Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  But leaving the hammam courtyard, dressed and dutifully veiled, did not mean that the beauty ritual had come to an end. There was still another step to go: perfume. That night or the next morning, the women would dress up in their most cherished caftans, sit in a quiet corner of their salons, put some musk, amber, or other fragrance onto a small charcoal fire, and let the smoke seep into their clothes and long unbraided hair. Then they would braid their hair, and put on kohl and red lipstick. We children especially loved those days because our mothers looked so beautiful then, and forgot to shout orders at us.

  The magic of the hammam beauty treatments and ritual came not only from feeling that you had been reborn, but also from feeling that you had been the agent of that rebirth. "Beauty is within; you just have to bring it out," Aunt Habiba would say, posing like a queen in her room on the morning after the hammam. She posed for no one but herself, with her silk scarf wrapped around her head like a turban, and the few pieces of jewelry that she had salvaged from her divorce glittering around her neck and on her arms. "But where exactly within?" I would ask. "Is it in the heart, or the head, or where exactly?" At that, Aunt Habiba would laugh and giggle away. "But my poor child, you needn't go that deep and complicate things! Beauty is in the skin! Take care of it, oil it, clean it, scrub it, perfume it, and put on your best clothes, even if there is no special occasion, and you'll feel like a queen. If society is hard on you, fight back by pampering your skin. Skin is political (A jlida siyasa). Otherwise why would the imams order us to hide it?"

  As far as Aunt Habiba was concerned, a woman's liberation had to start with skin toning and massage. "If a woman starts mistreating her skin, she's in for all kinds of humiliations," she would say. I did not completely understand the meaning of that last sentence, but her words inspired me to start learning all about face and hair masks. In fact, I became so good at it that Mother would send me to spy on Grandmother Lalla Mani or Lalla Radia to see what they were putting in their beauty mixtures. I had to spy because, like many other women, they shared the traditional belief that if their beauty treatments became widely known, they would lose their power. In carrying out my missions, I became so well informed that I even considered building a career in the beauty, magic, and hope business, if becoming a successful storyteller like Aunt Habiba proved to be too arduous.

  One of the face masks that I liked the best was the one that Chama used to help fade freckles, pimples, and other blemishes. I had enough freckles to keep me going for a lifetime. Chama's formula, which should be used for oily skin only, went like this: First, take a fresh egg. The only way you will know for certain that it is fresh is to have a little hen as a guest on your terrace for a few weeks. But if this proves to be too difficult, pick up an egg at your nearest grocery store. If it does not look fresh enough, paint it to a white perfection. Then, wash your hands with a natural soap. This, of course, also is not always easy to find these days, but if you cannot locate anything natural, wash your hands with the most detergentfree liquid possible. Once your hands are clean, carefully break open the egg, and throw away the yolk. Now, place the white on a flat earthenware plate. Earthenware or some kind of pottery is essential; metal cannot be used. Take a good piece of clean white shebba (alum) which fits nicely into your palm, and rub it vigorously into the white of the egg until it becomes full of lumps. Then, put a generous layer of this very white lumpy mixture on your face. Wait for io minutes until it feels dry. Finally, gently wash off your face with a cloth, made of natural fiber if possible, that has been moistened with lukewarm water. Your pores should now feel fantastically clean, and your skin smooth.

  Of course, such a mask did not work for Aunt Habiba, who had very dry skin. She needed a very different formula, and one that, although it cost very little, took some planning and attention to the seasons. It went like this: During the melon season, Aunt Habiba would choose one of the ripe pulpy fruits, cut a hole in it, and stuff it full with three handfuls of justwashed chick-peas. Then she would put the stuffed melon out on the terrace, and forget about it for two weeks or so, until it had dried up into a skinny little thing. Next, she would put the melon into a large mortar (nowadays, the blender is handier), and crush it with a pestle into a fine powder. She would then store this precious powder in a sunny place, carefully folded in paper inside a tin container to protect it from the humidity. Each week, she would take out a little of the powder, mix it with plain natural water (bottled water would also do), and put it on her face for an hour or so. When she washed it off with a lukewarm wet cloth, she would sigh with pleasure and say, "My skin loves me."

