Speaker of eternal night scheherazade of the catastrophic nights

A L S O B Y F A T I M A M E R N I S S I

Islam and Democracy

Fear of the Modern World

The Veil and the Male Elite

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A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam

The Forgotten Queens of Islam

Doing Daily Battle

Interviews with Moroccan Women

Beyond the Veil

Male/Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society

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DREAMS OF TRESPASS

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Treams

0 F T R E S P A S S

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TALES OF A HAREM GIRLHOOD

FATIMA MERNISSI

Photographs by

Ruth V. Ward

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CONTENTS

i. My Harem Frontiers i

2. Scheherazade, the King, and the Words 12

3. The French Harem 20

4. Yasmina's First Co-Wife 28

5. Chama and the Caliph 38

6. Tamou's Horse 48

7. The Harem Within 56

8. Aquatic Dishwashing 66

9. Moonlit Nights of Laughter 74

io. The Men's Salon 82

ri. World War II: View from the Courtyard 92

12. Asmahan, the Singing Princess 102

13. The Harem Goes to the Movies 112

14. Egyptian Feminists Visit the Terrace 124

15. Princess Budur's Fate 136

16. The Forbidden Terrace 144

17. Mina, the Rootless 156

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18. American Cigarettes 174

1g. Mustaches and Breasts 188

20. The Silent Dream of Wings and Flights 202

21. Skin Politics: Eggs, Dates, and Other Beauty Secrets 218

22. Henna, Clay, and Men's Stares 230

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DREAMS OF TRESPASS

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1.

MY HAREM FRONTIERS

I WAS BORN in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth-century Moroccan city some five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the hudud, or sacred frontier, is not respected. I was born in the midst of chaos, since neither Christians nor women accepted the frontiers. Right on our threshold, you could see women of the harem contesting and fighting with Ahmed the doorkeeper as the foreign armies from the North kept arriving all over the city. In fact, foreigners were standing right at the end of our street, which lay just between the old city and the Ville Nouvelle, a new city that they were building for themselves. When Allah created the earth, said Father, he separated men from women, and put a sea between Muslims and Christians for a reason. Harmony exists when each group respects the prescribed limits of the other: trespassing leads only to sorrow and unhappiness. But women dreamed of trespassing all the time. The world beyond the gate was their obsession. They fantasized all day long about parading in unfamiliar streets, while the Christians kept crossing the sea, bringing death and chaos.

Trouble and cold winds come from the North, and we turn to the East to pray. Mecca is far. Your prayers might reach it if you know how to concentrate. I was to be taught how to concentrate when the time was appropriate. Madrid's soldiers had camped north of Fez, and even Uncle `Ali and Father, who were so powerful in the city and ordered around everyone in the house, had to ask permission from Madrid to attend Moulay Abdesslam's religious festival near Tangier, three hundred kilometers away. But the soldiers who stood outside our door were French, and of another tribe. They were Christians like the Spaniards, but they spoke another

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language and lived farther north. Paris was their capital. Cousin Samir said that Paris was probably two thousand kilometers away, twice as far away from us as Madrid, and twice as ferocious. Christians, just like Muslims, fight each other all the time, and the Spanish and the French almost killed one another when they crossed our frontier. Then, when neither was able to exterminate the other, they decided to cut Morocco in half. They put soldiers near `Arbaoua and said from now on, to go north, you needed a pass because you were crossing into Spanish Morocco. To go south, you needed another pass, because you were crossing into French Morocco. If you did not go along with what they said, you got stuck at `Arbaoua, an arbitrary spot where they had built a huge gate and said that it was a frontier. But Morocco, said Father, had existed undivided for centuries, even before Islam came along fourteen hundred years ago. No one ever had heard of a frontier splitting the land in two before. The frontier was an invisible line in the mind of warriors.

Cousin Samir, who sometimes accompanied Uncle and Father on their trips, said that to create a frontier, all you need is soldiers to force others to believe in it. In the landscape itself, nothing changes. The frontier is in the mind of the powerful. I could not go and see this for myself because Uncle and Father said that a girl does not travel. Travel is dangerous and women can't defend themselves. Aunt Habiba, who had been cast off and sent away suddenly for no reason by a husband she loved dearly, said that Allah had sent the Northern armies to Morocco to punish the men for violating the hudud protecting women. When you hurt a woman, you are violating Allah's sacred frontier. It is unlawful to hurt the weak. She cried for years.

Education is to know the hudud, the sacred frontiers, said Lalla Tam, the headmistress at the Koranic school where I was sent at age three to join my ten cousins. My teacher had a long, menacing whip, and I totally agreed with her about everything: the frontier, the Christians, education. To be a Muslim was to respect the hudud. And for a child, to respect the hudud was to obey. I wanted badly to please Lalla Tam, but once out of her earshot, I asked Cousin Malika, who was two years older than I, if she could show me where the hudud actually was located. She answered that all she knew for sure was that everything would work out fine if I obeyed the teacher. The hudud was whatever the teacher forbade. My cousin's words helped me relax and start enjoying school.

But since then, looking for the frontier has become my life's occupation.

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Anxiety eats at me whenever I cannot situate the geometric line organizing my powerlessness.

My childhood was happy because the frontiers were crystal clear. The first frontier was the threshold separating our family's salon from the main courtyard. I was not allowed to step out into that courtyard in the morning until Mother woke up, which meant that I had to amuse myself from 6 A.M. to 8 A.M. without making any noise. I could sit on the cold white marble threshold if I wanted to, but I had to refrain from joining in with my older cousins already at play. "You don't know how to defend yourself yet," Mother would say. "Even playing is a kind of war." I was afraid of war, so I would put my little cushion down on our threshold, and play l-msaria h- lglass (literally, "the seated promenade"), a game I invented then and still find quite useful today. You need only three things to play. The first is to be stuck somewhere, the second is to have a place to sit, and the third is to be in a humble state of mind, so you can accept that your time is worth nothing. The game consists in contemplating familiar grounds as if they were alien to you.

I would sit on our threshold and look at our house as if I had never seen it before. First, there was the square and rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled everything. Even the white marble fountain, forever bubbling in the courtyard center, seemed controlled and tamed. The fountain had a thin blueand-white faience frieze all around its circumference, which reproduced the design inlaid between the square marble tiles of the floor. The courtyard was surrounded by an arched colonnade, supported by four columns on each side. The columns had marble at the top and the bottom, and blue-and-white tilework in the middle, mirroring the pattern of the fountain and floor. Then, facing one another in pairs, across the courtyard, were four huge salons. Each salon had a gigantic gate in the middle, flanked by enormous windows, opening onto the courtyard. In the early morning, and in the winter, the salon gates would be shut tight with cedarwood doors carved with flowers. In the summer, the doors would be opened and drapes of heavy brocade, velvet, and lace let down, so breezes could flow in while light and noise were kept away. The salon windows had carved wooden shutters on the inside, similar to the doors, but from the outside all you could see were silverplated, wrought-iron grilles, topped with wonderfully colored glass arches. I loved those colored glass arches, because of the way the rising morning sun kept changing their reds and blues to different hues, and softening the yellows. Like the heavy wooden doors, the windows were

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left wide open in the sum mer and the drapes were let down only at night or during afternoon naptimes, to protect sleep.

When you lifted your eyes toward the sky, you could see an elegant two- story structure with the top floors repeating the square arched colonnade of the courtyard, completed with a parapet of silver-plated ironwork. And finally, you had the sky - hanging up above but still strictly square-shaped, like all the rest, and solidly framed in a wooden frieze of fading gold-and- ocher geometric design.

