Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives

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10.1057/9780230100732 - Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives, Hasna Lebbady

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Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives



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Hasna Lebbady



Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives

FEMINIST TRADITIONS IN ANDALUSI-MOROCCAN ORAL NARRATIVES

Copyright © Hasna Lebbady, 2009. All rights reserved.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61940–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Stylized ink drawings by Carol Gharghur, Copyright Carol Gharghur. Cover photograph: “The interior of an Andalusi-Moroccan house in the medina of Tetouan,” by Diana Adams. Copyright Diana Adams. Material from “Redefining the Margins: Embodied Knowledge in ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?’ ” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 12: 2 (2003), 131–40. Courtesy of Taylor & Francis: http/www. informaworld.com. Information from “Of Women-Centered Moroccan Tales and Their Imagined Communities,” ed. Nabil Matar and Bindu Malieckal, The Muslim World, 95, 2 (2005): 217–230. Courtesy of Blackwell.



First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.



For my daughter, Hiam And for all the students, whom I have had the privilege to teach




Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on Transliteration

xi

Introduction

Re-Membering: From Memory to History

1

Chapter 1

Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter

29

Chapter 2

Ali and a Spinner Too?

55

Chapter 3

Lawza el-Bhiya

77

Chapter 4

Who’ll Buy a Word?

103

Chapter 5

Aisha Jarma

129

Chapter 6

The Female Camel

153

Chapter 7

Woman as the Source of Good

175

Notes

201

Bibliography

225

Index

235



Contents




F

irst and foremost I would like to thank all the women in Tetouan, including family and friends, who shared with me their versions of the tales that appear in this book, without which it could never have materialized. For their help with different aspects of the tales and related matters, I am particularly grateful to my mother Badria Raghun, my sister Asmae Lebbadi, as well as to Chafiqa Medina, Alia Raissouni, Zoubeida Afailal, Fama Erzini, Kinza Medina, Zohra El Ayachi, and Ashusha Nejjar. Apart from being very helpful, these ladies transformed the task of collecting the tales into a veritable pleasure. For her stylized ink drawings I am most obliged to my friend, Carol Gharghur—a professional artist based in Barcelona, Spain—who expressed such good faith in my project, long before it began to materialize, and offered to illustrate the tales about which she sensed my excitement. The illustrations that she made—specifically for this book project—provide another dimension through which the tales can be perceived and greatly enhance the overall purpose of this book. Both her encouragements as a friend and her professionalism were essential for bringing this work to completion. For the front page photograph many warm thanks go to Diana Adams, a friend who is also a professional artist and photographer. She responded to my request for photographs of the interior of Andalusi houses in the medina of Tetouan by lugging a huge camera and other equipment with her all the way from the United States and spending a whole day taking photographs. She did it all so unquestioningly, generously, and understandingly, with complete faith in my project, that I was deeply touched and thus really motivated to bring the project to conclusion. For taking the time to respond to my queries concerning such matters as Andalusi music and girls’ schools, showing me around his beautiful Andalusi-Moroccan house in the medina of Tetouan, and inviting



Acknowledgments

●

Acknowledgments

me into his extensive library, with whose books he was very generous, I am most grateful to Abdeslam Seffar. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Nabil Matar who encouraged me to do a book on these tales and later pointed me very much in the right direction concerning some of the sources that needed to be consulted. I am also grateful to Amyn Sajoo for suggesting possible publishers for the book, among them Palgrave Macmillan. I am also grateful to Valerie Kennedy for proof-reading some of the chapters and giving me very helpful feedback, as I am grateful to members of the English department in Rabat, particularly Fatima Zohra Lamrani and Taieb Belghazi for their encouragement and kind suggestions. Concerning books that had to be obtained one way or another on the spur of the moment I appreciate the help of Hilal Al Hilali and Afaf Hamzaoui. I am particularly grateful to the reviewer who reviewed the first three chapters of my book for Palgrave Macmillan and provided me with some very helpful feedback and relevant bibliography. My thanks go also to Lee Norton and Brigitte Shull for being patient with me and for their help throughout this project. My heartfelt thanks go to my husband, Mansour El Hilali, for his encouragement and moral support throughout, and for his help with all the technicalities associated with this book—which escaped me, especially those relating to such matters as diacritics and indexing.



x

D

iacritics, apart from those used in quotes from other sources and the references, have been used sparingly. The final h representing tā’ marbūta was dropped where it is silent but was retained as t when pronounced. Frequently used standard Arabic terms that can be looked up online were retained without diacritics but appear in italics: e.g. muwashshah, zajal, kharja, taifa, qaid, qibla, and so on. Arabic names in recent (twentieth-century) publications are reproduced in their Romanized form: e.g. Abdullah Laroui, Moulay Ahmed Lukili, and so on. The original tales were told in the Moroccan vernacular with a Tetouani accent. In the English translation they are sprinkled with some of the original vocabulary that attempts to retain their unique f lavor. However, to inscribe the vernacular is to write what is not writable with the tools at hand. Hence, the following scheme was devised: darija terms were first written in English as close to the pronunciation of the Tetouani accent as possible (e.g. mhamsa, metmora, gellas, gnawi). This introduces the vowels and consonants such as e, o, and hard g etc. where appropriate but not found in standard Arabic. Only once this was done were the diacritics added where necessary to distinguish between the different consonants (i.e. mhams a, metmora) and long vowels from the short ones (i.e. gellās, gnāwi¯ ). Most of the darija vocabulary is identifiable by those familiar with the standard Arabic (e.g. mitqāl for mithqāl, ida for ’ idha, metmora for matmūra). However, unlike that in the rest of Morocco, the Tetouani accent (like the Lebanese and the Syrian one) substitutes hamza for qāf. Since this aspect of the Moroccan darija is limited only to Tetouan (and Fez) and it would have made some terms difficult to recognize (’Ur’ān for Qur’ān, ’Anā‘a for Qnā‘a . . .) for most readers of standard Arabic, the qāf was retained. To further limit the use of diacritics, Arabic names in the tales were written simply: Ali for ‘Ali¯ , Aisha for ‘A’isha, el-Bahiya for al-Bahi¯ ya, and so on.



Notes on Transliteration





I

n The Forgotten Queens of Islam Fatima Mernissi describes the lives and deeds of no less than fifteen Muslim women who ruled within the various Islamic empires, in order to contradict the assertions of those who in 1988 claimed that for a woman such as Benazir Bhutto to rule a Muslim state would be a blasphemy. What intrigues Mernissi most about those women, who actually served as heads of state during different ages and in various parts of the Islamic world, is the fact that they have been forgotten. She wonders how such women could now be completely overlooked by scholars, particularly historians, both in the Arab world and in the West. My project in this book resembles Mernissi’s to the extent that it too involves a conscious effort to “remember” Muslim women who have been forgotten or overlooked within the contemporary context. However, there are notable differences between our two projects. Not only does mine deal with ordinary women, rather than queens, but it also deals with material that can be said to constitute what Diana Taylor terms the “repertoire,” rather than the “archive,”1 such as that to which Mernissi had recourse and which would appear to be more suited to the project of history. Even though Mernissi’s project, unlike mine, conforms to the notion of history that Pierre Nora opposes to memory and is closely associated with “the trace” 2 that can facilitate the task of researchers, this in itself did not ensure that those queens were not actually lost from memory or render Mernissi’s task particularly easy. In fact, those queens as well as their empowering feats had become to a large extent invisible by the time she started her project. If this is the case of real historical women, whose deeds were carefully put down in writing by numerous different



INTRODUCTION

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Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives

scribes and historians through the ages, how much more must it be the case of those women whose deeds have not been put down in writing— whose narratives are confined to a community’s memories—as is the case of the tales that form the subject of this book. The seven tales presented here all belong to the genre that Hasan El-Shamy refers to as “Zaubermärchen, typically assigned to female narrators as a culture specialty (hikayat an-niswan).”3 They were all compiled in Tetouan in the north of Morocco, translated into English, and analyzed from contemporary theoretical perspectives. Their protagonists are Muslim women whose most outstanding feature is their eloquence—which enables them to outwit the men in their lives—and who are revealed to have had more wit and agency than such women are normally credited with, especially within Orientalist discourse. These tales, which have been told by women to audiences made up predominantly of women, not only portray ingenious women protagonists but also contain a wealth of information about the women who have been involved in their narration. Those are the women who, by keeping the memory of the tales alive, have served to safeguard their sense of identity—which was rooted in a distant historical past—even while their narratives have remained, to use Ellen Rothenberg’s words within a different context: “voices of women whose history is largely unknown and uncommemorated.”4 Nevertheless, their tales can be said to constitute kinds of memorials in a community that, like the one to which Martha Norkunas refers, is marked “by the paucity of monuments to women despite their rich presence in the community.”5 Although my project, unlike Mernissi’s, involves texts which are more literary than they are purely historical, such texts are not entirely devoid of historical significance. The memory associated with oral narratives—constituting one form of literature—may appear to distinguish it completely from the field of history, yet there are numerous overlaps between the two fields. Significantly, and as Pierre Nora has noted: “Memory has known only two forms of legitimacy: historical and literary. These have run on parallel tracks but until now have always remained separate. Lately the boundary between the two has blurred.”6 Nora argues that it is history which has more recently come to play the imaginative role that used to be relegated to literature, whose reduced impact he appears to lament. The tales under study here appear to confirm the blurring of boundaries between the historical and the literary. However here it is the literary which can be said to have taken on the task of the historical in that even while remaining primarily oral these literary narratives can be said to constitute a “trace” enabling us to find



2

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3

our way back to certain aspects of a distant historical past. For not only do they afford us intimate glimpses into that past, and particularly into the lives of the women associated with it, but they do so by being couched within a specific literary tradition associated with that past. Concerning this tradition from the distant past, when I was in college I heard that the Courtly Love tradition had come from the Arabs; such a statement was usually made as an aside on the part of the speaker, who would announce it with an air of self-consciousness but as if stating an undisputed fact, which did not need to be elaborated on. Like the forgotten queens of whom Mernissi reminds us, the Arab source of the Courtly Love tradition appears to have been submitted to a form of forgetfulness so that, since the time when I was in college (1969–1973), the fact that this tradition came from the Arabs appears to have been called into question.7 This raises interesting questions about why the fact that the Arabs may have contributed to the Courtly Love tradition or the fact that there have been queens in the Muslim world appear to have been submitted to a kind of structural forgetting, like the tales that form the corpus of this book, and the women associated with them reduced to a notion of Muslim women as harem-bound and ineffectual. Of Memory, History, and Postcolonial Feminism Having survived for centuries within the collective memories of well-defined communities of women in the north of Morocco, the tales that form the subject of this book appear to have only started to be forgotten—in some ways even dismembered—in the twentieth century. What are the causes of such forgetting? Are they the same that resulted in the forgetting of fairy tales in the West? Features such as literacy and the rise of a print culture, the spread of globalization and the importance it accords to television and other media can be equated with the transformation of the whole culture of orality, associated with fairy tales in the West and with the women’s tales in this study. However, these factors, which had a great impact on the oral culture in the West, did not come about in quite the same way in places like Morocco; nor did they come about at quite the same time. Pierre Nora has commented on the displacement of memory by history in the West: “This uprooting of memory, its eradication by the conquering force of history, has had the effect of a revelation, as if an ancient bond of identity had been broken, calling into question something once taken for granted: the close fit between history and




●


memory.”8 Whereas Nora qualifies history as “the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer” so that history for him becomes “a representation of the past,” he views memory as “a phenomenon of emotion and magic,” which he perceives to be much more directly associated with everyday living.9 It is true that the conquering force of history in the West was closely associated with inventions such as that of print, which Walter Benjamin has associated with the dissemination of the novel that he claimed was “[t]he earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling.”10 This both resembles and differs from what happened to the tales that form the subject of this book, which would be difficult to situate entirely within either of the categories designated as exclusive of each other by Nora: history and memory. For, to the extent that they appear to reconstruct “what is no longer” the tales can be said to conform to the paradigm of history and to the extent that they constitute “a phenomenon of emotion and magic” closely associated with everyday living they conform to that of memory. These tales that have been transmitted orally from generation to generation by communities of women instead of conveniently opposing memory to history appear to draw our attention rather to the ways in which history and memory overlap and intertwine with each other. Like Nora’s lieux de mémoire, the tales enable us to both remember and understand a time and place associated with a remote historical past. This place is al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), with which the communities of women originally involved in their narration were intimately linked and from which they had been exiled. The “remembering” involved here is not so much the kind that Edward Casey discusses in such a detailed manner in his Remembering;11 it is less a matter of individual memory than it is a matter of collective efforts to remember a distant past way of life and in the process to keep it alive. Moreover, some of those involved in the narration, particularly those belonging to later generations, would not themselves have experienced that past directly but would have nevertheless perceived it as part of their roots. So what they were doing conforms to one variation of Casey’s contention that “[t]o remember is to relive the past. . . . [I]t is a matter of actively re-entering the ‘no longer lived worlds’ of that which is irrevocably past.”12 The aspect of memory with which these tales are most closely associated is memorization, which is one way that the communities of women involved managed to remember the distant past and in the process to keep it alive. Such feats of memorization have characterized other



4

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5

ancient cultures such as that of Greece where according to Casey, “[m]emory was a thematic, even an obsessive, concern.” To insure the survival of their rich oral culture the Greeks “depended on concerted, disciplined remembering” and were “forced to rely on the memorial powers of individuals, especially on those who had received special training.” Their great poets were “mnemonic masters who had no written texts to aid their memories.” In such a culture, among other things, memorization in Casey’s words “was a way of getting (and staying) in touch with a past that would otherwise be consigned to oblivion; it was a fateful fending off of forgetfulness.”13 Similar feats of memory have also characterized the Arab world where the Qur’an continued to be memorized even after it had been written down and where traditions associated with orality continue to coexist with those associated with literacy even today. The fending off of forgetfulness is what the women who told these tales were also involved in; what they were attempting to avoid forgetting were not so much specific personages such as the queens whom Mernissi set out to retrieve, but more a distant sense of cultural identity. What they managed to keep alive were not so much the details of what had actually occurred centuries before, but more the aura associated with a certain way of life that was captured in the form of tales— consisting of texts with distinctive features closely associated with a distinctive past tradition. The oral narratives that the women have managed to keep alive may be difficult to designate as historical; however although they cannot be said to constitute a written “trace,” they do comprise an “embodied practice” that, according to Diana Taylor, “offers a way of knowing,”14 and can help us to come to terms with the past. This kind of knowing is what Taylor associates with the “repertoire,” which includes “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” that can supplement the written “traces” in enabling “scholars to trace traditions and influences.”15 Women’s tales within the same tradition as those that appear in this book would have existed even before the exile from al-Andalus when the need to safeguard one’s sense of identity began to be forced upon those Muslim women by such historical phenomena as the Inquisition. By memorizing them, those communities of women enabled that remembering to continue taking place from generation to generation both before and after the actual exile. Pierre Nora has noted: “The transition from memory to history requires every social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past.”16 This need becomes even more pronounced among those




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who have been exiled from their past homes and sense of identity and for whom the memory becomes closely associated with the history. Given the significance of such tales, then, how did it come about that they started to be forgotten?17 The factors that brought about the demise of storytelling in the West started to impact the Maghreb only much later. These tales cannot be said to have been simply uprooted by the novel writing and history that the print culture made possible; for although compilations of stories and history were by no means unknown in the Maghreb—which produced both Sheikh Nefzaoui (ca. 1520) and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)—the kind of story writing and history that were eventually disseminated in Europe through print only began to take hold in this part of the world much later, when independence, in Nora’s words, “swept into history societies only recently roused from their ethnological slumbers by the rape of colonization.”18 The process in these formerly colonized societies was therefore different from that which took place in Europe in that it did not so much grow naturally out of their societies as it was imposed on them by a colonialism which moreover set out to denigrate much that it perceived as indigenous culture. Such a transformation did not begin to occur in places such as Morocco until the twentieth century when the women’s tales that form the corpus of this book not only began to be superseded by the numerous short stories and novels emanating from Europe and the Middle East, but their oral form as well as the kind of women they depicted and with whom they were closely associated began to be looked down upon. A whole new discourse came into usage, which set out to designate such women as third-world women and as Oriental. A good example of how Maghrebi Muslim women were Orientalized by the colonial powers appears in Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, where he studies certain colonial postcards depicting such women.19 So the fact that the twentieth century was characterized by the colonial domination of North African subjects as well as those of other African and Asian countries, with consequences as devastating in some cases as those of the Inquisition itself, cannot be overlooked in this context. The colonial process involved, among other things, an endeavor to erase native cultural output and to inscribe the colonizer’s own representations of the native over them. This is the framework that has been defined by the postcolonial feminist theorists Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who have demonstrated the extent to which the currently dominant Western discourse, which is heir to colonial discourse, has served to silence the voices of those designated as third-world women



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and to perceive them mostly in terms of the stereotypical image it has constructed of them. Gayatri Spivak, in her early essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 20 elaborates on how such (mis)representation of third-world women by the dominant imperial discourse actually works. She argues that one of the means used by Western imperialists to construct an image of themselves as upholding the values of good society worldwide is by claiming to protect the women of other cultures, which she describes as follows: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” 21 Such imperialist techniques, in fact, do not allow third-world women to speak for themselves but end up silencing them. The process of silencing that Spivak refers to is of a discursive nature; third-world women, or Muslim women in this case, become the objects of that discourse within which they are deprived of a subject position. Within the space associated with Western discourse Muslim women tend to become objects of signification, which rarely conform to the actual women in question. The latter, as is the case of historical Muslim women, have in fact always had spaces from within which they could speak—which existed outside the context of Western discourse, even apart from the popular oral tradition that is the subject of this book. Such spaces have included the highly learned adab written in standard Arabic, a tradition that included such renowned women writers as Wallāda bint al-Mu‘tasim and H afsa of Guadalajara. 22 Yet Muslim women’s voices are difficult to hear from within the space associated with the dominant Western discourse whose aim, as Spivak has pointed out, is to reinforce the logic of Western economic expansion and not in any way allow the subaltern to speak. 23 This makes the task of representing them within the present global context somewhat problematic. How does one set about representing such Muslim women by using a language that is closely implicated in imperial discourse and within which such third-world women’s narratives can be said to constitute what Spivak terms a “subtext”? The subtext becomes difficult to read not only because it has been covered up by what she calls the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism,” 24 and the Eurocentric attitude associated with it, but also because as an oral practice—one moreover strongly suggestive of an historically distant feminist tradition—it runs the risk of being further marginalized, even on the part of some feminist scholars. Western feminists, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, have tended to discursively homogenize the social and historical circumstances of the so-called third-world women and to thus reduce them to the “Other” of Western women. It is in “Under Western Eyes” that she