  But Chama's and Aunt Habiba's facial masks were good for cleansing only. Neither gave much nourishment to the skin. So one week, they would use their cleansing masks, and the next, they would use ones known for nourishment. Yasmina's red poppy mask and Lalla Mani's dates recipe were the best. The only problem with them both was that they did not keep, and had to be used immediately. The poppy mask was also, of course, dramatically tied to the seasons. Every year, Yasmina would await the spring with great eagerness, and as soon as the wheat was around knee-high, she would go out on horseback with Tamou to hunt for the first red poppies. Poppies grew in the rich green wheat fields all around the farm, but often Tamou and Yasmina had to ride quite far, beyond the train tracks, to steal the first flowers of the season from the neighboring fields which were more exposed to the sun. Their own farm's poppies would only follow weeks later. When they found the poppies, they made a generous harvest, coming back with gigantic red bouquets. Then that night, after enlisting the help of the other co-wives, they would spread a white sheet out on a table and delicately take the flowers apart, keeping the petals and pollen, and throwing away the stems. Next, the flowers would be placed in a big crystal jar and Tamou would send someone out to the lemon trees to pick the highest fruits, those gushing with sun and ready to pour out their juices. She would squeeze the lemon juice over the flowers and leave them to soak for a few days until they had became a soft paste. Finally, when they were ready, everyone would be invited to partake in the beauty treatment. The co-wives would rush in, queuing for their turn, and for a few hours the entire farm would be filled with red-faced creatures. Only their eyes would be showing. "When you wash off your face, your skin will glow like the poppies," Yasmina would say, with that insolent self-confidence that magicians have.

  In the Fez Medina, Mother dreamed about poppies, but most of the time she had to fall back on more accessible beauty masks. Good dates like the ones Lalla Mani used in her masks were hard to find, too, because they had to be imported from Algeria, but they were surely easier to get ahold of than the spring poppies. I have to give myself credit for discovering the date mask, because without my spying on Grandmother Lalla Mani, Mother would never have found out her secret. And Lalla Mani's skin glowed, period. Age had not made any difference at all. Lalla Mani put hardly anything on her skin most of the time, but once a week, she wore a beauty mask for a whole afternoon. No one could ever guess what the mask was made of until Mother sent me to spy, and I found out about the dates and the milk. Lalla Mani was quite disturbed when she realized that we knew about her secret mask and from then on, we children were chased out of her salon whenever she set to work on her beauty treatments.

  To make her mask, Lalla Mani would place two or three very fleshy dates in a glass of whole milk, cover it, and let it sit for a few days near a sunny window. Then she would mash the mixture with a wooden spoon, apply it all over her face, and avoid going out in the sun. The mask had to dry very slowly, a detail which I could not glean from spying, and Mother, using a lot of patience, found out for herself. "You have to sit in front of an open window," she told me after discovering Grandmother's secret, "or better still, sit under an umbrella on a terrace with a lovely view."

  22.

  HENNA, CLAY, AND

  MEN'S STARES

  FATHER HATED THE smell Of henna, and the stink of the argan and olive oil treatments that Mother used to f
ortify her hair. He always looked ill-at-ease on Thursday mornings when Mother put on her horrible, previously green but now dirty gray qamis (an ancient gift from Lalla Mani's pilgrimage to Mecca, which had taken place before my birth), and started running around with henna on her hair and a chick-pea-and-melon mask smeared on her face from one ear to the other. Her hip-long hair, moistened with henna paste and then braided and pinned to the top of her head, looked like an impressive helmet. Mother was wholeheartedly of the school that the uglier you made yourself before hammam, the more beautiful you came out afterwords, and she invested an incredible amount of energy in transforming herself, so much so that my little sister would fail to recognize her through her masks and shriek whenever she approached.

