Guest Author - Julie L Baumler

Dreams of Trespass: Tales of A Harem Girlhood is the story of Moroccan sociologist, Fatima Mernissi's girlhood and the important women in her life – her mother, her aunts and cousins, and her grandmother and her co-wives. She writes from her view of life as a young girl in the 1940's informed by an adult's understanding without losing the experiences of a child's limited world view and attempts at understanding the world around her.

This book is an interesting glimpse of domestic life in mid-Twentieth Century Fez. Because it reads much like a novel, it is able to provide a very accessible view of the important social and political changes of the time, such as the French occupation of Morocco, World War II, Islamic Feminism, and Moroccan Nationalism. Because the book takes place almost exclusively within the family circle, domestic issues and day to day life figure prominently as well. Separating issues into the domestic and socio-political is an artificial device and Mernissi shows the artificiality of this method. For instance, despite her husband's many attempts to force or persuade her to use modern cosmetics and beauty products, Mernissi's mother insists on using the traditional Moroccan methods. This is not because she objects to modern methods, she in fact holds strong feminist and modernist views. However, she is unwilling to allow the control over her beauty and her person to pass out of her hands and into the hands of the scientist who create modern cosmetics.

The erasing of the barriers between the personal and the political is one of the strengths of Mernissi's story and how she shares it. This same theme extends to Mernissi's girlhood attempts at understanding what the harem is and what it means both to her and to society. Rather than attempt to explain harems as so many other writers do, she shares her childhood experiences, questions and confusion. As a girl, she is familiar with the historical harems of the Caliphs , the walled city harem of her family, the wall-less country harem of her mother's parents, all of which are almost completely different yet to her confusion all of which are harems. This confusion and her attempts to end it form a central and fascinating theme.

Dreams of Trespass is a fascinating book I had trouble putting down. I highly recommend it and am looking forward to reading some of Mernissi's more academic works, which I probably would not have considered previously.

Fatima Mernissi. Dreams of Trespass : Tales of a Harem Girlhood. (New York: Basic Books, 1994.)

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Fatema Mernissi's website