Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  That discussion was a turning point in my relation with Mother. She definitely knew that I was becoming independent. She probably also realized that time was flying by, her first daughter was growing fast, and her own beauty was not eternal. If I was about to become a young woman, that meant that she was growing old. "What else did Lalla Tam tell you?" asked Mother, looking at me as if I had come from another planet. "Did she say anything about babies?" Poor Mother, she just could not believe that I, her little thing, could be stuffed so full with cosmic information. I told her then that I knew I could bear a baby at age twelve or thirteen, because by that age, I would have haq ach-har and the breasts "necessary to feed the little, munchy, grouchy baby." She was a little taken aback. "Well," she said at last, "I would have waited a year or two before talking about such matters, but since it is part of your education.... " I then explained to her that she need not worry too much in any case, because I had already known all about this for years, just from the theater sessions, and the tales, and from listening to the women talk. Now the knowledge was official, that was all. To cheer her up, I joked that Samir' s voice would soon sound just like that of Fquih Naciri, the imam (preacher) of our local mosque.

  What I did not tell Mother, however, was that I was determined to become an irresistible ghazala, or a gazelle-like femme fatale, and that I had already become heavily involved in dubious shour, or magic practices involving astrological manipulations, thanks to Chama's fortunate, absent-minded habit of leaving her charm books strewn about. Chama kept dozens of these books in her room, and since she never really hid them, I became tremendously adept at both memorizing magic formulas and copying down spell charts, complete with complicated arrays of letters and numbers, in the stressfully short interludes when she walked out of her room.

  To perform terrace magic, I had to become very knowledgeable in astronomy as well. I would spend hours during sunsets scrutinizing the sky, and asking everyone nearby the stars' names in the order of their appearance. Sometimes people would gracefully volunteer the information; other times I would be abruptly silenced by "Shut up! Can't you see that I am meditating? How can you talk when cosmic beauty is so overwhelming?"

  As far as I was concerned, performing shour rituals such as burning small white candles during the new moon or burning outrageously decorated long candles during the full moon, or whispering secret incantations when Zahra (Venus) or Al- Mushtari (Jupiter) were overhead, was by far the most interesting crime committed on the terrace. We were all part of those operations, too, because the women needed us children to hold the candles, recite incantations, and do all sorts of special movements. The Milky Way would twinkle so close, we had the impression that it was shining just for us.

  Bless Chama's soul, she used to totally forget about my young age when she became engrossed in the reading aloud of "Talsam al-quamar" (Full Moon Talisman), which was a chapter from Iman al-Ghazali's Kitab al-awfaq pamphlet.' This chapter told how to chant garbled incantations on the special days and precise hours when the sky was in particular configurations. Not all of the literature about astrology and astronomy was considered to be of a dubious nature, either. Respectable historians such as Al-Mas`udi wrote about the influence of the full moon on the universe, including plants and human beings, and their works were often read aloud.'- I would listen carefully to what Al-Mas`udi said about the moon: it made plants grow, fruits ripen, and animals fatten. It also caused women to get their liaq acll-liar.3

  My God, I thought, if the moon can do all that, it can certainly make my hair grow longer and straighter, and speed up the development of my breasts, which was unfortunately far from happening. Malika, I noticed, had started moving her shoulders beautifully lately - she was walking like Princess Farida of Egypt before her divorce - but she could afford to do so because she had something going on. You would not call what she had breasts yet, but still, two little mini-tangerines were burgeoning under her blouse. As for me, I had nothing except a desperate hope that things would soon start happening to me, too.

  What really entranced me about the magic on the terrace was the fact that a little nothing like myself could weave spells around those wonderful astral bodies floating up there, and catch some of their glow. I became an expert on the names that Arabs gave to the moon. The new moon was called hilal, or crescent, and the full moon was called gatnar or badr. Both qamar and badr also meant a stunningly beautiful man or woman, because it was then that the moon was at its brightest and most perfect. In between and after the hilal and the qamar, there were still other names. The thirteenth night was called bayd, or white, because of the translucent sky, while sawad was the black night when the moon was hidden behind the sun. When Chama told me that my star was Zahra (Venus), I started moving slowly about, as if made of a vaporous celestial substance. I felt I could spread silver wings any time I wanted to.

