Just finished reading
Dec. 30th, 2002 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
electriclandDreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi.
It's a fascinating look at a totally different world. The author is a sociologist who was born in 1940 (same year as Mummy). She mostly writes anecdotes about various little domestic happennings in her childhood (when she was about 8), which were all the women in her family (mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, various others) had access to -- they rarely left the house. There are traditionalists, like her grandmother and her aunt; rebels like her mother and her cousin Chama, who dream of escape; women with more and less power depending on their status. Something as simple as cooking a meal for yourself is dangerously subversive. It's a very communal, feminine, circumscribed life, but at the same time very close and loving.
It's contrasted with her grandfather's household, also a harem but totally different from the one in the city. The little girl spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, in that case, a harem actually is. The author's added several footnotes that expand on her memories from an adult, historical perspective.
Really liked it.
Aunt Habiba was certain that we all had magic inside, woven into our dreams. "When you happen to be trapped powerless behind walls, stuck in a dead-end harem," she would say, "you dream of escape. And magic flourishes when you spell out that dream and make the frontiers vanish. Dreams can change your life, and eventually the world. Liberation starts with images dancing in your little head, and you can translate those images in words. And words cost nothing!" She constantly kept hammering at us about this magic within, saying that it was all our fault if we did not make the effort to bring it out. I could make frontiers vanish too -- that was the message I got, sitting on my cushion, up on that terrace. It all seemed so natural as I rocked myself back and forth, throwing my head back occasionally to feel the starlight shining on my face. Theaters ought to be always situated high up, on whitewashed terraces, near the skies. In Fez, on summer nights, faraway galaxies joined in our theater, and there were no limits to hope.
It's a fascinating look at a totally different world. The author is a sociologist who was born in 1940 (same year as Mummy). She mostly writes anecdotes about various little domestic happennings in her childhood (when she was about 8), which were all the women in her family (mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, various others) had access to -- they rarely left the house. There are traditionalists, like her grandmother and her aunt; rebels like her mother and her cousin Chama, who dream of escape; women with more and less power depending on their status. Something as simple as cooking a meal for yourself is dangerously subversive. It's a very communal, feminine, circumscribed life, but at the same time very close and loving.
It's contrasted with her grandfather's household, also a harem but totally different from the one in the city. The little girl spends a lot of time trying to figure out what, in that case, a harem actually is. The author's added several footnotes that expand on her memories from an adult, historical perspective.
Really liked it.
