The other pioneering feminist whom Chama admired a lot, and we had to live with, was Zaynab Fawwaz, an erudite, selftaught Lebanese woman born in the 11850s, who rose from the status of an obscure village domestic to that of a famous literary figure in Beirut and Cairo intellectual circles, through a combination of strategically planned marriages and disciplined self-improvement. But since Zaynab never stepped out of her harem, transforming her truncated life into drama was awfully difficult. From her harem, all Zaynab Fawwaz could really do was inundate the Arab press with articles and poetry, in which she vented her hatred of the veil and condemned the seclusion of women. Both, she argued, were major obstacles to Muslim greatness, and both explained our mediocre performance when facing Western colonial armies. Fortunately, we on the terrace did not have to endure Zaynab's press releases, which were exceedingly repetitive, for long. She had also published a "who's who" of famous women in 1893, in which she had collected more than four hundred and fifty dazzling, eclectic biographies of role models for women, from Cleopatra to Queen Victoria of England, and these gave Chama a lot of material to choose from.2
But the most successful pioneering champion of women's rights, as far as the terrace audience was concerned, was Huda Sha`raoui, an aristocratic Egyptian beauty, born in 1879, who bewitched Egypt's rulers with ardent speeches and popular street marches. Her life provided ample opportunity for everyone on the terrace, including us children, to get up on stage and chant nationalist military hymns. You needed actors to play the Egyptian protesters, actors to play the British police, and of course actors to play the bystanders.
Forced into an early marriage at age 13, Huda fascinated Chama because she was able to transform a whole society in just a few decades by sheer stubborn will. Huda managed to do two seemingly contradictory things at the same time - fight the British occupation and end her own traditional seclusion and confinement. She tossed away her veil when she led the first official. women's street march against the British in Igig, and influenced legislators to pass numerous important laws, including one in 11924 which raised the legal marriage age for girls to i6. She also was so utterly disgusted by the newly independent Egyptian state, formed in 1922, when they passed the Constitution Of 1923 restricting the vote to males, that she created the Egyptian Feminist Union and successfully fought for a woman's right to vote.3 Huda Sharaoui's stubborn insistence on women's rights inspired many other newly independent Arab nations, already attracted to the nationalist ideals, to include a woman's right to vote in their new constitutions as well.
On the terrace, we loved the 1919 women's street march. A key moment in the buildup of Chama's plot, it allowed almost everyone to invade the stage, push past the very shaky drapes that Chama had had such difficulty putting up (they were supported. by wash poles stuck in olive jars), jump up and down, shout insults at imaginary British soldiers, and toss away their scarves, symbols of the despised veils. We children, of course, had an. especially wonderful time, entranced by the sight of all these grownups, including our own mothers, playing like kids. Often, things got so exhuberant that Chama would be forced to climb up onto the ladder used to set up the scenery, and shout that the actors would have to leave the stage, because the British had left Egypt in 1922 and it was now 1947• Huda was about to die and solemn silence was a must, because she had died peacefully in her bedroom. When, as was often the case, we did not budge from the stage, Chama's shouts turned to threats. "If the actors do not come to their senses and respect the play's timing," she would proclaim from the top of the ladder, "the theater management is going to declare its doors shut for the entire summer, because of hooliganism, perpetrated by uncontrolled elements."
Switching from the festive igig street march to Huda's deathbed scene was quite tricky. Not only did we have to leave the stage to become the audience once again, but we also had to show, through heavy silence, that we were in mourning. Not all of us could do it. Aunt Habiba was officially thrown off the terrace once because she could not resist laughing when Chama, rushing out from behind the drapes, covered in a hastily-put-on black sheet, tripped and lost her balance. Everyone else wanted to laugh, too, but luckily, Chama was so involved in regaining her equilibrium that she did not see our faces. Only Aunt Habiba made the mistake of laughing loud, and then Chama demanded that the audience help throw her out. We went along with Chama's request, because otherwise she would have declared a theater strike, and that would not have been in anyone's interest.