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demonstrates how Western feminists have discursively colonized the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby representing them as a composite singular “third world woman.” She designates the representation of the “third world woman” as a monolithic subject in Western feminist texts, by maintaining that such colonial construction of the third-world woman is basically discursive. 25 Feminist scholarship, which Mohanty qualifies as political, falls within the domain of hegemonic discourses and serves to create an arbitrary relation between “women as historical subjects” and the “representation of Woman”—which serves to colonize the “material and historical heterogeneities” of third-world women, thereby demonstrating the “authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.” 26 As Mohanty puts it: “Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of ‘third world feminisms’ must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms, and the formulation of autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies. The first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second, one of building and constructing.” 27 Theorists such as Spivak and Mohanty have already brilliantly carried out the first project. Rather than just concentrating on deconstruction and critique of such hegemonic discourse, my aim in this book is more directly involved with the process of reconstructing third-world women’s narratives—ones that furthermore strongly suggest their feminist concerns and that have been reduced to subtexts in the colonial process. This involves the recollection of precolonial narratives, which have been handed down from mothers to daughters and which are associated with specific communities of women who have been well grounded in a particular geographical, historical, and cultural context, and whose translation into the dominant discourse presents obvious problems. Translating the Tales: Another Form of Re-Membering Translation, even between two languages that I speak fluently: Moroccan darija (dialectic Arabic) and English, has always appeared to me to be an impossible task. The connotations and moods generated by one language can never be captured in the other and the complete difference between the two contexts has always appeared to me to be impossible to traverse. Perhaps one of the broader aims of this book is an attempt to bridge the gap between those two different worlds, each of which forms



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an integral part of me. However, by translating the tales, or retelling them in English, I am in effect attempting to enable the subaltern to speak from within the linguistic space of the dominant discourse. And this, as Spivak has so well demonstrated, is a contradiction in terms; for how can the subaltern take on the role of subject within the discourse of the West? Moreover, how would those women, who show that they were quite adept at revealing their real identities to the princes and Sultans in the tales, have felt about revealing themselves to those who have “othered” them? What I have set out to do involves, therefore, the daunting task of placing such tales within the domain of the global discourse, which has effectively reduced such narratives to subtexts. Furthermore, such a task involves the transformation of the tales into an altogether different context, making them comprehensible to an audience for which they were never intended—an audience among whom, moreover, there are those who persist in viewing such women in denigrating ways. Those submerged stories, tales whose aura has remained vitally alive in my memory even though the actual details have been forgotten, are what I approach, in greater depth, by having recourse to contemporary theory. This for me is part of the dominant discourse into which I have attempted to transfer the tales rather than an effort to position myself as a third-world postcolonial critic making use of first world post-structuralist theory. Such theory, in fact, has not rendered it any easier for me to come to terms with the connotations generated by the two different languages at issue here nor has it facilitated the groping for words that this project has entailed. By way of example, I would like to refer to two terms that are of central importance to my topic; the term “Moor” and the term “harem,” which do not appear to me to refer realistically to Moroccan culture. Within Western discourse people from my part of the world have been designated as the “Moors”; even at times in the historical past as “Moriscos” (or little Moors), women in this case tending to be subsumed under the male designation, which tends to be used in denigrating ways. This is the case of Leslie Fiedler’s reference to Diderot’s statement on Richardson in which he claims: ‘It is he who carries the torch to the back of the cave. . . . He blows upon the glorious phantom who presents himself at the entrance of the cave; and the hideous Moor whom he was masking reveals himself.’ Surely, ‘the hideous Moor’ is a striking symbol of the demonic in ourselves, which the Enlightenment inadvertently discovered in its quest for light. 28




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What is it about the Moor that makes him appear to be hideous to Diderot, and why does he symbolize the demonic in the European self for Fiedler? What is it about the people he refers to that so obsessed the European imagination, producing a feeling of simultaneous attraction and repulsion? Was this simply a matter of cultural interaction, as Ania Loomba posits? She demonstrates how “Morris dancing, which might be regarded as quintessentially English, evolves from Moorish dances brought back to Europe through the Crusades.” 29 As Loomba goes on to explain, the term “Moor” not only became associated with Muslims in general, but also with the racial other or the black person, “as is evident from the term ‘blackamoors,’ ” thus intensifying the “cultural prejudice against both blackness and Islam, each of which was seen to be the handiwork of the Devil.”30 The people thus referred to would have had difficulty identifying with that nomenclature; they thought of themselves as Andalusis (coming from al-Andalus), which is the term that I have used in this book to refer to them. Such a groping with terms, in an effort to avoid the discursive construct of Andalusis in denigrating ways, becomes particularly apparent with respect to Muslim women who have become associated with the “harem” within the Western imaginary. This view of Muslim women has been to a large extent constructed by dominant Western modes of representation. One way that the Western media have contributed to such a construction appears in a comment by Grace Ellison, who notes how shortly before World War I a photograph that she had taken for a London newspaper of the women’s living quarters in what she calls a Turkish family’s harem, which in fact had little to distinguish it from a European drawing room of the same period, was returned to her with the comment that “[t]he British public would not accept this as a picture of a Turkish harem.”31 In other words, the only representation of a “harem” that the paper considered appropriate was one that conformed to the stereotypical image that the British public had constructed of such a place; therefore, the London paper refused the real representation of the household where actual Turkish women lived. The term “harem” is, in fact, extraneous to the Andalusi and Moroccan contexts; it was used more within the Ottoman Empire,32 (1292–1922) which came into power later than al-Andalus (711–1492), or the Western Islamic empire that included both al-Andalus and Morocco (929–1234). Thus “harem” is now used much more predominantly in the Eastern Mediterranean regions than in Morocco, to designate the women’s quarters within households.33 Given such discrepancies, how does one go about translating, for a contemporary global audience, the concerns of those distant Moroccan



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women of Andalusi origin as they are enacted within precolonial tales, without allowing “[t]he process of translation involved . . . [to] entail varying degrees of violence”?34 The violence at issue here includes what Spivak refers to as “epistemic violence,” which she qualifies as “the remotely orchestrated, far-f lung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.”35 Spivak, for whom “translation is the most intimate act of reading,”36 argues in “The Politics of Translation”37 that there is something like a relationship between translating from third-world languages and postcolonial reading as translation. My own reading and analysis of these third-world texts is meant to supplement their translation in the hope that by analyzing them in terms of contemporary theoretical approaches I will render them more visible to a contemporary planetary audience. Yet, such a reading and translation still face the formidable task of having to depict the women protagonists of these tales, as well as the women who told the tales, as very much at the center of their world for they could not have conceived of the reshuff ling of the episteme that would reduce their culture to the status of the “Other.” This is why the act of translation necessarily “desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy”38 and thus attempts to dismantle the stereotypes. The kind of errors of translation I have tried to avoid are ones like those that have been committed by such transcribers of European fairy tales as the Grimm brothers and Charles Perrault—who gathered the oral tales they transcribed from the women who told them, and whom Perrault designates as “Mother Goose.” Even though such tales were not only told by women, but tended to narrate the fates of women, including “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” the more liberating potential of such women-centered narratives was to a large extent ironed out by the male transcribers of the tales who wished to make them conform more to what was deemed appropriate by the genteel patriarchal society of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries in the case of Perrault and that of the nineteenth century in the case of the Grimm brothers.39 Similarly, and as Husain Haddawy suggests, some of the original European translators of The One Thousand and One Nights went to such extremes as to concoct tales from a combination of the tales in the Nights—as is the case of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” which he does not believe formed part of the original collection.40 Through such processes the translators may have attempted to render those tales more in accordance with their society’s perception of the Orient and in the process ended up opposing them to the supposedly more authentic literature written in the West.




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The written word would appear to contribute to more precision to the extent that it allows for recording a narrative exactly as it is told. Yet in fact it is not as reliable as it appears to be; it too is liable to distortions. By putting a narrative down in writing some transcribers have tended to freeze it into one form, which was originally not meant for all audiences. Such methods not only run the risk of transforming the narrative into what the transcribers consider to be proper, as was the case with Perrault for instance, but of leaving out alternative versions. The women’s tales in this book do not conform to the norms which, according to Walter Ong, make writing an “imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself even without the aid of etymologies.”41 Furthermore, unlike the printed text that has “created a new sense of the private ownership of words,”42 the oral-based tales were not meant to belong to any one individual, who could use them as capital assets, but to the community at large—the community of women in this case. Yet, although their tales differ in their thematic concerns from the postmodernist texts that, according to Frederic Jameson, conform to “the cultural logic of late capitalism,”43 they contain features reminiscent of postmodern strategies and lend themselves well to the contemporary theoretical approaches associated with the dominant discourse. One thematic feature of the tales that I have attempted not to transform in my translation of the tales is the centrality of the women protagonists, who are revealed to have both wit and agency. This feature, which distinguishes the tales from both those told by Scheherazade and those transcribed by the Grimms and Perault, is one of the most characteristic features of the tales. Thus in the Moroccan version of Cinderella, called “Aisha Rmida” (or Aisha of the Cinders), it is the young woman’s own wit and ingenuity that enable her to overcome her dilemma rather than the intervention of any fairy. Within such tales, according to Mernissi “the cleverer sex is rarely the one that religious authorities would expect. If Muslim laws give men the right to dominate women, the opposite seems to be true in the oral tradition.”44 The tales in the oral tradition to which Mernissi refers are the ones that she remembers from growing up in Fez, which are similar to the ones I remember from growing up in Tetouan and which I have tried to recollect for this book. They have been told by women, about women and to an audience made up predominantly of women. The women who told such tales within the confines of the households in the medina knew whom they were addressing and so could be daring in their narration, which remained a very flexible medium that could be transformed according to the audience that happened to be present at any one



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sitting. This does not mean that they attempted to transgress the norms of what was considered morally correct by their society; that does not appear to have been the case at all. However, their oral tales did allow for more f lexibility than that ordained by the tyranny of the written word. In the process of translating the tales one formal feature that struck me was the way the dialogues at the heart of the tales tended to rhyme, and the fact that so many translations of tales in general seemed to overlook such rhyme.45 I was not sure at first of how significant the rhyme was, but I set out to try and recapture it. The attempt proved to be more daunting than I had foreseen; some of the rhyme schemes in the different tales, which use a variety of rhyme patterns, including internal rhymes, proved very difficult to recapture in translation. What I have done is in fact to suggest to the reader that the dialogue is in verse, while remaining as faithful to the original meaning as I could. However, it was the attempt to pay more attention to this poetry at the heart of the tales that compelled me to look at them more closely, using the tools available to me from literary studies. Only once I started analyzing the tales did I begin to perceive how rich and complex they really were, and to note that they bore striking similarities to the canonical texts that constituted the corpus of English literature. Why did “Ali and a Spinner Too?” for instance, contain features so reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or As You Like It? The more the tales yielded to my analysis the more I became convinced that they formed part of a broader and richer tradition than the storytellers, who could still remember them, were aware of. Collecting the Tales: Also a Form of Re-Membering Ever since I was a little girl I had heard bits and pieces of these tales, referred to in the Moroccan darija as khrā’ if ’ (pl. of khrāfa), and closely associated with the women who inhabited the households of the medina in Tetouan. These are the tales that I attempted to go back to Tetouan and compile more recently as a researcher. However, collecting them, another form of re-membering what had been dismembered, did not prove to be as easy as I had expected. I had to begin by simply feeling my way around at first, trying to distinguish them from all the other kinds of tales that exist in Morocco. In fact there are many different kinds of tales in Morocco, as there are in much of the Arab world. Nor is it easy, for someone like myself who, unlike Hasan El-Shamy, is not a specialist in the field, to distinguish between them with any degree of




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ease or to be sure of the background from which they come. Even if I limit myself only to those that are centered on women and leave out the male-centered tales such as the vast corpus of Jah ā tales (that archetypal trickster who appears in a wide variety of tales), for example, there are still many different kinds. In the Women’s Studies graduate program at Mohammed V University a few years ago, I supervised a few DESA (equivalent of MA) theses by young women who went out to search for some of these tales. This was in Rabat and none of them came up with the tales that I was looking for. However, from what they came up with it became evident that there is a range of different women’s tales in Morocco. For instance the tales that appeared to be more distinctively Amazigh (North Africans referred to in the West as Berbers), which one of the young women collected, were quite different from the ones in which I was interested. Although they too at times center on women protagonists they tend to have other distinguishing features, such as the inclusion of animals as characters. These were different again from the kind of animal fables that appear to have come from the Indian or Persian traditions via The Thousand and One Nights. I also began to distinguish features which set apart the tales from rural areas that tend to contain a ghoul or ghoula (ogres), of whom the central character has to be particularly wary. Such inclusion of animals as well as of ghouls was lacking in the tales that I was collecting and that I was beginning to perceive as emanating not only from urban centers but from specific urban centers such as Fez and Tetouan. Thus the tale known in Tetouan as “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” was one that was also known in Fez where it tended to be called “Aisha the Merchant’s Daughter.” The tales that I was interested in tended to be set, as is the case with Aisha’s tale, in the kind of houses that exist in those medinas with the open courtyards and in which the terraces in the roof constitute specifically women’s spaces. And since such houses are representative of Andalusi architecture I began to suspect that those tales, which have been told in such towns as Fez and Tetouan, both of which have a substantial Andalusi background, were of Andalusi origin. As regards their Andalusi background, one major difference between the two places is that the Andalusi immigrants to the much older city of Fez, who were limited to only one section of the city, started going there a long time before they started going to Tetouan. The latter was rebuilt in the fifteenth century by Andalusi immigrants and was inhabited for a long time by a population made up exclusively of Andalusis, where it would have been easier to maintain an Andalusi way of life. Eventually I limited myself to the tales from Tetouan, not only because I knew it better and thought it



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would be easier to collect the tales there but also by way of limiting the context of the tales. I started collecting these tales almost too late, after the process of forgetting had set in and many of the women who used to narrate them had died. At the beginning I simply tried to follow the vague memories I had of some of the tales from my childhood, which I wished to preserve before they completely disappeared. Trying to find women who could remember them and share with me what they remembered proved to be more difficult than I had foreseen. Some of the women who promised to come up with a tale when I explained to them that I was conducting a research on the tales would come up with one that I was later to find came from a book and that moreover had what they considered to be a good moral. Many of the women I approached were reluctant to be associated with the tales; they reminded me that they had gone to school and had read books when they were children both in Spanish and in Arabic lest I should mistake them for being illiterate. Some of them pointed out that such tales had been told by the descendants of the former black slaves who had been brought to Tetouan from central Africa and most of whom had passed away in the beginning of the twentieth century. Others felt there was money to be made from the tales and were unwilling to share what they had, which would eventually reveal itself to be garbled versions of a variety of tales. Some of the tales I have collected are really just fragments of the originals, as is the case with “Aisha Jarma.” The women whom I asked about this tale could remember the name and the fact that there was such a tale, though not the tale itself. One woman, who remembered that there was a tale by that name from her childhood, told me that when she had tried to act smart as a child the grown-ups would tell her not to do that; that she was not Aisha Jarma after all! The process of connecting the different fragments of a tale, often collected from different sources, can be risky. One older lady, in her eagerness to appease me and my persistent questions about the tales, had mixed up “Aisha Jarma” with the tale called “Lawza el-Bhiya.” She was convinced that it was Lawza el-Bhiya who had posed the condition in her marriage contract that the prince should build her a room on top of the court and had ended up taking the prince back home with her in a trunk. But I, or rather the five-year-old child that still lingered somewhere in me, seemed to remember there was a candy bride in the ending of “Lawza el-Bhiya.” I could not remember any of the dialogue, or the details of what actually happened at the end, but I did remember that candy bride. Finally we found another woman who remembered the details of that




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ending, in which a candy bride did in fact figure. This solved the problem of “Lawza el-Bhiya” but not of “Aisha Jarma,” which apparently contains at least three different incidents in which Aisha solves the problems of those who bring their cases to her husband and proves to be a better judge than the Sultan and of which I have been able to gather only one. While some of the tales I have collected appear to be more complete than others, none of them is as long as it would originally have been. I have been told that some of the tales were so long that they could not be told entirely in one evening and had to be told over two or even more consecutive evenings. This suggests that the tales as they now stand constitute the bare bones of the original narratives, and much of the f lesh has been either forgotten or considered superf luous. Thus, the section in “The Female Camel” where the old woman goes to the royal palace to cure the princess would have been extended considerably by adding the stories of all the prominent male physicians who also had gone to the court to cure the princess but who all had failed in their endeavors. Similarly the beginning of “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” would have been extended considerably by contrasting her with a number of other sisters who would have been confronted by the prince’s queries but would not have known how to respond to them as eloquently as Aisha does. The group of seven tales I have compiled from the accounts of a number of women in Tetouan can be said to constitute a repertoire. Except for “Who’ll Buy a Word,” they all tell the stories of women protagonists who come from all the different social classes. These extend from the princess in “The Female Camel” to the numerous middle-class women such as “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” or “Lawza el-Bhiya,” to the working-class women such as “Aisha Jarma” and finally to the jāriya in “Woman as the Source of Good”—a kind of indentured servant who was a singer. These different women represent, to some extent, the women who were originally involved in the storytelling itself, who constituted the communities of women, consisting of both literate upper-class women and illiterate working-class women and servants, who lived in the big households where these tales have been told. Such women in the past would have spoken the vernacular—the Moroccan darija in this case—as they still do now, and even those who could read and write would have had a considerable amount of practice retaining large segments of texts to memory, such as the sūras of the Qur’an, which has always been recited by both men and women. Coming from such a tradition, the women would have had no trouble retaining the



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narratives in their memories; one feature of the tales that would have helped them to remember is the fact that there are rhymed lyrics in the tales, which make it easier to memorize. This is similar to the “systemic meters (e.g. hexameters)” used by the ancient Greek bards as a form of “mnemotechnics,” which according to Edward Casey “were sorely needed in view of the taxing tasks to which the bard’s memory was submitted. . . . The memorization of such verses . . . was the sole means of keeping an entire body of collectively held lore alive.”46 Concerning these tales, it is not only the rhythm but also the rhyme that constituted a mnemotechnic. In fact many of the women, whom I approached about the tales, still speak in rhyme—threading what they say with sayings or with verses of poetry, even with some of the dialogue from the tales. Hence, while collecting the tales, I listened to an older woman’s version of “Aisha Jarma” in which Aisha tells the khat tāba who comes to visit her about her brother that “[h]e has gone to deliver the air, in exchange for what is fair.” Following our attempt to remember the story, we started talking about the sad way that some old wooden Moroccan furniture was being exchanged for newer versions covered with formica. After a while the woman looked at me significantly and she said: “We’re giving up what is fair, in exchange for empty air.” Tetouan, from where the tales in this book were all compiled, is still in many ways an Andalusi city since it was rebuilt from scratch in the fifteenth century by immigrants from al-Andalus. Some features in the tales suggest sociopolitical set-ups similar to those that existed both in al-Andalus at the time of the taifa states and in Tetouan in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries.47 For the women who told these tales originally, storytelling appears to have been not only a source of entertainment but a means of both remembering the distant past and also articulating their concerns about the trauma of exile and their position as women trying to come to terms with their new circumstances. Notions of exile seem to be interwoven into the tales, for although they form part of the oral tradition they can be seen as “a communal experience; [where] writing participates in the constitution of a community.”48 Furthermore, by keeping in mind the fact that the Moroccan and Andalusi contexts from which these tales emanate never formed part of the Ottoman Empire, with which the term “harem” is more closely associated, it becomes easier to appreciate the fact that in this context, rather than the “[r]ivalry between wives and concubines [which] meant that poison was ‘the active agent’ in many stories of harem life,”49 what becomes evident is the collaboration between the women involved in the stories, who were trying to come to terms with their new circumstances in the light of their




