Dreams of Trespass : : Tales of a Harem Girlhood

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Originally published: Reading, Mass. : Addison-Wesley, c1994.
My harem frontiers -- Scheherazade, the king, and the words -- French Harem -- Yasmina's first co-wife -- Chama and the Caliph -- Tamou's horse -- Harem within -- Aquatic dishwashing -- Moonlit nights of laughter -- Men's salon -- World War II: view from the courtyard -- Asmahan, the singing princess -- Harem goes to the movies -- Egyptian feminists visit the terrace -- Princess Budur's fate -- Forbidden terrace -- Mina, the rootless -- American cigarettes -- Mustaches and breasts -- Silent dream of wings and flights -- Skin politics: eggs, dates, and other beauty secrets -- Henna, clay, and men's stares.
Overview: "I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." So begins Fatima Mernissi in this exotic and rich 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, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass is the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world. In a book as evocative as anything found in A Thousand and One Nights, Mernissi, who was born in a harem in 1940 in Morocco, writes with great wit and color of the politics of seductions, of the harem as a metaphor, and of the world beyond--every woman's inaccessible obsession.

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