Looking at the sky from the courtyard was an overwhelming experience. At first, it looked tame because of the manmade square frame. But then the movement of the early morning stars, fading slowly in the deep blue and white, became so intense that it could make you dizzy. In fact, on some days, especially during winter, when the purple and shockingpink rays of the sun violently chased the last, stubborn twinkling stars from the sky, you could easily have become hypnotized. With your head tilted back, facing the squared sky, you would feel like going to sleep, but just then people would start invading the courtyard, coming up from everywhere, the doors and the stairs - oh, I almost forgot the stairs. Lodged in the four corners of the courtyard, they were important because even grownups could play a sort of gigantic hide-and-go-seek on them, running up and down their glazed green steps.

Facing me across the courtyard was the salon of Uncle and his wife and their seven children, which was an exact reproduction of our own. Mother would not allow any publicly visible distinctions to be made between our salon and Uncle's, although Uncle was the firstborn son, and therefore traditionally entitled to larger and more elaborate living quarters. Not only was Uncle older and richer than Father, but he also had a larger immediate family. With my sister and brother and my parents, we only numbered five. Uncle's family totalled nine (or ten, counting his wife's sister who visited often from Rabat, and sometimes stayed as long as six months at a time, after her husband married a second wife). But Mother, who hated communal harem life and dreamt of an eternal tete-atete with Father, only accepted what she called the 'azma (crisis) arrangement on the condition that no distinction be made between the wives. She would enjoy the exact same privileges as Uncle's wife, despite their disparities in rank. Uncle scrupulously respected this arrangement because in a well-managed harem, the more power you have, the more generous you ought to be. He and his

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children ultimately did have more space, but it was on the top floors only, well away from the highly public courtyard. Power need not manifest itself blatantly.

Our paternal grandmother, Lalla Mani, occupied the salon to my left. We only went there twice a day, once in the morning to kiss her hand, and a second time in the evening to do the same. Like all the other salons, hers was furnished with silk brocade-covered sofas and cushions running along all four walls; a huge central mirror reflecting the inside of the gate door and its carefully studied draperies; and a pale, flowered carpet which completely covered the floor. We were never, never supposed to step on her carpet wearing our slippers - or even worse, with wet feet, which was almost impossible to avoid doing in the summer, when the courtyard floor was cooled twice a day with water from the fountain. The young women of the family, such as my cousin Chama and her sisters, liked to clean the courtyard floor by playing la piscine (swimming pool), that is, by throwing buckets of water onto the floor and "accidently" splashing the person next to them. This, of course, encouraged the younger children - specifically, my cousin Samir and I - to run to the kitchen and come back armed with the waterhose. Then we would do a really good splashing job, and everyone would be screaming and trying to stop us. Our shouts would inevitably disturb Lalla Mani, who would angrily raise her drapes and warn us that she was going to complain to Uncle and Father that very night. "I will tell them that no one respects authority in this house anymore," she would say. Lalla Mani hated water splashing and she hated wet feet. In fact, if we ran to talk to her after we had been standing near the fountain, she would always order us to stop where we were. "Don't talk to me with wet feet," she would say. "Go dry yourself first." As far as she was concerned, anyone who violated the Clean-and-Dry-Feet Rule was stigmatized for life, and if we dared to go so far as to trespass on or dirty her flowered carpet, we were reminded of our wayward deed for many years to come. Lalla Mani appreciated being respected, that is to say, being left alone to sit elegantly dressed in her bejeweled headdress, and look silently out into the courtyard. She liked being surrounded by heavy silence. Silence was the luxurious privilege of the happy few who could afford to keep the children away.

Finally, on the right side of the courtyard was the largest and most elegant salon of all - the men's dining room, where they ate, listened to the news, settled business deals, and played cards. The men were the only ones in the house supposed to have access to a huge cabinet radio which they kept in

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the right corner of their salon, with the cabinet doors locked when the radio was not in use. (Loudspeakers were installed outside, however, to allow everyone to listen to it.) Father was sure that he and Uncle had the only two keys to the radio. However, curiously enough, the women managed to listen to Radio Cairo regularly, when the men were out. Chama and Mother often would be dancing away to its tunes, singing along with the Lebanese princess Asmahan "Ahwa" (I am in love), with no men in sight. And I remember quite clearly the first time the grownups used the word khain (traitors) to describe Samir and myself: when we told Father, who had asked us what we had done while he was away, that we had listened to Radio Cairo. Our answer indicated that there was an unlawful key going around. More specifically, it indicated that the women had stolen the key and made a copy of it. "If they made a copy of the radio key, soon they'll make one to open the gate," growled Father. A huge dispute ensued, with the women being interviewed in the men's salon one at a time. But after two days of inquiry, it turned out that the radio key must have fallen from the sky. No one knew where it had come from.

Even so, following the inquiry, the women took their revenge on us children. They said that we were traitors, and ought to be excluded from their games. That was a horrifying prospect, and so we defended ourselves by explaining that all we had done was tell the truth. Mother retorted by saying that some things were true, indeed, but you still could not say them: you had to keep them secret. And then she added that what you say and what you keep secret has nothing to do with truth and lies. We begged her to explain to us how to tell the difference, but she did not come up with a helpful answer. "You have to judge by yourselves the impact of your words," she said. "If what you say could hurt someone, then you keep quiet." Well, that advice did not help us at all. Poor Samir hated being called a traitor. He rebelled and shouted that he was free to say whatever he wanted. I, as usual, admired his audacity, but kept silent. I decided that if, on top of trying to distinguish truth from lies (which was already giving me a lot of trouble), I also had to distinguish this new category of "secret," I was headed for a lot of confusion, and I would just have to accept the fact that I often would be insulted and called a traitor.

One of my weekly pleasures was to admire Samir as he staged his mutinies against the grownups, and I felt that if I only kept following him, nothing bad could happen to me. Samir and I were born the same day, in a long Ramadan afternoon, with hardly one hour's difference.' He came first, born on the second floor, the seventh child of his mother. I was born one hour later in

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our salon downstairs, my parents' firstborn, and although Mother was exhausted, she insisted that my aunts and relatives hold the same celebration rituals for me as for Samir. She had always rejected male superiority as nonsense and totally anti-Muslim - "Allah made us all equal," she would say. The house, she later recalled, vibrated for a second time that afternoon, with the traditional you-you-you- you2 and festive chants, and the neighbors got confused and thought that two baby boys had been born. Father was thrilled: I was very plump with a round face "like a moon," and he immediately decided that I was going to be a great beauty. To tease him a little, Lalla Mani told him that I was a bit too pale, and my eyes were too slanted, and my cheekbones too high, while Samir, she said, had "a beautiful golden tan and the largest black velvet eyes you ever saw." Mother told me later that she kept quiet, but as soon as she could stand on her feet, she rushed to see if Samir really had velvet eyes, and he did. He still does, but all the velvety softness disappears when he is in his seditious moods, and I have always wondered whether his inclination to jump up and down when rebelling against the grownups was not merely due to his wiry build.

In contrast, I was so plump then that it never occurred to me to leap when someone annoyed me; I just cried and ran to hide in my mother's caftan. But Mother kept saying that I could not rely on Sainir to do all the rebelling for me: "You have to learn to scream and protest, just the way you learned to walk and talk. Crying when you are insulted is like asking for more." She was so worried that I would grow up to be an obsequious woman that she consulted Grandmother Yasmina, known to be incomparable at staging confrontations, when visiting her on summer vacations. Grandmother advised her to stop comparing me with Samir, and to push me instead to develop a protective attitude toward the younger children. "There are many ways to create a strong personality," she said. "One of them is to develop the capacity to feel responsible for others. Simply being aggressive, and jumping at your neighbor's throat whenever he or she makes a blunder is one way, and surely not the most elegant one. Pushing a child to feel responsible for the younger ones in the courtyard gives her room to build strength. Hanging on to Samir for protection could be okay, but if she figures out how

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to protect others, she can use that skill for herself."