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past heritage. These storytellers actually formed part of communities of women involved in such activities as spinning, making music, cooking, and storytelling as well as the transformation into ceremonials of all their weddings, births, and even deaths. Their tales present to some extent an effort to recreate the sense of home they had left behind them in al-Andalus, which included the houses to which some claimed to still have the keys. This hopeful vision is evident in the very formula they use to begin their tales, which is not the traditional “kān httā mā kān” (there was until there was not) normally associated with tales in the Eastern tradition. These women, for whom the tales appear to have been ways of recapturing the past, insist on beginning their tales with the formula “kān httā kān” (there was until there was). However, some of the broader concerns of such tales can only be appreciated once one begins to truly understand their context. The Andalusi Context Within the contemporary theoretical framework not only have literary texts come to be seen as valid conveyors of historical processes, but their meanings also have come to be perceived as residing as much in their contexts as in the texts themselves. This is as much the case of more popular oral narratives as it is of the canonical written texts. In fact, one of the outstanding features of Andalusi culture, which characterized both al-Andalus and such Andalusi towns in Morocco as Tetouan, is the way it synthesizes between its highly learned component and its more popular one. Thus Tetouan prides itself in having numerous well-known scholars who have written extensively on a number of subjects ranging from travel narratives to history. These include Muhammad as-Saffar, author of the famous eighteenth-century account of a Moroccan delegation’s trip to the French court of Louis Philipe, where he accompanied the qaid Ash‘āsh (also from Tetouan) who had been appointed by the Sultan Mulay Abderrahmane as his ambassador to that court.50 A more recent Tetouani scholar is Muhammad Daoud (1901–1984) who has written a history of Tetouan in ten volumes. Tetouan has also produced some of the best known compilers and practitioners of Andalusi music. These include al-H ā’ik who compiled his famous Kunnāsh in the eighteenth century, which was edited for publication more recently by another Tetouani, Malek Bennouna.51 There are also well-known twentieth-century musicians including Mohammed Ben Larbi Temsamani (1919–2001) and Abdessadeq Cheqara (1931–1998) as well as women musicians such as Mennana el-Kharraz (1921–1984) and



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Alia el-Mjahed (1941–), who in their own way did much to preserve the spirit of Andalusi music—which is one outstanding cultural output that still links Tetouan with its Andalusi roots. It was between the fifteenth- and seventeenth centuries that the successive waves of immigrants who settled in such towns as Tetouan came to Morocco from al-Andalus. Those immigrants brought with them an extensive culture and way of life that are still evident today in such features as the Andalusi architecture, which distinguishes the buildings of the medina, as well as in the tales that, although they are being quickly forgotten, are still told there. These immigrants were later arrivals than the Andalusi émigrés whom Abdellah Laroui describes as having introduced “court etiquette, formalism and diplomacy”52 to the various Maghrebi courts of the fourteenth century. They were forced into exile and those who settled in Tetouan, which they in fact rebuilt from scratch, began arriving there between 1483 and 1485.53 They came initially from the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the only Muslim kingdom that had preserved its autonomy after the rest of al-Andalus was taken over by the kingdom of Castile in the early thirteenth century. During the next two centuries Granada developed its own culture and art form, known in art history as Mudejar—the name designating the Muslims who remained in the parts of Spain conquered by the Catholics. Numerous features of that Nas rid and Mudejar culture can be found in Tetouan where, significantly, much of it has been preserved by women. As Miège, Benaboud, and Erzini point out, the style of dress of the Mudejar women of Granada is still evident in the large hats, short coats, and gaiters of the jbāla women (Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the North Western Rif Mountains) in the countryside around Tetouan as are certain features of Nasrid jewelry that still form part of Tetouani jewelry.54 Similarly, designs of Nas rid and Mudejar embroidery can still be found in some traditional Tetouani embroidery, the only instance in North Africa where those designs have been preserved.55 It is not surprising then that those Andalusi women, who preserved so many other aspects of their culture, were also the ones to safeguard the tradition of women’s tales—including the name used to refer to them. Thus, whereas in Meknes, for instance, the term used to refer to such tales is hajiya, the term used in Tetouan, is khrāfa (pl. khrā’ if ), a version of khurāfa, where the vowel has been deleted in a manner characteristic of the darija. In fact, it is the term khurāfa (pl. khurāfāt) that, according to Manuela Marín, was used in al-Andalus to denote the tales told in the evenings by women while they were spinning. Both the




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spinning and the storytelling, she points out, were activities specifically associated with women, involving a system of transmitting knowledge, which were considered too lacking in prestige to be incorporated into the written word more closely associated with men.56 The women in Tetouan, like those in al-Andalus, were involved in telling tales at the same time that they spun wool, lint, or silk obtained from silkworms which they raised themselves. Some of the older women from whom I collected the tales told me about their visits as children to some of the households where silkworms were raised. At certain stages in the process, when the worms were breeding, enormous efforts were made to maintain silence in such houses; so doorways were wrapped in cloth to prevent them from banging and children were asked to remain quiet. One of the main gates of the medina of Tetouan is still known as Bāb al-Tūt, outside of which could be found the tūt or mulberry trees whose leaves were used to feed the silkworms. So, did all these ways of doing things, including the storytelling, come from Granada? What we know for sure is that the original immigrants to Tetouan, as stated earlier, did come from Granada. It was these original Mudejar immigrants who, according to Mhammad Benaboud: turned it into a town created in order to welcome Andalusian civilisation. . . . Tetouan’s location offered a strategic position for those exiles, who had little if no rest in pushing back the threat of Christian menace. . . . Taking advantage of the central power vacuum which defined Morocco at the time, they supervised their own administration, creating a city in the image of those they had had to leave.57

The original Mudejar immigrants in Tetouan, whose settling in Morocco was actually greatly facilitated by the Moroccan government of the time, were eventually joined by the so-called Moriscos—those Muslims who had been forcefully baptized at the time of the Inquisition after Granada was conquered by the Catholic kings in 1492, but who secretly preserved their Muslim faith. Eventually they were forcefully, at times even brutally,58 expelled not only from Granada but also from other regions of Spain—particularly from such northern regions as Castille and Aragon59 —in two major waves, first in 1566–1567 and again in 1609–1610.60 Very often the only luggage these later immigrants, who came from different parts of the Iberian Peninsula, could bring with them to their new homes in Morocco were their songs and their tales. 61 These art forms, representative of different regions of al-Andalus, had



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managed to survive the havoc wrought by the Inquisition precisely because they were oral and could therefore be carried from place to place as a form of invisible luggage. Had they been committed exclusively to the written form they may have been burned by the Inquisitors along with the thousands of books in Arabic that were burned at the time, and we would have been left with no trace of them. The fact that the women, such as those who safeguarded the tradition of these tales, have been granted a certain measure of importance in societies such as that of Tetouan is partly due to the legacy inherited from al-Andalus—where women had been protected by a very considerate legislation, 62 permitting a large number of them to work not only as midwives and wet nurses but also as calligraphers and teachers, 63 as well as to become writers and poets. Like the women in al-Andalus, the Andalusi Tetouani women, those descendants of different waves of Andalusi immigrants who eventually constituted the bourgeoisie of Tetouan, also became calligraphers, teachers, midwives, and doctors, some of whom were famous for the jbi¯ ra (setting of broken bones) that they mastered.64 Some of them also had a substantial amount of wealth at their disposal enabling them to wield considerable political power as well as to leave endowments for various charitable and religious purposes.65 Moreover, the importance granted to women was not limited to those who have been recognized by historians, such as al-Sayyida al-Hurra (sometimes also referred to as al-Sitt al-Hurra)66 who ruled Tetouan from 1525 to 1542, 67 but also to less well-known women, including the jawāri¯ , 68 who tended to be more like indentured servants than like slaves. As in al-Andalus, to be a jāriya was not necessarily to be looked down upon.69 In some respects, it is difficult to tell whether it was better to be a free woman or a jāriya.70 What becomes evident is that both led more rewarding and versatile lives than the image of the harem-bound Muslim woman would suggest. Both the upper-class women who became poets and the jawāri¯ , who were expert musicians and often took part in poetic gatherings contributing their own improvised verses to those of the professional male poets, belonged to a long and rich literary tradition produced by Muslim women. This tradition appears to have greatly inf luenced the tales, which could have been told by some of the same women involved in those musical and poetry gatherings. Although no specific author—or date—can be ascribed to them, they contain a wealth of information about the women who originally told them—making their narratives thus constitute if not histories as such, then “systems of signification by which we make sense of the past.” 71




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What has to be kept in mind is that these oral-based narratives emanated from a culture that was not primarily based on orality or in any way illiterate, but was one that did not perceive literacy and orality in terms of binaries. The culture that gave rise to the women’s tales also represented for the Europeans of the Middle Ages the highest form of expertise “on high-tech subjects that were just beginning to be apprehended and coveted outside the Arabic-reading world: astronomical tables, astrology, calendrical calculations, astrolabes.” 72 The expertise of the Andalusis was not limited to the sphere of science and mathematics but also extended to matters of a more literary nature, enabling them to contribute extensively to the elitist adab in classical Arabic as well as to the newly emerging imaginary forms of literature in Europe. The Andalusi writers and scholars displayed knowledge of an astonishingly varied range of topics and could transgress the boundaries between a diversity of fields. Thus Ibn H azm’s famous work on the nature of love called Tawq al-hamāma (known in English as The Ring of the Dove), which appeared in the eleventh century, demonstrates how various inf luences converged to form a perfect blend of sacred learning and erotic knowledge. Expressed in a superbly poetic form, Ibn H azm’s treatise on love represents one of the best-known written versions of the Courtly Love tradition produced when al-Andalus was at the height of its power. In the twelfth century, the Andalusi physician and philosopher, Ibn T ufayl, wrote an allegory titled Hayy ibn Yaqz ān about a child who grows up alone on a desert island and who uses his reason to discover the meaning of truth. This work, which is very reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century Robinson Crusoe, tends to be overlooked as an early predecessor of the novel form. As J.C. Burgel claims: “Although this novel is one of a long series of philosophical allegories and edifying tales (the Arabic term for the genre being tamthi¯ l ) it stands out as unique not only in Arab Andalusia but within medieval Arabic literature as a whole. Medieval Arabic fiction was either popular, or of foreign origin, or both.” 73 It is in such ways that Andalusi culture contributed to both the elitist adab in classical Arabic and to Western literature in general. What these writers accomplished is very much in line with the spirit of the Andalusis, whose great thinkers were concerned with synthesizing between different ways of knowing and affirming the unity between them. Foremost among these was Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, who was able to accomplish this by demonstrating that there is no discrepancy between a theological view of the world and



The Highly Learned Andalusi Culture


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The More Popular Andalusi Culture Both Wallāda’s poetry, which was put down in writing, and the tradition of women’s tales that is of central concern to my project here, are in the process of being forgotten. Although one hopes that the written text can be retrieved more easily, the more popular and oral one is more likely to get lost forever. Yet, this more popular component of Andalusi culture also had a great impact on European civilization. This is the case not only of the Andalusi music, as we shall see, but of even such popular art forms as the tale form itself—which Menocal refers to as the “framed tale.” Many different kinds of tales were known in al-Andalus where “[e]ven the humblest Andalusian Christian, because he could understand spoken Arabic, . . . was able to hear tales that had once been told in Greek or Persian and now were being retold in Arabic, and a thousand and one permutations, from one end of the empire to the other, by the master storyteller herself, Scheherazade.” 75 These tales ended up influencing Western literature through such works as The Priestly Tales of Petrus Alfonse, or “Piers Alfonse” as he was known to Chaucer—the Andalusi Jew who converted to Christianity and traveled to England. His collection of tales, absorbed from his Andalusi background, ended up having an impact on European literature through writers such as Chaucer himself and numerous other writers, “who took the framed tale he had introduced in rudimentary form and ran with it.” 76 The other popular aspect of Andalusi culture, which also had a great impact on European civilization, is the Andalusi music that survives to this day and that harmonizes between the elite and more popular features of that culture. According to Dwight Reynolds this music “ranks as one of the oldest continuously performed art music traditions in the world.” Reynolds goes on to explain that “Although sometimes portrayed as a courtly tradition of the Muslim elite, the medieval song tradition of muwashshahs and zajals, extended across sectarian and social boundaries.” 77 Making use of very sophisticated lyrical poetry and instrumental music, Andalusi music is associated with a whole way of life, which is community based and resonant of a given sense of identity.



that of philosophy. Intellectuals such as Ibn Rushd formed part of the highly literate and learned component of Andalusi culture, which included not only men, but also women—as is the case of the poet, Wallāda, the Muslim woman writer who presided over a literary salon in eleventh-century Europe.74

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The music itself, as well as some of the instruments that have been used to produce it, go back to the almost legendary Ziryāb,78 —who went as a young man to Umayyad Córdoba from Hārūn al-Rashi¯ d’s Abbassid court in Baghdad, taking with him a considerable knowledge of music on which he expanded extensively, developing a whole new school of music in Córdoba. The Andalusi music that he initiated eventually had an impact on European music, which is most evident, as Owen Wright points out, in “the wide range of instruments that medieval Europe acquired from Islamic sources. Here lexical and iconographic evidence comes to the fore. The extensive vocabulary of Arabic origin found not only in Iberian languages but also in French and even English is itself a sufficient indication of cultural indebtedness.” 79 The aspect of Andalusi music that is most closely related to the subject of this book is the poetry that is at the heart of its songs. 80 These are the muwashshah and zajal poems that Reynolds has qualified as “the two strophic vocal genres that emerged uniquely in Muslim Spain.”81 These distinctively Andalusi poetic forms harmonize between the one in the elite standard Arabic—the muwashshah—and the one in the vernacular—the zajal. Even within the muwashshah there is often a kharja, the refrain or final part of the poem, which at times serves a purpose similar to the final couplet in Shakespeare’s sonnets— providing a form of exit that illuminates what may have remained obscure. This kharja often tends to be in the vernacular and in a woman’s voice, even when the rest of the muwashshah is in the standard Arabic and in a male voice. Thus Andalusi music, and more specifically its lyric poetry, can be seen as synthesizing between the elite segments of its society and the more popular ones—bringing together not only women’s voices along with men’s but also those of all the social classes. In this way it enabled all the different social and sectarian groups, those who were highly literate as well as those who may have been illiterate, to take part in this highly creative process. What becomes noteworthy is that the women, including the jawāri¯, were not excluded from this creative communal process that Andalusi music represents. Women have been noticeably involved in these art forms from their very inception in al-Andalus where they were, for instance, often professionally trained in both instrumental and vocal music. The fact that Andalusi women were involved in this music is evident in Andalusi towns in northern Morocco, such as Tetouan and Chefchaouen, which have always had ensembles of Andalusi musicians made up exclusively of women—who have been just as dedicated to and as impassioned by the sophisticated music that they produce as the male



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musicians. Such women would have memorized not only the music, but also the muwashshah and zajal poetry at the heart of the music with which many of those in the audience would have also been intimately acquainted—as they still are today. It is the fact that the tales I collected in Tetouan contain features which clearly associate them with the poetry of Andalusi music that finally confirmed for me their Andalusi identity. What distinguishes the tales is not only the importance they give the women protagonists, who are often depicted as being more resourceful and wittier as well as doing a better job at being scholars or even judges than the Sultans and princes who appear in the tales. They are not distinguished for their physical beauty about which there is little mention, nor for that matter by their social position—as they come from all the different ranks of society. 82 What appears to be their most distinctive feature is the special facility with language that the women have; it is their eloquence which is highlighted in the tales by the fact that what they say is often in verse. Their statements that appear in lyrical form are what bring them to the notice of the princes and Sultans and enable them to both outwit those men and to come to terms with their own identities, which are all noticeably individualized. What is most striking about their lyrics, moreover, is the extent to which they resemble some of the features of Andalusi music, such as the kharja of muwashshah poetry. Thus, in some cases, as is the case in “Lawza el-Bhiya,” the tale ends at the point where the protagonist disarms the prince through an intervention in lyrical form, in which she both summarizes what has happened in the tale and explains to the prince aspects that had remained hidden to him. It is this intervention that reveals to him her true identity, designating her as the most worthy companion for him. Such Muslim women do not come across as the passive victims of a misogynist society, but appear as vital contributors to their culture and active participants in the creation of their own gender roles. The fact that they are in control of their identities is evident in the tales in the way they strategically conceal and reveal aspects of their identity to suit their own ends. These are some of the features that appear to me to be particularly distinctive of the tales, and which have enabled me to qualify them as belonging to the same long and rich tradition as the Andalusi music itself. The emphasis that the Andalusi music places on the words themselves, which are often repeated with variations in melody, to enhance their exquisiteness, is also evident in the tales. This is apparent in “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” in which the linguistic expertise of the protagonists’ exchanges with the prince is highlighted by the fact that each




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time they meet the whole exchange is repeated, and a new couplet is added. Such interventions, which are in verse and are meant to be understood as improvisations, appear to have evolved from the tradition of Andalusi women poets—both those from the upper classes and the jawāri¯—who took part in poetry gatherings and responded with improvised verses of their own to the male poets who recited their own poetry. 83 This aspect of Andalusi culture, which brings together the highly erudite and the much more popular artistic forms, appears to have evolved from the time of the taifa states, in whose courts women from the lowest social strata met with the most learned men of the day and took part in their poetry gatherings. The kind of competitive spirit that this generated is evident in the tales, within which the women’s ability to respond wittily to the princes’ or Sultans’ statements becomes her major source of attraction. Unlike the fairy tales of the West, which stress the beauty of the protagonist, who moreover tends to rely on some kind of fairy to help her out, it is their ability to speak well—even to outwit the men—that distinguishes the protagonists in the AndalusiMoroccan tales. Even though the tales are in the Moroccan darija, one form of the vernacular, they can acquire a high level of erudition by making use of both sophisticated Arabic vocabulary and rhyme schemes. Thus in one version of “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter,” which differs slightly from the one that appears in my translation for this book, the prince approaches Aisha with the statement: “Yā naqqāshat ’ l-hbaq addaq, qulli¯ shhāl fi¯h min luwraq” (“Oh ye cultivator of the densely leafed basil plant, tell me how many leaves it contains”) and in her response, Aisha instead of referring to the stars and the fish asks: “Qulli¯ shhāl min kawāki¯b fi¯s smā’ w shhāl min marāki¯b ‘ la wujah al-mā’ ” (“tell me how many planets there are in the sky and how many vessels there are on the surface of the sea”) using two rather erudite terms—kawāki¯b and marāki¯b, which furthermore constitute an internal rhyme. Such poetically articulated works of art, which vary in subject matter and form, all have features that reveal them to be part of the same tradition; that to which the Andalusi music itself belonged, which like the tales themselves, was not meant to be played in concert halls but at more communal events, such as weddings, births, and even deaths—which tended to bring the whole community together. It is more closely associated with a group of people making music together to enrich their souls, and not necessarily just to make money. One case in point that remains entrenched in my mind is what I was told by a Tetouani connoisseur of Andalusi music who confided to me that some of the most beautiful music he had ever heard was produced by the musician Ahmed



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Lukili (1901–1988) at dawn after a whole night of music making, when everyone had retired to bed and he thought he was by himself. The extremely moving music that this great musician, who was also a fqi¯h (expert in Islamic jurisprudence), played appeared to be an expression of his soul yearning toward the rising dawn. This image of a fqi¯h musician expressing his soul’s yearning in the Andalusi music—which is so closely associated with romantic songs—appears to symbolize the essence of Andalusi identity, which has always sought to synthesize between seemingly disparate phenomena: religious and more secular philosophy, highly learned and more popular art forms, even the sacred and the erotic. This is also the case of the women’s tales, which not only bring together all the literary genres including elements of drama, poetry, as well as fiction, but also make use of dialogues in sophisticated poetic forms combined with thematic concerns of a highly stylized romantic nature. Furthermore, the romances at the heart of the tales systematically involve relations with princes and Sultans, suggesting that the love in question is one of a courtly nature. So, could these tales, which combine so many different genres, be said to also constitute one form of the Courtly Love tradition—about which I had heard that it came from the Arabs but whose Arab background had, like the queens who Mernissi reminds us of, been rendered invisible? In fact, there is a longstanding debate going on about the nature and source of Courtly Love. Scholars have recognized the similarities between certain Andalusi art forms and those of Provençe, such as that between Andalusi music and the music of the Troubadours, as well as their poetry, which is a lyric poetry in the vernacular dealing with the theme of Courtly Love. These scholars do not dispute the fact that the Troubadour poetry had an extensive inf luence on Western literature, granting them a prominent place in the history of Western civilization. What remains a matter of great controversy, however, is the extent to which this poetry had its roots in the neighboring Arabic Andalusi tradition, which is what the Arabists argue. Those who uphold the Romance theory, however, deny the possibility that a tradition which is of such central importance to Western literature could have come from the Arabs. At any rate, as Roger Boase contends: “European scholars have, on the whole, been reluctant to concede the possibility that the troubadours might have been indebted to the lyrical tradition of the Arabs.” 84 Some of the arguments that they put forward include the fact that it would have been very difficult for Europeans to be inf luenced by a literature in a language they did not understand. 85 Others have argued that a tradition which appears to idolize women and is greatly concerned




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with the theme of romantic love could not have come from a society that is as repressive to women as they claim Arab society to be. What has made it particularly difficult to trace is the fact that, as Roger Boase has noted, it may have been “rooted in a popular and anonymous oral tradition.”86 Could the tradition of women’s tales presented in this book, which is heavily inf luenced by Andalusi culture, form part of the popular and anonymous oral tradition to which Boase refers? Perhaps we need to look at the tales more closely before we can decide.



