Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

When the men leave the harem, the women gather to listen to singers on the radio, such as the Egyptian Oum Kalthoum, and Lebanon’s Princess Asmahan with her “ravishing voice” (104). Oum Kalthoum is someone the harem’s women should admire—a girl from a poor background who worked hard for her fame, and who sings “right and noble” songs of Arab culture—yet the women don’t “love her the way they loved Asmahan” (104). Unlike the curvy, traditionally dressed Oum Kalthoum, Asmahan is a willowy woman who wears Western clothes and sings not of nationalist causes, but only of her own “tragic quest for happiness” (105). Asmahan even embraces men in “Western-style dance” (105), something the harem’s women wish they could do as well.

Chama often dramatizes Princess Asmahan’s life in the plays she performs for the harem, so Fatima is familiar with Asmahan’s story and its “tragic end” (105)—for as Fatima says, an Arab woman cannot strive for sensual pleasures and for her own happiness without paying a price. Asmahan married her cousin, Prince Hassan, at a young age, but Hassan divorced her because she wanted to become a singer and actress. Asmahan was married and divorced twice more before living an extravagant, independent life as an entertainer in Cairo, until she died at age 32 in “a mysterious car accident involving international spies” (106). After her death, Asmahan became an even greater “legend” than she was in life, with her story suggesting that a “short and scandalous” (107), but happy and fulfilling, existence is better than a longer life spent bowing to tradition.

Fatima describes the elaborate plays Chama stages, in which she painstakingly recreates Asmahan’s appearance down to her beauty mark and uses a wooden horse to reenact Asmahan’s passion for horseback riding. Fatima is so entranced by the performance that she decides to become an actress herself. She fantasizes about “dazzl[ing] Arab crowds,” showing them “how it felt to be a woman intoxicated with dreams” (110) in a country that denies women their freedom. Theater, Fatima decides as the chapter ends, is such a powerful form of communication that it should be considered “a sacred institution” (111).

The author begins Chapter 13 by emphasizing how popular Aunt Habiba and Chama’s performances are among the harem residents. These “high priestesses of imagination” take young Fatima on trips “all over the world” (113) with their vivid storytelling. As Aunt Habiba often tells Fatima, the power of words and stories can “make frontiers vanish” (114), and just as Fatima dreams of becoming an actress like Chama, she vows to become a storyteller like her aunt as well.

In contrast to the harem’s women, the young men are less interested in these nightly performances, as the men can attend the nearby Boujeloud Cinema as often as they like. Chama wants to attend the movies so badly that she often follows the men out, forcing the doorkeeper to chase her down and bring her back inside. However, when a movie is particularly popular—like all of Asmahan’s movies—the women of the harem are permitted to go see it. The children, who “stage” their “own revolts” (117)—with Samir in the lead—are sometimes allowed to go as well.

To attend the movies, the women spend hours dressing up and doing their hair and makeup, but then they must cover themselves completely with the veil and a long cloak, or haik. Fatima’s mother wants to follow the nationalist women’s example by wearing a djellaba, or men’s coat, instead of the haik. The djellaba allows more freedom of movement, but Father says that if women begin to dress like men, it will be “fana (the end of the world)” (119). However, as increasingly more women throughout Morocco choose to wear the djellaba and a sheer veil, Mother defies her husband and does so as well.

Fatima goes on to describe the grand “procession” (120) of the harem’s residents to the movies, with the “rebels” like Mother and Chama wearing vibrant makeup behind their “tiny, transparent” veils (121). The chapter ends as the group arrives at the theater, where they take up two rows and buy up tickets for the rows in front of and behind them as well. They want these rows empty so no strangers will get too close to the harem’s women—and thus the chapter ends with another invisible hudud, or frontier, separating women from the outside world.

The author begins by recounting how Zin would often take a starring role in Chama’s plays, with his “grace and eloquence” (125). In fact, the plays offered “opportunities” (126) for many of the harems’ residents to both display their talents and become more self-confident. Fatima herself performs the “acrobatic leaps” (126) she’s learned from Grandmother Yasmina, which are particularly useful when she needs to distract the audience during scene changes and problems backstage.

Aunt Habiba tells Fatima that just as she plays the “role” (126) of acrobat in the plays, she needs to “develop a talent,” a “bigger role to play in real life” (127). Fatima is determined to find her own talent and share it with others, but she does not yet know what her great ability might be. While she waits to find out, she’ll “learn all [she] could from the heroines of literature and history” (127) as depicted in Chama’s plays—including real-life Egyptian and Lebanese feminists.

Because there are no well-known feminists in Morocco, Moroccan women like Chama have to “export their feminists from the East” (118). These women include Aisha Taymour, who wrote “fiery poetry against the veil” in many languages, foreign tongues which Fatima thinks of as “wings that allow you to fly to another culture” (129). Huda Sha‘raoui, on the other hand, gave speeches and organized marches that the harem theater recreates. Sha‘raoui threw off her veil in a 1919 women’s march, a moment Chama loves to act out, and she secured Egyptian’s women’s right to vote—accomplishments that inspire young Fatima.

As inspiring as the feminists are, their experiences don’t make as good theater as the fictional heroines of A Thousand and One Nights, who lead lives of “love, lust, and adventure” (132). Fatima says that instead of writing about women’s rights, “try[ing[ to convince society to free them” as the feminists did, these fictional women “went ahead and freed themselves” (133). These heroines did what seemed “impossible” (133) in real life, like one fictional woman, Princess Budur, who dressed as a man to avoid rape and ended up as a powerful ruler. While Fatima may be moved by the real-life feminists, she’s even more entranced by these stories of women “transform[ing]” the world “according to [their] wishes” (134).

