Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  16.

  THE FORBIDDEN TERRACE

  HAPPINESS, HOWEVER, I thought then and still do now, is inconceivable without a terrace, and by a terrace I mean something very different from the European rooftops that Cousin Zin described after visiting Blad Teldj, or Snowland. He said that the houses up there did not have the neatly whitewashed, and sometimes sumptuously paved, flat terraces like our own, with sofas and plants and flowering shrubs. In contrast, their roofs were triangular and pointed because they had to shelter the houses from the snow, and you couldn't possibly stretch out on them because you would slide right off. Still, not all the terraces of Fez were meant to be accessible; the highest ones normally were declared off-limits, because you could die if you fell off of them. Nonetheless, I dreamed constantly of visiting our forbidden terrace, which was the highest one on our street, and one where no child had ever been seen, as far as I could remember.

  But the first time I finally climbed up onto that forbidden terrace, I forgot all about my dreams of visiting the place. Instead, I decided right on the spot to reconsider the idea that grownups were always unreasonable and dead set against letting children be happy. I was even so scared, standing up there, that I lost the capacity to breathe and started trembling. I wished that I had obeyed the grownups after all, and had never left the banal lower terrace, surrounded by its twometer-high walls. The minarets and even the huge Qaraouiyine Mosque crouched below me like tiny toys in a dwarf's city. Meanwhile, the clouds passing by overhead seemed menacingly close, with bright pink, almost red flames on their tops, which I had never seen from below. I heard a bizarre noise so frightening that, at first, I thought it was a monstrous, invisible bird. But when I asked Cousin Malika about it, she said that I was just scared; the noise was my own blood rushing through my veins, and she had felt the same way, the first time she had found herself on the forbidden terrace. But she also said that if I cried or said I was afraid, she would go so far as to help me down, but would never bring me up here with her again, and I would spend the rest of my life confused about the word "harem." That, you see, was the subject that she and Samir were planning to discuss on the terrace. They had given themselves the mission to analyze that elusive word, and as a reward, had treated themselves to a visit to the fabulous forbidden terrace. Total discretion was essential; they did not want anyone to know about the visit.

  So I whispered that I was not afraid. All I needed was some advice about how to stop the noise in my head. She said that I should lie down, with my face up to the sky, avoid looking at moving objects, such as clouds or birds, and fix my eyes on a stable point. Then, if I concentrated on that point for a while, the world would return to normal. Before I lay down, I instructed her to let Mother know that, in case it was Allah's will that I die on the terrace, I owed huge sums of money to Sidi Sussi, the king of roasted chick-peas and charcoal-grilled peanuts and almonds, who had a stall outside our Ko ranic school. You would be sent directly to hell, my teacher Lalla Tam had told me, if you arrived in the other world with debts. A good Muslim always paid her debts and kept clean accounts, alive or dead.

  The terrace above the one on which we staged our plays was forbidden because it had no walls, and you could fall and die with one false move. Five meters higher than the terrace below it, it was in fact, the very ceiling of Aunt Habiba's room. There were no stairs leading to it because it was not meant to be visited; the only official means of access was a ladder, kept by Ahmed the doorkeeper. But everyone in the house knew that troubled women who had hem, a kind of mild depression, climbed up there to find the quiet and beauty that they needed to cure themselves.

  Hem was a strange suffering, quite different from a mushkil, or a problem. The woman who had a mushkil knew the reason for her pain. If she suffered from hem, however, she did not know what was wrong with her. Whatever was making her suffer had no name. Aunt Habiba said that you were lucky if you knew what hurt, because then you could do something about it. The woman who had hem could do nothing, except sit there silently, with her eyes wide open and her chin tucked into the palm of her hand, as if her neck could no longer hold up her head.