Deep down, though, the problem with feminists' lives was that they did not have enough singing and dancing in them. Chama might have liked staging them, but the audience much preferred watching Asmahan or one of the adventurous heroines from A Thousand and One Nights, For one thing, those stories had more love, lust, and adventure in them. The feminists' lives seemed to be all about fighting and unhappy marriages, never about happy moments, beautiful nights, or whatever it was that gave them the strength to carry on. "All these hyperactive ladies who pioneered new ideas fascinated Arab men," said Aunt Habiba. "Men were constantly falling in love with them, but we never hear a word about those enchanting embraces, either because feminists thought they were politically irrelevant, or because they censored themselves for fear of being attacked as immoral." Sometimes, too, Aunt Habiba privately wondered if it were not Chama who did the censoring, afraid to dramatize the romantic parts for fear that the audience might drift off and forget about the struggle. Whatever the reason was, I decided then and there that if I ever led a battle for women's liberation, I definitely would not forget about sensuality. As Aunt Habiba said, "Why rebel and change the world if you can't get what's missing in your life? And what is most definitely missing in our lives is love and lust. Why organize a revolution if the new world is going to be an emotional desert?"
Scheherazade's women of A Thousand and One Nights did not write about liberation - they went ahead and lived it, dangerously and sensuously, and they always succeeded in getting themselves out of trouble. They did not try to convince society to free them - they went ahead and freed themselves. Take the story of Princess Budur, for example. Here she was, a very spoiled and extremely over-protected princess, the daughter of mighty King Ghayur, and the wife of the equally powerful Prince Qamar al-Zaman. She set off on a journey with her husband, and of course he took care of everything; she was just following behind, as women do when traveling with their husbands and male relatives. They traveled a long way into foreign lands, and then, one day, Princess Budur woke up to find that she was all alone in her tent, in the middle of nowhere. The Prince Qamar had vanished. Afraid that the other men in the caravan might try to rape her, steal her jewelry, or even sell her into slavery, Princess Budur decided to dress in her husband's clothes and convince the others that she was a man. She was no longer Princess Budur, but Prince Qamar al-Zaman. And her ruse worked! Not only did she escape rape and dishonor, but she also was given a kingdom to rule.
The terrace cheered Princess Budur, because she dared to imagine the impossible, the unrealistic. As a woman, she was powerless and desperately weak, surrounded by tough highway robbers. In fact, her situation was really hopeless - she was stuck in the middle of nowhere, far away from home, in the midst of a whole caravan of untrustworthy slaves and eunuchs, not to mention dubious merchants. But when your situation is hopeless, all you can do is turn the world upside down, transform it according to your wishes, and create it anew. And that is precisely what Princess Budur did.
15.
PRINCESS BUDUR'S FATE
IF YOU LOOKED for Princess Budur in A Thousand and One Nights, you would have a hard time finding her. First of all, her name does not appear in the table of contents. The story goes by her husband's name, "The Tale of Qamar al-Zaman." Second, her story is told on the nine hundred and sixty-second night, so you would have to read almost to the end of the book to find it. Aunt Habiba said that that could have been because Scheherazade, the author of the tales, was afraid of having her head chopped off if she had told
the story of Princess Budur earlier.' The bottom line of her story, after all, was that a woman can fool society by posing as a man. All she has to do is to wear her husband's clothes; the difference between the sexes is silly, only a matter of dress. That indeed, was quite an insolent lesson for Scheherazade to narrate to angry King Schahriar, especially at the beginning. She had to soften him up first, by entertaining him with less threatening tales.
One very likeable quality of Princess Budur was that she was not strong. Like the majority of the women on the terrace, she was not a person who was accustomed to solving her own problems. Totally dependent on men, and completely ignorant of the world outside, she had never developed any self-assurance nor had any practice in analyzing problematic situations and coming up with solutions. Yet, in spite of her apparent helplessness, she made the right - and very daring - decisions. "There is nothing wrong with being helpless, ladies!" Aunt Habiba would say, when it was her turn to take over the stage. "Princess Budur's life is the proof. Not having had the opportunity to test your talents does not mean that you have none."
