Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

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Description

”I used to be born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco…” So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich narrative of a childhood in the back of 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 outdoor, 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 latest Muslim world.

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 repeatedly urged by her rebellious mother to spring beyond it. Worried that Mernissi is too shy and quiet, her mother tells her, “You will have to learn how 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 from side to side through the gates that trapped her restive mother. She spins amiable, ceaselessly incredible 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.

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