Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood [Paperback]

Fatima Mernissi (Author), Ruth V. Ward (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 1995

”I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco...” So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth—women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass is the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1940, harems still abounded in Fez, Morocco. They weren't the opulent, bejeweled harems of Scherezade, but the domestic sprawl of extended families encamped around a walled courtyard that marked the edges of women's lives. Though born into this tightly sheltered world, Fatimi Mernissi is constantly urged by her rebellious mother to spring beyond it. Worried that Mernissi is too shy and quiet, her mother tells her, "You must learn to scream and protest, just the way you learned to walk and talk." In Dreams of Trespass, an enjoyable weave of memory and fantasy, it is clear that Mernissi's fertile imagination let her slip back and forth through the gates that trapped her restive mother. She spins amiable, often improbable tales of the rigidly proper city harem in Fez and the contrasting freedoms of the country harem where her grandmother Yakima lives. There, one of Yakima's cowives rides like the wind, another swims like a fish, and Yakima relishes twitting the humorless first wife by naming a fat, waddling duck after her.

From Publishers Weekly

This rich, magical and absorbing growing-up tale set in a little-known culture reflects many universals about women. The setting is a "domestic harem"in the 1940s city of Fez, where an extended family arrangement keeps the women mostly apart from society, as opposed to the more stereotypical "imperial harem," which historically provided sex for sultans and other powerful court officials. Moroccan sociologist Mernissi ( Islam and Democracy ) charts the changing social and political frontiers and limns the personalities and quirks of her world. Here she tells of a grandmother who warns that the world is unfair to women, learns of the confusing WW II via radio news in Arabic and French, watches family members debate what children should hear, wonders why American soldiers' skin doesn't reflect Moroccan-style racial mixing and decides that sensuality must be a part of women's liberation. With much folk wisdom--happiness, the author's mother told her, "was when there was a balance between what you gave and what you took"--this book not only tells a winning personal story but also helps to feminize a much-stereotyped religion. Photos. BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 242 pages
• Publisher: Perseus Books (September 4, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201489376
• ISBN-13: 978-0201489378
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > History > Africa > Morocco
  • #13 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Women in Islam

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oh, to trespass OUT rather than to trespass into..., September 3, 2000

By 

R. Peterson "International citizen" (Leverett, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Paperback)

Subtitled, Tales of a Harem Girlhood, this is a most fascinating tale of the realities of a Moroccan harem. Most Westerners take the word harem and think Turkish harem - hundreds of women floating around large tiled rooms waiting to serve the lord and master. Mernissi, a western schooled sociologist, feminist, and scholar, takes us into the life of a young girl born into a family in Fez (in Western Morocco) in the 1940's. Her harem is not the rooms of I-Dream-of-Jeannie look-alikes but rather the complex social structures of the Moroccan/Muslim family in the middle of this century. Her harem is the world of women, daughters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who live 'inside' the urban home (but interestingly, live more freely out on the country farm). We learn about the feelings she and her brother (with whom she is close) experience when they come of an age to be separated; he relegated to the world of the men, and she to the hidden world of the harem. Mostly, though, this beautiful book tells the stories of the women in Fatima's harem who have dreams and fantasies (that will never come true), including the dreams of trespass into the outside world, the world of men. After having worked in Morocco in the early 1990s, I could see that much has changed for Moroccan women, but thoughout the Arab world there still exist plenty who still have those dreams of trespass.

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The seclusion of women through the eyes of a child, August 12, 2001

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Paperback)

Subtitled, "Tales of a Harem Girlhood," this is the story of the author, Fatima Mernissi's Moroccan childhood in the 1940s. Now a sociologist at the University Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco, she has skillfully recreated the sense of wonder and observation of a child. Her own father had only one wife, but she lived in an extended family with an aunt, uncle, cousins, divorced female relatives, and even some women who had once been slaves and who no had nowhere else to go. The term "harem" as she uses it, means the seclusion of women. Her mother, who was illiterate, dreamed moving beyond the walls, but did not even have the privilege of simply walking down the street as western women do. Instead, she rebelled by embroidering birds of flight and encouraged her daughter to get an education. The household was lively, and I felt myself drawn right in, getting to know each person through Ms. Mernissi's eyes. I was treated to their storytelling and home theatrical productions; I observed them sneaking up to the roof to get a bit of privacy; I understood why the act of chewing gum was considered a rebellion; I left the walled compound in the city with her when she visited her maternal grandmother who lived on a farm, one of eight co-wives, who gets to "cuddle" with her husband only one out of eight days.

As I'm about the same age as the author, I couldn't help thinking about my life and how much I took for granted in my own childhood - such as the simple act of walking down the street and being exposed to the outside world through newspapers, radio and television. This book provided a magnificent glimpse into a world that seems as strange to me as mine would have seemed to her. And it certainly opened my eyes. At only 242 pages, "Dreams of Trespass" was much too short. I could have gone one reading and reading. And my only criticism is that it was only about her childhood. I wished it would have gone on and described the next fifty years. Highly recommended.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful again and again!, January 26, 2006

By 

Wildeguy "wildeguy2000" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Paperback)

To me it is alarming how prevalent the myth of the "harem" is among Americans. I just watched an interview a few weeks ago and the gentleman interviewer smiled from ear to ear when his guest (a female professor) mentioned the word. I guess I was lucky to have visited a harem in Berrechid, Morocco over a decade ago and got the true story of its cultural evolution over time. Well there were pashas at one time and they did have several wives, but today it is the tales about them that feed our curiosity. Although these stories are not as Romantic as we may like, they still feed the imagination in a remarkable way. This book is simply wonderful in its direct and simple approach to a cultural phenomena that is still evolving, and Mernissi is helping that evolution to occur. It is above all her way of telling old stories that can tame the Shahriyar's in all of us. How could you not fall in love with Chama? Mernissi writes with deep feeling and compassionate understanding for the Morocco that all Westerner's should know but so rarely get a chance to experience. In her writing she takes you behind the hijab and the 40's harem wall to meet with people who have so much to teach us about limits, boundaries, and breaking out. But breaking out means knowing the rules (qa'ida, read 62-3). I think that the lesson is in learning 'how to know.' Not just knowing the rules as they are but in knowing 'how' they exist.

Mernissi explains all uncommon and new words to readers by way of interesting footnotes that are valuable even for people who are familiar with Moroccan societies. That helps the reader again to know 'how' the rules of the harem exist.

More than anything I am attracted to her descriptions of the beautiful people that live in her memories. Though some may see this book as just anthropology, socoiology, or even feminism, I think it is actually a book about the human capacity for compassion and love. In fact when I go back through the book I see it everywhere in Asmahan's "Ahwa!" (I am in love) and even in such names as Aunt Habiba (root habib=friend, companion). Even when she writes about Christians or Jews it is always with a comical kind of curiosity never malicious or spiteful, just enough to make you smile. She brings the outside in. This is a dream book, one you can enjoy in your own interior harem, or if you prefer Castillo Interior (Santa Teresa's "interior castle").