dreams of tresspass

I will admit that i have not finished reading my book yet, so I decided to blog about what we're supposed to write about for Wednesday; and then I'll switch.

When I began reading Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi, I was instantly intrigued as to what, exactly, a Harem was. The first thing I thought of when I read the title was of the typical Harems we read about, the ones with a sultan and hundreds of concubines all there to please him. However, once I began, I immediately realized that this book was not in line with the kind of thing we typically associate the word harem with. Many people just think, harem: a bunch of women a sultan (or something) uses for sex – a personal brothel if you will. But this is quite different. This harem, though it does have many women in it, they are not all there to be used for sex. In fact, the Harem that the author lives in is just one large house with one big family in it. However, Mernissi does speak of her grandmother, who is one of nine of her husband's wives.

Not surprisingly, most women do not like being confined to a Harem and having to share their husband with other women. Towards the beginning of the book, the author overhears her grandmother complain about being "suck in a harem" and she asks her what that meant.

Sometimes, she said that to be stuck in a harem simply meant that a woman had lost her freedom of movement. Other times, she said that a harem meant misfortune becasue a woman ahd to share her husband with many others. (Mernissi 34)

After this excerpt, the author makes an extensive footnote about harems, defining the different types and describing the difference between them. According to this footnote, there are domestic and imperial harems, and the imperial are the ones we most typically associate with the word 'harem.' However, this book only deals with the imperial harem.