We children loved that part, and sometimes one of us would get so excited that he forgot that the clay was still soft, and started running faster and faster, until the whole contents of the board slipped off onto his head. That was horribly embarrassing, especially because then someone would have to lead him back down to the courtyard, his eyes sealed shut with clay. This kind of incident never happened to me, however, since I was so desperately slow in everything. But ghassoul- making day was one of the rare occasions when that quality was appreciated.
Once we children emerged on the terrace with the wooden boards on our heads, huffing and puffing away to show how important our contribution was, Mina would take charge. Her job was to watch over the boards and monitor the drying process. At night, she would instruct us to take the boards in, so that the humidity would not affect them, and around noon the next day, when the sun was hot, she would instruct us to bring them back out again. After five days, the clay would have dried into a thin crust, and split into small pieces. Then, Mina would dump it all out onto one big clean sheet and divide it up among all the adult women. Those who had children got proportionally more, because their needs were greater.
Ghassoul was used in the second chamber of the hammam as a shampoo, and in the third and hottest chamber, where the most compulsive cleansing took place, as a smoothing and cleansing cream. Samir and I hated that third room, and even called it the torture chamber, because it was there that the grownups insisted on "seriously" taking care of us children. In the first two chambers of the hammam, the mothers would forget about their offspring, so involved were they with their beauty treatments. But in the third chamber, just before undertaking their own purification rituals, the mothers felt guilty about neglecting us, and tried to make up for it by turning our last moments in the hammam into a nightmare. It was then and there that everything suddenly went wrong, and we started sliding from one unfortunate experience to the next.
First of all, the mothers filled buckets of cold and hot water directly from the fountains, and poured it over our heads before testing it properly first. And they never succeeded in getting the right temperature. The water was either scaldingly hot or ice cold, never anything in between. Officially, too, we were not even allowed to scream in the third chamber because all around us, the women were conducting their purification rituals. To purify oneself, that is, to prepare for the prayer that took place immediately after stepping out of the hammam, adults needed to use the purest of waters. The only way to insure that purity was to be as near to the source (in this case, the fountains) as possible. That meant that the third chamber was always crowded and you had to line up in order to fill your buckets. (Actually, the third chamber of the hammain was the only place where I ever saw Moroccans line up in an orderly way.) Every minute spent waiting for that fountain was simply unbearable, because of the heat.
As soon as the buckets were filled, the adults immediately started in on the purification ritual, right at the front of the line. The ritual washing was distinguished from routine washing by a silent concentration and a prescribed order in which the body parts were washed - hands, arms, face, head, and finally the feet. You were not supposed to run in front of a woman doing her ritual, which meant that you could barely move. So between that and the too-hot or too-cold water being poured over your head, you could always hear children shrieking and howling all over the place. Some would manage to escape from their mother's grip for a moment, but since the marble floor was slippery with water and clay, and the room so crowded, they never got away for very long. Some would try to avoid going into the third chamber in the first place, but in that case, which was often what happened to me, they would just be picked up off their feet and forced in, despite their shrill screams.
Those were the few terrible moments that practically erased the whole delightful effect of the hammam session, nearly wiping out in a single stroke the long string of wonderful hours spent concealing Aunt Habiba's precious Senegalese ivory comb, only to magically produce it again when she started frantically searching for it; stealing a few of Chama's oranges that she kept in a cold bucket of water; watching the fat women with huge breasts, the skinny ones with protruding behinds, or the tiny mothers with giant teen-age daughters; and, most of all, comforting the grownups when they fell down on the slippery clay- and henna-coated floors.