But it was the radio incident that taught me an important lesson. It was then that Mother told me about the need to chew my words before letting them out. "Turn each word around your tongue seven times, with your lips tightly shut, before uttering a sentence," she said. "Because once your words are out, you might lose a lot." Then I remembered how, in one of the tales from A Thousand and One Nights, a single misspoken word could bring disaster to the unfortunate one who had pronounced it and displeased the caliph, or king. Sometimes, the sia_f, or executioner, would even be called in.

However, words could save the person who knew how to string them artfully together. That is what happened to Scheherazade, the author of the thousand and one tales. The king was about to chop off her head, but she was able to stop him at the last minute, just by using words. I was eager to find out how she had done it.

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2.

SCHEHERAZADE, THE KING, AND THE WORDS

ONE LATE AFTERNOON, Mother took the time to explain to me why the tales were called A Thousand and One Nights. It was no accident because, for each one of those many, many nights, Scheherazade, the young bride, had to spin an entrancing, captivating tale to make her husband, the King, forget his angry plan to execute her at dawn. I was terrorized. "Mother, do you mean that if the King does not like Scheherazade's story, he will call in his siaf (executioner)?" I kept asking for alternatives for the poor girl. I wanted other possibilities. How could the story displease the King, yet Scheherazade be allowed to live? Why could Scheherazade not just say what she wanted, without having to worry about the King? Or why could she not reverse the situation in the palace, and request that the King tell her a captivating story every night? Then he would realize how frightening it was to have to please someone who had the power to chop off your head. Mother said that I needed to hear the details first; then I could look for escapes.

Scheherazade's marriage to the King, she said, was not a normal one at all. It had taken place under very bad circumstances. King Schahriar had discovered his wife in bed with a slave, and, deeply hurt and enraged, had beheaded them both. To his great amazement, however, he discovered that the double murder was not enough to make him forget his ferocious anger. Revenge became his nightly obsession. He needed to kill more women. So he asked his vizier, the highest official in his court, who also happened to be Scheherazade's father, to bring him a virgin every night. The King would then marry her, stay with her that night, and order her executed at dawn. And so he did for three years, killing more than one thousand innocent girls, "till folk raised outcry against him and cursed him, praying Allah utterly to destroy him and his rule, and women made an uproar and mothers wept and

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parents fled with their daughters till there remained not in the city a young person for carnal copulation."' Carnal copulation, explained Mother when Cousin Samir jumped up and down and yelled for an explanation, was when bride and groom lay together in a bed and slept until morning.

Finally, one day, in all the city, there were only two virgins left: Scheherazade, the eldest daughter of the Vizier, and her little sister Duniazad. When the Vizier went home that evening, pale and preoccupied, Scheherazade asked him what was the matter. He told her his problem, and she reacted in a way her father did not expect at all. Instead of begging him to help her escape, she immediately volunteered to go and spend the night with the King. "I wish thou wouldst give me in marriage to this King Schahriar," she said. "Either I shall live or I shall be a ransom for the virgin daughters of Muslims and the cause of their deliverance from his hands and thine."

Scheherazade's father, who loved her dearly, opposed such a plan, and tried to convince her that she had to help him think of another solution. Marrying her off to Schahriar was like condemning her to certain death. But she, unlike her father, was convinced that she had exceptional power and could stop the killing. She would cure the troubled King's soul simply by talking to him about things that had happened to others. She would take him to faraway lands to observe foreign ways, so he could get closer to the strangeness within himself. She would help him see his prison, his obsessive hatred of women. Scheherazade was sure that if she could bring the King to see himself, he would want to change and to love more. Reluctantly, her father gave in, and she was married that very night to Schahriar.2

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As soon as she entered King Schahriar's bedroom, Scheherazade started telling him such a marvelous story, which she cleverly left hanging at a most suspenseful part, that he could not bear to part with her at dawn. So he let her live until the next night, so she could finish her tale. But on the second night, Scheherazade told him another wonderful story, which she was again far from finishing when dawn arrived, and the King had to let her live again. The same thing happened the next night, and the next, for a thousand nights, which is almost three years, until the King was unable to imagine living without her. By then, they already had two children, and after a thousand and one nights, he renounced his terrible habit of chopping off women's heads.

When Mother finished Scheherazade's story, I cried, "But how does one learn how to tell stories which please kings?" Mother mumbled, as if talking to herself, that that was a woman's lifetime work. This reply did not help me much, of course, but then she added that all I needed to know for the moment was that my chances of happiness would depend upon how skillful I became with words. With this knowledge, Samir and I (who had already decided to avoid upsetting the grownups with unwelcomed words, thanks to the radio incident) started training ourselves. We would sit for hours, silently practicing, chewing words, and turning them seven times around our tongues, all the while watching the grownups to see if they were noticing anything.

But the grownups never noticed anything, especially on the courtyard level, where life was very proper and strict. Only upstairs were things less rigid. There, divorced and widowed aunts, relatives, and their children, occupied a maze of small rooms. The number of relatives living with us at any one time varied according to the amount of conflict in their lives. Distant female relatives would sometimes come to seek refuge on our top floors for a few weeks when they got into fights with their husbands. Some would come to stay, with their children, for a short time only, just to show their husbands that they had another place to stay, that they could survive on their own and

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were not desperately dependent. (This strategy often was successful, and they would return home in a stronger bargaining position.) But other relatives came to stay for good, after a divorce or some other serious problem, and this was one of the traditions Father always worried about whenever someone attacked the institution of harem life. "Where will the troubled women go?" he would say.

The rooms upstairs were very simple with white tiled floors, Whitewashed walls, and sparse furniture. Very narrow sofas, upholstered with multi- flowered peasant cottons and cushions, were scattered here and there, along with easily washable raffia mats. Wet feet, slippers, and even the occasional spilled cup of tea, did not produce the same excessive reactions up here as they did downstairs. Life upstairs was so much easier, especially since everything was also accompanied by hanan, a Moroccan emotional quality that I rarely have encountered elsewhere. Hanan is hard to define exactly, but basically, it is a free-flowing, easygoing, unconditionally available tenderness. People who give hanan, like Aunt Habiba, never threaten to withdraw their love when you commit some unintentional minor or even major infraction. Hanan was hard to come by downstairs, especially among the mothers, who were too busy teaching you to respect the frontier to bother with tenderness.

Upstairs was also the place to go for storytelling. You would climb the hundreds of glazed steps that led all the way up to the third and top floor of the house, and the terrace which lay before it, all whitewashed, spacious, and inviting. That was where Aunt Habiba had her room, small and quite empty. Her husband had kept everything from their marriage, with the idea that should he ever lift his finger and ask her to come home again, she would bow her head and come rushing back. "But he can never take the most important things away from me," Aunt Habiba would say sometimes, "my laughter and all the wonderful stories I can tell when the audience is worth it." I once asked Cousin Malika what our aunt meant by "an audience who is worth it," and she confessed that she did not know either. I said maybe we should ask her directly, but Malika said no, better not, because Aunt Habiba might start crying. Aunt Habiba often cried for no reason; everyone said so. But we loved her, and could hardly sleep on Thursday nights, so excited were we at the prospect of her Friday storytelling sessions. These gatherings usually ended in great confusion, because they lasted too long, according to our mothers, who were often forced to climb up all those stairs to fetch us. And then we would scream, and the most spoiled of my cousins,

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like Samir, would roll on the floor, and shout that they did not feel sleepy, not at all.