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There was upon a time until there was A world that exists not and really does

A

t that time there was a carpenter who had a daughter named Aisha, of whom he was exceedingly fond. Aisha was in the habit of growing potted plants in the st ah or uppermost terrace of their house in the medina. Like other houses in the medina, this one was built around an internal courtyard that could be looked down into from the terrace through the opening in the ceiling, called daw el-hilqa, that overlooks the inner courtyard of the house. The terrace was the best lit place in the house; so it was there that Aisha grew, among other things, her basil plants and where she could often be found watering them. Adjoining their house was the grandiose dwelling of the Sultan’s son, who had taken note of Aisha and made it a habit to spy on her. One day he approached her from the terrace of his house where he ventured to address her respectfully:1 Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who’s so gen’rous to her plants with water, How many leaves may there be In each of the plants that you see?



CHAPTER 1

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Aisha immediately responded:

The king’s son was considerably vexed by her answer. “She’s making fun of me,” he told himself. So he immediately left the terrace and she soon followed suit. The next day when she went up to water her plants the king’s son spied on her from a hidden part of his terrace, without making his presence felt. As it happened, on that day in Aisha’s house, they had prepared her favorite mhams a dish. 2 They called Aisha when it was ready, and she immediately joined the family downstairs to relish this treat. As she was tasting it, some of it dropped on a button of her sleeve and, unwilling to let it go to waste, she quickly licked it up. The Sultan’s son, who was observing her from the terrace through the d aw el-hilqa, triumphed at this incident: “I’m not going to hesitate to remind her of this,” he said. So the next day when she went up to water her plants, he approached her again as he had done previously: Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who’s so gen’rous to her plants with water, How many leaves there may be In each of the plants that you see?

And she again responded: Sidi Mohammed, the son of the king, You Qur’an reader, who knows everything, How many stars are there up in the sky? And how many fish in the deep sea lie?

It was at this point that he triumphantly interceded: Don’t you remember, you greedy glutton, How you licked some mh ams a off your button?

“This young man appears to be spying on me,” she told herself, and for some days she refrained from going up to the terrace. She was considering ways of getting back at the Sultan’s son. One day, while she was on



Sidi Mohammed, the son of the king, You Qur’an reader, who knows everything, How many stars are there up in the sky? And how many fish in the deep sea lie?

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her way to visit her aunt, she noticed him visiting a shopkeeper who had offered him some pomegranates. She observed him while he was walking around in his grand manner and as he absentmindedly bent down in search of a grain that had fallen and rolled on the ground. He found it, picked it up and ate it. At this point, Aisha hastily continued on her way. The next morning when she went up to the terrace to water her plants, the prince approached her again by saying: Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who’s so gen’rous to her plants with water, How many leaves there may be In each of the plants that you see?

To which she hastily responded: Sidi Mohammed, the son of the king, You Qur’an reader, who knows everything, How many stars are there up in the sky? And how many fish in the deep sea lie?

Here he triumphantly intercepted: Don’t you remember, you greedy glutton, How you licked some mh ams a off your button?

At this point it was her turn to retort: Don’t you remember, you fancy strutter, The pomegranate you picked from the gutter?

The Sultan’s son was terribly vexed at this: “Dear God,” he ref lected, “this girl must be spying on me.” So he tried to devise a plan to get even with her. One day he saw a Jewish fish vendor, with a donkey load of fish. The king’s son bought from him all the fish as well as his clothes and the donkey. Thus, disguised as a fish vendor, he went to sell his fish in front of Aisha’s house. “Fish, fish,” he cried, “Who wants to buy fish?”

He kept shouting thus until Aisha appeared in the doorway. She wanted to know for how much he was selling the fish and he responded that to her he would gladly sell them for a kiss. She was very tempted and,




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Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who’s so gen’rous to her plants with water. How many leaves there may be In each of the plants that you see?

To which she hastily responded: Sidi Mohammed, the son of the king, You Qur’an reader, who knows everything, How many stars are there up in the sky? And how many fish in the deep sea lie?

This is when he intercepted: Don’t you remember, you greedy glutton, How you licked some mh ams a off your button?

To which she in turn retorted: Don’t you remember, you fancy strutter, The pomegranate you picked from the gutter?

This was the moment he was waiting for to triumphantly add: As fish vendors we’ve been arrayed And on Aisha’s cheeks we have played.

Aisha was extremely vexed at this. Next day she started working on a plan to get even with him. She asked her father to buy her some black paint. A week later she covered her body with it to look like a Sudanese slave girl. Then with the help of her Dada (nurse or servant) she got herself introduced to the household staff at the king’s house, who took her under their wing as a new servant. She soon found ways of ingratiating herself with them so that she eventually found herself in the position of serving the prince himself. So one night when she brought him his food, she came equipped with a little bag that she had hidden on her person. In a secluded part of his quarters, she took out a sleeping draught and applied it generously to his tea. Once the king’s son had fallen into a



ascertaining that nobody was watching, she extended her cheek to be kissed. After that incident everything was calm for a few days. Then one day, on going up to the terrace, the king’s son spoke to her again:

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deep sleep, she took out a razor from her bag and shaved off his beard. Then she took out some make-up and made him up, by applying khol (kohl) to his eyes and rouge to his cheeks and lips. Finally she placed a mirror conveniently in front of him so that the first thing he saw when he woke up would be his own face. Having completed her task, she went up to the terrace and escaped back to her father’s house. It took the king’s son a long time to come out of his quarters after that. When he had finally woken up from his drugged sleep, he was outraged at the sight of his face in the mirror. He looked around for the slave girl who was nowhere to be found. “God knows who has played this trick on me,” he wondered. After that he stayed indoors for seven days, waiting for his beard to start growing back. Meanwhile Aisha was back at home, washed and dressed in her usual manner. Every day she went up to the terrace and looked out for the prince, but there was no sign of him. Finally he appeared and, as was his custom, greeted her: Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who’s so gen’rous to her plants with water. How many leaves there may be In each of the plants that you see?

To which she responded as was her wont: Sidi Mohammed, the son of the king, You Qur’an reader, who knows everything, How many stars are there up in the sky? And how many fish in the deep sea lie?

At this point he hastily responded: Don’t you remember, you greedy glutton, How you licked some mh ams a off your button?

And she was no less hasty in her response: Don’t you remember, you fancy strutter, The pomegranate you picked from the gutter?

Here he triumphantly pointed out: As fish vendors we’ve been arrayed And on Aisha’s cheeks we have played.




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This was the moment Aisha was waiting for to triumphantly announce:

The king’s son became extremely embarrassed at this point. “How did she manage to make such fun of me?” he wondered. On that day he swore that he would get even with her once and for all. So on that very day he asked his father, the Sultan, to send somebody to ask for Aisha’s hand in marriage. The Sultan was extremely surprised: “What!” he exclaimed, “You overlook the daughters of all the viziers and even your own cousins, to choose the daughter of a mere carpenter?” “I will marry no one but her,” insisted the prince, “and will have her no matter what the conditions may be.” So the Sultan sent to ask for Aisha’s hand. This time it was the carpenter who was alarmed. He went to consult with his daughter in order to find a way out of this difficulty, but his daughter comforted him and told him: “Father, give him my hand.” Although he tried to dissuade her, she was persistent and consoled him by reminding him of how competent she was; she told him that she was capable of building a tunnel connecting their house to that of the Sultan’s son. Finally the father gave in and consented to the marriage. On the day of the wedding when Aisha finally joined the prince in his dwelling and they were left by themselves, he told her: “So, you have dared to make fun of me and ridicule me?” He was incensed to see that Aisha could only agree with this. “And now,” he asked her, “who is the strongest, man or woman?” “Woman, my lord,” she replied.

At this point his anger knew no bounds, so he had her locked up in a met. mora—an underground silo—where he visited her every day, bringing her half a loaf of barley bread, a pitcher of water, and reminding her of her confined position by addressing her as: Aisha, the meqhora, 3 Living in the met mora Who is the most powerful, Man or woman?

To which she invariably answered: Woman, my lord



As Sudanese slave girls we’ve been arrayed And on the Prince’s cheeks we have played.

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No sooner would he hear that answer than he would leave and she would remain in her prison. In fact she spent most of her time digging a tunnel to her father’s house, an endeavor in which she was helped by those in that household. Eventually the tunnel extended from Aisha’s house to the metmora where she was now to be found. In this way, Aisha could escape to sleep in her father’s house unnoticed. In the daytime she would return to her prison where the king’s son visited her regularly and repeatedly asked his question to which Aisha invariably responded that woman was stronger than man. So Aisha remained in her metmora while days came and days went. One day the king’s son came to visit Aisha and to inform her that he was going on a pleasure excursion to a place called Sour. She told him that she hoped he would have a good trip while at the same time ascertaining the date of his departure. As soon as he had left, she rushed to her father’s house where she got everyone involved in a plan she had devised. Many tasks had to be performed: a hennāya (henna artist) had to be brought to decorate her hands with henna patterns. The tent that the family at times used when traveling had to be aired and prepared for use. Aisha was finally ready for her excursion. On the day before the king’s son was to leave on his trip, he came to bid Aisha farewell. She wished him a good trip and mentioned not a word about her plans. As soon as he had left, she ran to her father’s house and proceeded to install herself in Sour before the arrival of the Sultan’s son. When he finally arrived there, he found that her tent had already been set up in a nearby field. “Who could have beaten me to this place?” he wondered. When his tent was put up in the proximity of the other, he sent one of his servants to find out who owned the mysterious tent. The servant came back and reported that it belonged to a lady. The Sultan’s son then sent his servant back with the orders that she be brought before him. When the servant came to inform Aisha of this she asked him to tell the Sultan’s son that it was not customary for a woman to visit a man but rather the other way round. So the prince put on his official outfit and then went to visit the mysterious woman in her tent. They talked, ate, and drank, and did not deprive themselves of any pleasure. In this way, they stayed together for three days. When the Sultan’s son finally decided to leave, he presented Aisha with one of his rings. As soon as he left, Aisha quickly dismantled her tent and she disappeared well before the king’s son had time to leave the area.




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As soon as he returned home Sidi Mohammed went to visit Aisha in her prison, and greeted her thus:

“You have missed a wonderful excursion,” he informed her. “I am very pleased that my lord has amused himself so well,” she responded. “You should have seen the marvel whom I met,” he continued, “She was someone quite incomparable in her beauty.” To which Aisha responded: “I’m delighted that my lord has regaled himself so well. It is no more than he deserves.” And the prince left, well pleased with himself. Some days after that, Aisha found that she was pregnant and in due course she gave birth to a son whom she named Sour. At night she nursed him in her father’s house, and in the daytime when she returned to her prison she left him in the care of her Dada in her father’s house. The prince continued to visit her regularly and to ask his question to which she always answered that it was the woman who was the more powerful. In this way days went and days came and one fine morning the prince came to inform Aisha that he was again going on a pleasure excursion, this time to Dour. She prepared for this as she had for the previous one. So when the prince arrived in Dour, she was already installed in her tent. This time too she made him come to her, and he stayed with her for seven days. Before leaving he presented her with his jeweled dagger. No sooner had he left than Aisha quickly dismantled her tent and vanished from sight. When the prince’s people woke up in the morning there was not a trace of her to be found. “She must be a jinni−ya,” (female jinn) they said. “She couldn’t have been human.” Once he arrived back in his house, the prince went to visit Aisha in her prison. He took her the usual black bread and water and asked his usual question: Aisha, the meqhora, Living in the met mora, Who is the most powerful, Man or woman?



Aisha, the meqhora, Living in the met mora


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To which she answered in her usual manner:

At this point he informed her that the excursion had been very pleasant, and that he had again met a gorgeous creature whose beauty surpassed any that he had ever come across before. “My lord deserves the best of everything,” she responded, upon which he left her, very satisfied with himself. After a number of days had come and gone Aisha found that she was again pregnant and in nine months gave birth to a second son whom she named Dour. Days came and days went and one day the prince came to visit her and to inform her that he was going on yet another excursion. This time to a place called Lalla H māmet el-Qsour (The Dove of the Palaces). As was her custom, Aisha wished him all the very best. After he left, she prepared for the event as she had for the previous ones. So when he arrived at his destination she was already installed in her tent, and he was again invited to visit her. This time they stayed together for a couple of weeks, and did not deprive themselves of any pleasure. When the king’s son announced his intention to return home, she wished him a good trip and he presented her with his embroidered purse before leaving. Upon their return, Aisha found that she was pregnant for the third time. She eventually gave birth to a little girl whom she named Lalla H māmet el-Qsour and raised, as she did her brothers, in her father’s house next door. In this way days came and days went and one fine day the king’s son came to see her and informed her that his father, the Sultan, had been anxious to get him married, and he had finally accepted to marry his cousin. Having ascertained the date of the wedding, Aisha took refuge in her father’s house and started making plans once again. This time she summoned her children, washed them, and dressed them with care. She donned the first one with the prince’s ring, the second with his dagger, and the third with his purse. She furthermore supplied them with a pair of scissors and threaded needles. Then she instructed them to go to the prince’s house, where preparations for the wedding were under way, and to turn everything topsy-turvy with the help of the scissors and needles; they were to cut all the fine new brocades bought to furnish the rooms for the wedding and to sew them up all upside down. They were further instructed that if anyone tried to stop them they were to say that: This house is our father’s And we’re being chased by others.



Woman, my lord.

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This is what the children did. Inside the prince’s house, they started to call each other:

And when the people of the house looked up to the sky to see what they were pointing at, the children would busily cut up all the mattress and cushion covers and sew them upside down. When the servants chased them they told them: This house is our father’s And we’re being chased by others.

So finally the Sultan’s son was called, and he asked them whose children they were. At this point they gave him their names and told him that their mother was: Aisha, the meqhora Living in the met mora

Looking at them intently, the prince recognized his ring, dagger, and purse; so he went to visit Aisha in her prison and addressed her: Aisha, the meqhora Living in the met mora Who is the most powerful, Man or woman?

To which she answered, as was her custom: Woman, my lord.

This time Sidi Mohammed had to admit that she was right, and so he brought her out of the met mora. He furthermore decided that she was a bride more worthy of him than the cousin whose marriage to him was being prepared. So it was Lalla Aisha and Sidi Mohammed’s wedding that was celebrated that night and it was indeed a splendid event. In their excitement, the living stamped so hard on the ground that they woke the dead up and told them: “[W]ake up and help us to celebrate



Come Sour, look Dour Did you see Lalla H māmet el-Qsour? Flying around on a tour?


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the wedding of Aisha the meqhora who was for such a long time imprisoned in a met mora.”