  Already on late Wednesday afternoons, Father would start looking gloomy. "Douja, I love you as natural as God made you," he would say. "You needn't go through all this trouble to please me. I am happy with you as you are, in spite of your quick temper. I swear, with God as my witness, that I am a happy man. So, please, why don't you forget about the henna tomorrow." But Mother's answer was always the same. "Sidi (my lord), the woman you love is not natural at all! I have been using henna since I was three. And I need to go through this process for psychological reasons too - it makes me feel reborn. Besides, my skin and hair are silkier afterwards. You can't deny that, can you?"

  So, on Thursdays, Father would sneak out of the house as early as he could. But if, by chance, he needed to come back, he would run away from Mother whenever she came near. It was a game that the courtyard loved. Occasions when men showed any terror in front of women were rare indeed. Mother would start chasing Father between the columns, and everyone would be screaming with laughter, until Lalla Mani, in her imposing headdress, appeared on her threshold. Then everything would come to a sudden stop. "You know, Madame Tazi," she would call out, using my mother's family name to remind her that she was a stranger in the family, "in this respected household, husbands are not to be terrorized. Maybe at your father's farm that's how things are. But here, in the middle of this very religious city, and only a few meters away from the Qaraouiyine Mosque - one of the centers of Islam worldwide - women behave by the book. They are obedient and respectful. Outrageous behavior of the type practiced by your mother Yasmina is only good for entertaining peasants." At that, Mother would look furiously at Father, and then disappear upstairs. She hated the harem's lack of privacy and the constant interference of his mother. "Her behavior is unbearable and vulgar too," Mother would say, "especially for someone who is always lecturing about manners and respect for others."

  At the beginning of their marriage, Father had tried to keep Mother away from traditional beauty treatments by getting her to use the French beauty products which took much less time to prepare and had immediate results. Beauty products were the only area in which Father favored the modern over the traditional. After long consultations with Cousin Zin, who translated the beauty ads in the French newspaper and magazines for him, he made a long list. Then they went shopping in the Ville Nouvelle, coming back with a big bagful of beautiful packages, all wrapped in cellophane and tied with colorful silk ribbons. Father asked Zin to sit down in our salon while Mother opened the packages, in case she needed help understanding the French directions, and looked on with a great deal of interest as she carefully opened each item. It was evident that he had spent a fortune. Some packages were hair dyes, others shampoos, and then there were three kinds of creams for both the face and the hair, not to mention perfume in jewellike bottles. Father especially disliked the musk fragrance that Mother insisted on putting on her hair, and so he eagerly helped her open the bottle of Chanel No 5, swearing that "It has all the flowers in it that you like the best" Mother looked at everything with a lot of curiosity, made some inquiries about their composition, and asked Zin to translate the instructions. Finally she turned to Father and asked him a question he did not expect. "Who made these products?" He then made the fatal mistake of telling her that they had been made by scientific men in clinical laboratories. Upon hearing that, she picked up the perfume, and threw everything else away. "If men are now going to rob me of the only things I still control -my own cosmetics then they will be the ones who have power over my beauty. I will never allow such a thing to happen. I create my own magic, and I am not relinquishing my henna." That settled the matter once and for all, and Father had to resign himself, along with all the other men in the courtyard, to the inconveniences of the beauty treatments.

  On the night before the hammam, when Mother put henna in her hair, Father deserted our salon and took refuge at his mother's. But he would always come back immediately when Mother returned home, wearing Chanel N° 5. She would stop by Lalla Mani's salon first to kiss her hand. That was a traditional ritual. A daughter-in-law was obliged to stop at her mother-in-law's to kiss her hand after the hammam. However, thanks to the nationalist revolution and all the talk about women's liberation, the ritual was dying out in most places, except for on important religious festival days. Still, since Lalla Radia continued to respect the ritual, Mother had to do so as well.