  What I appreciated about astral magic, too, was the incredible range of its usage. You could increase a spell's power to influence key people such as a grandmother or a king, or simply the local grocer, who would miscalculate in your favor when you were paying for an expensive item if you planned your incantations well. But as far as I was concerned, only two things really mattered when it came to magic spells. The first was to make my teachers give me good grades, and the second was to increase my sex appeal.

  I wanted of course to enchant Samir, even though the opposite seemed to be happening and our relationship was becoming more and more difficult. For one thing, like Father and Uncle, he was profoundly scornful of shour, and condemned it as being utter nonsense. That, of course, forced me to go underground a good part of the evening, and to disappear completely when the moon was full. I was forced, too, to use my incantations to attract imaginary Arab princes of my own age whom I did not yet know. Still, I was rather cautious. I did not want to cast my spells too far away from Fez, Rabat, or Casablanca, and even Marrakech seemed a bit too far, although Chama said that a young Moroccan lady could marry as far away as Lahore, Kuala Lampur, or even China. "Allah made Islam's territory immense and wonderfully diverse," she said. Much later, I discovered that the magic spells only worked if you knew your prince and could visualize him during the ritual. That meant that I was seriously handicapped, because after I had excluded Samir - as he had forcefully requested - there was no one I wanted to visualize. Most of the boys I played with at school were much shorter and younger than I, and I wanted my prince to be at least one centimeter taller and a few hours older. Still, I had knowledge of magic, and that gave me confidence.

  If you wanted to make a man fall madly in love with you, you had to think about him intensely on a Friday evening at the precise moment when Zahra (Venus) appeared in the sky. All the while, too, you had to recite the following incantation:

  Laf, Laf, Laf Daf, Daf Yabech, Dibech, Ghalbech, Ghalbech, Da`ouj, Da`ouj Araq cadrouh, Hah, Hah.4

  Of course, for the incantation to have any effect at all, you were supposed to recite the magic words in a steady, melodious voice, with no mistakes in pronunciation, and this was almost impossible, since the words were totally unfamiliar to us: they were not Arabic. How could they be, since the incantations were fragments of languages of the supernatural djinnis, kidnapped and decoded by gifted scholars who wrote them down for the benefit of mankind? My faulty pronunciation, I explained to myself as I dutifully chanted, was why my incantations did not have much effect, and no prince had yet appeared to ask for my hand. Mispronouncing the magic words was terrifyingly dangerous, too, because the djinnis could turn against you and scar your face or twist your leg for life if you angered them. If Samir, my protector, had been with me, he could have checked my mispronunciations and saved me from the wrath of the djinnis. But he remained totally indifferent to my nascent and sudden obsession to become a femme fatale.

  When it came to magic, Mina agreed wholeheartedly with Samir, and although she was very tolerant of the rituals on the terrace, she still objected to them, saying that the Prophet was absolutely
against them. Everyone else kept telling her that the Prophet was only against black magic, the kind that you conducted to hurt other people, but that when you burnt talismans, musk, or saffron, or recited magic spells during full moons to heighten your sex appeal, grow longer hair, become taller, or enlarge your breasts, that was all right. Allah was sensitive (latif) and full of tenderness and forgiveness (rahim) for his fragile and imperfect creatures. He was generous enough to understand such needs. Mina argued that the Prophet did not make such distinctions, and that all women doing any kind of magic would face unpleasant surprises on Judgment Day. The angels' records would lead them straight to hell.