Performative Language versus Visual Performance Aisha’s tale is the best-known of the tales in this book and appears in a more complete form than do the others. It is known under different names in different parts of Morocco; these include “Aisha the Merchant’s Daughter,” “The Merchant’s Daughter and the Son of the Sultan,” and more recently Keid Ensa or “The Ruses of Women,” which is how some women, who have been prompted by Farida Belyazid’s 1999 film version of the tale, now refer to it. It is also the only one that has been written down; thus the Moroccan sociologist Abdessamad Dialmy discusses it in his book titled: Feminisme Soufi: Conte Fassi et Initiation Sexuelle,5 in which he refers to three different versions of the tale: a 1923 French version collected by G. Marchand in “Contes et Légendes du Maroc,” a 1926 version collected in “Contes Fasis,” by E. Dermenghem, and finally a 1983 version by Fatima Mernissi titled: “Qui l’emporte, la femme ou l’homme.”6 An English version of the latter appears in Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing titled “Who’s Cleverer, Man or Woman?” 7 This was translated from the Arabic and French by Miriam Cooke and Elise Goldwasser. More recently The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre at Fez has published Tales of Fez, an English translation by E. Powys Mathers of Dermenghem’s “Contes Fasis” containing his version of Aisha’s tale. 8 The tale “was even adapted as a puppet play by Federico Garcia Lorca,” 9 reminding us of how its roots stretch to Spain and possibly from there all the way back to al-Andalus. None of these translations has attempted to recapture the lyrics at the heart of the tale,10 nor has a full-f ledged literary analysis of the tale been attempted to my knowledge. Of Folktales and Fairy Tales Folktales, such as Aisha’s tale, and fairy tales in general have been known to contain more than a sheer entertainment value, and have been approached from a variety of different perspectives. Some traditional approaches to tales have enabled us to perceive that they con-



So we left them with their deed And came home to eat our trid.4

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tain deeper meanings, which touch us at some profound level and help us to both understand and to cope with the world. Like dreams and myths, they have been perceived to contain allegories of the inner life, which is why Bruno Bettelheim has described them as consoling.11 This is similar to how Geina Mhlophe perceives them when she claims: “ We need to sharpen our hearing and listen to the voices from the past as they speak through the stories; what they have to say is like gold— ever shining and precious.”12 The importance of such stories, due to the cultural values they uphold, is much more profound than may at first be apparent. Such tales come in a variety of forms and represent different perspectives, which cannot be reduced to any one unified category. However, like all narratives they tend to be ideologically loaded, which is why fairy tales have appeared to some feminist writers to uphold values that are not necessarily beneficial to women. This is the case of Angela Carter who did not agree with Bettelheim’s view on fairy tales, claiming that “[e]veryone knows that Bettelheim is terrific with children, but I think he is sometimes wrong. I’m not sure that fairy tales are as consoling as he suggests.”13 Carter, in fact, contested such tales “because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.”14 In her own writing she attempted to demythologize the cultural myths of her society, and considered fairy tales to be just as entrapping to women as myths are. Fairy tales, like mythologies, serve to construct images of “reality” that uphold certain values and her aim as an artist was to come to terms with those constructs and to expose them for limiting women’s scope. This was one of her aims in her collection of short stories titled The Bloody Chamber,15 in which, according to Joyce Carol Oates, “Ms Carter’s retelling of the tales rejects cultural stereotypes of the female, especially the pure, passive, brainless and asexual female, in favour of more assertive and sexually adventurous heroines.”16 Carter’s transformations of the fairy tales aim at empowering women and demonstrating ways in which they can develop a more healthy adult identity. She therefore refuses to be resigned to the status quo and the myths it upholds. It seems to me that, in their very different ways, this is also what the women involved in Aisha’s tale were attempting to do; they refused to resign themselves to the status quo and the myths (especially concerning femininity) that it upheld. Rather, they were using such tales in an attempt to devise a more healthy adult identity that refused to conform to the stereotype of femininity as “passive, brainless and asexual.” In the process, they were envisioning an identity for women that allowed for a more



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sexually adventurous way of being. What makes their tales, unlike the fairy tales to which Carter was referring, so much more liberating to women could be the fact that they have not been submitted to the transcription of a male writer such as Charles Perrault, who could have contributed to making the Western tales more oppressive to women, as noted in the introduction. This, however, has not prevented the Moroccan women’s tales from being forgotten or denigrated even when not forgotten. One way or another these tales have been reduced to the subtexts of the palimpsestic Western narratives. The tales—in the women’s own voices—allowing for a greater understanding of those women than the solid stones of the buildings in which they lived, have been reduced to submerged narratives. Concerning the relationship between narratives and places, the cultural geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan has claimed that “a great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone.”17 In fact, it can be argued that the stone in itself is meaningless without the words, for as Lacan has pointed out “C’est le monde des mots qui crée le monde des choses”18 (meaning that it is the world of words that creates the world of things). To the extent that it is actually words which give the stones their meanings they constitute the building blocks, enabling us to construct places out of spaces and to understand the people who inhabited those spaces. Thus Martha Norkunas, even though her project involved studying the physical monuments of her hometown, was moved to claim that “For women, the site of memory, the place where the living and the dead commingle, is not on the landscape but remains rooted in narrative.”19 Western Palimpsestic Narratives Narratives come from a variety of different sources and perspectives. Some places in Morocco, for instance, have tended to be represented by narrators who have not felt as closely attached to them as Norkunas does to her hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. If we limit ourselves to a place such as Tangier, by way of example, we can perceive that some of the ways in which it has been represented are what Caraës and Fernandez, writing about the numerous expatriate European and American writers who have come to Tangier, qualify as the literary colonization of a place. 20 The perspectives of such writers, which have tended to overlook the native narratives, have tended to contribute to the kind of palimpsestic narratives that Spivak has blamed for reducing those of the colonized to “subtexts.”




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something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from center to circumference—foreign inside and outside and all around—nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness—nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo! In Tangier we have found it. Here is not the slightest thing that ever we have seen save in pictures—and we always mistrusted the pictures before. We cannot anymore. The pictures used to seem exaggerations—they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough—they were not fanciful enough— they have not told half the story. 21

What the writer stresses here is the sense of difference he perceives in Tangier. There is nothing wrong with difference as such, which is what these travelers were actually seeking. It is when such difference comes under the sway of binary logic, and is represented as the “Other” that it takes on more negative connotations. Such a perception of Morocco appears in some of the writing even of a writer such as Paul Bowles, who not only recorded numerous Moroccan popular music traditions but was later to become involved in translating and transcribing the work of such Moroccan storytellers as Mohammed Choukri and Mohammed Mrabet. 22 Thus his 1952 novel Let It Come Down, which is set in Tangier, focuses on the protagonist, Dyar, who ends up stealing a huge fortune and killing Thami, the Moroccan who helps him to escape with it to Agla. Paradoxically, Dyar is described by Bowles as “a ‘victim’ ” 23 and becomes associated with Hercules from his very first night in Tangier when Daisy tells him: “I call the place Hesperides because it’s here to this mountain that Hercules is supposed to have come to steal the golden apples.” 24 Thami, on the other hand, becomes for Dyar “a spokesman for the place; like Antaeus, whatever strength he had came out of the earth, and his feet were planted squarely upon it.” 25 This image reinforces the extent to which Antaeus belongs to the place and highlights the significance of the strategy that Hercules/Dyar uses to defeat him, which he can only do after uprooting him from the earth in which he is solidly planted. This is how Hercules disconnects Antaeus, whose very name implies “anti-us” thus reinforcing the binary logic, from his sense of home and



Not all representations of Morocco by foreigners fall into this category; not all are equally negative. Thus if we take a representation of Tangier such as Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, we find that Morocco corresponds precisely to what the writer and his fellow travelers had been looking for; that is:

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identity—which is what in effect kills him. By grounding his narrative in the myth of Hercules, Bowles wishes to position all his readers as the kind of Westerners who have predominantly colonial/imperial perspectives. They are meant to identify with the one who comes to steal the golden apples and not with the one who is defending his land against such thieves. What about those readers who would have been interested in finding out more about Antaeus’s perspective? Those who identify more with Antaeus, who feel that attitudes such as the one described earlier have served to subalternize such natives, have been faced with questions similar to the one that preoccupies Miriam Cooke when she wonders “how a subalternized group can assume its essentialized representations and use them strategically against those who have ascribed them.” 26 One example of how this can be done appears in Aisha’s tale where it serves to allow for a liberation from binary thought associated with the logic either/or and a movement to the logic neither/both. Although Aisha’s tale was not in any way concerned with the conf lict between Western colonial and postcolonial discourses it did demonstrate how the liberation from binary thought could be accomplished on the level of gender. The kind of transition suggested by the tale is one that needs to be made before any authentically comprehensive representation of Morocco can be produced. Subtexts such as Aisha’s tale must be recuperated from under the palimpsestic narrative of Western discourse, so that Moroccans in general and Moroccan women in particular need no longer view themselves exclusively from the latter’s perspective. Visualizing Antaeus’s Perspective Acquiring Antaeus’s perspective, however, is not as easy as it may sound. Aisha’s tale, on which Farida Belyazid bases her film Keid Ensa, represents the perspective of one who, like Antaeus, has been deeply rooted in the Moroccan soil for centuries, but whose voice has remained to a large extent unknown not only to Westerners, but even to Moroccans themselves. Belyazid’s film is therefore worthy of applause, not only due to the extent to which it renders Aisha visible but also due to the attentive detail with which it depicts the whole way of life associated with her. The film, which presents a visual performance of Aisha’s tale, is thus in many ways a veritable feast for the eyes. However, even this great achievement on the part of one of the best women film producers in Morocco does not appear to have done full justice to the tale. This may not be due to Belyazid herself, who has really done wonders to




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Moroccan cinema—representing aspects of this culture that had remained unrepresented in cinema, and adding such endearing touches to her films as those that enable us to hear the Tangier accent the way it is actually spoken there. What may be more at fault is the way in which we Moroccans still have a certain tendency to see ourselves and the traditions of our society through a lens from which the colonial impact has not been completely erased. This could be why it took me so long to see that there is more to this tale than meets the eye. It took me a while to realize the extent to which it is vitally feminist. In fact, Aisha’s tale forms part of that tradition of women’s tales, as I stated in the introduction, which has a characteristic form and is associated with a specific historical background. These are the tales that have been told by women in the north of Morocco for hundreds of years, and can be traced back to the time of al-Andalus where similar kinds of tales were closely associated with the women who gathered in the evenings to spin wool. 27 This is why the performances in such tales are meant to take place in the imagination of the audience, for originally their hands and eyes would have been taken up with the spinning. These women, who can be said to have been both literally and figuratively “spinning yarns,” in the process ended up crafting performances meant not so much for the spectators’ sight as for their insight. This is no doubt why such tales all place a great emphasis on words and on the different interpretations to which they lend themselves, which is very much the case of Aisha’s tale. It is perhaps this emphasis on insight which has enabled the tale to dismantle the binary logic that opposes men to women in ways that the film has difficulty doing. The process of adapting a tale to film may in some ways be compared to what happened to European fairy tales, as touched upon in the introduction, when they were first set down in writing by male writers such as Perrault in the seventeenth century and the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth. Those fairy tales, by virtue of being written, came to prescribe a certain behavior for women— passivity for instance—which was probably more a legacy of what those centuries’ patriarchal culture of literacy deemed proper than any faithful rendition of the original storytellers’ aspirations. By becoming the written property of the literate upper classes, such tales, as Nancy Walker argues, “could be used to further the goals of gentility and Victorian propriety.” 28 This is no doubt similar to what has made the film Keid Ensa, which had a great success among the Moroccan audience with a new appetite for authentically Moroccan representations, appear to me to be more conventional than the tale itself. Not only is



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this a matter of what Marshall McLuhan argues when he claims that the medium (of cinema in this case) is the message. 29 Such transformations are also the result of what has been noted by film historians, who argue that due to the increase in the size of cinema audiences and their diversification filmmakers could no longer make assumptions about the audience’s knowledge of well-known stories but had to make them “more self-contained and redundant.”30 They often had to explain things that did not require explanation in the original versions. This is what happens in the film adaptation of Aisha’s tale, which includes numerous scenes and incidents that are extraneous to the tale itself but which have been added in accordance with the demands of the more technically based art form and in an effort to explain an authentic Moroccan context to a more global audience. In this process the film appears to have relied on assumptions of Moroccan society as being more constricting to women than is the case in the tale. Furthermore, the desire to do justice to the time and place in the film, which uses some lovely costumes as well as Amina el Alaoui’s gorgeous singing, all of which is very much to the point, draws attention away from the lyrics at the heart of the tale. The film even imposes certain words on the tale, such as the word “keid ” (ruse), which appears in the title Keid Ensa or “Ruses de femmes.” This word, which has been used in association with women by numerous Arab and Moroccan male writers, does not appear in the tale itself but does appear in Abdessamad Dialmy’s explication of it.31 Rather than applauding the women’s actions, the term highlights the idea of stratagem or cunning and has the connotation not so much of outwitting as of deceiving. To this extent it reinforces the kind of negative idea of “strategy,” which is often associated with women in patriarchal societies and which is not what we get in the tale. Moreover, the film presents the version of the tale where Aisha is the merchant’s daughter, rather than the version in which she is the carpenter’s daughter such as the one I compiled in Tetouan. Whereas having a father who is a merchant may suggest that he could have afforded to pay for all of Aisha’s excursions in pursuit of the prince, carpentry would traditionally have been a more valued profession—permitting one to live off what one produced oneself. Furthermore, a carpenter fashions things with his own hands; so he is in that sense an artist, and Aisha as his daughter naturally resembles him. What she inherits from him, in this case, is much less a matter of material goods than it is a matter of his craftsmanship—an attribute with which the women involved in telling her tale were all very well endowed.




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The storytellers who narrated this tale placed Aisha at the center of their tale, in ways that appear to have been more difficult to do in the film—where the men, both the father and the Sultan’s son, contend with Aisha for the central position. Aisha in the film seems to be overprotected by her father whom we are told hides her between two walls, even from the women in the neighboring prince’s house. She is furthermore often perceived from the prince’s perspective, which makes the film conform to the tendency of cinema to create a subject position for the male spectator that reinforces his belief in his power and value while failing to provide a corresponding position for the women viewers.32 In the tale itself, the father’s presence is much less evident than it is in the film and Aisha does not appear to be as disempowered as the prince’s perspective, or that of his servant, at times depicts her to be. Sidi Mohammed, in the tale, whose authenticity is enhanced by the fact that he bears the prophet’s name, is both the prince in a position of authority and also the boy next door. As for Aisha, Dialmy has suggested that her name makes her a representative of women in general, as it ranges in significance from Aisha, the virtuous prophet’s wife, to Aisha Qandisha, the mythical seducer of men: from one extreme of femininity to the other.33 However, Aisha, though she may be representative of a wide range of women, like other protagonists of these women’s tales, belongs to a tradition of storytelling that conforms neither to the religious model nor to that of the mythical Aisha Qandisha—who is much more a male projection of a fearful femme fatale than the product of storytellers such as those involved in this tale. Aisha in the tale comes across as an individualized character whose appeal derives primarily from her eloquence. Significantly, when we first meet her in the tale, she appears in a contest on the level of words with the prince. It is while she is tending her potted plants in the terrace that the prince first approaches her from the adjoining terrace of his own house with his query: Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter, Who is so gen’rous to her plants with water, How many leaves may there be In each of the plants that you see?

Aisha immediately responds: Sidi Mohammed the son of the king, You Qur’an reader who knows everything,



Aisha’s Performative Language


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What becomes immediately apparent in this initial exchange is the way Aisha both mimics what the prince says and also transforms his words to her own ends, as if she is positioning herself to be in dialogue with the opposing position that he represents. This initial exchange develops into a protracted dialogue, which is highlighted by the way it is repeated in the course of the tale, that is revealed to be a performance, like a play, dramatizing Aisha’s efforts to outwit the prince at his own strategies. The dialogue here also suggests a process of subject formation, more particularly that of gendered subjectivity. At this stage it is the prince who makes use of the male language of numbers and Aisha, unperturbed by his question, immediately retorts in kind—thus demonstrating her ability to control his language and to moreover place him at an impasse. In fact, she exposes the limitations both of the prince’s power over the language of numbers, representative of male rationality, and of such a language itself. She shows him that despite his superior education and the fact that he has read the Qur’an, he is far from being all-knowing or from being able to use that language to outwit her. Moreover, the notion of mental ability, associated as it is with both subjectivity and the ability to count, is here revealed to be a sterile kind of ability that has little bearing either on the beauty or fecundity of the plants with which Aisha herself (whose very name implies that she is alive) becomes associated. This episode therefore suggests that to the extent that a subject’s consciousness is a matter of knowing how to count, men are certainly not superior to women—who might in fact have the advantage here as they refuse to be limited by the language of numbers. The next episode, you may recall, takes place when, in Aisha’s house, they prepare her favorite mhamsa dish. This is when the prince spies on her through the d aw el-hilqa, that opening in the roof onto the courtyard in the middle of the house, and notices her licking it off the button on her sleeve; so the next day when she goes up to water her plants, he again approaches her and rebukes her thus: Don’t you remember you greedy glutton? How you licked some mhams a off your button?

It is soon after this that Aisha observes him while he is visiting with a shopkeeper, as he absentmindedly picks a pomegranate grain that had



How many stars are there up in the sky? And how may fish in the deep sea lie?

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fallen on the ground and eats it. This, you will recall, is what she does not hesitate to bring to his notice when they next meet and he taunts her again with her greediness. That is when she triumphantly retorts:

This second method to which Aisha and the prince resort in order to outwit each other involves bringing the instance of greediness to the other’s notice. Both are upset at being caught unaware, at a moment of oblivion. In the language of the tale this suggests the unconscious, which according to Lacan “is structured like a language”34 and which is here revealed to also represent no essential difference between the sexes. In fact, the relationship between the sexes is highlighted in the dialogue not only due to the psychological dimension of its meaning but also due to its more structural qualities, particularly the way it is repeated at different intervals in the tale. It is true that the tale here appears to conform to Lacan’s notion of identity, even sexual identity, based as it is on his reinterpretation of Freud from a structuralist perspective and which he comes to perceive as being basically linguistically constructed rather than purely innate. Thus in the tale it is the dialogue between Aisha and the prince which reveals that there is no essential gender difference on the level of consciousness or even the unconscious. However, this is further reinforced in the tale by the fact that this dialogue is repeated at different intervals suggesting that it serves as a form of refrain or as what María Rosa Menocal refers to as the “ring song,” which is how she designates the muwashshah—whose meaning derives from the word for “sash,” “circle,” or “girdle.” She goes on to explain: “As its name suggested, this kind of song made rhyme an encircling device, repeating rhyme patterns of sometimes dizzying complexity, with internal rhymes as well as those linking one stanza to another.”35 There is internal rhyme in this tale too, if you recall the verses I quoted from it in the introduction. Moreover, even though the refrains here may appear to differ from the kharjas that can be found in muwashshah poetry, which tend to be in a woman’s voice and express a variety of amatory feelings ranging from stylized articulations of love to naked expressions of desire, they do appear to furnish the tale with similar stylistic features. And those refrains do, in their own distinctive manner, contribute to the romance at the heart of the tale—which is not entirely devoid of desire.



Don’t you remember you fancy strutter? The pomegranate you picked from the gutter?

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A hint of the notion of desire is apparent in the next episode of the tale in which the prince pretends to be a Jewish fish vendor, whom Aisha allows to sell her the phallic fish for a kiss.36 Although the action here has moved to the level of play acting or performance, the notion of desire is evident in Aisha’s reaction when she allows the prince the kiss that he asks for. This of course is what enables him to extend his dialogue with her even further by announcing to her: As fish vendors we’ve been arrayed And on Aisha’s cheeks we have played

Aisha is extremely vexed at this, for his strategy serves to reveal a hidden wanton aspect of her character—traditionally associated with masculinity—which was not completely indifferent to sexuality and which needs to be repressed if she wants to maintain the image of virginal innocence associated with femininity. This is the notion of desire that has been given expression in this episode. What is even more interesting is the extent to which Aisha decides to get even with the prince by enacting a whole long process whose aim is to enable her to surpass him on the level of words. She is able to achieve this by disguising herself as a Sudanese slave-girl who insinuates herself into his household and proceeds to enter his bedchamber, where she drugs him and makes him up to look like a woman. Such an action is what eventually enables her to triumphantly announce to him: As Sudanese slave-girls we’ve been arrayed And on the prince’s face we have played

Here we have a repetition with a difference; Aisha is repeating the prince’s words but referring to totally different actions. Moreover, here language is not being used in simple mimetic manner to ref lect some given reality; rather the reality is a performance carried out by the speaker precisely in order to enable her to pronounce certain words. The reality in this way is made to conform to the language that she would like to utter. Such an ability to take hold of language enables the tale to continue demonstrating that the subject formation of women is no different from that of men and that there is no essential difference between men and women on the level of looks, any more than there is between their conscious capacities and their unconscious inclinations. The tale, in fact, stresses the arbitrary nature of gender roles that Aisha sets out




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to deconstruct by having recourse to a number of strategies, which are not ruses.