But if you did manage to stay until the story ended, that is until the heroine triumphed over her enemies and crossed back over the "seven rivers, seven mountains, and seven seas," you were faced with yet another problem: you were scared to go back down the stairs. First of all, there was no light. The switches to the stair lights were all controlled by Ahmed, the doorkeeper, from the entrance gate. He turned them off at 9 P.M., to signal that everyone on the terrace was going in and all traffic ought to be officially stopped. The second problem was that a whole population of djinnis (demons) was out there, lurking in silence and waiting to jump out at you. And last, but not the least, was the fact that Cousin Samir was so good at imitating the djinnis that I often mistook him for the real thing. Several times, I literally had to feign passing out to get him to stop from posing as a djinni.

Sometimes, when the story lasted for hours, the mothers did not appear, and the whole house fell suddenly silent, we would beg Aunt Habiba to let us spend the night with her. She would unfold her beautiful bridal carpet, the one she kept carefully folded behind her cedar chest, and cover it with a clean white sheet and perfume it with orange-flower water, special for the occasion. She did not have enough cushions for all of us to use as pillows, but that was not a problem, as we did not care. She would share with us her huge, heavy wool blanket, turn off the electric light, and place a big candle on the threshold at our feet. "If by any chance someone needs to go urgently to the toilet," she would say, "remember that this carpet is one of the only things I have which reminds me of my previous life as a happily married lady."

So, on these graceful nights, we would fall asleep listening to our aunt's voice opening up magic glass doors, leading to moonlit meadows. And when we awoke in the morning, the whole city lay at our feet. Aunt Habiba had a small room, but a large window with a view that reached as far as the Northern mountains.

She :knew how to talk in the night. With words alone, she could put us onto a large ship sailing from Aden to the Maldives, or take us to an island where the birds spoke like human beings. Riding on her words, we traveled past Sind and Hind (India), leaving Muslim territories behind, living dangerously, and making friends with Christians and Jews, who shared their bizarre foods with us and watched us do our prayers, while we watched

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them do theirs. Sometimes we traveled so far that no gods were to be found, only sun- and fireworshippers, but even they seemed friendly and endearing when introduced by Aunt Habiba. Her tales made me long to become an adult and an expert storyteller myself. I wanted to learn how to talk in the night.

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3*

THE FRENCH HAREM

OUR HOUSE GATE was a definite hudud, or frontier, because you needed permission to step in or out. Every move had to be justified and even getting to the gate was a procedure. If you were coming from the courtyard, you had to first walk down an endless corridor, and then you came face to face with Ahmed, the doorkeeper, who was usually sitting on his throne-like sofa, always with his tea tray by his side, ready to entertain. Since the right of passage always involved a rather elaborate negotiating process, you were invited either to sit beside him on his impressive sofa, or to face him, duly relaxed on the out-of-place "fauteuil d'Franca," his hard, shabby, upholstered easy chair that he had picked out for himself on a rare visit to the joutya, or local flea market. Ahmed often had the youngest of his five children on his lap, because he took care of them whenever his wife Luza went to work. She was a first-rate cook and accepted occasional assignments outside our home when the money was good.

Our house gate was a gigantic stone arch with impressive carved wooden doors. It separated the women's harem from the male strangers walking in the streets. (Uncle's and Father's honor and prestige depended on that separation, we were told.) Children could step out of the gate, if their parents permitted it, but not grownup women. "I would wake up at dawn," Mother would say now and then. "If I only could go for a walk in the early morning when the streets are deserted. The light must be blue then, or maybe pink, like at sunset. What is the color of the morning in the deserted, silent streets?" No one answered her questions. In a harem, you don't necessarily ask questions to get answers. You ask questions just to understand what is happening to you. Roaming freely in the streets was every woman's dream. Aunt Habiba's most popular tale, which she narrated on special occasions only, was about "The Woman with Wings," who could fly away from the

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courtyard whenever she wanted to. Every time Aunt Habiba told that story, the women in the courtyard would tuck their caftans into their belts, and dance away with their arms spread wide as if they were about to fly. Cousin Chama, who was seventeen, had me confused for years, because she managed to convince me that all women had invisible wings, and that mine would develop too, when I was older.

Our house gate also protected us from the foreigners standing a few meters away, at another equally busy and dangerous frontier - the one that separated our old city, the Medina, from the new French city, the Ville Nouvelle. My cousins and I would sometimes slip out of the gate when Ahmed was busy talking or napping, to take a look at the French soldiers. They dressed in blue uniforms, wore rifles on their shoulders, and had small gray eyes that were always alert. They often tried to talk to us children, because the adults never spoke with them, but we were instructed never to answer back. We knew that the French were greedy and had come a long way to conquer our land, even though Allah had already given them a beauti ful one, with bustling cities, thick forests, luscious green fields, and cows much bigger than ours that gave four times as much milk. But somehow the French needed to get more.

Because we lived on the frontier between the old city and the new, we could see how different the French Ville Nouvelle was from our Medina. Their streets were large and straight, and lit by bright lights in the night. (Father said that they squandered Allah's energy because people did not need that much bright light in a safe community.) They also had fast cars. Our Medina streets were narrow, dark, and serpentine - filled with so many twists and turns that cars could not enter, and foreigners could not find their way out if they ever dared to come in. This was the real reason the French had to build a new city for themselves: they were afraid to live in ours.

Most people walked on foot in the Medina. Father and Uncle had their mules, but poor people like Ahmed had only donkeys, and children and women had to walk. The French were afraid to walk. They were always in their cars. Even the soldiers would stay in their cars when things got bad. Their fear was quite an amazing thing to us children, because we saw that grownups could be as afraid as we could. And these grownups who were afraid were on the outside, supposedly free. The powerful ones who had created the frontier were also the fearful ones. The Ville Nouvelle was like their harem; just like women, they could not walk freely in the Medina. So

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you could be powerful, and still be the prisoner of a frontier.

Nonetheless, the French soldiers, who often looked so very young, afraid, and lonely at their posts, terrorized the entire Medina. They had power and could hurt us.

One day in January 1944, Mother said, King Mohammed V, backed by nationalists all over Morocco, went to the topranking French colonial administrator, the Resident General, to make a formal demand for independence. The Resident General got very upset. How dare you Moroccans ask for independence! he must have screamed, and to punish us, he launched his soldiers into the Medina. Armored cars forced their way as far as they could into the serpentine streets. People turned to Mecca to pray. Thousands of men recited the anxiety prayer, consisting of one single word repeated over and over for hours when one is faced with disaster: "Ya Latif, Ya Latif, Ya Latif!" (0 Sensitive One!) Ya Lat f is one of the hundred names of Allah, and Aunt Habiba often said it was the most beautiful one of all because it describes Allah as a source of tender sympathy, who feels your sorrow and can help you. But the armed French soldiers, trapped in the narrow streets, surrounded by chants of "Ya Latif" repeated thousands of times, became nervous and lost control. They started shooting at the praying crowds and within minutes, corpses were falling on top of each other on the mosque's doorstep, while the chants were still going on inside. Mother said that Samir and I were barely four at the time and no one noticed us watching from our gate as the blood-soaked corpses, all dressed in the ceremonial white prayer djellaba, were carried back home. "For months afterward, you and Samir had nightmares," she said, "and you could not even see the color red without running to hide. We had to take you to the Moulay Driss sanctuary many Fridays in a row to have the sharifs (holy men) perform protection rituals over you, and I had to put a Koranic amulet under your pillow for a whole year before you slept normally again." After that tragic day, the French walked around carrying guns with them in plain view all the time, while Father had to ask permission from many different sources just to keep his hunting rifle, and even then, had to keep it concealed unless he was in the forest.