Aunt Habiba took over the stage whenever the audience got bored with Chama's feminists and demanded more cheerful dramas that included singing and dancing. As a stage director, Aunt Habiba was not as compulsive as Chama, who invested an incredible amount of energy into the stage set and the costumes. Aunt Habiba, by contrast, reduced everything to the minimal. "Life is already complicated enough as it is," she would say. "So, for God's sake, don't make things difficult when you want to relax." During the dramas, Aunt Habiba would sit on a comfortable chair covered with a lavishly embroidered drape, to make it look like a throne. She also wore, for the occasion, her elegant gold embroidered caftan, which she usually kept carefully folded in the cedar chest that she had salvaged from her divorce. Made of black velvet and studded with pearls that her father had brought back from his pilgrimage to Mecca, the caftan had taken Aunt Hababa three years to embroider. "Today, people buy ready-made clothes and go around wearing things they did not create," she would say. "But when you put many nights into embroidering a scarf or a caftan, it becomes a wonderful work of art."2 Surely, Aunt Habiba's caftan was unusually impressive, and since she only put it on for special occasions, you always felt as if you were somewhere else the moment she appeared wearing it on stage.
Princess Budur's drama started out well enough, with her father, King Ghayur, providing her and her loving husband, Prince Qamar al-Zaman, with everything they needed for their trip. The King
brought out of his stables horses marked with his own brand, blood dromedaries which can journey ten days without water, and prepared a litter for his daughter, besides loading mules and camels with victual; moreover, he gave them slaves and eunuchs to serve them and all manner of traveling gear, and on the day of departure, when King Ghayur took leave of Qamar al-Zaman, he bestowed on him ten splendid suits of cloth of gold embroidered with stones of price, together with ten riding horses and ten she-camels, and a treasury of money, and he charged him to love and cherish his daughter the lady Budur. [Then, the Prince and Princess set out] without stopping through the first day and the second and the third and the fourth; nor did they cease faring for a whole month till they came to a spacious Champaign, abounding in pasturage, where they pitched their tents; and they ate and drank and rested, and the Princess Budur lay down to sleep.3
And when she woke up the next morning, she was all by herself in the tent. Her husband had mysteriously disappeared.
At this point, we children, sitting behind Princess Budur's tent, would make all sorts of noises to indicate that the caravan was waking up. Samir was superb at imitating the horse noises and jumping about, and would only stop reluctantly when Chama, as Princess Budur, started reflecting out loud about the solitude and the powerlessness of a woman who suddenly finds herself without a husband.
"If I go out and tell the valets and let them learn that my husband is lost, they will lust after me: there is no help for it but that I use stratagem." So she rose and donned some of her husband's clothes and riding-boots, and a turban like his, drawing one corner of it across her face for a mouth veil. Then, setting a slave-girl in her litter, she went forth from the tent" [and along with her entourage, journeyed for days and nights] till they came in sight of a city overlooking the Salt Sea, where they pitched their tents without the walls and halted to rest. The Princess asked the name of the town and was told, "It is called the City of Ebony, its King is named Armanus, and he hath a daughter Hayat al-Nufus."4
Arriving at the City of Ebony did not bring an end to Princess Budur's troubles. In fact, her situation got worse because King Armanus was so pleased with the counterfeit Qamar alZaman that he wanted to marry her off to his own daughter, Hayat al-Nufus. What a horrifying prospect for Princess Budur! Hayat al-Nufus would discover her ruse immediately, and she might even be beheaded. People got beheaded in the City of Ebony for less than that every day.
In the next scene, Princess Budur paced back and forth in her tent, wondering what to do. If she accepted the King's proposition, she might be sentenced to death for lying. But if she refused the King's proposition, she might also be sentenced to death. You could not refuse a king's offer if you wanted to live a long and healthy life, especially when to refuse a King's offer meant snubbing his daughter.