In this chapter, the author explores Princess Budur’s story from the Thousand and One Nights. This tale is located near the end of the Nights perhaps because, as Aunt Habiba says, it is quite subversive: it suggests that “a woman can fool society by posing as a man” and the gulf between the two sexes is “only a matter of dress” (137). Aunt Habiba rather than Chama retells Budur’s story, and Habiba points out that Budur is so inspiring precisely because she is “dependent on men” (138) when the story begins and has to develop her own strength as troubles befall her.

The author retells Budur’s entire story, including several quotations from Burton’s translation of the Thousand and One Nights. As the tale begins, Princess Budur and her husband, Prince Qamar al-Zaman, set out on a trip. After a long journey they stop and pitch a tent to sleep, and Budur awakens to find her husband has “mysteriously” (140) vanished. She knows if she tells the valets what happened, they will “lust after” (140) her, so she dresses in her husband’s clothes, using part of his turban to cover her face, and pretends to be Qamar al-Zaman as she continues her journey.

Budur reaches the City of Ebony, where the king wants to marry the “counterfeit Qamar al-Zaman” (140) to his daughter, Princess Hayat. Budur fears she’ll be beheaded for refusing the proposal, yet if she accepts and is revealed to be a woman, she will be executed for that as well. At this point, the harem listeners always “split into two camps” (141): more traditional women like Lalla Mani, along with the harem’s men, believe Budur should reveal herself to the king and hope he’ll fall in love with her. Meanwhile, the more progressive women think Budur should marry the princess and confide in her, relying on “women’s solidarity” (141) to keep her secret. Mother says the women like Lalla Mani, who “all[y] themselves with men” (141), are a significant cause of women’s lack of freedom. While Chama keeps these disagreements from developing into full-blown arguments, Fatima understands how important the idea of “women’s solidarity” (141) is to her mother.

In the story, Budur does choose to marry the princess, and she becomes the ruler of City of Ebony. At first, Budur prays every night until Hayat falls asleep, but when Hayat tells her father her new “husband” won’t give her a child, the king threatens to throw Budur out. So Budur confides her entire story to Hayat and asks for her aid—and Hayat agrees to help. The women pretend to be husband and wife in public, and the story ends happily—while suggesting that “women’s solidarity” is the “key” (143) to both escaping troubles and achieving a happy life.

The author states that she’s always believed, both as a child and adult, that “happiness […] is inconceivable without a terrace” (145)—by which she means the flat, furnished terraces of Fez which are filled with plants and offer stunning views of the city. However, when Fatima first defies her parents’ orders and sneaks onto the harem’s tallest terrace as a child, she’s terrified to be so high that the buildings “crouch […] below [her] like tiny toys in a dwarf’s city” (146).

The author goes on to explain that this highest terrace is “forbidden” (147), not only to children but to all the harem’s residents because it has no walls, and one could easily fall to his or her death. However, whenever the harem’s women have “hem, a kind of mild depression,” they retreat to this terrace with its “quiet and beauty” (147) to heal. This hem is different from a mushkil, or a specific problem that can be resolved—hem is a pain with “no name” (147) and no clear solution. In the harem, Chama is the only one who is sometimes “stricken” (147) with hem, particularly after she listens to the radio reporting on women’s rights in Egypt and Turkey. Chama bemoans the fact that women are “liberat[ed]” (147) in these countries while Moroccan women are left behind, “like neglected butterflies” (148).

In addition to Chama, Aunt Habiba sometimes goes to the terrace and shows the children how to get to it without a ladder, by performing a complex “operation” (148) involving laundry poles set in empty olive jars and steps made of wooden boxes. Fatima and her cousins Samir and Malika use this method for their own trips to the terrace, where they plan to “analyze that elusive word” (146)—harem. Once there, they ask a series of questions which only perplex them more. First, they wonder if a harem is where “a man lives with many wives” (150), and the answer is only sometimes. Next, they question if all married men have harems, and conclude that they don’t. Fatima speculates that only rich men have harems, and Malika posits that a man must have “a big thing under his djellaba to create a harem” (151). At this point, Samir refuses to continue the discussion.

On their second trip to the terrace, the children wonder if a harem can have “more than one master” (151) and decide some can, but others not. They realize that “the more masters one had, the more freedom and the more fun” (152): While Malika’s harem is run only by her father, Uncle Karim, and his word is law, Fatima’s harem has two masters, Uncle ‘Ali and her father, and thus two chances for the children to gain permission to do what they want. Yasmina’s harem, with Grandfather and his two sons for masters, has even more opportunities for freedom.

The three cousins are now “more confused than ever” (153), so they consult Aunt Habiba. Their aunt is embroidering a large bird with its wings outstretched, an unusual and untraditional subject for embroidery. Aunt Habiba says that as they grow up, the children will have to learn to accept “tanaqod, or contradiction” (154), both as it relates to the definition of harems and elsewhere in life. She tells them harems change “from one part of the world to another, and from one century to the next” (154), she and encourages them to continue their inquiries.

The next time the cousins visit the terrace, Malika wonders if slaves are a necessary part of a harem. When Samir says there are no slaves in their harem, Malika reminds him of Mina, who was enslaved in Sudan and sold several times before coming to share their home. Now, Fatima says as the chapter ends, Mina no longer does housework and spends her time on the lower terrace, praying and “facing Mecca” (155).