All these events puzzled me and I talked about them often with Yasmina, my maternal grandmother, who lived on a beautiful farm with cows and sheep and endless fields of flowers, one hundred kilometers to the west of us, between Fez and the Ocean. We visited her once a year, and I would talk to

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her about frontiers and fears and differences, and the why of it all. Yasmina knew a lot about fear, all kinds of fears. "I am an expert on fear, Fatima," she would tell me, caressing my forehead as I played with her pearls and pink beads, "And I will tell you things when you are older. I will teach you how to get over fears."

Often, I could not sleep the first few nights on Yasmina's farm - the frontiers were not clear enough. There were no closed gates to be seen anywhere, only wide, flat, open fields where flowers grew and animals wandered peaceably about. But Yasmina explained to me that the farm was part of Allah's original earth, which had no frontiers, just vast, open fields without borders or boundaries, and that I should not he afraid. But how could I walk in an open field without being attacked? I kept asking. And then Yasmina created a game that I loved, to help put me to sleep, called mshia-f-lekhla (the walk in the open fields). She would hold me tight as I lay down, and I would clasp her beads with my two hands, close my eyes, and imagine myself walking through an endless field of flowers. "Step lightly," Yasmina would say, "so you can hear the flowers' song. They are whispering, `salam, salam' (peace, peace)." I would repeat the flowers' refrain as fast as I could, all danger would disappear, and I would fall asleep. "Salam, salam," murmured the flowers, Yasmina, and I. And the next thing I knew, it was morning and I was lying in Yasmina's big brass bed, with my hands full of pearls and pink beads. From outside came the mixed music of breezes touching the leaves and birds talking to one another, and no one was in sight but King Farouk, the peacock, and Thor, the fat white duck.

Actually, Thor was also the name of Yasmina's most hated co-wife, but I could only call the woman Thor when thinking about her silently to myself. When I said her name out loud, I had to call her Lalla Thor. Lalla is our title of respect for all important women, just as Sidi is our title of respect for all important men. As a child, I had to call all important grownups Lalla and Sidi, and kiss their hands at sunset, when the lights were turned on and we said msakum (good evening). Every evening, Samir and I would kiss everyone's hands as quickly as we could so we could return to our games without hearing the nasty remark, "Tradition is being lost." We got so good at it that we managed to rush through the ritual at an incredible speed, but sometimes, we were in such a hurry that we would trip over each other and collapse onto the laps of important people, or even fall down on the carpet. Then everyone would start laughing. Mother would laugh until there were tears in her eyes. "Poor dears," she would say, "they already are tired of

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kissing hands, and it is only the beginning."

But Lalla Thor on the farm, just like Lalla Mani in Fez, never laughed. She was always very serious, proper, and correct. As the first wife of Grandfather Tazi, she had a very important position in the family. She also had no housekeeping duties, and was very rich, two privileges that Yasmina could not abide. "I could not care how rich this woman is," she would say, "she ought to be working like all the rest of us. Are we Muslims or not? If we are, everyone is equal. Allah said so. His prophet preached the same." Yasmina said that I should never accept inequality, for it was not logical. That was why she named her fat white duck Lalla Thor.

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4.

YASMINA'S FIRST CO-WIFE

WHEN LALLA THOR heard that Yasmina had named a duck after her, she was outraged. She summoned Grandfather Tazi to her salon, which was actually a self-contained palace, with an internal garden, a large fountain, and a glorious ten-meter-long wall covered with Venetian glass. Grandfather came in reluctantly, walking with long strides and holding a Koran in his hand, as if to show that he had been interrupted in his reading. He was wearing his usual loose white cotton pants, his white cotton chiffon qamis and farajiya, and his yellow leather slippers.I In the house, he never wore a djellaba, except when hosting visitors.

Physically, Grandfather had the typical look of the Northerners of the Rif region, where his family had originated. He was tall and lanky, with an angular face, fair skin, light and rather small eyes, and a very distant, haughty air. People from the Rif are proud and not very talkative, and Grandfather hated it when his wives argued or provoked conflict of any kind. Once, he stopped speaking to Yasmina for a whole year, leaving the room whenever she entered it, because she had instigated two disputes in a single month. After that, she could not afford to be involved in more than one fight every three years. This time it was the duck, and the whole farm was alerted.

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Lalla Thor offered Grandfather tea before attacking the subject. Then she threatened to leave him if the duck's name was not changed at once. It was the eve of a religious festival, and Lalla Thor was dressed to the hilt, wearing her tiara and her legendary caftan, embroidered with genuine pearls and garnets, to remind everyone of her privileged status. But Grandfather was apparently quite amused by the whole affair because he smiled when the subject of the duck came up. He had always found Yasmina to be quite eccentric, and had in fact needed a long time to get used to some of her habits, such as climbing up trees, and hanging up there for hours at a time. Sometimes, she even managed to talk a few co-wives into joining her, and then they would have tea served all around while sitting on the branches. But what always saved Yasmina was the fact that she made Grandfather laugh, and that was a real achievement, for he was a rather moody person. Now, caught in Lalla Thor's luxurious salon, Grandfather slyly suggested that she retaliate by naming her ugly dog Yasmina - "That would force the rebel to rename her duck." But Lalla Thor was in no mood for jokes. "You are completely under Yasmina's spell," she shouted. "If you let her get away with this today, tomorrow she will buy a donkey and name it Sidi Tazi. This woman does not respect hierarchies. She is a troublemaker, like everyone from the Atlas Mountains, and she is bringing chaos to this decent house. Either she gives her duck another name, or I am leaving. I don't understand the influence she has on you. It's not as if she were beautiful - she's so skinny and so tall. Like an ugly giraffe."

It was true that Yasmina did not fit the beauty standards of her day, of which Lalla Thor was a perfect model. Lalla Thor had very white skin, a round face like the full moon, and a lot of flesh all around, especially on her hips and buttocks and bust. Yasmina, on the other hand, had the brown, suntanned

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skin of mountaineers, a long face with strikingly high cheek bones, and hardly any bust. She stood almost 18o centimeters tall, which was just a little shorter than Grandfather, and had the longest legs you've ever seen, which was why she was so good at climbing trees and performing all kinds of acrobatic stunts. But her legs did look like sticks under her caftan. To camouflage them, she sewed herself an enormous pair of sarwals, or harem pants, with many pleats. She also cut long slits in the sides of her short caftan to give herself some volume. At first, Lalla Thor tried to get everyone to laugh at Yasmina's innovative dress, but very soon all the other cowives were imitating the rebel because the slit, shortened caftans gave them a lot more freedom of movement.

When Grandfather went to Yasmina to complain about the duck, she showed little sympathy. So what if Lalla Thor did leave? she said; he would never feel lonely. "You will still have eight concubines to take care of you!" So Grandfather tried to bribe Yasmina by offering her a heavy silver bracelet from Tiznit, in exchange for which she had to make a couscous with her duck. Yasmina kept the bracelet, and told him that she needed a few days to think things over. Then, the following Friday, she came back with a counterproposal. She could not possibly kill the duck, because its name was Lalla Thor! It would not be a good omen. However, she could promise never to call her duck by its name in public. She would do so only in her mind. From then on, I was instructed to do the same and I worked very hard to keep the duck's name to myself.

Then there was the story of King Farouk, the farm peacock. Who would name a peacock after the famous ruler of Egypt? What was the pharaoh doing on the farm? Well you see, Yasmina and her co-wives did not like the Egyptian King, for he kept threatening to repudiate his lovely wife, Princess Farida (whom he did eventually divorce in January 1948). Just what had brought the couple to this impasse? What unforgivable crime had she commited? She had given birth to three daughters, none of whom could accede to the throne.