One of the strategies she uses becomes evident when we consider her strategic use of the mirror itself which, as in Lacan’s mirror stage, produces a ref lection that appears to be both the self and not the self. What appals the prince most is that when he looks at himself in the mirror what he sees is the “Other,” whom he considers as completely exclusive of himself. This is one of the ways that Aisha sets out to dismantle and to thus liberate herself from the logic either/or—by superimposing the feminine features over the masculine ones, and demonstrating the extent to which they are not as exclusive of each other as the prince assumes. Aisha thus uses the mirror to highlight for the prince the feminine aspect of his personality, which he has to repress in order to appear masculine. In this way she demonstrates not only that “[i]dentity is a very different word from essence,”37 as Gayatri Spivak has noted, but also that identity conforms more to the logic neither/both than to the binary logic since the prince is revealed to have traits that are neither exclusively masculine nor exclusively feminine, but both. It is at this point, you will recall, that the prince decides to ask for Aisha’s hand in marriage, which she does not refuse. On the day of the wedding when she finally joins him in his dwelling and they are left by themselves, he tells her: “So, you have dared to make fun of me and ridicule me?” To which she can only agree. “And now,” he asks her, “who is more powerful, man or woman?” to which Aisha responds: “woman, my lord.” It is at this point that he places her in a met mora, an underground silo in which the grain is normally kept, and vows to keep her there until she acknowledges the superiority of men. The Met mora as Subverted Symbolic Marriage for this patriarch becomes a means of getting even with Aisha, of reducing her overwhelming nature to dimensions that are more comprehensible to him; however, from the woman’s perspective, marriage becomes aptly imaged by the met mora (that underground silo), which depicts it as comparable to being buried alive. Whereas in the film we are confronted visually with Aisha’s pathetic confinement in the met mora, what is stressed in the tale, which is based entirely on words,



The Image of the Self in the Mirror

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is the more symbolic dimension of the met mora and the strategies that Aisha uses to subvert it. The met mora here takes on the shape not of a tall tower, often associated with the male symbolic order of language, but of a tower that has been inverted into the ground and which Aisha (whose name reminds us that she is very much alive) has come to inhabit and to subvert to her own ends. For now that Aisha has proved her supremacy on the level of words, the audience is ready to believe that she is capable of anything. And she does not let them down, but demonstrates her artistry by transforming the live burial that the prince has planned for her into a matter of becoming, like her potted plants, well planted in the soil thus enabling her to grow and to multiply in ways completely unforeseen by the prince and further subverting the logic of his language of numbers. It is by becoming, like Antaeus, so well rooted in the earth that Aisha obtains the power to use the prince’s essentialized representations strategically against him. For, even while she appears to conform to the image of live burial which he imposes on her, Aisha proceeds to make plans that enable her to get even with him. By demonstrating how one can devise a more adventurous sexuality even while being seemingly buried alive, she points out ways of subverting the construct of femininity imposed on her by her patriarchal society. By planning her escapes to Sour, Dour, and Lalla H māmet el-Qsour, Aisha demonstrates that there is a natural progression from words to actions and exhibits the extent to which words serve as a prelude to actions. Furthermore, by proceeding to seduce the prince at each of these excursions, Aisha shows herself to be both the virtuous wife and the seductive mistress—thus effectively dismantling that binary. Even while she is ostensibly imprisoned and shunned by the prince, Aisha proceeds to give birth to three children—who belong incontestably to him and whom she names after the places where they were conceived. Revitalizing the Language of Numbers The protagonist of the tale then becomes a woman who uses her children to act out in a kind of performance for the benefit of the prince, enabling her to thus confront him with her true identity. In this way, the language of numbers on which the tale opens is transformed to much more vital matters; it becomes more closely associated with the children who are the outcome of that relationship. Moreover, those children, on whom Aisha dons the mementos obtained from the prince, become her strategically dressed works of art—with which she finally




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confronts the prince, even while she remains literally absent. In this way Aisha is able to control his perceptions by positioning him as the spectator—rather than the artist—a position that she reserves for her own self. The point that she gets across to the prince here is that the patriarchy (the fact that he is the father of the children) on which he prides himself and from which he derives his authority is to such a large extent dependent on her. Aisha’s feat is that she appeases the prince at the same time that she impels him to dismantle the stereotype of femininity with which he associates her. It is this moment of insight, when he realizes that the children who claim to be Aisha’s children are really his own, that reveals to the prince Aisha’s true identity—which leaves him no choice but to acknowledge her superiority. Like contemporary women writers the women involved in crafting this tale had to devise an alternative form of narration, one that could subvert the phallic symbolic order of language from within the way that Aisha subverts the met mora. In this way such women obtained the power to create a self more in conformity with their own aspirations than with those of the patriarchal order. However, whereas these women were challenging the norms of their patriarchal society, they were not attempting to transgress its ethical limits. So in the process of subverting the symbolic, they were not setting out to alienate the men in their lives who tended to also be the ones in authority. Rather such women were allowing for a more meaningful relationship with them, by reshaping how those men perceived them even while they appeared to be conforming to the stereotypical norm. It is in this way that Aisha’s tale demonstrates how “a subalternized group can assume its essentialized representations and use them strategically against those who have ascribed them.”38 The women involved in tales such as Aisha’s were wise beyond words and we have much to learn from their wisdom. Such tales can help us to enrich our present by taking into consideration our authentic heritage, which we need no longer view through a distorted colonial lens. As Moroccan women we have a rich history of creative women, who were trying to cope with problems very similar to the ones that face us today. They not only raised questions about what constituted gender roles but dramatized the whole adventure of becoming involved in a sexual relationship. Central among the questions they raised is what it means to be a woman, which is currently being asked by contemporary feminists. And yet the feminism at the heart of this tale is not one that has been imported from the West, as we are often told about contemporary Moroccan feminism. In fact, the storytelling in which the traditional communities of women were involved served,



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among other things, as a form of consciousness-raising that was as good as any devised by Western feminists more recently. What is most significant about Aisha’s tale is the way it foregrounds the role of language, and women’s ability to take control of it. The women involved in crafting the tale were very much aware of this matter and of the extent to which, unless one can represent oneself from one’s own perspective, one may as well remain buried alive. Such a tradition of storytelling can help Moroccan women come to terms with their identity in ways that do not have to conform to the way that Orientalist—or imperial—discourse tends to depict them. This tradition of storytelling can also provide a source of inspiration for women writers seeking alternative modes of expression. In the manner of the women storytellers involved in this tale, they must understand that they can only begin to exist for others when they can truly represent themselves in their own voices.








There was until there was in times so fair When basil and lilies grew here and there And Allah was to be found everywhere

A

t that time there were two brothers; one who had seven sons and the other seven daughters. The seven sons were all trained in the crafts proper to young men, so that they all ended up becoming serious artisans including carpenters, leather tanners, and iron forgers. Similarly, in the other brother’s family, where there were seven daughters, each of the older daughters was trained in some skills proper to women such as sewing kaftans, weaving silk cloth, or embroidering ta‘ri¯ja (a form of embroidery specific to Tetouan) in the typically traditional manner. However, the youngest daughter in that family decided not to choose an employment considered suitable to women but rather to become an ‘ālim (religious scholar), one of the men of learning who traditionally became theologians and jurists. Apparently not encountering any objection from her father, who, it is understood, would have been pleased to have an ‘ālim in the family even though he had no sons, she set out to acquire all the learning associated with the written word that would enable her to become an ‘ālim. Once she had done so, she



CHAPTER 2

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had to disguise herself as a man because an ‘ālim was understood to be a man. She thus became known as the ‘ālim Ali and under this disguise could travel freely from medina to medina. The Sultan of a nearby medina, who was looking for a great man of learning to tutor his son, was told about the ‘ālim Ali. So he asked Ali to come to his court, where after ascertaining himself of his competence he hired him as tutor for his son. This is how it happened that Ali became acquainted with the young prince and they eventually became close companions. As the time passed the prince slowly began to perceive that he felt very attracted to Ali; he began to include him in both the scholarly gatherings he organized and those of a less scholarly nature, where he began to count on his presence more and more. In fact, the prince became so fascinated by Ali that he began to doubt the nature of his attraction. How could he be so taken up with this young man? It did not seem natural, so he figured that there must be more to it. This is what made the prince set out to find out whether Ali was really a woman. After consulting with his mother, the prince followed her advice and invited Ali for lunch with them to try and discern his gender from his manner of eating. For, as his mother explained, women have a much more delicate way of eating. However, Ali appeared to eat in as manly a manner as any other male, without of course exceeding the limits of politeness. After lunch the prince took him on a visit to the arsenal of weapons in the palace. There he showed him all the weapons that were at their disposal, about which Ali appeared to be as knowledgeable and as interested as any young man could be. However, when he took him to see a display of the royal jewelry, Ali did not appear to be as impressed or as interested as a woman would normally be; so the prince could not obtain any conclusive evidence that he was really a woman. After again consulting with his mother, the prince next invited Ali to spend the night with them to see whether certain plants that were supposed to dwindle and die in a room where a woman breathed would be affected in a harmful way. So Ali was invited for a d yāfa (an invitation to come and stay with one for a certain period of time), and treated with all the honor devoted to guests, particularly by royalty. However, having become a person of learning, Ali was well informed in these matters and spent the night tending the plants that had been placed in his bedroom so that they would not dwindle and die and thus enable the prince to prove that he was really a woman. And indeed the prince was quite puzzled when he discovered in the morning that no



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significant change had taken place in the plants. Finally, as a last resort, the prince proposed that Ali come to the hammām (bath) with him and his companions—the final proof being that once Ali undressed in the hammām they would be able to tell for sure whether he was a man or a woman. However, Ali quickly sought out the gellās 1 at the hammām, gave him a letter, and asked him to give it back when he next saw Ali. This is what the gellās did the next day when he saw Ali coming to the hammām with the prince and his companions. After reading the letter, Ali told them that his father had died and that he had to leave at once for the funeral. So he immediately began making arrangements to get back to his hometown, and the prince did all within his power to help him— thus ascertaining exactly where he was going. Once he was back in his hometown, where the prince eventually succeeded in following him, Ali transformed himself into a woman again. She sat spinning wool with the women of the household where the prince finally was able to discover her, and ask her his titular question, “Ali and a spinner too?” The woman responded, “If stuck, what can he do?” And as my tale approached the river fork I came back home to be with my own folk

A Tale of Embodied Knowledge2 The traditional Moroccan women, who told the tale of “Ali and a Spinner Too?” may appear to have been excluded from the public sphere, but this does not necessarily mean that they were completely cut off from the world at large. It is true that the position of such women meant that they could not travel to university centers such as that in Fez, as could the men, to acquire the learning associated with the written word and thus to become theologians and jurists. However, the setting of the tale, in which no city is mentioned by name, appears to be more reminiscent of the set up that prevailed in al-Andalus at the time of the taifa states, when scholars were continuously moving from one taifa court to another and where the different Sultans vied with each other for the best among them. It is in such courts that women from all the different social classes came into contact with the best thinkers and artists of the time. In Tetouan, which operated for some time as a citystate modeled to a large extent on those taifa states, the women were not prevented from being quite learned even while remaining within the confines of the large households in the medina where they often




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became experts in such matters as calligraphy and herbal medicine. In fact, these women managed to transform the houses in the medina into veritable centers of cultural production, not only through such activities as embroidery and music but also through the narratives with which they became involved—which served to a large extent to connect them with the outside world. These women both conformed to and also contested the structures within which they found themselves, through tales such as “Ali and a Spinner Too?” that reveal them to have been more in control of their position as women than is normally assumed. The way the protagonist in this tale takes control of her position demonstrates the extent to which the women both questioned and effectively redefined their marginal position. Furthermore, their narratives, which contain numerous features reminiscent of contemporary women writers and theorists, also contain distinctive features that can be traced to the work of such renowned European writers as William Shakespeare himself. Such women would have been quite aware of the authority of the written word, to which they could only have access if they upheld the values of their patriarchal culture. The written word is after all associated with the ‘ulamā’ (pl. of ‘ālim [scholar particularly of religious matters]) and their decrees of what would be deemed proper behavior for women, based on their interpretations of religious texts. It is perhaps such a perception of the written word that made the women feel more comfortable in limiting their creativity to the more f lexible oral medium. The latter allowed women from all the different social classes to take part in the creative process, and allowed them moreover to incorporate into their art form features from other oral-based art forms such as the Andalusi music with which they were also involved and whose zajal and muwashshah poetry they would have memorized. Such oral-based mediums enabled women to resort to indirect means in order to transgress the patriarchal norms even while they conformed to them. To this extent their tales, like those of some nineteenthcentury English women writers, can be described as “palimpsestic,” that is, “[w]orks whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible and less socially acceptable levels of meaning. Thus these [nineteenth-century English] authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards.” 3 This is precisely what “Ali and a Spinner Too?” achieves by appearing to conform to the male norms on the surface, but by conveying quite different messages underneath.



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A close look at this tale reveals it to be quite different from the fairy tales told in the West, since it is not entirely at the service of what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order of language or of the law of the father associated with it.4 Like their European counterparts, these Moroccan women also felt completely excluded from the male- dominated texts that failed to represent their desires. This is because within the patriarchal order a woman is not supposed to have desires, much less express them. However, due to the fact that these Moroccan women were segregated from the male public domain, and using an oral-based form of narrative, they were endowed with a greater measure of freedom to express themselves since they were addressing an audience that would have been predominantly female.5 This aspect also rendered them more aware than their European counterparts of society’s constraining role on their sexuality. As Michel Foucault has pointed out, sexuality is shaped by and according to the interests of those in power, and is an “historical construct”—what he calls “a great surface network” and not “a natural given.”6 Interestingly, a similar kind of awareness on the part of the Moroccan women involved in Ali’s tale enabled them to transform the predominantly male modes belonging to the public sphere and to mold their tales into narratives within which they could express themselves as women. The concern with how women truly can articulate themselves given the confines of patriarchy has impelled a number of French feminists to formulate theories that would enable women to express themselves even while operating within the male symbolic. Julia Kristeva attempts to bring the speaking body back into discourse through the semiotic element of signification, which she associates with the initial mother/ child relationship and with the repressed female aspect of language.7 For her both the symbolic and the semiotic contribute to the signifying system that for Lacan consists exclusively of the symbolic, which comes under the law of the father. Similarly, Hélène Cixous has proclaimed women as the source of life and energy and hailed the advent of a feminine mode of writing that could subvert the authority of the male symbolic; the speaking body for her becomes closely associated with what she terms “écriture féminine.”8 It seems to me that these are the kind of considerations that Andalusi-Moroccan women storytellers were taking into account long before the French feminists began to formulate their intellectual theories. The tales these women told appear to conform to Cixous’s claim that woman writes in white ink, which she equates with



Women’s Tales and Contemporary Theory

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the mother’s milk, since they are in fact not written at all but told orally and told moreover in the mother tongue.9 The oral tradition is marginal to literacy, but it is what endows these tales with the f lexibility, f luidity, and lyricism that tend to be lacking in written texts, particularly those associated with the ‘ulama. Thus, along with the mother tongue, the vernacular Moroccan darija in this case, which is marginal to the written standard Arabic, the oral tradition enabled women to challenge the hegemony of male narratives and of the written word—so closely associated with the law of the father. Their oral and more popular narratives do not depend on the authority of an author or of any special storyteller. Yet they demonstrate that these women, who appear to be very much at the center of the tales and were expert manipulators of words, were much more in control of their position than they normally are given credit for, which is what enabled them to redefine the marginal position of their gender. Is There an Essence to Gender? On a first reading “Ali and a Spinner Too?” appears to be the archetypal story of a woman who pretends to be a man just as some of William Shakespeare’s characters do in such plays as Twelfth Night and As You Like It. In fact, there is more in Shakespeare that resembles the tale as we shall see in due course. In the tale, being a man is revealed to be only a matter of role-playing that can be learned, much like the trades or occupations mentioned at the beginning of the tale. The woman, who wishes to transgress the boundaries imposed on her by gender, has to adopt a male guise in order to exercise the male profession of her choice. However, the tale raises interesting questions about what actually constitutes gender: Is it only a matter of what one learns and of how one acts on the surface? The tale goes to some length to raise questions about whether femininity is social—a matter of manners such as how one eats—or whether it has some more essential qualities, such as the capacity to make certain plants dwindle and die.10 Even the idea that gender is a matter of biology remains at best a hypothesis that the prince is incapable of proving. The female element here is what the prince senses but which he rationally cannot reduce either to the social or to the biological. Some of the questions the tale raises appear to be similar to those raised by a number of contemporary women writers, who call into question the possibility that gender could have an essence. At the heart of the tale is the image of the ‘ālim, the archetypal representative of male



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learning, who is revealed in fact to be a woman. Gender here becomes a kind of mask, reminiscent of Angela Carter’s protagonist in The Passion of New Eve who has been forcefully transformed—by way of an operation—from a male (Evelyn) to a female (Eve) compelling him/ her to proclaim: “Under the mask of maleness I wore another mask of femaleness but a mask that now I never would be able to remove.”11 In the Moroccan tale, the idea of masking is accentuated by the fact that no actual physical transformation takes place in the person of the character involved. Gender here becomes much more a matter of wearing certain kinds of clothes and of taking control of a given role. This is similar to Jenny Diski’s The Dream Mistress, which depicts the woman writer’s attempt to take hold of the symbolic in terms of her inhabiting the lighthouse and toll house through which all of us, who are depicted as travelers at sea, are obliged to pass.12 The lighthouse here becomes an apt image of the phallic symbolic, which the woman writer inhabits and manipulates from within. The woman writer in that story revels in the f luidity of water, with which she tries to reinvest language so that it becomes more capable of representing her. This appears to be similar to what “Ali and a Spinner Too?” also achieves, without having to resort to some of the antirational postmodern strategies to which both Diski and Carter resort—whose writing will be elaborated on further in chapter 6. By transforming herself into a man—an archetypal ‘ālim at that—the nameless woman here also comes to inhabit the symbolic that she manipulates from within. This is what enables her publicly to assert herself since her transformation endows her with both a male name and a male profession. Yet even while she assumes all those male characteristics, she still retains a certain inexplicable attraction that troubles the prince. This feature, which he only can sense but not actually prove, could be the woman’s “jouissance” that becomes associated with the discourse beyond the masculine text of reason and order. This is in effect the semiotic that, according to Kristeva, manifests itself only indirectly through bodily drives.13 What is interesting about this particular instance of “jouissance” is that it accounts not only for what the woman is able to express through bodily drives but also for the prince’s response to her. “Jouissance” thus becomes the effect she has on him as “reader.” To this extent, the woman reveals herself to be more than what Roland Barthes terms the “readable” text,14 which can be consumed passively, and to demand a much more active role on the part of her “reader.” Thus the woman inside the male disguise, in the tale, demonstrates that she is not entirely constrained by the male structures but is, in fact, the one who




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has learned to inhabit those structures and to effectively manipulate them from within.