While Chama paced back and forth, dramatizing Princess Budur's dilemma, the audience split into two camps. The first camp suggested that she tell the King the truth, because if she let hint know that she was a woman, he might fall in love with her and pardon her. The second camp suggested that it would be safer for her to accept the offer of marriage and then tell Princess Hayat everything, once in the bridal suite, because that would trigger women's solidarity. Women's solidarity was actually a highly sensitive issue in the courtyard, since the women rarely sided all together against men. Some of the women, like Grandmother Lalla Mani and Lalla Radia, who were in favor of harems, always went along with the men's decisions, while women like Mother did not. In fact, Mother accused women who allied themselves with men as being largely responsible for women's suffering. "These women are more dangerous than men," she would explain, "because physically, they look just like us. But they are really wolves posing as sheep. If women's solidarity existed, we would not he stuck on this terrace. We would be traveling around Morocco or even sailing to the City of Ebony if we want to." Aunt Habiba, who always sat in the front row, even when she did not herself direct or have a role to play, was charged by Chama to keep a tight surveillance over the audience's moods, and whenever the issue of women's solidarity came up, she censored it before it escalated into a serious, bitter argument.
At any rate, Princess Budur did choose women's solidarity, and it proved to be a very good choice, and one that demonstrated that women were capable of grand and noble sentiments towards one another. Princess Budur accepted King Armanus' proposal to marry his daughter, and this was an act which immediately gave her the right to become the ruler of the City of Ebony - not a bad start at all. We on the terrace celebrated the wedding, with Samir and I handing out cookies. Once, Chama tried to argue that since a marriage between two women is not legal, cookies need not be distributed. But the audience reacted at once. "The cookie rule must be respected. You never mentioned that the marriage had to be legal."
After the wedding, the newlyweds retired to Princess Hayat's bedroom. But that first night, Princess Budur kissed her bride a very quick good night and then started praying for hours on end until poor Hayat fell asleep. During this scene, we would be all laughing at Chama's portrayal of the very religious groom. "Stop praying, and get on with the job," Mother would shout. Then Samir and I would rush forward to let down the drapes and thereby show that one night had passed. Then we would raise the drapes again and the poor husband would still be praying while Hayat al-Nufus sat waiting to be kissed. We would do this again and again, with the husband always praying, the wife always waiting, and the whole audience roaring with laughter.
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Finally, after many nights of prayer, Princess Hayat got fed up and went to complain to her powerful father, King Armanus. Prince Qamar, she said, was not interested in giving her a child, for he spent all his nights praying nonstop. As one might expect, this did not please the King and he threatened to banish the bridegroom from the City of Ebony immediately, if he did not start behaving as a man should. So that very night, Princess Budur confessed to Princess Hayat, telling her the whole story from beginning to end, and asked for her help. "I conjure thee by Allah to keep my counsel, for I have con cealed my case only that Allah may reunite me with my beloved Qamar al-Zaman."5
And of course the miracle happened. Princess Hayat sympathized with Princess Budur and promised to help her. The two women then staged a false virginity ceremony, as tradition dictated.
Hayat al-Nufus arose and took a pigeon-poult, and cut its throat over her smock and besmeared herself with its blood. Then she pulled off her petticoat-trousers and cried aloud, whereupon her people hastened to her and raised the usual lullilooing and outcries of joy and gladness.6
After that, the two women posed as husband and wife, with Princess Budur ruling the Kingdom with one hand, and organizing search parties to find her beloved Qamar al-Zaman with the other.
The women on the terrace cheered at Princess Hayat's decision to help the distressed Budur, who had dared to do the impossible, and after the play was over, talked heatedly, long into the night, about fate and happiness, and how to escape the first and pursue the second. Women's solidarity, many agreed, was the key to both.
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood Page 11