  Because only quiet and beauty could cure women affected by hem, they were often taken to sanctuaries on the tops of high mountains, such as Moulay Abdesslam in the Rif, Moulay Bouazza in the Atlas, or one of the many retreats lying near the ocean between Tangier and Agadir. In our harem, we were lucky, because only Cousin Chama was sometimes affected by hem, and even she was not completely under its spell. Usually, she was stricken only when she listened to a special program on Radio Cairo about Huda Sha`raoui and the progress of women's rights in Egypt and Turkey. Then, hem would seize her. "My generation is being sacrificed!" she would cry. "Revolution is liberating women in Turkey and Egypt, and we are left out here, up in the air. Neither part of the tradition, nor fully benefiting from modernity. Up hanging in the middle, like neglected butterflies." Whenever Chama cried out like this, we would surround her with hanan, that unlimited, unrestricted tenderness, until she recovered. Silent, natural beauty and tenderness are the only medicines for that kind of disease.

  The other woman in the house who sometimes secretly climbed up onto the forbidden terrace was Aunt Habiba. She had begun using the terrace when she first came to live with us, after her divorce. And it was from her that we learned how to get up there without using a ladder. We, the children, knew Aunt Habiba's secret because she needed us to watch the courtyard and the stairs when she was climbing up onto the forbidden terrace. She would take two of the gigantic laundry poles that were kept on the lower terrace (these were used for drying heavy wash like wool blankets and carpets, which were cleaned only in August, when the sun was the hottest) and use them like a ladder. It was not an easy operation. First, Aunt Habiba would stabilize the poles by putting them in empty olive jars, with cushions at the bottom to muffle the noise. Then, she would cross the two poles at the top, so as to create a step onto which she could place her foot. Beneath this step, she would create other steps with the wooden boxes lying around on the terrace. The wooden boxes would get her three or even four meters above the ground, and then the final step, created by the poles, would allow her to push herself up onto the forbidden terrace. We would never have guessed how to do this without seeing Aunt Habiba in action.

  The olive jars were as essential to the operation as were the poles. Black olives were brought to the house from the countryside in October, and at first, they were stored in huge bamboo containers with heaps of sea salt and stones on top, in order to press out the bitter juice. (Fresh olives are far too bitter to eat.) After their juices had been squeezed out, the olives would be removed from their bamboo containers, placed in big earthen jars, and left out on the terrace to be cured by the sun. From time to time, Aunt Habiba would expose the olives to the open air by spreading them flat on a sheet in a remote corner of the terrace, and once they were all wrinkled and cured, she would add heaps of fresh oregano and other herbs to them, and place them back safely in their jars. By the end of February, the olives could be eaten, and the team of women in charge of preparing breakfast that day would come up to get a good bucketful of them. Eating black olives with strong mint tea, khli`,1 and fresh bread was a most common and delicious breakfast.

  I loved breakfast, not only because of the salty olives, but also because of ch-hiwat, which were delicacies provided by the eccentrics among the courtyard population who wanted to eat other things besides the ones officially available at the communal tables. Since you could not eat in front of others without sharing, the ch-hiwat turned breakfasts into feasts. The eccentrics had to provide us all with their own favorite foods, and in large enough quantities to satisfy the entire household. Some provided turkey and duck eggs, others had cravings for eucalyptus-scented honey from the forests of the Kenitra region. Some loved doughnuts, and brought dozens to be democratically shared. The most appreciated of eccentrics, however, were those who brought strange fruits out of season, or salted cheese from
the Rif, served in palm leaves.

  But to get hack to the olives. Although we children did love eating them, even more delightful was the knowledge that the jars were gradually being emptied of their contents. We used the jars for all kinds of projects. Climbing up onto the forbidden terrace was just one of them. Playing hide-and-go-seek was another.

  Samir and Malika's purpose, when they climbed up onto the highest terrace, was to push their investigation of harems further. On our first visit, though, we did not get very far. Once we recovered our normal breathing patterns, the beauty and quiet got ahold of us. We sat very still, watching and not wanting to move, because we were sitting so close together that the slightest motion annoyed the others. Even when I adjusted my braids, pinning them back up on top of my head, the other two complained. Then Malika asked a question, a rather simple question: "Is a harem a house in which a man lives with many wives?" Each one of us came up with a different answer. Malika said the answer was yes, since that was the case with her own family. Her father, Uncle Karim, had two wives - her mother Biba and the co-wife Knata. Samir said the answer was no, because you could have a harem without co-wives, like that of his own father, Uncle `Ali, or my father. (A fierce hatred of co-wives was just about the only thing that my mother and Lalla Radia, Samir's mother, had in common.)

