Empowerment through disempowerment: Harem and the covert female resistance in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Abstract

This article probes the dynamics of covert female resistance as evident in Fatima Mernissi’s only fiction work entitled Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994). Mernissi’s memoir is a real account of her early childhood spent in a harem. The discussion explores the institution of the harem in terms of how it is believed to have disempowered/empowered its female inhabitants through history. With this in mind, it takes up a number of issues that surface in Fatima’s (Mernissi’s narrator in Dreams of Trespass) narrative, and which stand central to women’s situation in the harem of Fez. These include confinement and denial to spatial freedom to them, women’s desire to gain literacy and thus become intellectually enlightened, the potential of dreams, and one’s personal strength in transgressing the normative boundaries, and finally polygamy in the harem. The article argues how women’s disempowerment, designed by the patriarchal scheme of the harem life, ironically empowers them in specific ways. This view challenges the orientalist appropriations in relation to the female inhabitants of the place who are historically believed to be passive receivers of traditional patriarchy.