.

  But really, in the end, the most troubling of all the mysteries remained the question of why the Americans had landed in Casablanca in the first place. One day, I got so tired of trying to answer this question that I told Samir that maybe they had just come for a picnic. Just to visit, because they thought Casablanca was simply an island, with no inhabitants at all. Samir got upset at this and told me that if I was going to drift into silliness, he was going to quit the discussion. I begged him not to, and to mollify him, I said that I was sure there must be "a serious political reason," as Father would say, why the Americans had landed in Casablanca. I then suggested that we look at all the elements of the situation very carefully.

  While I was saying this, I secretly was thinking that I had been having a lot of difficulties with Samir lately; he had become so serious suddenly, everything had to be political, and whenever I disagreed with him, he argued that I did not respect him. So I either had to go along with him and censor my own ideas, or else make the decision to rupture our close friendship. Of course, I never seriously considered this last option because I was afraid to face the grownups by myself. Whenever I wanted to get something, or stage a revolt, all I needed to do was whisper the idea to Samir, and he would raise hell. And all I needed to do after that, was to sit closely by, assist him when he needed a push, and cheer him when he succeeded. Take the American mystery, for example. I had thought that the idea of warriors sailing from their faraway island just to go on a picnic would amuse him, but it did not. "You keep mixing things up," he argued, very earnest and highly concerned about my future. "War is war. Picnic is picnic. You always avoid looking at reality, because you are scared. What you do is dangerous, too, because you might go to sleep thinking that the warriors are in Casablanca to look at flowers and sing with birds, when they are about to come over to Fez to slit your throat. Even Malika, who is much older than I, talks this nonsense. I think it is a problem with women." I kept very quiet at those enigmatic words because what he said sounded at the same time both bizarre and right.

  The biggest problem we had with the Americans really was the one of enemies. Because if there were no Allemane in sight, why had the Americans landed in Casablanca? After many discussions, Samir came up with an explanation which made a lot of sense. He said that maybe war is like a children's game, and the Americans had landed in Casablanca to fool the Allemane, just like we hid in the olive jars to fool each other. Morocco was the Americans' olive jar. They were hiding here, and would later sneak north to attack the Allemane. I thought that Samir was very clever for thinking of this, and wished that I could travel like he did. It was his wandering around with Uncle and Father which made him so clever.

  I knew that if you moved around, your mind worked faster, because you were constantly seeing new things that you had to respond to. And you certainly became more intelligent than someone stuck in a courtyard. Mother was completely convinced of this too, and said that much of the reason why men kept women in harems was to prevent them from becoming too smart. "Running around the planet is what makes the brain race," said Mother, "and to put our brains to sleep is the idea behind the locks and the walls." She added that the whole crusade against chewing gum and American cigarettes was in fact a crusade against women's rights as well. When I asked her to elaborate, she said that both smoking cigarettes and chewing gum were silly activities, but men opposed them because they gave women opportunities to make decisions on their own, decisions which were unregulated by either tradition or authority. "So you see," said Mother, "a woman who chews gum is in fact making a revolutionary gesture. Not because she chews gum per se, but because gum chewing is not prescribed by the code."

  19.

  MUSTACHES AND BREASTS

  OFFICIALLY, MEN WERE not allowed on the terrace; it was the women's territory. That was largely because communication among separate houses was possible through their terraces - it was all just a simple matter of climbing and jumping. And how safe could the harems be, if men were allowed to roam from one terrace to the next? Contact between the sexes could all too easily occur.

  Eye contact between my male cousins and our neighbors' daughters most certainly did occur, especially during the spring and summer, when the sunsets on the terraces were spectacular. Unmarried youth of both sexes often lingered up here, when the weather was nice, to watch as the unparalleled Fez sunsets, crazy with red and purple clouds, stretched their magic wings across the skies. Sparrows would be dancing away up there, as if seized by frenzy. Chama was always up there, along with her two older sisters, Salima and Zoubida, and three older brothers, Zin, Jawad, and Chakib. Her brothers were supposed to never set foot on our terrace, for they would be looking straight into the Bennis house, and the Bennis family had many girls, as well as boys, of marriageable age. But neither the Mernissi nor the Bennis youth ever obeyed the rules, and on summer evenings, they all flocked up to the romantic whitewashed terraces, so close to the clouds. Each family kept to its own ground, but glances and smiles crisscrossed and trespassed, and sinful lust floated all around. The most talented of the youth would sing the songs of Asmahan, Abdelwahab, or Frarid, while all the others held their breath.

  One day at school, during a biology session devoted to the miraculous insan (the human being, Allah's most perfect creation), Lalla Tam explained to us how boys and girls became men and women capable of having babies. When we reached the age of twelve or thirteen, she said, or maybe even earlier, the boys' voices would get tougher, mustaches would appear on their faces, and suddenly, they would become men. (When Samir heard that, he drew a charcoal mustache on his upper lip with my mother's kohl, which I smuggled out for him from her very well-equipped vanity table.) As for us
girls, we would develop huge busts and get haq ach-har (literally, the month due), which was a kind of bloody diarrhea. It did not hurt, it was all natural, and when it happened, we ought not be afraid. During haq ach-har, we would have to wear aguedouar (sanitary napkin) between our legs to keep it all discreet. When I came home from school that day, I immediately asked Mother for more details about the guedouar, and at first she was in shock. Then she started quizzing me about who had given me that information so soon. She was amazed to learn that it was none other but Lalla Tam, my teacher. "We need to know about the human body, and Allah's wonderful design," I explained to reassure her, for she seemed lost. "A good Muslim ought to know all about science and biology, and the planets and the stars." Then Mother got really upset, because she realized that I was no longer a child - not because I had changed physi cally, but because I had information that, according to her, children were not supposed to have. For the first time, I had some kind of power over Mother, and it was information which had given it to me.