  My answer to Malika's question was more complicated. I said that it depended. If I thought about Grandmother Yasmina, the answer was yes. If I thought about Mother, the answer was no. But complicated answers make others resentful, because they make the confusion worse, and so both Samir and Malika ignored my contribution and kept arguing between themselves, while I drifted off and watched the clouds overhead, which seemed to be coming closer and closer. Finally, Samir and Malika decided that they had started with too complicated a question. We had to go back to the beginning, and ask the silliest question of all, "Do all married men have harems?" From there, we could work our way up.

  The three of us agreed that Ahmed the doorkeeper was married. He lived right by the gate in two tiny bedrooms with his wife Luza and their five children. But his house was not a harem. So it was not marriage that did it. Did that mean then, I said, that you could not have a harem if you were not a rich man? I felt very clever asking that question and it turned out to be a hell of a good one, because it kept both Malika and Samir silent for a while. Then Malika, who regularly abused her advantage of age, asked a lewd, indecent question that we did not expect: "Maybe a man needs a big thing under his djellaba to create a harem, and Ahmed has only a small one?" Samir put an end to that line of inquiry immediately. He said that each one of us had an angel sitting on our right and left shoulders, who put down every word we said into a big book. On Judgment Day, that book was scrutinized, our deeds evaluated, and in the end, only the lucky ones who had nothing to be ashamed of were admitted to paradise. The others were thrown into hell. "I don't want to be embarrassed," concluded Samin When we asked him where he had gotten this information, he said that it was from our teacher, Lalla Tam. At that, we decided that from now on, we would restrict our questioning to the halal, or the permissible, and I tried to put the possible mysterious link between the size of a man's sex and his right to a harem out of my mind.

  The second time we climbed up onto the forbidden terrace, we were a lot more relaxed, both because its height seemed less frightening, and because we knew that we were going to stick with the halal. Our question this time was, "Can you have more than one master in a harem?" It was a tough question, and one which kept us all silently engrossed in our own thoughts for some time. Then Samir said that you could in some cases; in others, you could not. He compared our harem to that of Uncle Karim, Malika's father. In Malika's harem, there was only one master. In ours, there were two. Both Uncle `Ali and Father were masters, although Uncle was a little more of a master than Father, because he was the older, firstborn son. Still, both Uncle and Father made decisions, and did or did not grant you permission to do what you wanted. And as Yasmina said, having two masters was better than having just one, because if you could not get permission from one master, you always could turn to the other. In Malika's house, things were pretty grim when Uncle Karim did not grant permission (he either gave it, or he did not, with no room for confusion). When Malika wanted permission to come home with us after Koranic school and stay until sunset, she had to first beg her father for weeks. But he did not listen. He said that a little girl had to come directly home after school. Finally, Malika enlisted the help of Lalla Mani, Lalla Radia, and Aunt Habiba, and the women only succeeded in making him change his mind by arguing that her uncle's house was identical to her father's, and that besides, she had no one her own age to play with at home. All her brothers and sisters were much older than she.

  The more masters one had, the more freedom and the more fun. That was also the case at Yasmina's farm. Grandfather Tazi was the supreme authority, of course, but two of his eldest sons, Hadj Salem and Hadj Jalil, made decisions as well. When Grandfather was absent, they acted as his caliphs, often doing everything they could to aggravate Yasmina and the other cowives. Yasmina would often aggravate them right back by claiming, for example, that Grandfather had granted her permission to go fishing before he left that morning at dawn, a statement which the two sons could not possibly disprove because they did not wake up before 8 A.M. Yasmina was always getting away with murder just because she woke up early, and she told me that if I wanted to be happy in life, I would have to wake up just before the birds, too. Then, she said, my life would unfold before me like a garden. The music of the little creatures would stir happiness within me, while I sat quietly reflecting on how to use my day and take the next small step forward. To he happy, she said, a woman had to think hard, during long silent hours, about how to make each small step forward. "Figuring out who has sulta (authority) over you is the first step," said Yasmina. "That information is basic. But after that, you need to shuffle the cards, confuse the roles. That is the interesting part. Life is a game. Look at it that way, and you can laugh at the whole thing." Sulta, authority, games. These were key words which kept popping up, and it struck me that maybe the harem itself was just a game. A game between men and women who were afraid of each other, and therefore always trying to prove how strong they were, just like we kids always did. But I could not share that thought that afternoon with Malika and Samir, for it sounded too crazy. It meant that grownups were no different than children.