According to Muslim law, a woman cannot rule a country, although that had happened a few centuries ago, Grandmother said. With the help of the Turkish army, Shajarat al-Durr had acceded to the throne of Egypt after the death of her husband, Sultan al-Salih. She was a concubine, a slave of Turkish origin, and she ruled for four months, governing neither better nor worse than the men who came before and after her.2 But of course, not all

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Muslim women are as astute or as cruel as Shajarat al-Durr. When Shajarat al-Durr's second husband decided to take a second wife, for example, she waited until he got into the hammam, or bath, to relax, and then "forgot" to open the door. Of course he died from the steam and the heat. But poor Princess Farida was not such a perfect criminal, and she did not know how to maneuver in power circles or defend her rights in the palace. She was of very modest origins, and was somewhat helpless, too, which was why the co-wives on the farm, who had similar backgrounds to hers, loved her and suffered for her humiliations. There is nothing so humiliating for a woman, Yasmina said, as being cast out. "Shlup! Right into the street like a cat. Is that a decent way to treat a woman?"

Besides, Yasmina added, as high and mighty as King Farouk was, he did not know much about how babies were made." If he did," she said, "he would know that his wife was not responsible for not having a boy. You need two to make a baby." And she was right about that, I knew. To make babies, the bride and the groom had to dress up nicely, put flowers in their hair, and lie down together on a very big bed. The next thing you knew, many mornings later, there was a little baby crawling between them.

The farm kept track of King Farouk's conjugal caprices through Radio Cairo, and Yasmina's condemnation of him was swift and decisive. "What kind of good Muslim leader," she said, "dismisses a wife just because she does not produce a son? Allah alone, says the Koran, is responsible for the sex of babies. In a justly run Muslim Cairo, King Farouk would be dismissed from the throne! Poor, lovely Princess Farida! Sacrificed through sheer ignorance and vanity. Egyptians should repudiate their king."

And that is how the farm peacock came to be called King Farouk. But if condemning kings was an easy matter for Yasmina, dealing with a powerful co-wife was another matter altogether, even after already having gotten away with naming a duck after her rival.

Lalla Thor was powerful, and she was the only aristocratic, city-born wife of Grandfather Tazi. Her last name also was Tazi, as she was one of his cousins, and she had brought with her, as a dowry, a tiara of emeralds, sapphires, and gray pearls, which was kept in the big strongbox in the right- hand corner of the men's salon. But Yasmina, who was from a modest rural

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background like all the other co-wives, was not impressed. "I can't consider someone superior just because she owns a tiara," she said. "Besides, as rich as she is, she is still stuck in a harem, just like me." I asked Yasmina what that meant, to be stuck in a harem, and she gave me several different answers, which of course only confused me.

Sometimes, she said that to be stuck in a harem simply meant that a woman had lost her freedom of movement. Other times, she said that a harem meant misfortune because a woman had to share her husband with many others. Yasmina herself had to share Grandfather with eight co-wives, which meant that she had to sleep alone for eight nights before she could hug and snuggle with him for one. "And hugging and snuggling your husband is wonderful," she said.3 "I am so happy your generation will not have to share husbands anymore."

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The nationalists, who were fighting the French, had promised to, create a new Morocco, with equality for all. Every woman was to have the same right to education as a man, as well as the right to enjoy monogamy - a privileged, exclusive relationship with her husband. In fact, many of the nationalist leaders and their followers in Fez already had only one wife, and looked down on those who had many. Father and Uncle, who espoused the nationalist views, each had only one wife.

The nationalists also were against slavery. Slavery had been prevalent in Morocco at the beginning of the century, Yasmina said, even after the French had made it illegal, and many of her co-wives had been bought in slave markets. (Yasmina also said that all human beings were equal, no matter how much money they had, where they came from, what place they held in the hierarchy, or what their religion or language was. If you had two eyes, one nose, two legs, and two hands, then you were equal to everyone else. I reminded her that if we counted a dog's forelegs as hands, he would be our equal too, and she immediately responded with, "But of course he is our equal! Animals are just like us; the only thing they lack is speech.")

Some of Yasmina's co-wives who had been slaves had come from foreign lands like the Sudan, but others had been stolen from their parents right in Morocco, during the chaos that ensued after the arrival of the French in 1912. When the Makhzen, or the State, does not express the will of the

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people, Yasmina said, women always pay a high price, because insecurity and violence set in. That's exactly what happened then. The Makhzen and its officials, unable to face the French armies, signed the treaty which gave France the right to rule Morocco as a protectorate but the people refused to give up. Resistance sprang up in the mountains and the deserts, and civil war crept in.

"You had heroes," Yasmina said, "but you also had all kinds of armed criminals running around all over. The first were fighting the French, while the second were robbing the people. In the South, at the edge of the Sahara, you had heroes such as Al-Hiba, and later his brother, who resisted until 1934• In my region, the Atlas, the proud Moha on Hamou Zayani kept the French army at bay until 1920. In the North, the prince of the fighters, Abdelkrim, gave the French - and the Spanish - a real beating, until they ganged up on him and defeated him in 1926. But also, during all this turmoil, little girls were being stolen from their poor parents in the mountains and sold in the big cities to rich men. It was standard practice. Your grandfather was a nice man, but he bought slaves. It was the natural thing to do back then. Now he has changed, and like most of the notables in the big cities, he supports the nationalists' ideals, including respect for the individual, monogamy, the abolition of slavery, and so on. Yet strangely enough, we co- wives feel closer to one another than ever, although those who were slaves among us have tried to track down and contact their original families. We feel like sisters; our real family is the one that we have woven around your Grandfather. I could even imagine changing my mind about Lalla Thor, if she ever stopped looking down on all of us because we don't have tiaras."

Naming the duck Lalla Thor was Yasmina's way of participating in the creation of the beautiful, new Morocco, the Mo rocco that I, her little granddaughter, was going to step into. "Morocco has changed quickly, little girl," she often told me, "and it will keep on doing so." That prediction made me feel very happy. I was going to grow up in a wonderful kingdom where women had rights, including the freedom to snuggle up with their own husbands every night. But even though Yasmina lamented having to wait eight nights for her husband, she added that she should not complain too much, because the wives of Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, each had had to wait nine hundred and ninety-nine nights, for he had one thousand jaryas, or slave girls. "To wait eight nights is not like waiting nine hundred and ninety-nine nights," she said. "That is almost three years! So things are getting better. Soon, we will have one man, one wife.4

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Let's go feed the birds. We'll have lots of time later to talk more about harems." And then we would rush to her garden to feed the birds.

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5.

CHAMA AND THE CALIPH

"WHAT EXACTLY Is a harem?" was not the kind of question grownups volunteered to answer. Yet they were always insisting that we children use precise words. Every word, they kept saying, has a specific meaning and you ought to use it for that specific one only, and for none other. But, given a choice, I would have used different words for Yasmina's harem and our own, so different were they. Yasmina's harem was an open farm with no visible high walls. Ours in Fez was like a fortress. Yasmina and her co- wives rode horses, swam in the river, caught fish, and cooked it over open fires. Mother could not even step out of the gate without asking multiple permissions, and even then, all she could do was visit the shrine of Moulay Driss (the patron saint of the city) or her brother who happened to live down the street, or attend a religious festival. And poor Mother always had to be accompanied by other women of the household, and by one of my young, male cousins. So it did not make sense to me to use the same word for both Yasmina's and Mother's situations.

But whenever I tried to find out more about the word "harem," bitter arguments ensued. You needed only to pronounce the word, and impolite remarks would start to fly. Samir and I discussed this matter, and concluded that if words in general were dangerous, then "harem" in particular was explosive. Anytime someone wanted to start a war in the courtyard, all she had to do was prepare some tea, invite a few people to sit down, throw out the word "harem," and wait for half an hour or so. Then poised, elegant ladies, dressed in lovely embroidered silk caftans and pearl-studded slippers, suddenly would turn into shrieking furies. Samir and I therefore decided that, as children, it was our duty to protect the adults. We would handle the word "harem" with parsimony, and gather our information through discretion and observation only.

