Themes in Dreams of Trespass PDF

Themes in Dreams of Trespass Matriarchs vs. Patriarchs In focusing on women’s escapades to avert the patriarchal order, the memoir captures the mix of humor, irony, wonder, and shame that makes up the women’s worlds. Fatima’s mother is, upon first impression, a protective matriarch, who, despite he...

Themes in Dreams of Trespass Matriarchs vs. Patriarchs In focusing on women’s escapades to avert the patriarchal order, the memoir captures the mix of humor, irony, wonder, and shame that makes up the women’s worlds. Fatima’s mother is, upon first impression, a protective matriarch, who, despite her proclivity for sleeping late, has instilled in young Fatima a keen awareness of the “first frontier,” the boundary between her family’s private quarters and the extended family quarters. In response to this prohibition, Fatima retreats into solitary mind games, acquiescing to the inevitability of perpetual ennui. This child’s first frontier, drawn by her mother, is a line that Fatima will swiftly learn to transgress. On one occasion, Fatima and her boy cousin Samir observe the women of the extended Mernissi household contriving to break house rules by getting their hands on the forbidden key and listening to the parlor radio. A confrontation ensues between the overbearing patriarchs and the misbehaving matriarchs. In the aftermath, Fatima receives a lecture from her mother about the difference between truth, lies and secrets, Fatima’s father scoffs: “If they made a copy of the radio key, soon they’ll make one to open the gate” (8). Whether fact or fiction, the matriarchs are effectively prisoners inside the home, and the patriarchs—albeit ineffectively—sensor information entering the household. Yet, women’s solidarity wins the day, and the men do not find out who obtained the key to the radio cabinet or how; the women succeed in outsmarting the men in the ensuing reenactment of Albert Tucker’s prisoners dilemma. Fatima, in turn, begins to sense the thrill of small rebellions, even if breaking rules has risks. Between Tradition and Modernity For most of the narrative, Fatima’s father retains much of the unsympathetic air he acquires through the radio key episode. However, much further into the narrative readers are given another side to this man. He is deeply loving, obliging, and compromising, much like his brother Uncle Karim (karim means generous in Arabic), the latter described as: “a cheerful fellow who had himself often felt constrained by the discipline of harem life” (77). Uncle Karim readily conforms to his wife’s wishes to leave the Mernissi harem on account of the privacy it did not afford her. Fatima’s father does not yield to his wife’s-aspirations to leave the harem, on account of his own mother’s wishes, but the pair do find happiness in their relationship, a happiness that Fatima describes as contagious as she watches them chase each other around the terrace in an utter breach of harem etiquette. Fatima and her paternal cousin Samir are “born the same day, in a long Ramadan afternoon, with hardly one hour’s difference” (8). The similarities between the first cousins allow Mernissi to develop running commentary on gender equity. To her credit, Fatima’s mother is adamantly opposed to males being favored over females, a stance grounded in her sense of religious ethics; the notion of male superiority was “non-sense and totally anti-Muslim,” as “Allah made us all equal” (9). Going against longstanding custom, her mother insists upon ritual celebrations for newborn Fatima that are akin to those for her infant male cousin Samir, and Fatima’s mother does not respond to her mother-in-law's taunts about Fatima’s awkward features compared to of her radiant boy cousin. Like much of Arab storytelling, the tensions between the two, mother-in-law and daughter-in- law, are a central thematic concern. Lalla Mani, the undisputed matriarch of the household, touts the need for respecting authority and for cultivating discipline by adhering to tradition. Douja, Fatima’s mother, is outspoken for the cause of freedom and self-determination, having come of discerning age as part of the Moroccan bourgeoisie for whom nationalist rhetoric meant shedding tradition. Through the struggles of Fatima’s mother in particular, Mernissi highlights how indigenous independence struggles, and exposure to European culture, impacted women’s feminine consciousness. On one occasion, Douja remarks about French women and their customs: The French do not imprison their wives behind walls, my dear mother-in-law…they let them run wild in the local souk (market), and everyone has fun, and still the work gets done. In fact, so much work gets done that they can afford to equip strong armies and come down here to shoot at us (42). Douja’s condescension toward her own “imprisonment’ leads her to praise the behaviors of the colonizers. For Douja, western dress symbolizes a rejection of the authoritative control of matriarchs and patriarchs and the economic revaluation of women’s potential. She advises her daughter: If you plan to be modern, express it through what you wear, otherwise they will shove you behind the gates. Caftans may be of unparalleled beauty, but Western dress is about salaried work (85). Likewise, when young Fatima playfully adorns a veil, she is reprimanded: ‘Don’t you ever cover your head!’ Mother shouted…. Hiding does not solve women’s problems. It just identifies her as an easy victim. Your Grandmother and I have suffered enough of this head- covering business (100). Later, Fatima observes contentions between her parents when her mother takes liberties with her coverings: Father angrily warned her that she was destroying the family honor. But family honor suddenly seemed to be in serious jeopardy all over Fez, because the Medina streets were flooded by women wearing the men’s djellaba with coquettish chiffon veils. Not long after that, too, the daughters of the nationalists began appearing in the streets with bare faces and bare legs, in Western dresses with distinctive Western handbags on their shoulders. Later, in 1956, as soon as Mother heard that Morocco had gained independence and the French armies were leaving, she joined the march organized by the nationalists’ wives and sang with them until late in the night. When she finally came home exhausted from walking and singing, her hair was uncovered and her face was bare (120). Indeed, nationalist movements across North Africa were an impetus for bourgeois women to shed traditional clothing. Somewhat paradoxically, the women’s challenge to the colonial power also entailed assimilating the colonizer’s normative behaviors and appearances. This complicated relationship between colonialism, nationalism, and indigenous feminist consciousness is in many ways at the heart of the book. Mernissi’s work shows how women used the national independence movement in service of their own aspirations for boundary crossing. At the same time, the work suggests that Moroccan nationalist discourse, for all the incentives that it provided the women of her mother’s milieu, remained elusive about issues of major importance to women, like lifting restrictions within harems, or women with meaningful access to employment. Resistance: As Fatima’s mother, Douja seeks to instill what she sees as feminist virtues in her daughter. She insists that Fatima not cry and retreat when annoyed but rather “learn to scream and protest,” least she become “an obsequious woman” (9). Interestingly, when Fatima’s grandmother Yasmina weighs in, her advice is that it is best to develop a strong personality through an ethic of care rather than a proclivity toward contestation. Douja’s situation leads her to favor small acts of disobedience and verbal confrontations as means of resistance; yet, when young Fatima inquires of her grandmother about the special and functional boundaries between men and women, with her grandmotherly care, Yasmina tells Fatima that the world at large: “was not concerned about being fair to women,” that “rules were made in such a manner as to deprive them in some way or another” (63). Furthermore, “rules are ruthless because they are not made by women,” and “the moment women get smart and start asking…they will find a way to change the rules and turn the whole planet upside down” (63). Mother Douja and maternal grandmother Yasmina agree on the value of a strong personality, though they differ about what strength entails or how to shape it in Fatima. Whereas Douja often aspires to the norms of European women, Yasmina can discern a universal dynamic unfavorable to women, and she has a bold picture for how women should transform their current reality. Yasmina assures Fatima that she will be “a modern educated lady” who will “learn foreign languages, have a passport, devour books, and speak like a religious authority” (64). Yasmina continues by reassuring Fatima that: “at the very least, you will certainly be better off than your mother” (64). In her quest for strength, Fatima begins to learn the mastery of words. Through the example of Shahrazad, the fabled character of Arabian legend, her mother and grandmother teach young Fatima to employ her skills with words. For some harem entertainment, Douja and some of the younger women act out the lives of 19th and early 20th-century Arab feminists. Observing these lively shows, Fatima draws a comparison between the women of modern feminism and the women of the classical oral tradition she received from her grandmother; essentially the former writes about liberation and later actually lives it. She remarks: Scheherazade’s women of A Thousand and One Nights did not write about liberation—they went ahead and lived it, dangerously and sensuously, and they always succeeded in getting themselves out of trouble. They did not try to convince society to free them—they went ahead and freed themselves. (133). With this embrace of irony and contradiction, the work celebrates intelligent and spirited female figures. Mernissi captures the perplexities and contradictions involved in female subjectivity. She explores tensions in perspective between different women’s understandings of agency, solidarity, autonomy, and fulfillment. Simultaneously, Mernissi’s narrative complicates and even in places defies Orientalist stereotypes. In response to invisible and often shifting boundaries of social etiquette and power, Mernissi’s heroines develop the “contingent, contextually determined strategic self-positioning,”which may be understood as an essential characteristic of feminist consciousness in all of its varieties. By lifting up humorous and powerful accounts of women’s agency, Dreams of Trespass commemorates indigenous feminist consciousness, with all of its complexities brought to bear.