  When we left the terrace that day, we were so engrossed in our inquiry that we did not even notice the pink clouds drifting silently toward the west, nor much of anything else. We had not found any answers - in fact, we were more confused than ever, and we rushed to Aunt Habiba to ask for help. We found her absorbed in her embroidery, her head bent over her mrema, a horizontal wooden frame used for elaborate projects. The ttirema resembled the men's large weaving loom, but was much smaller and lighter. A woman fitted the fabric tightly around, so it remained taut when the needle went through. The mrema was a very personal item, with each woman adjusting hers so she did not have to bend her head too much. Embroidery was primarily a solitary endeavor, but the women often teamed up together when they wanted to talk or when they were involved in a project that required a lot of work.

  That day, Aunt Habiba was stitching a green bird with golden wings all by herself. Big birds stretching out their aggressive wings were not a classical design, and if Lalla Mani had seen it, she would have said that it was an awful innovation, and one that meant its creator had flight and escape on her mind. Of course, birds appeared in traditional embroidery designs, but they were tiny, and often totally paralyzed, squeezed as they were between gigantic plants and fat leafy flowers. Because of Lalla Mani's attitude, Aunt Habiba always embroidered classical designs when down in the courtyard, and kept her big, winged birds to herself, up in her private room, with its direct access to the lower terrace. I loved her so much. She was so silent, so apparently quiescent to the demands of a tough outside world, and y
et, she still managed to hang onto her wings. She reassured me about the future: a woman could be totally powerless, and still give meaning to her life by dreaming about flight.

  Malika, Samir, and I waited for Aunt Habiba to raise her head, and then we explained our problem and how we got confused every time we tried to clarify the harem business. After listening carefully, she said that we were stuck in a tanaqod, or contradiction. Being caught in a tanaqod meant that when you asked a question, you got too many answers, which only increased your confusion. "And the problem with confusion," Aunt Habiba said, "is that you don't feel smart." However, she went on, to become a grownup, you had to learn how to deal with tanaqod. The first step for beginners was to develop patience. You had to learn to accept that, for a while, whenever you asked a question, your confusion would only get worse. That was no reason, however, for a human being to stop using the most precious gift that Allah had bestowed upon us - `aql, or reason. "And remember," Aunt Habiba added, "no one, up to now, has figured out a way to understand things without asking questions."

  Aunt Habiba also said something about time and space, about how harems change from one part of the world to another, and from one century to the next. The harem kept by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid in ninth-century Baghdad had nothing to do with our own. His jaryas, or slave girls, were very educated women, swallowing history and religious books as fast as they could, in order to entertain him. Men of that time did not appreciate the company of illiterate, uneducated women, and you had no chance of capturing the Caliph's attention if you could not dazzle him with your knowledge of science, history, and geography, not to mention jurisprudence. These subjects were the Caliph's obsession, and he spent most of his free time discussing them, between the two jihads, or holy wars. However, Aunt Habiba added, the Abbasid caliphs had lived a long time ago. Now, our harems were filled with illiterate women, which only went to show how far we had strayed from tradition. And as for power and might, the Arab leaders were no longer conquerors, they were the conquered, crushed by the colonial armies. Back when the jaryas had been super-educated, the Arab men had been on the top of the world. Now, both the men and the women were at the bottom, and the craving for education was a sign that we were emerging from our colonial humiliation. As Aunt Habiba was talking, I looked at Samir to see whether he understood everything she was saying. But he looked puzzled, too. Aunt Habiba noticed our restlessness and said not to worry, we need not get into time and space yet. What was important now was that we were advancing, even if we did not know it. For the moment, all we could do was go on with the mission.