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One grownup camp said that the harem was a good thing, while the other said that it was bad. Grandmother Lalla Mani and Chama's mother, Lalla Radia, belonged to the pro-harem camp; Mother, Chama, and Aunt Habiba, to the anti-harem one. Grandmother Lalla Mani often got the discussion started by saying that if the women were not separated from the men, society would come to a halt and work would not get done. "If women were free to run about in the streets," she said, "men would stop working because they would want to have fun." And unfortunately, she went on, fun did not help a society produce the food and goods it needed to survive. So, if famine were to be avoided, women had to stay in their place at home.

Later, Samir and I had a long consultation about the word "fun" and we decided that, when used by grownups, it had to do with sex. We wanted to be absolutely clear about that though, and so we took the matter to Cousin Malika. She said that we were definitely right. Then we asked her, standing as tall as we could, "What is sex, according to you?" Not that we did not already know the answer, we just wanted to make sure. But Malika, who thought we knew nothing, solemnly pushed back her braids, sat down on a sofa, took a cushion in her lap like grownups do when they are reflecting, and said slowly, "The first night of the marriage celebration, when everyone goes to sleep, the bride and groom stay by themselves in their bedroom. The groom makes the bride sit down on the bed, they hold hands, and he tries to make her look at him straight in the eyes. But the bride resists, she keeps her eyes down. That is very important. The bride is very shy and frightened. The groom says a poem. The bride listens with her eyes glued to the floor, and finally she smiles. Then he kisses her on the forehead. She still keeps her eyes down. He gives her a cup of tea. She starts drinking it slowly. He takes the cup away, sits near her, and kisses her."

Malika, who shamelessly manipulated our curiosity, decided to pause right there at the kiss, knowing that Samir and I were dying to know where the groom actually kissed the bride. Kissing on the forehead, cheek, and hand meant nothing unusual, but the mouth was indeed another story. However, we decided to teach Malika a lesson, and instead of showing our curiosity, Samir and I started whispering to each other, oblivious of her existence altogether. Showing total disinterest to your speaker, Aunt Habiba had recently told us, was one good way for the weak to take power: "To speak while others are listening is indeed the expression of power itself. But even the seemingly subservient, silent listener has an extremely strategic role, that of the audience. What if the powerful speaker loses his audience?"

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And sure enough, Malika immediately resumed her dissertation on what happens on the bridal night. "The groom kisses the bride on the mouth. Then they both lie together in a big bed, with no one looking." We did not ask any more questions after that. We knew all the rest. The man and the woman take off their clothes, shut their eyes, and the baby follows a few months later.

The harem makes it impossible for men and women to see each other, so everybody proceeds with their duties. While Lalla Mani was praising harem life, Aunt Habiba would be fuming; you could tell by the way she kept readjusting her headdress even though it was not slipping. Because she was divorced, however, she could not contradict Lalla Mani openly, but had to mumble her objections softly to herself, and leave it up to Mother and Chama to voice dissent. Only those who had power could openly correct others and contradict their views. A divorced woman did not have a home really, and had to buy off her presence by making herself as inconspicuous as possible. Aunt Habiba never wore bright colors, for example, even though she sometimes expressed the wish to try on her red silk farajiya again. But she never did. Most of the time, she just wore washed-out gray or beige colors, and the only make-up she used was kohl around the eyes. "The weak have to be disciplined so as to avoid humiliation," she would say. "Never let others remind you of your limits. You can be poor, but elegance is always there to be grabbed."

Mother would begin her attack on Lalla Mani's views by tucking her legs in under her on the sofa, straightening her back, and pulling a cushion onto her lap. She would then cross her arms and stare straight at Lalla Mani. "The French do not imprison their wives behind walls, my dear mother in-law," she would say. "They let them run wild in the local souk (market), and everyone has fun, and still the work gets done. In fact, so much work gets done that they can afford to equip strong armies and come down here to shoot at us."

Then, before Lalla Mani could gather herself together for a counterattack, Chama would present her theory about how the first harem got started. That is when things used to get really bad, because both Lalla Mani and Chama's mother would start screaming that now our ancestors were being insulted, our sacred traditions ridiculed.

Chama's theory was actually quite interesting, and Samir and I loved it. Once upon a time, she argued, men fought each other constantly. There was much needless bloodshed, and so one day, they decided to appoint a sultan

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who would organize things, exercise sulta, or authority, and tell the others what to do. All the rest would have to obey. "But how shall we decide who among us shall be this sultan?" the men wondered as they met to ponder this problem. They reflected very hard and then one of them had an idea. "The sultan must have something the others do not have," he said. They reflected some more, and then another man had another idea. "We should organize a race to catch women," he suggested, "and the man who catches the most women will be appointed sultan."

"That's an excellent idea," the men agreed, "but what about proof? When we all start running in the forest to catch women, we will get dispersed. We need a way to paralyze the women once they're caught, so we can count them, and decide who is the winner." And that was how the idea of building houses got started. Houses with gates and locks were needed to contain the women. Samir suggested that it might have been simpler just to tie the women to trees, since they had such long braids, but Chama said that in the old days, women were very strong from running in the woods just like men, and if you tied two or three of them to a tree, they might uproot it. Besides, it took too much time and energy to tie up strong women, and they might scratch your face or kick you in some unmentionable place. Building walls and shoving them in was much more handy. And so the men did.

The race was organized all over the world, and the Byzantines won the first round.' The Byzantines, who were the nastiest of all the Romans, lived close to the Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they never missed an occasion to humiliate their neighbors. The Emperor of the Byzantines conquered the world, caught a huge number of women, and put them in his harem to prove that he was the chief. East and West bowed to him. East and West were scared of him. But then, centuries went by and the Arabs started learning how to conquer territories and chase women. They became very good at it and dreamt of conquering the Byzantines. Finally, Caliph Harun al-Rashid had that privilege. He defeated the Roman Emperor in the Muslim year 181 (A.u. 798), and then went on to conquer other parts of the world. When he had gathered one thousand jarya, or slave girls, in his harem, he built a big palace in Baghdad and put them in it, so no one would doubt that he was the Sultan. The Arabs became sultans of the world, and they gathered more women. Caliph Al-Mutawwakil gathered four thousand. Al- Muqtadir managed to round up eleven thousand.2 Everyone was very impressed after that - the Arabs gave orders, the Romans bowed.

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But while the Arabs were busy locking women behind doors, the Romans and the other Christians got together and decided to change the rules of the power game in the Mediterranean. Collecting women, they declared, was not relevant anymore. From now on, the sultan would be the one who could build the most powerful weapons and machines, including firearms and big ships. But the Romans and other Christians decided not to tell the Arabs about the change; they would keep it a secret so as to surprise them. So the Arabs went to sleep, thinking that they knew the rules of the power game.

At this point, Chama would stop speaking and jump to her feet, in order to dramatize the story for Samir and me, all but ignoring Lalla Mani and Lalla Radia, who would be crying out in protest. Meanwhile, Aunt Habiba would be twisting her mouth., so that you would not see that she was smiling. Then Chama would raise up her white lace qamis, so as to liberate her legs and leap onto an empty sofa. She would stretch out in a sleeping position, bury her head in one of the huge cushions, push her rebellious red hair over her freckled face and declare, "The Arabs are sleeping now." Then she would close her eyes and start to snore, only to spring up a moment later, look around as if she had just come back from a very deep sleep, and fix her eyes on Samir and me as if she had never seen us before.