  But shour, or magic, did not really endanger the harem nearly as much as did the nationalists' decision to encourage women's education. The entire city was turned upside down when the religious authorities of the Qaraouiyine Mosque, including Fquih Mohammed al-Fassi and Fquih Moulay Belarbi Alaoui, supported women's rights to go to school, and with the backing of King Mohammed V, encouraged the nationalists to open up institutions of learning for girls.s Upon hearing the news, Mother immediately petitioned Father that I be transferred from Lalla Tam's Koran school to a "real one," and he responded by calling for an official family council meeting. Family council meetings were serious business, and were usually requested only when a family member needed to make an important decision or was faced with a paralyzing conflict of some kind. In the case of the transfer, the decision was too big for Father to make alone without the backing of the family. It was an enormous step to go from a traditional familiar institution, which up until then had been the only option available to little girls, to a nationalist primary school modeled on the French system, where girls learned mathematics, foreign languages, and geography, often were taught by male teachers, and played gymnastics in shorts.

  So the council met. Uncle, Grandmother Lalla Mani, and all my young male cousins, who were well informed about the recent shifts in educational matters thanks to the local and foreign press, came to help Father make his decision. But you could not have a balanced family council without someone to back Mother, who had initiated the idea in the first place. Normally, this representative should have been her father, but since he lived far away on his farm, he sent a substitute in the form of Uncle Tazi, my mother's brother, who lived next door. Uncle Tazi was always invited to our family councils whenever Mother was involved in any way, so as to insure equity and prevent a joint assault of the Mernissi group against her interests. So, Uncle Tazi was invited, the council took place, and Mother went out of her mind with joy when at the end of the council, my transfer had been accepted. I was not the only one affected either: all ten of my cousins were going, too. We all said a happy good-bye to Lalla Tani, and rushed on to the new school of Moulay Brahim Kettani, located a few yards from our gate.

  The change was incredible, and I was elated. In Koranic school, we had had to sit cross-legged on cushions all day long, with only one break for lunch, which we brought with us from home. Discipline was ferocious Lalla Tam would beat you with her whip whenever she did not like the way you looked, or talked, or recited the verses. The hours dragged on forever as you slowly learned and recited your lessons by heart. But in Moulay Brahim's nationalist school, everything was modern. You sat on chairs and shared a table with two other girls or boys. Someone was always interrupting and you never got bored. Not only did you jump from one subject to another - from Arabic to French, from math to geography - but you also spent a lot of time hopping from one classroom to the next. Between classes, too, you could sneak away, do acrobatics, borrow chick-pea snacks from Malika, and even ask for permission to go to the toilets, which were located at the other end of the building. That gave you a substantial ten minutes' worth of official leave, and even if you came back late, all you had to do was softly knock twice on the classroom door before entering. The two knocks on the door, before pushing it open and entering, sent me into ecstatic bliss because in our house, gates were either closed or open, and knocking would not do. Not only because of the thickness of the gigantic doors, and the impossibility of moving them, but also because a child was not allowed to open a closed door or close an open one. In addition to all this excitement, we now had two long breaks at school just to play in the courtyard, one in mid-morning and the other in mid-afternoon, and two prayer breaks. One was at midday, just before lunch, and the other was in late afternoon, when we would be led to the school mosque after having done our ritual washing at the nearby fountain.

  But that was not all. On top of everything else, we now got to go home for lunch, and it was then that we Mernissi kids started wreaking havoc in the short section of the street between school and home. We would jump up and down around the little donkeys crossing our path, loaded with fresh vegetables, and sometimes the boys would even manage to climb up on the backs of the animals that were not loaded. I was so thrilled to be allowed out in the street in midday, and often managed to hug the small donkeys with their soft, moist eyes, and talk to them for a few minutes, before their master spotted me and started pushing me away. Ganging up on Mimoun, the grilled-chick-pea vendor, was another favorite activity of ours, but we always ended up in trouble because the number of portions he handed us never matched the amount of money he received in return. Then, he would accompany us to the gate, swearing by Moulay Driss, the patron saint of Fez, that he would never do business with us again, and that some of us would end up in hell, because we enjoyed eating things we had not paid for. Finally, after weeks of this, Ahmed the doorkeeper came up with an honorable solution: we all would deposit our chick-pea money with him in advance, and he would pay Mimoun at the end of each week. When one of us had exhausted our credit, we would be notified, along with Mimoun.