  But Mother also used the hand-kissing ritual as an opportunity to joke a little. "Dear Mother-in-law," she would say, "do you think your son is ready to face his wife again, or does he want to stay with mom?" Mother would be smiling as she spoke, but Lalla Mani would respond with a frown, and raise her chin. She thought that humor in general was a form of disrespect, and that when it came from mother, in particular, it was a kind of straightforward aggression. "You know dear," she would inevitably retort, "you are lucky to have married such an easygoing man as my son. Others would have cast out a wife who disobeyed them and insisted on putting henna in her hair when they begged her not to. Besides, don't forget that Allah has given men the right to have four wives. If my son ever uses his sacred right, he could go to his second wife's bed, when you drive him out with your henna stink." Mother would listen to Grandmother calmly and serenely, until she finished her sermon. Then, without any another word, she would kiss her hand and proceed towards her own salon, with Chanel No 5 trailing close behind.

  The hammam that we went to in order to bathe and wash off our beauty treatments was all white marble walls and floors, with a lot of glass in the ceilings to keep the light flowing in. That combination of ivory light, mist, and nude adults and children running all around made the hammam seem like a steamy-hot, exotic island that had somehow become adrift in the middle of the disciplined Medina. Indeed, the harnmam would have been paradise, if it had not been for its third chamber.

  The first chamber of the hammam was steamy, yes, but nothing exceptional, and we passed through it quickly, using it mainly as a way to get used to the misty heat. The second chamber was a delight, with just enough steam to blur the world around us into a sort of extraterrestrial place, but not enough to make breathing difficult. In that second chamber, women would get into a cleansing frenzy, sloughing off dead skin with mhecca, or round pieces of cork wrapped up in handcrocheted woolen covers.

  To wash out the henna and oils, the women used ghassoul, a miraculous clay shampoo and lotion which made your hair and skin feel incredibly smooth. "The ghassoul is what transforms your skin into silk," claimed Aunt Habiba. "That's what makes you feel like an ancient goddess when you step out of the hamrnam." It took many seasons, and two to three days of hard work, to make ghassoul, which was actually fragrant brown chips of dried clay. Once they were made, all you needed to do with the chips was to sprinkle a handful of them into rosewater, and you had a magical solution.

  The making of ghassoul started in the spring, and the whole courtyard would get involved. First, Sidi Allal would bring in heaps of rosebuds, myrtle, and other fragrant plants from the countryside, and the women would rush to take them upstairs and spread them out on clean sheets away from the sun. Once dried, the flowers would be put away until the big ghassoul- making day in mid-summer, when they would be combined with clay and dried again into a thin crust - this time
by the hot summer sun. No child ever wanted to miss that day because then, not only did the grownups need our assistance, but we were also allowed to knead the clay and become as dirty as we liked, with no one complaining. The perfumed clay smelled good enough to eat, and once Samir and I did try some, only to come down with stomach aches which we kept carefully secret.

  As with the other beauty treatments, the making of ghassoul took place around the fountain. Women would bring their stools and charcoal fires, and sit near the water, so as to be able to wash their hands and pots and pans easily. First, kilos of dried roses and myrtle would be placed in separate deep pots and left to simmer slowly for a while. Then, they would be taken off the fire, and allowed to cool down. Women who were fond of a special kind of flower - like Mother, who loved lavender - would put these flowers in smaller pots to simmer. Again, as with the other beauty treatments, some women believed that all the magical effect of their ghassoul formula would evaporate if it became common knowledge, and so these women would disappear into dark corners on the top floors, close doors, and mix their mysterious plants and flowers in secrecy. Some women, like Aunt Habiba, dried their roses in the moonlight. Others restricted themselves to flowers of specific colors, and still others recited magic incantations over their plants to enhance their enchanting powers.

  Then the kneading process would start. Aunt Habiba would give the signal by putting a few handfuls of raw clay in a wide earthenware pan like those used to knead bread. She would then pour a bowlful of myrtle or rosewater over the clay, allow it to sink in, and start kneading it until it became a smooth paste. Next, she would spread the paste over a wooden board, and call on us children to take the board to the terrace to dry.