Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Author: Fatima Mernissi

Brand: Basic Books

Edition: 1st pb ptg edition

Number Of Pages: 242

Details: Product Description

This “wonderful and enchanting” memoir tells the revelatory true story of one Muslim girl’s life in her family’s French Moroccan harem, set against the backdrop of World War II (The New York Times Book Review).

“I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco . . . ”
So begins Fatima Mernissi in this illuminating 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, without access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination.

A beautifully written account of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex, Dreams of Trespass illuminates what it was like to be a modern Muslim woman in a place steeped in tradition.

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.

Review

“Wonderful and enchanting…. Mernissi brings this vanished world to life.”―New York Times Book Review

“A remarkable book…vits good humor is unwavering; it tempers judgmentalism with understanding; and it provides a vivid portrait of a world that most Westerners can scarcely comprehend.”―Washington Post Book World

“[Mernissi] creates a necklace of tales as delightful as Scheherazade’s.”―Elle

About the Author

Fatema Mernissi teaches sociology at University Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco. She is the author of more than eight books, including Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Scheherazade Goes West, The Veil and the Male Elite, and Beyond the Veil.

Release Date: 04-09-1995

Package Dimensions: 23x232x192