Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

The greatest hudud in Fatima’s life—in fact, the institution that comes to symbolize all the boundaries placed on women in her world—is the harem. Fatima spends much of the memoir asking different adults for their definitions of harems, trying to understand this complex concept for herself—a quest that shows how important harems are in her culture. Literally speaking, harems are physical, usually walled communities where families live together; yet they come to represent much more by the end of the autobiography.

As a result of this quest to define harems, Fatima receives conflicting information: her father and grandmother see harems as an institution that upholds tradition, keeps women from distracting men in the outside world, and even provides a place for single women to live safely. Meanwhile Fatima’s mother, grandmother, cousin, and aunt chafe against the walls of the harem, wishing for “invisible wings” (22) that will allow them to fly away. Not only the physical walls that keep women within the harem, but the customs its residents must follow, limit women’s freedoms: Mother hates having to eat meals in a large group and not being able to go to the market and choose her own fabrics or other goods; Grandmother Yasmina wishes she didn’t have to share her husband with many other wives. In fact, Yasmina tells Fatima that the real harem is “tattooed in the mind” (62) and consists of a set of rules and traditions that keep women behind invisible walls. Most of all, Fatima determines that being in a harem means “the world does not need you,” and “what you do is useless” (214).

By the end of the memoir, Fatima, like previous generations of women, comes down against the limitations that harems represent. She dreams of a world without harems, both visible and intangible ones; a world where the power of women’s words will “render the frontiers”—including harems—“useless” (114).

Near the opening of Dreams of Trespass, the author states that Aunt Habiba’s most loved story is “The Woman with Wings” (22), a tale that inspires her female listeners to imagine their own “invisible wings” (22) that will carry them out of the harem. Throughout the book, imagery of wings reoccurs, representing women’s desire to fly away from the restrictions of their lives.

Aunt Habiba counsels young Fatima that “anyone could develop wings” and that “the earlier you started focusing on the flight, the better” (204). Fatima sees that her aunt’s “wings” are her stories that take listeners far beyond the harem walls, and her cousin Chama takes a similar flight through her dramatic performances. In fact, even the subject matter of these stories often includes wing imagery: one of the women’s favorite stories describes a peacock couple who fly freely across the world, looking for a home that will make them happy. Chama and Mother also embroider this story—a scandalous subject matter, as birds with wings outstretched are not considered suitable subject matter for traditional embroidery. By telling stories of escape and depicting images of flight, the harem’s women manage to “hang onto [their]wings” (154)—though they may not achieve equality, they do bring meaning to their lives “by dreaming about flight” (154).

The walled harem in Fez, where nature often exists only as depictions in floor tiles and draperies, keeps women from experiencing not only the outside human world, but the natural world as well. When Fatima spends time in nature while visiting her grandmother’s farm harem, she comes to understand just how freeing nature is—and how constricting the lack of it can be. After a rare outdoor excursion, Fatima’s mother says that “when you spend a whole day among trees […] waking up with walls as horizons becomes unbearable” (59). Similarly, Fatima’s grandmother says that “the worst thing for a woman [is] to be cut off from nature” (55). Fatima witnesses how the women on Grandmother’s farm seem to live with “no limits” (55), able to garden, ride horses and swim whenever they please. Spending time in nature allows women to heal, to feel free, and even to “cure” their “fears” (55). As a result, women in urban harems, like Fatima and her mother, are deprived of one of the few sources of freedom and enjoyment that might exist in their lives.

In Dreams of Trespass, veils are another hudud or frontier, a convention that emphasizes the fact that men and women must be separated, with men holding the power while women do not. Traditional veils are literally imprisoning, heavy and difficult to move in, and thus women like Fatima’s mother and cousin fight against tradition by wearing “tiny, transparent” veils (121) on their rare excursions to the movies. Mother even supports a feminist author who argues that Arab men should “develop strength within themselves” (121) to resist female beauty, rather than forcing women to confine themselves behind veils. As the tradition of wearing veils outside the harem begins to change, the lifting of the veil symbolizes the hope for new freedoms for Islamic women, as Fatima dreams of a world where “the difference need[s] no veil” (111).