I discovered, at one point, a way to speed up the process in the torture chamber and force Mother to rush me to the door. I faked fainting, a talent at which I had already became rather skillful, to keep people from bothering me. Fainting when the other children imitated the djinnis as we rushed down the stairs late at night, would often result in the child who had frightened me dragging me down to the courtyard or at least alerting Mother. That, in turn, would result in Mother raising hell, and going to complain to the child's mother on my behalf. But performing my strategic fainting in the hammam, when I was dragged to the third chamber, was more rewarding because I had an audience. First, I would grip Mother's hand to make sure she was looking my way. Then I would close my eyes, hold my breath, and start sliding down towards the wet marble floor. Mother would beg for help. "For God's sake, help me get her out of here! This child is having heart failure again." I told my trick to Samir, and he tried it too, but he was caught smiling when his mother started howling for help. She reported this to Uncle `Ali, and Samir was publicly chided the next Friday, just before the prayer, for fooling his own mother, "the most sacred creature walking on two feet on God's vast planet." Samir then had to ask her pardon, kiss Lalla Mani's hand, and ask her to pray for him. To get to paradise, a Muslim had to pass under his mother's feet (al-janatu tahta aqdami 1-ummahat), and Samir's prospects at that moment looked rather dim.
Then came the day that Samir was thrown out of the hammam because a woman noticed that he had "a man's stare." That event made me realize that we were both somehow drifting into a new era, maybe into adulthood, even though we still looked terribly small and helpless compared to the giant-sized grownups around us.
The incident occurred one day in the second chamber when a woman suddenly started shouting and pointing at Samir. "To whom does this boy belong?" she cried. "He is not a child anymore." Chama rushed up to her and told her that Samir was just nine, but the woman was adamant. "He might be four, but I am telling you, he looked at my breast just like my husband does." All the women who were sitting around, washing the henna out of their hair, stopped what they were doing to listen to the exchange, and they all started laughing when the woman went on to say that Samir "had a very erotic stare." Then Chama got nasty: "Maybe he looked at you like that because you have a strange breast. Or maybe, you're getting an erotic kick out of this child. If so, you're going to be in for some serious frustration." At that, everyone started laughing uproariously, and Samir, standing there in the middle of all those naked ladies, suddenly realized that he unquestionably had some kind of unusual power. He pounded his skinny chest and shouted out with aplomb his now-historic retort which became a sort of witticism in the Mernissi household: "You are not my type. I like tall women." This put Chama in an awkward position. She could no longer keep defending her surprisingly precocious brother, especially since she herself could not refrain from laughing along with the crowd. Their laughter reverberated around the room. But that comic incident signaled, without Samir and I realizing it, the end of childhood, when the difference between the sexes did not matter. After that, Samir was less and less tolerated in the woman's hammani, as his "erotic stare" began disturbing more and more women. Each time it happened, Samir would be taken back home as a triumphant male, and his manly behavior commented on and joked about in the courtyard for days. Finally, though, news of the incidents reached Uncle `Ali, who decided that his son should stop going to the women's hammam and join the men's.
I was very sad to go to the hammam without Samir, especially since we could no longer play the games we had usually played during the three hours we spent there. Samir made equally sad reports on
his experiences in the men's hammam. "The men don't eat there, you know," he said. "No almonds, no drinks, and they don't talk or laugh either. They just clean themselves." I told him that if he could just avoid looking at the women the way he did, maybe he could still convince his mother to let him join us again. But to my great amazement, he said that that was no longer possible and that we needed to think about the future. "You know," he said, "I am a man, although it does not show yet, and men and women have to hide their bodies from each other. They need to separate." That sounded profound, and I was very impressed, although not convinced. Samir then remarked that in the men's harnmam they did not use henna and face masks. "Men don't need beauty preparations," he said.
That remark brought me back to the old discussion we had had on the terrace, and I felt that it was an attack on me. I had been the first to jeopardize our friendship, by insisting on my need to get involved in the beauty treatments, so I started to defend my position. "Aunt Habiba says that skin is important," I began, but Samir interrupted me. "I think that men have a different skin," he said. I just stared at him. There was nothing I could say because I realized that for the first time in our children's games, all that Samir had said was right, and that whatever I said did not matter that much. Suddenly, it all seemed so strange and complicated, and beyond my grasp. I could feel that I was crossing a frontier, stepping over a threshold, but I could not figure out what kind of new space I was stepping into.