"The Arabs finally woke up a few weeks ago!" she would say. "Harun al- Rashid's bones have become dust, and the dust has melted with the rain. The rain ran down to the Tigris River, and off to the sea where all big things become tiny, and get lost in the fury of the waves. A French king is now ruling in our part of the world. His title is President de la Repub- lique Francaise. He has a huge palace in Paris called the Elysee and he has, oh surprise, only one wife! No harem in sight. And that single wife spends her

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time running in the streets, with a short skirt, and a low neckline. Everybody can stare at her ass and bosom, but no one doubts for a moment that the president of the French Republic is the most powerful man in the country. Men's power is no longer measured by the number of women they can imprison. But this is news in Fez Medina, because the clocks are still frozen in Harun alRashid's time!"

Then Chama would jump back to the sofa, close her eyes, and bury her face in the flowered silk cushion again. Silence.

Samir and I loved Chama's story because she was such a good actress. I would always watch her closely to learn how to put movements into words. You had to use the words, and at the same time make the gestures with your body. But not everyone was as entranced with Chama's story as were Samir and I. Her own mother, Lalla Radia, was at first appalled, and then outraged, especially at the mention of Caliph Harun alRashid. Lalla Radia was a literate woman who read history books, a skill she had learned from her father, a famous religious authority in Rabat. She did not like people making light of caliphs in general, and Harun al-Rashid in particular. "0 Allah!" she would cry, "Pardon my daughter, for she is attacking the caliphs again! And confusing the children! Two equally monstrous sins. Poor little ones, they will have such a distorted view of their ancestors, if Chama keeps this up."

Lalla Radia would then ask Samir and me to sit near her so she could tell us the correct version of history, and make us love Caliph Harun." He was the prince of all caliphs," she would say, "the one who conquered Byzance and made the Muslim flag fly high in Christian capitals." She also insisted that her daughter was all wrong about harems. Harems were wonderful things. All respectable men provided for their womenfolk, so that they did not have to go out into dangerous, unsafe streets. They gave them lovely palaces with marble floors and fountains, good food, nice clothes, and jewelry. What more did a woman need to be happy? It was only poor women like Luza, the wife of Ahmed the doorkeeper, who needed to go outside, to work and feed themselves. Privileged women were spared that trauma.

Samir and I often felt overwhelmed by all these contradictory opinions, and so we would try to organize the information a bit. Grownups were so untidy. A harem had to do with men and women - that was one fact. It also had to do with a house, walls, and the streets - that was another fact. All of this was quite simple and easy to visualize: put four walls in the midst of the streets

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and you have a house. Then put the women in the house, and let the men go out: you have a harem. But what would happen, I ventured to ask Samir, if we put the men in the house, and let the women go out? Samir said that I was complicating things, just at the moment when we were getting somewhere. So I agreed to put the women back in and the men back out, and we proceeded with our inquiry. The problem was that the walls and everything worked for our harem in Fez, but did not work at all for the harem on the farm.

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6.

TAMOU'S HORSE

THE HAREM ON the farm was housed in a gigantic T-shaped one-story building surrounded by gardens and ponds. The right side of the house belonged to the women, the left to the men, and a delicate two-meter-high bamboo fence marked the liudud (the frontier) between them. The two sides of the house were in fact two similar buildings, built back to back, with symmetrical facades and roomy arched colonnades which kept the salons and smaller rooms cool, even when it was hot outside. The colonnades were perfect for playing hide-and-go-seek, and the children on the farm were much more daring than the ones in Fez. They would climb up the columns with their bare feet, and jump down like acrobats. They were also not afraid of the frogs, tiny lizards, and little flying animals that seemed to leap out at you non-stop whenever you crossed the corridors. The floors were paved with black and white tiles, and the columns were inlaid with a rare combination of pale yellow and dark gold mosaic that Grandfather liked, and that I have never seen elsewhere. The gardens were surrounded by high delicate wrought-iron grilles with arched doors that always seemed closed, but we only had to push at them to get out into the fields. The men's garden had a few trees and a lot of neatly kept flowering shrubs, but the women's garden was another story altogether. It was overrun with strange trees and bizarre plants and animals of all kinds, because each co-wife claimed her own little plot of land which she declared to be her garden, where she raised vegetables, hens, ducks, and peacocks. You could not even take a walk in the women's garden without trespassing on someone's territory, and the animals would always follow you around, even under the arches of the paved colonnades, making a terrible racket which contrasted sharply with the monastery-like silence of the men's garden.

Besides the farm's main building, there were adjoining pavilions scattered

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about. Yasmina had the one on the right. She had insisted on it, explaining to Grandfather that she had to be as far away from Lalla Thor as possible. Lalla Thor had her own self-contained palace in the main building, with wall-towall mirrors and colorful woodwork on the ceilings, mirrors, and chandeliers. Yasmina's pavilion, on the other hand, consisted of a large, very simple room, with no luxuries. She did not care about all that, as long as she could stay away from the main building, and have enough space to experiment with trees and flowers, and raise all kinds of ducks and peacocks. Yasmina's pavilion also had a second floor, which had been built for Tamou after she fled the war in the Rif Mountains to the north. Yasmina took care of Tamou when she was sick, and the two became close friends.

Tamou came in 1926, after the defeat of Abdelkrim by the combined Spanish and French armies. She appeared early one morning over the horizon of the flat Gharb Plain, riding a Spanish saddled horse, and dressed in a man's white cape and a woman's headdress so that the soldiers would not shoot at her. All the co-wives loved to describe her arrival at the farm, and it was as good as the tales of the thousand and one nights, or even better, since Tamou was there to listen and smile and be the star. She had appeared that morning wearing heavy silver Berber bracelets with points sticking out, the kind of bracelets that you could use to defend yourself if necessary. She also had a khandjar, or dagger, dangling from her right hip and a real Spanish rifle that she kept hidden in her saddle, beneath her cape. She had a triangular-shaped face with a green tattoo on her pointed chin, piercing black eyes that looked at you without blinking, and a long, copper-colored braid that hung over her left shoulder. She stopped a few meters from the farm and asked to be received by the master of the house.

No one knew it that morning, but life on the farm was never going to be the same again. For Tamou was a Riffan and a war heroine. Morocco was full of admiration for the Rif people., the only ones who had kept on fighting the foreigners long after the rest of the country had given up, and here was this woman, clad as a warrier, crossing the cArbaoua frontier into the French Zone all by herself to look for help. And because she was a war heroine, certain rules did not apply to her. She even behaved as though she did not know about tradition.

Grandfather probably fell in love with Tamou the first minute he saw her, but he did not realize it for months, so complex were the circumstances surrounding their meeting. Tamou had come to the farm with a mission. Her

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people were stranded in a guerrilla ambush in the Spanish Zone, and she needed to bring them aid. So Grandfather gave her the help she needed, first signing a quick marriage contract to justify her presence on the farm, in case the French police came looking for her. Then Tamou asked him to help her bring food and medicine to her people. There were many injured, and with the defeat of Abdelkrim, each village had to survive on its own. Grandfather gave her the supplies and she left at night with two trucks, rolling slowly down the side of the road, with the lights out. Two peasants from the farm, posing as salesmen, rode on donkeys up ahead, scouting for trouble and signaling back to the trucks with torches.

When Tamou returned to Grandfather's farm a few days later, one of the trucks was loaded with corpses, covered with vegetables. They were the bodies of her father and husband, and her two little children, one boy and one girl. She stood silently by as the corpses were unloaded from the trucks. Then, the co-wives brought her a stool to sit on, and she just sat there watching as the men dug holes in the ground, placed the corpses inside, and covered them with the earth. She did not cry. The men planted flowers to camouflage the tombs. When they had finished, Tamou could not stand, and Grandfather called Yasmina, who rook her arm and led her to her pavilion, where she put her to bed. For many months after that, Tamou did not talk, and everyone thought she had lost the capacity to speak.