  Modern school was so much fun that I even started getting good grades, and soon became intelligent, despite the fact that I was still helplessly slow at everything, from eating to speaking. I also found another way to be a star: I learned by heart many of the nationalist songs that we sang in school, and Father was so proud that he would ask me to recite them in front of Grandmother Lalla Mani at least once a week. At first, I sang just standing on the ground. Then, when I saw the effect my singing had, I asked permission to stand up on a stool. Next, I set my sights even higher by asking Father to pressure Mother into letting me wear my Princess Aisha dress while singing. The dress, which had a satin top and tulle all around, was a copy of the one that the Princess sometimes wore while accompanying her father, King Mohammed V. Princess Aisha often went around the country making speeches about women's liberation, and that had inspired Mother to have a copy of the dress made for me. Usually, I was allowed to wear it on special occasions only, because it was all white, and soiled easily. Mother hated when I dirtied my clothes. "But stains are unavoidable if this poor child is to lead a normal life," argued Father on my behalf. "Besides, our girl is growing so fast, this dress might be totally useless by the end of the year." Finally, to make my theatrical performance complete, I suggested to Father that he give me a little Moroccan flag, made to my size, to sing beside, but he turned down the idea immediately. "There is a fine line between good theater and a circus," he said. "And art only flourishes when that separation is carefully maintained."

  But if things were going well for me, thanks to my new educators, things were going badly for Mother. With all the news about the Egyptian feminists marching in streets and becoming government ministers, the Turkish women being promoted to all kinds of official positions, and our own Princess Aisha urging women, in both Arabic and French, to take up modern ways, courtyard life had become more unbearable for her than ever. Mother cried out that her life was absurd - the world was changing, the walls and gates were not going to be here much longer, and yet, she was still a prisoner. And she could see no logic behind this. She had asked to go to literacy classes - a few schools in our own neighborhood were offering them - but her demand had been turned down by the family council. "Schools are for little girls, not for mothers," L
alla Mani said. "It is not in our tradition." "And so what?" Mother retorted. "Who is benefitting from a harem? What good can I do for our country, sitting here a prisoner in this courtyard? Why are we deprived of education? Who created the harem, and for what? Can anyone explain that to me?"

  Most of the time, her questions flew away unanswered, like disoriented butterflies. Lalla Mani would lower her gaze and avoid eye contact, while Chama and Aunt Habiba would try to divert the conversation. Mother would remain silent for a while, and then reassure herself by talking about her children's future. "At least my daughters will have a better life, full of opportunities," she would say. "They will get an education, and travel. They will discover the world, understand it, and eventually participate in transforming it. As it is, the world is most definitely rotten. For me at least. Maybe you ladies have found the secret to being happy in this courtyard." Then she would turn to me and say, "You are going to transform this world, aren't you? You are going to create a planet without walls and without frontiers, where the gatekeepers have off every day of the year." Long silences would follow her speeches, but the beauty of her images would linger on, and float around the courtyard like perfumes, like dreams. Invisible, but so powerful.

  20.

  THE SILENT DREAM OF

  WINGS AND FLIGHTS

  ONE AFTERNOON, the courtyard was, as usual, still and quiet, with everything in its place. But maybe it was even a little more still and quiet than usual. I could hear the fountain's crystal-clear music very distinctly, as if people were holding their breath, waiting for something to happen. Or maybe someone was working on creating a mirage. I knew from Chama's magic books and from discussions with her, that you could send images to your neighbor if you developed tarkiz, or the power of concentration, similar to the concentration needed to prepare yourself for prayers but more intense. Lalla Tam insisted that most of prayer was concentration. "To pray is to create the void, to forget the world for a few minutes, so you can think about God. You can't think about God and your daily problems at the same time, just as you can't walk in two directions at the same time. If you do, you arrive nowhere or at least not where you wanted to go."