Suddenly I felt sad for no reason, and I went up to Mina on the terrace and sat by her side. She stroked my hair. "Why are we so quiet today?" she asked. I told her about my conversation with Samir, and also about what had happened in the hammam. She listened with her hack to the western wall, her yellow headdress as elegant as ever, and when I had finished, she told me that life was going to be tougher from now on for both me and Samir. "Childhood is when the difference does not matter," she said. "From now on, you won't be able to escape it. You'll be ruled by the difference. The world is going to turn ruthless."
"But why?" I asked her, "and why can't we escape the rule of the difference? Why can't men and women keep on playing together even when they are older? Why the separation?" Mina replied not by answering my questions but by saying that both men and women live miserable lives because of the separation. Separation creates an enormous gap in understanding. "Men do not understand women," she said, "and women do not understand men, and it all starts when little girls are separated from little boys in the hammam. Then a cosmic frontier splits the planet in two halves. The frontier indicates the line of power because wherever there is a frontier, there are two kinds of creatures walking on Allah's earth, the powerful on one side, and the powerless on the other."
I asked Mina how would I know on which side I stood. Her answer was quick, short, and very clear: "If you can't get out, you are on the powerless side."
Table of Contents
i. My Harem Frontiers
2. Scheherazade, the King, and the Words
3. The French Harem
4. Yasmina's First Co-Wife
5. Chama and the Caliph
6. Tamou's Horse
7. The Harem Within
8. Aquatic Dishwashing
9. Moonlit Nights of Laughter
io. The Men's Salon
ri. World War II: View from the Courtyard
12. Asmahan, the Singing Princess
13. The Harem Goes to the Movies
14. Egyptian Feminists Visit the Terrace
15. Princess Budur's Fate
16. The Forbidden Terrace
17. Mina, the Rootless
18. American Cigarettes
1g. Mustaches and Breasts
20. The Silent Dream of Wings and Flights
21. Skin Politics: Eggs, Dates, and Other Beauty Secrets
22. Henna, Clay, and Men's Stares
One of my weekly pleasures was to admire Samir as he staged his mutinies against the grownups, and I
on the second floor, the seventh child of his mother. I was born one hour later in our salon downsta
Scheherazade's marriage to the King, she said, was not a normal one at all. It had taken place under
Scheherazade's father, who loved her dearly, opposed such a plan, and tried to convince her that she
According to Muslim law, a woman cannot rule a country, although that had happened a few centuries a
Sometimes, she said that to be stuck in a harem simply meant that a woman had lost her freedom of mo
rocco that I, her little granddaughter, was going to step into. "Morocco has changed quickly, little
The race was organized all over the world, and the Byzantines won the first round.'
nastiest of all the Romans, lived close to the Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they never
During storytelling night, all the co-wives would gather in Yaya's room, and tea trays would be brou
On picnic day, everyone woke up at dawn and buzzed around the courtyard as if it were a religious fe
concerned, its origin was dubious. "There's no record of it in the Hadith," she said, "It might even
We would arrive on the farm in mid-morning, equipped with dozens of carpets and light sofas and khan
With the exception of Lalla Thor, who was a city woman with very white, lifeless skin, most of the c
ants were its threat.'-
Zin worked very hard at becoming the ideal modern nationalist, that is, one who possessed a vast kno
The fifth and largest key group in the city was that of the craftsmen, who had produced practically
What I could not understand was, what were the Jews doing in the country of the Allemane? How did th
Caliph Harun badly needed to relax, because he spent most of his days fighting. During his reign, th
nationalists' wives, and sang with them until late in the night. When she finally came home exhauste
of Chama: Aisha Taymour, Zaynab Fawwaz, and Huda Sha`raoui.1
literary figure in Beirut and Cairo intellectual circles, through a combination of strategically pla
British occupation and end her own traditional seclusion and confinement. She tossed away her veil w
caftan, it becomes a wonderful work of art."2
their tents; and they ate and drank and rested, and the Princess Budur lay down to sleep.3
cealed my case only that Allah may reunite me with my beloved Qamar al-Zaman."5
placed in big earthen jars, and left out on the terrace to be cured by the sun. From time to time, A
Despite all the excitement surrounding the annual ceremony at Sidi Belal's house, most of the time M
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood Page 20