To the extent that she actually writes the letter that figures at the heart of the tale, that is, the letter which Ali gives to the gellās of the hammām, the woman in this tale reveals herself to be a woman writer. Like the contemporary British women writers I have mentioned, she only can appear to write like men because she is obliged to operate within the male symbolic order. In fact, she both uses and abuses male modes of writing, enabling her simultaneously to send two different messages. The first, which is meant for the men in the tale, is intended to confuse them and prevent them from perceiving her true identity. Those for whom the other, more significant, message is meant begin to become apparent when we consider that the letter is what the woman sends to herself. The fact that the nameless female protagonist actually addresses the letter to herself suggests that she is sending the message to women in general, to the audience that would have consisted mostly of women. What the tale seems to bring most forcefully to our attention is the fact that nothing is what it appears to be. In fact, nothing has a fixed and definite meaning; meanings are revealed to be shifting and f luid. This is the case not only of the protagonist’s identity but also of the letter that she writes. To the extent that the message she sends to the women is quite different from the one she presents to the men, her letter becomes a floating signifier open to different interpretations. However, it is the woman in this tale who takes control of the signifier, enabling it to convey different meanings to different “readers.” The woman’s letter reveals her to have become an expert manipulator of male strategies that she is able to use against them. This is the case of the strategy she uses to keep the men in the tale in their state of uncertainty about her true identity. And what is her true identity in this text? To the extent that the figure of the ‘ālim represents the male modes of writing, within which the woman inscribes herself, she becomes the woman who embodies the male text and male knowledge in general. She also self-consciously calls attention to herself since she writes a letter that she sends to herself. Her text thus can be described as a form of metafiction, in which it is the reader “who is maneuvered by the work into a ‘proper’ position from which to perceive the paradoxically hidden but perceptible structure



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of meaning.”15 The privileged reader here, who originally would have included mostly women but who now includes all readers, knows that the protagonist is really a woman in ways that the men in the text are incapable of knowing. This instance of dramatic irony suggests that the reader is invited to become a collaborator instead of just a passive consumer, one who can take part actively in uncovering the tale’s layers of meaning. Even the prince is positioned as a reader in search of the woman in this text. To the extent that her body becomes her text, the woman here is writing her body as Cixous advises women to do.16 It is by subverting the predominantly male structures of learning and male modes of writing that the woman at the heart of this tale is able to speak her body. For the speaking body is the woman who enters the male symbolic that she transforms from within, enabling her to represent herself and not simply to conform to others’ representations of her. According to Kristeva the speaking body, which is evident in the semiotic aspect of signification, adds the affective to the purely rational and structural.17 It puts back into communication the notion of desire, which can be reduced exclusively neither to the biological nor to the social. This is what enables the woman in the tale to convey the coded message to the women in the audience. And what is the message that she sends these women? She wishes them to perceive that the importance of the written word is not literally in the word itself—not in its essence—but rather in the use that is made of it. It is the intentions of those in power, those who normally do the reading and interpreting, that determine the meanings. This is the case of the ‘ulamā’ who read and interpreted the Islamic sources on which they based themselves as legislators. Those ‘ulamā’, who contributed to the actual writing of the law and used it to constrain women’s lives, could be the ones who imposed the meanings on the Islamic texts. Such a realization on the part of the women involved in transmitting the coded message in this tale would suggest that they were anticipating some of the concerns of the contemporary Islamic feminists who argue that it is not so much the Islamic sources that constrain women as the way those sources have been interpreted from predominantly male perspectives with patriarchal interests in mind. These include Fatima Mernissi, who has demonstrated that some of the misogynist views attributed to Islam are unjustified by undertaking revisionary readings of some of the hadiths that can be traced back to such sources as Abū Hurayra—depicting the latter as a misogynist who could have distorted some of the Prophet’s sayings after his death.18 Leila Ahmed also argues




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that some of the more emancipating views of women that had characterized the outset of Islam were underplayed during the Abbasid period in favor of the “androcentric voices of Islam,” which became the only ones allowed to be heard due to what she terms “an interpretive decision.”19 Similarly Amina Wadud has suggested ways in which the Qur’an, which has been interpreted almost entirely by men, can be read from a woman’s perspective. 20 Texts, such as the letter in this tale, derive their signification not from what actually is written in them (or not written at all as the case may be here) but rather from the intentions and interests of those who send them. The letter, which derives its authority from the fact that it is “written” and is thus emblematic of male knowledge and jurisdiction, in fact might be simply a blank page in this case or it may contain a message that is completely different from the one actually attributed to it. Such a text derives its power from the position of the person who sends it and the one who reads it, both of which have been appropriated by the woman in this tale. To this extent, the woman reveals that what is written—the maktūb or mūktāb (in darija literally that which is written) that traditionally has been used to mean that which is destined and cannot be changed—actually may not be as definitely fixed or destined as women have been led to believe. Femininity, for instance, may not be women’s essential destiny but only what patriarchal society arbitrarily has imposed on them by claiming to base itself on the letter of the law. In fact, there may be no substance to male authority, which could be entirely arbitrary. The fact that the letter here, like the protagonist herself, may be a blank page does not detract from its significance. This could be suggestive of an alternative script—a writing with white ink, so to speak. It could represent a refusal to conform to the norms of writing or of written texts. The blank sheet here cannot be read as implying that the woman is waiting to be written on by others or has somehow been reduced to silence. For the blank sheet is prior to the written text and although it may remain invisible to the literate society in authority—the society of men—it would by no means have been invisible to the women. For this seeming blank page represents the matrilineal tradition of storytelling, which enables us to hear the voices of women that tend to be silenced within the authoritative written texts. It thus becomes representative of this uniquely female art form that calls into question the authority of the written word itself. The discovery that the written word may not be as rigidly fixed in place as it appears to be, and may not in itself be the source of power,



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becomes an empowering one for the woman in the tale who realizes that she too can both reinterpret it, as the Islamic feminists mentioned earlier would advocate, and thus also manipulate it. To this extent the male symbolic becomes both the source of her confinement and also that of her liberation. The woman’s expert manipulation of the symbolic is evident not only in the use that she makes of the letter in the tale, but also in the words used to tell the tale itself. The tale demonstrates, through the use of puns and some sophisticated play on words, that the spoken vernacular—the Moroccan darija in this case—can be used as poetically and as eloquently as the written Classical Arabic itself. This becomes particularly evident in the final exchange between the protagonist, who now has revealed herself to be a woman, and the prince, who finally discovers her and asks, “ ‘Ali w yaghzel? ” (“Ali and a spinner too?”). She responds, “Ida hrafetlu aysh ya‘mel? ” (“If stuck, what can he do?”). What is especially significant about this ending is that the exchange constitutes a couplet consisting of a zajal-like lyric in the vernacular that resembles the kharja of the muwashshah poetry; this literally means the exit and it furthermore here consists of a woman’s voice completing the male-voiced verse This is reminiscent of the long and rich tradition of Andalusi women’s poetry stretching all the way back to the women poets in al-Andalus who responded with improvised verses of their own to those of the male poets. The tradition of lyric poetry associated with the zajal and the muwashshah is very similar to the one which gave rise to the literary tradition that the Troubadours disseminated throughout Europe, enabling us to find traces of it even in Shakespeare’s plays as we shall see. In the tale, by asking his titular question at the end of the tale, the prince jokingly questions how one can be a man of learning and also a spinner of wool—a task normally associated with women. This seeming contradiction is highlighted beautifully by the choice of the word ghzel itself, which not only means to spin but has numerous other significant connotations—such as ghazzāl (weaver) or (eulogizing one’s love in poetry). These different connotations all imply a form of narrativity, ranging from the spinning of yarns or telling of tales to the much more elaborate process of praising a beloved in verse. It now becomes evident that the protagonist not only has revealed herself to be a woman—even a loving woman—but also the one who primarily is associated with the telling of tales, possibly even of this tale itself. Furthermore, by punning on ghazal and thus foregrounding her involvement in both the storytelling and the more elaborate ghazal poetry, the woman demonstrates that she is in fact transgressing the




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barriers between popular and more elite art forms and thus dismantling their hierarchies. Her strategy, in this respect, becomes similar to the mixing of genres characteristic of so much contemporary postmodern and postcolonial writing. In her response, the word h rafetlu, which here implies that he was stuck, has connotations that touch upon some of the central themes of the tale. Hrafetlu contains the root for h irfa or occupation, from which she has th arrafet, or has deviated, by refusing an occupation that is proper to women. She refuses to stick to the h arf or letter (including the letter of the law) of what has h arf i¯yan, or “literally” been defined as femininity, and thus she refuses to remain within the h arf or edge/ margin to which such a literal definition relegates her. This woman does not wish to confine herself to the marginal position—including that which perceives women’s tales as merely popular and therefore insignificant art forms—imposed on her by patriarchal society. So when she says h rafetlu, referring to Ali whom she has incorporated, she demonstrates that if he was stuck it is because he was confining himself to one extreme conception of his identity. It is the man who was stuck, not the woman. For she finds no contradiction in revealing herself to have the artful, even magical, capacity to move between genders. And she can transform a female task such as spinning or weaving into a male one of celebrating her love in poetry, just as she can turn a great man of learning, an ‘ālim, into a spinner of wool or of yarns. If she is able to express all this, it is because she has th arrafet or deviated from the role of femininity imposed on her. And by doing so she has demonstrated her capacity to inhabit the center and to manipulate it to her own ends. What is more, the prince has no problem understanding her statement perfectly well and responding to it positively, demonstrating that he too is learning—for has he not managed to discover the woman in the text and is she not the one who in fact has been his tutor? Only once he learns his lessons well does he become a fit subject of union with her, which is why she reverts back to being a woman allowing for the union at the end. For as we have been led to perceive, the true learning in this text is revealed to be not the purely male learning nor, for that matter, the purely female learning. It is the learning that involves supplementing the symbolic with the semiotic and bringing the affective back to the rational. The true person of knowledge is, like Tiresias, the one who “knows” both what it is to be a man and to be a woman. So the union between them at the end becomes a marriage between true minds. Or could that be all?



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There is more to the tale when we consider what it is that makes it so reminiscent of a number of Shakespeare’s plays, as I shall try to demonstrate in this section. I realize that I am getting into deep water here, especially given the fact that I am not a specialist in Shakespeare and cannot even claim to have taught him; the only works of his I have taught are some of his sonnets. Nor have I had the opportunity, living in Morocco as I do, to see his plays performed on any regular basis or to keep up with the enormous amount of scholarship on him that has been produced over the years since I was in college. This is why my reading of him is limited to the collection of his plays that I used when I was in college, which is the one I refer to in this book. I have been able to expand on this considerably by reading Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, which I found to be both a pleasure to read and a revelation in its own right. However, this may not be enough to truly do justice to the kind of questions that I have been asked about my intention here. Thus, as a friend and colleague has pointed out to me: how can one compare a relatively unknown woman’s tale from a place such as Tetouan to one of the most canonized writers in mainstream European literature? It has also been pointed out to me that any resemblances I might be able to perceive in these two very different works may be purely coincidental. Both of these points are of course very well taken and the similarities I bring out may very well be coincidental; however, that does not mean that they should not be investigated. What I am doing here is after all an attempt to present a perspective that conforms more to that of Antaeus than to that of Hercules. However, this may only enable me to respond to the questions that have been raised by my colleagues with questions of my own: Why is it that, globally speaking, although they appear to share some features, a writer such as Shakespeare has been so highly canonized whereas tales such as “Ali and a Spinner Too?” have been reduced to a form of structural forgetting? Moreover, what if the similarities that can be perceived in the two different works are purely coincidental—does that not in itself tell us something about the artistic value of the tales? In order to appreciate what is involved, we have to keep in mind that Shakespeare began his career by integrating his eloquence and verbal abundance into lyric poetry. He in fact began by incorporating his considerable genius into the sonnet form, which had come to England via Italian sonneteers such as Petrarch. It was only later that he turned to the theater; as Robert Briffault puts it: “[H]e abandoned



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lyric poetry and took to the theatre because it paid better.”21 By adapting his genius to the popular mode of theater, however, Shakespeare did not completely relinquish lyric poetry; rather, he incorporated it in innovative ways into his plays in ways that resemble these tales, and in the process incorporated numerous conventions associated with the Courtly Love tradition as well. This tradition of love was not the dominant one that prevailed during Shakespeare’s time. Other writers writing at the time were “not following the courtly or Petrarchan tradition with its glorification of love and its absorbed interest in the subtleties of the conventions.” For them “love was a disease which deprived man or woman of reason.” However, Shakespeare was “not interested in moral judgments,” but accepted “the conventions of love as they existed in the courtly world.” 22 He in fact made use of these conventions in combination with numerous others from different traditions, which he was able to blend to great effect. The plays that contain Courtly Love elements particularly reminiscent of “Ali and a Spinner Too?” are Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. These include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, which, in Alfred Harbage’s words are whimsical love-tales acted out in improbable places by charming aristocrats, and hence a world removed from the ludicrous trickeries inf licted by and upon the middle-class stereotypes of classical comedy. However, the inf luence of the latter is perceptible in them, as is the inf luence of a less literary strain, the folk humor descending through medieval miracle play and early Tudor interlude. 23

Of these different conventions, it is the more popular Courtly Love tradition that is most closely associated with the theme of love in the comedies. Apart from the use of lyrics there are numerous other features in these plays, which appear to be closely related to this tradition. One characteristic feature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies is the dual setting in which they tend to be enacted. Although a court normally figures in these plays, it is usually in the more natural settings, associated with a forest or woods, that the love scenes tend to take place. While the court is associated with reason and social order in general, the forest tends to be associated with a seemingly more magical world of love. It is in the latter that the lyrical poetry predominates; blank verse and prose are spoken in the world of the court. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Madeleine Doran puts it: “the court, where the action begins and ends, is elegant, ceremonious, a scene ‘with pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.’ The blank verse generally spoken there helps to set



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the courtly background, with its greater formality and decorum, from the comic adventures of the lovers.” 24 Duke Theseus has many of the qualities of the princes in the chivalric tradition, which according to J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842) “was an Arab importation, initially unconnected with the feudal system.” 25 Doran describes him as “a huntsman, and a sage prince. He is a strong, sensible, kind ruler, not particularly imaginative, and skeptical of fantasy, whether in lovers’ brains or in poets’.” As is the case of the court that figures in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” his court represents “the stable world of common sense and social order.” 26 The notion of social order has been disrupted in As You Like It, where the world of the court becomes associated less with the positive norms of social order and more with the false power that has exiled the real Duke to the forest of Arden. The corrupted society in which the Duke and his followers have “been victimized for their very virtues, and unjustly driven from public society . . . forms, in fact, a major pole of contrasts to the life in Arden.” 27 The latter, which is depicted as being more positive than the life at court, was according to Harold Bloom “named, in part, for his mother, Mary Arden” by Shakespeare. 28 This forest is where numerous different kinds of lovers meet and where, as Ralph M. Sargent has noted, “Shakespeare introduces the largest number of lyrics in any of his plays.” 29 Here as in some of Shakespeare’s other plays “setting and poetry are made to sustain and illuminate the action. . . . The poetry creates the wood, the moonlight, and the fairies, and it is in the wood, under fairy spells, that all the fantastic events of the night take place.”30 Love lyrics in this play appear even on the barks of trees written not by the natives of the forest but by one of the gentlemen courtiers who has chosen the forest as an escape from corruption. In this way the play resembles “the Arcadian fantasy” which according to Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) grew out of the Courtly Love tradition in Europe and represented “a flight from culture, offering a temporary relief from the ceremony and over-sophistication of life at court.” This is the kind of tradition in which “courtiers played shepherd and shepherdess, just as they had previously [in the more chivalric mode] played Lancelot and Guenevere.”31 The use of lyrics that characterizes this setting in A Midsummer Night’s Dream extends to the character of Bottom, the weaver, whom Harold Bloom has qualified not only as “Shakespeare’s Everyman”32 but also as “Shakespeare’s most engaging character before Falstaff.”33 According to Bloom, “There are folkloric magical associations attendant upon weaving, and Puck’s choice of Bottom for enchantment is therefore not as arbitrary as first it seems.”34




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Significantly Bottom, although he speaks with his friends in prose, is the one who uses the unique rhyme scheme of the Andalusi zajal in his song (I: ii, 26–33).35 The use of a dual setting in a Midsummer Night’s Dream is very similar to what we get in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” in which it appears to be less a matter of a contrast between culture and nature than a separation between the male space associated with the written word and the court on one hand, and on the other the woman’s space associated more with the oral tales and the protagonist’s home—where there are seven daughters, and where the tale begins and ends. It is to that woman’s space that the prince is drawn at the end and where he discovers Ali spinning with the other women of the household. Even in Shakespeare the magical space that corresponds to this, the Forest of Arden, becomes associated with the mother—Shakespeare’s mother as Bloom has noted—and by extension with women in general. It is in such a woman’s space in the tale, associated with the spinners and storytellers, that the protagonist transforms the prince’s words into a lyric and thus the prince himself into a poet to whom she can reveal her true identity. It is only within such a space that she is able to reveal her feelings—the revelation being closely related to the lyric poetry—and to thus demonstrate not only who she is but also how she feels about him. This space, unlike that of the court, is what allows for expressions of love. Set in the Comic Mode Other devices used by Shakespeare that resemble such tales as Ali’s include the use of puns, as when Curio in Twelfth Night asks the Duke Orsino whether he will go hunt . . . the hart (I: i, 16–18). The allusion immediately recalls to the Duke the story, belonging to the classical tradition, of Actaeon turned into a hart by Diana, whom he accidentally beholds while she’s bathing, and as a result is killed by his own hounds, as Charles T. Prouty has noted. In his words, “Such mental agility, such appropriate references turned to the occasion of the moment were the very essence of the true courtly lover.” 36 Play on words and revelry in language are also evident in some of the exchanges between Olivia and Viola, when the latter is disguised as Cesario and serving as go-between for the Duke. Both women, according to Prouty, “are well skilled in the dialectic of love. Olivia opens with a well-known gambit, ‘Now, sir, what is your text?’ This is the familiar association of love as a religion



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with its holy books.’ ”37 Not only are these women characterized by their eloquence, as are the women in these tales, but the allusion to religious texts associated with the written word also recall “Ali and a Spinner Too?” with its allusions to the ‘ulamā’ and their association with the written word. Another convention that the plays and the tale appear to share is the use of the letter, such as the one that is sent to Malvolio in Twelfth Night—contributing further to his exaggerated sense of self-importance. This letter, which appears to be sent by one woman, Olivia, is really sent by another woman, Maria, with completely different motives in mind. The letter, written by a woman as in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” contributes to the dramatic irony as well as to the comic effect. A letter also figures in As You Like It (IV: iii) where it is brought by Silvius to Ganymede to whom it has been sent by Phebe. Here is another letter written by a woman and sent to another woman disguised as a man, Ganymede, reprimanding him for his cruelty in failing to respond to her love. This letter—a love letter that is significantly in verse—serves as in Twelfth Night less to support the main plot than to contribute to the purely comic effect. Such techniques in Shakespeare resemble those used in Ali’s tale, although in Shakespeare some of them appear to be more in line with the way the Courtly Love tradition developed and was adapted to feudal Europe as well as with the way it was considerably elaborated on by Shakespeare and adapted to a much more formal notion of theater. One such transformation becomes particularly evident in II: iv, 106–109, when Viola tells the Duke: “My father had a daughter loved a man, / As it might be perhaps, were I a woman, / I should your lordship.” The Duke then asks: “And what’s her history?” to which she replies: “A blank, my lord: she never told her love.” According to Harold Bloom, “[b]lank is a Shakespearean metaphor that haunts poetry in English from Milton through Coleridge and Wordsworth on through Emily Dickinson to Wallace Steven. Here it means primarily an unwritten page, a history never recorded.”38 This blank that haunts English poetry is also evident in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” in the letter that figures at the heart of the tale, which may be a blank page to the extent that there may be nothing written in it. That the page may be blank suggests not only that this woman’s narrative has not been written, but that it conforms to a whole other form of narrativity associated with oral storytelling and poetry that reveals to the prince the protagonist’s true identity as well as her feelings for him.




