title: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
author:  Fatima Mernissi 
description: 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 <i>Dreams of Trespass</i>, 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.
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  # SEX AND LIES
  
  
  LEÏLA SLIMANI
  
  
  Translated by Sophie Lewis
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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  In memory of Fatima Mernissi;  
  
  
  For my Aunt Atika;  
  
  
  For all the women who confided in me:  
  
  
  this is to thank you.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Preaching chastity is an open incitement to anti-nature. Disdain for sexual
  life and sullying it with the notion of ‘impurity’, such is the true sin
  against the Holy Spirit of life.
  
  
  Friedrich Nietzsche, _The Antichrist_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  When Allah created the earth, said Father, he separated men from women, and
  put a sea between Muslims and Christians for a reason. Harmony exists when
  each group respects the prescribed limits of the other; trespassing leads only
  to sorrow and unhappiness. But women dreamed of trespassing all the time. The
  world beyond the gate was their obsession. They fantasised al