Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

“But since then, looking for the frontier has become my life’s occupation. Anxiety eats at me whenever I cannot situate the geometric line organizing my powerlessness.”

This quote articulates one of the narrator’s primary motivations throughout the memoir: her drive to understand the “frontiers,” or boundaries, of her world. Growing up in a traditional Islamic culture, Fatima comes to understand that many of these boundaries, like the harem that keeps her within its walls, leave women without power. Yet in 1940s Morocco, this traditional culture is beginning to change, with nationalists supporting new rights and freedoms for women. As a result, the boundaries of young Fatima’s world—both literal and figurative, from written laws to unspoken beliefs—are in constant flux. For Fatima, understanding her place within these shifting borders is important enough to become her “life’s occupation.”

“But it was the radio incident that taught me an important lesson. It was then that Mother told me about the need to chew my words before letting them out. ‘Turn each word around your tongue seven times, with your lips tightly shut, before uttering a sentence,’ she said. ‘Because once your words are out, you might lose a lot.’”

The author emphasizes the power and importance of words that becomes a major theme of the novel. The “radio incident” refers to Fatima inadvertently revealing to Father that the women have an illicit key to the radio, which then causes the other women to blame and shun Fatima. This is one of Fatima’s earliest lessons in the potent effects words can have, in the way they can cause you to “lose”—or gain—“a lot.” Fatima also learns that she must carefully consider her own words, in order to exercise some measure of control in her life.