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However, the feature that makes Shakespeare’s romantic comedies most reminiscent of tales such as Ali’s tale is the centrality of the women characters. Thus as Madeleine Doran notes about the male lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream “neither lover can be much distinguished from the other, being both just infatuated young men.” 39 The women protagonists of these plays come across as playing a more central role than the men, a position that they share with the women protagonists of these women’s tales. The centrality of the women in Shakespeare is further elaborated on by Harold Bloom who claims that “Hermia has considerably more personality than Helena, while Lysander and Demetrius are interchangeable, a Shakespearean irony that suggests the arbitrariness of young love, from the perspective of everyone except the lover.”40 In this way, it is the young women, the dark Hermia and the blonde Helena, who come across as being more individualized. Thus Madeleine Doran argues that “[t]he girls have more personality and individuality.”41 Such personality and individuality becomes particularly evident in the character of Rosalind in As You Like It whom Bloom has praised unreservedly and has qualified as “unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share.”42 Apart from her centrality in the play, Rosalind resembles the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” in that she too plays the role of tutor to the man in her life. This is what Bloom reveals when he claims that “Orlando is an amiable young Hercules, whom Rosalind is happy to educate, in her ostensible disguise as the forestboy Ganymede.”43 What’s more, and as Bloom so brilliantly points out, “A stage play is virtually impossible without some degree of dramatic irony; that is the audience’s privilege. We enjoy such an irony in regard to Touchstone, Jacques, and every other character in As You Like It, except for Rosalind.” She is so likable, he argues, that we do not mind the fact that she knows more about “what matters” than we do.44 Like the woman protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” Rosalind here “seems not to be subject to dramatic irony, her mastery of perspective being so absolute.”45 Like the Andalusi-Moroccan women storytellers whose use of dramatic irony is to the advantage of the woman protagonist in the tale and to the women in the audience, it is Rosalind who appears to be in control of the dramatic irony in As You Like It and not such male characters as Touchstone or Jacques.



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It is true that my perspective concerning these matters might be partial, but here is Roger Boase who reminds us of scholarship suggesting that Shakespeare’s women in general are the ones who conform to those of the Troubadour tradition—which is so different from the classical one, and which Giammaria Barbieri (1519–1575) claimed arose out of contact with al-Andalus.46 There is also Robert Briffault who has actually noted the following: And Shakespeare’s ideal female figures, his Perditas, Imogens, Mirandas, have no sisters in the imaginative works of Greece or Rome, nor are they sib to the Diarmaid, Etain, or Essyelt of Celtic Saga. They are the nonesuch Lady-liege of the troubadour-knight, the paragons of every feminine charm and perfection with which the f lattery of lyrical homage painted and bedecked her.47

Not only do the women in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies play a more central role than the men, but like the woman in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” they appear disguised as men in plays such as As You Like It and Twelfth Night. This strategy was not original on the part of Shakespeare, but had numerous precedents particularly among the Italian sources to which he had recourse.48 Nor is the disguise here to be confused with veiling; significantly the veil is referred to in Shakespeare in ways that it is not in the women’s tales. Thus in Twelfth Night Olivia veils when informed of the arrival of male visitors and later unveils for the benefit of Viola, disguised as Cesario (I: v, 221) to whom she feels attracted. The use of disguise in Shakespeare, which at times serves to produce manifold effects since it was well known that the women’s roles were played by young men, does not appear to have been intended primarily to enable the women to gain access to predominantly male spaces, as is the case in the tale. However, as in the tale it not only allows for dramatic irony, but furthermore enables the women to find out about the men’s feelings in ways they otherwise would not have been able to. Thus in As You Like It Rosalind is able to use her disguise “to heighten the amusement,” by drawing out “Orlando on the subject of his love.”49 It furthermore allows for the final revelation at the end when she clarifies all that appears mysterious to her father and to Orlando, by finally revealing herself to them and allowing the marriage to take place. The use of disguise in Twelfth Night also allows for an apparently unexpected outcome when Orsino, who describes himself as a true lover, decides to marry Viola rather than Olivia whom he has been wooing with much style. Concerning this, Bloom has noted that “[t]here is




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an air of improvisation throughout Twelfth Night, and Viola’s disguise is part of that atmosphere.”50 The courtship between Orsino and Olivia belongs to the chivalric tradition that developed out of the Courtly Love tradition in Europe, in which according to Gaston Paris (1839–1903) “love, like chivalry and courtoisie, is an art with its own code of rules,” and where according to Violet Paget (1856–1935) “there is no progress in love; the knight and his lady are always at the same distance from each other.”51 This could be one reason why Orsino changes his mind about marrying Olivia. By doing so, in Prouty’s words, he “epitomizes the eternal vacillations and improbabilities when at one moment he is prepared to kill Viola and at the next to marry her.”52 Could it not be argued, however, that Orsino was simply acting according to the conventions of a more popular Courtly Love tradition, one more closely affiliated with what we have in the women’s tales? Although he appears to be set on marrying Olivia—his equal in social rank, like the cousin in Aisha’s tale whom the prince was prepared to marry—he cannot help falling in love with his apparent inferior, Viola, once she reveals her true identity to him. It is the disguise that serves to dramatize the final revelation and to accentuate the surprise element of falling in love; only once she reveals herself to be a woman and the one who has been wooing him all along does Orsino realize that she would be a more appropriate bride for him. Only at this moment does he become poignantly aware of Viola’s presence as a true lover, in ways that he was not before. This, in fact, could be the revelation or epiphany to which the title, Twelfth Night, alludes. So would Shakespeare have known about the existence of women’s tales such as Ali’s, aspects of whose tradition he appears to have absorbed? Actually, it is unlikely that he himself would have been aware of the fact that the Courtly Love tradition to which he had recourse came from the Troubadours or from al-Andalus much less from such little known tales. For him as for other English writers it came from Italy, which was regarded as the natural heir of classical antiquity, but she was at the same time the repository of the Provençal tradition. Many who turned to Italy for closer touch with the “antique,” received instead the “courtly” and romantic inspiration that hales [sic] from Provence. Englishmen who undertook the Italian journey to breathe in its native fields the perfume of the “antique,” returned loaded with the fruits of troubadour tradition. The Italian inf luence gave rise, on the one hand, to Racine and French classicism, and on the other to Elizabethan eff lorescence and Shakespeare.53



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The Troubadour tradition to which Briffault refers, which those Englishmen mistook for classical antiquity, is the one for which Julián Ribera y Tarragó (1858–1934) claimed, in Roger Boase’s words, “to have discovered in the Andalusi zajal the key to the strophic forms.”54 It is also what gave rise to Chivalry which, according to Sismondi, “was an Arab importation, initially unconnected with the feudal system.”55 The connection between Andalusi songs, those of the Troubadours, and by extension of Provence, is clarified further by Robert Briffault who states: The Provençal song-makers did not then frame anew the form only of poetical expression; they enacted a change which has struck deeper into the European mind, a change in the whole of its emotional and imaginative cast. They did not pour new wine into old bottles; they poured new wine into new bottles. Both form and content were, in their poetry, a new departure, in all respects, foreign from the tradition of GrecoRoman literature.56

It is possible, then, that, the tradition of women’s tales to which “Ali and a Spinner Too?” and “ ‘Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” belong, which forms part of the Arab Andalusi tradition and is closely associated with its songs, could have extended well beyond the confines of the courts and households within which the tales were initially told and served to pave the way for even such far-off geniuses as Shakespeare himself.







Lawza el-Bhiya

There was upon a time until there was A world that exists not but really does

A

t that time there lived a couple who did not have any children because every time they had a baby it died. Finally, one day, they had a baby girl, whom they really wanted to live. So they decided not to give her a name but let her name herself when she grew up, in the hope that by thus breaking with the custom they would enable this baby to stay alive and become an adult. In due course the baby grew up and became a young girl. When she started going to dār el-m‘allma where she was sent to be taught with the other young girls in her community, she began to notice that everyone had a name and when they asked her what her name was she did not know. Since this seeming ignorance was a source of derision on the part of some of the girls, she asked her parents why it was that she did not have a name. They explained to her how it had come about that they wanted her to name herself. After considering this for some time the young girl was eventually able to proclaim to the others: My name’s Lawza el-Bhiya and I’m free To outwit others who can’t outwit me.



CHAPTER 3

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She grew up to become a very well-accomplished young woman, whom Allah had endowed with all the graces and whose wittiness made her so well known that even the prince of that town had heard about her. It did not take long for him to become interested in such an extraordinary young woman. So he sent one of the ladies in the court to serve as a go-between, who could convey his messages to Lawza el-Bhiya and take back her responses to him. When a degree of familiarity was thus established between them, the prince asked the lady to beg Lawza el-Bhiya to let him see her, or at least some part of her, even if it was just her little finger. Lawza el-Bhiya considered this a good occasion to try out her wit on the prince, so she got a long radish and sculpted a delicate white finger with red nail out of it. This is what she showed the young man, which pleased him enormously. Encouraged by this apparent willingness to establish a degree of intimacy on her part, the prince, after some time, begged her to go a little further and allow him to see her hair. Lawza el-Bhiya was not discouraged any more by this petition than she had been by the previous one. She sought out a Jewish friend of hers, explained to her what she was up to, and asked her to allow her to show her long tresses of hair to the prince. The young woman had no objection to this, being herself a good sport and enjoying the prospect of taking part in such fun making. So she let her tresses loose at an upstairs window of the house where the prince could view them from the street below. This time the prince felt really triumphant. Here was an even more daring show of intimacy on the part of Lawza el-Bhiya, he thought. Surely this was a gesture on her part that she did not consider him a stranger; surely such a young woman, who thought she could outsmart others, could herself be easily taken advantage of. This encouraged him to ask her the definitive question: if she would allow him to spend the night with her. She responded that she would do so only on one condition: that he would enter her chamber at night and leave it also while it was still dark. This the prince readily agreed to, so she set out to contrive yet another way of outwitting him. She sought out a Gnāwi¯ 1 slave woman who, she happened to know, was enchanted by the prince and begged her to help her outwit him. The Gnāwi¯ woman was only too pleased to help out. So Lawza el-Bhiya transformed one of the toilets in the eastern wing 2 of the house into a bedroom by spreading it with carpets and mattresses and this is the chamber to which the Sultan’s son was led in the middle of the night to lie by the side of the Gnāwi¯ slave woman and from which he also emerged in the dark.



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By then the prince was convinced that Lawza el-Bhiya could be easily outwitted. So he sent to ask for her hand in marriage to which she readily agreed. He was convinced that once she married him, Lawza el-Bhiya would be completely at his mercy. However, she was not to be so easily outwitted. Suspecting that the marriage was intended as a means of getting even with her, she set out to outwit him even concerning this matter. So in preparation for the day of the wedding she made a confectioner’s doll, entirely of sweetmeats and candy, and dressed it up in all the finery and numerous strings of pearls normally donned by a typical Moroccan bride.3 This is the bride whom the Sultan’s son found in his nuptial chambers when he entered after all the guests had left. Thus the Sultan’s son stood in front of the doll bride in all his hauteur and started asking her: “So you are the one who showed me her little finger?” to which the doll bride responded by nodding her head, so that he continued: “And you are the one who let me see her hair tresses from the upstairs window?” to which she again nodded complacently. “And are you also the one who dared to allow me into her bed chamber at night?” he then asked, to which she nodded yet again. The doll bride responded to everything he said by nodding as it was being manipulated by means of a string from under the bed where Lawza el-Bhiya was hiding. The Sultan’s son kept getting angrier with each of her nods, until he finally exploded: “And do you suppose that all this makes you a worthy bride for a Sultan?” he shouted. When she once more nodded calmly to this, he took his sword out of its sheath and angrily chopped her head off. Then he licked his fingers and noted in surprise that her blood tasted sweeter than her f lesh. Only then did Lawza el-Bhiya emerge from under the bed to confront the Sultan’s son with the truth of what he had really seen and experienced. As he looked at her in bewilderment, she explained to him all that had happened thus: The finger you saw was a radish red The tresses belonged to a Jewish head In the east wing toilet you lay in bed, With a Gnāwi¯ slave woman in my stead.

The prince’s initial surprise was transformed into satisfaction as he listened to these revelations. He became extremely relieved that he had not beheaded the real woman and this realization made him convinced



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beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no better match for him and no more suitable bride than Lawza el-Bhiya.

Representing the Self as Strategic Use of Essentialism In “Lawza el-Bhiya” we have a variation on the themes that appear in both “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” and “Ali and a Spinner Too?” As in the two previously discussed tales, the protagonist here is able to take hold of the male symbolic and to represent herself in her own terms, arriving at the epiphanic revelation at the end—which in this tale is enhanced by the kharja-style lyric she finally pronounces. After analyzing this tale, I would like to relate the way the self is represented as subject in it to how this self-representation is enacted within “multicultural” and “trans-cultural” contexts, so topical these days, characterizing such postcolonial identities as those of Maghrebi immigrants in France for instance. Such a sense of self, it can be argued, is present even in the writings of Maghrebi writers who did not migrate to France but who aspire to write creatively according to Western norms in general and French ones in particular. The concerns of such writers, particularly their attempts to construct viable identities, appear to have had antecedents in tales like this one, told by traditional Moroccan women whose identities were also originally shaped by memories of, at times, brutal trans-cultural relocation.4 This could be why in the process of coming to terms with her identity as subject within the patriarchal context in which she finds herself, Lawza el-Bhiya in this tale feels compelled to discard the repressive femininity imposed on her by her patriarchal society in favor of a notion of self that endows her with considerably more control. Even though the contributions of such traditional women have not always had public visibility or been adequately acknowledged they do have much in common with more recent women’s narratives, despite the rather dissimilar strategies they use. Thus although this tale resembles “The Sleeping Beauty” as well as the concerns of such women writers as Charlotte Brontë and Margaret Atwood, it arrives at resolutions that are in some ways more innovative. This traditional tale, in fact, suggests strategies for emancipating women that appear to have been overlooked by more recent women writers such as Nedjma in The Almond,5 even though her title bears a close resemblance to that of “Lawza el-Bhiya.”



Letting my tale flow down the oued (river) I came back home to knead my bread

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One feature that characterizes Lawza el-Bhiya’s exploits is her ability to dismantle the stereotypes associated with women’s bodies. Stereotypes are what Muslim women in general and Moroccan women in particular have had often to contend with, particularly as concerns their representations within Western discourse. These include such stereotypes as those associated with the colonial postcards that Malek Alloula discusses in The Colonial Harem and which he qualifies as: “forms of colonial discourse.”6 Stereotypical representations of Moroccan women appear even in such seemingly neutral accounts as Edith Wharton’s In Morocco. Although this appears to be primarily a travel narrative in which she describes her visit to Morocco, the fact that she visited it as the guest of the French Resident General and therefore within a predominantly colonial framework should not be overlooked. This may very well have contributed to the perspective she projects when she claims that [c]onversing through interpreters is a benumbing process and there are few points of contact between the open-air occidental mind and being imprisoned in a conception of sexual and domestic life based on slaveservice and incessant espionage. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking, needle-work, or any household arts.7

The view that Moroccan women are ignorant and passive, because they are supposedly harem-bound, derives from a predominantly Colonialist/ Orientalist perspective. It may not be so much, as some believe, that only in the twentieth century has the role allegedly imposed on women by Islam begun to be challenged. Rather, it could be argued that it is in the more recent Colonial/Imperial context—and to a large extent due to a variety of Orientalist discourses to which this has contributed— that Muslim women’s lives have become constructed as necessarily confined and limited to the so-called harem. What is particularly interesting about a tale such as Lawza el-Bhiya’s is that the traditional space from which it emanates seems to have allowed for strategies for emancipating women that appear to be less readily available to more contemporary women writers. The way Muslim women viewed themselves in the past appears to have been less constricted than it is now due to such processes as those instigated by the colonial process, which has served to reduce them to stereotypes. This could be why some contemporary women’s writings appear to have more problems dismantling



Dismantling Stereotypes

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the stereotypes associated with women in general and Muslim women in particular than does Lawza el-Bhiya. The process of dismantling such stereotypes involves a double operation, as Alloula argues: “[f ]irst, to uncover the nature and meaning of the colonialist gaze, then to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women.”8 If we merge the colonial with the patriarchal, since both represent a form of the powerful center, then it would be easier to see that both of the processes mentioned by Alloula are enacted in “Lawza el-Bhiya”, which was told by women who were challenging the norms of their patriarchal society in precolonial times. They were submitting their role as women to similar kinds of criticism that present-day Western feminists are submitting theirs to, even though it would be a mistake to view what they did entirely from the perspective of contemporary Western feminism. As Mohanty has argued in “Under Western Eyes,” 9 we must remain wary of the kind of falsely universalizing methodologies adopted by some Eurocentric feminist discourse that aims to construct homogenous visions of thirdworld feminism. That said, however, it is interesting to note that the Muslim women involved in the oral narration of Lawza el-Bhiya’s tale were using strategies similar to those of present-day feminists. What they were doing is very similar to what is being done by Christian or Jewish feminists who are examining and rethinking their own traditions, but who do not always acknowledge the same moves by Muslim women.10 These Muslim women were not seeking to give up their culture, religion, or traditions—or to adopt those of others as Nedjma in The Almond appears to be doing—but they were devising ways to transform those traditions from within, which is precisely what “Lawza el-Bhiya” enacts. The way Lawza el-Bhiya is able to uncover the nature and meaning of the prince’s gaze, which appears to conform to Alloula’s first step in dismantling the stereotypes inherent in the colonial gaze,11 will become evident in a later section of this chapter. I would like to reverse the order suggested by Alloula and concentrate in this section on the way she performs the second step suggested by Alloula of subverting the stereotype attached to women’s bodies. What enables her to do this is her ability to distinguish between her own view of what a sexual relationship could be and that of the prince, whose lustful tendencies she relegates to the east-wing toilet. She is thus able to call into question the prince’s claim to knowledge, including carnal knowledge of her. In her final effort to outwit him she confronts him with an image that conforms entirely to his own stereotypical construction of her that also corresponds to the



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image of femininity upheld by her society. This bride, normally gloriously made up and highly stylized in Morocco, is her final chef d’oeuvre, with which she presents the prince. The candy bride is, in effect, an essentialized representation of the self that the protagonist uses strategically here. Its essentialism—highlighting its consumable quality—is reinforced by the prince’s comment that her blood tastes sweeter than her f lesh. It is by representing her self in terms of the prince’s stereotypical perception of her, and furthermore making that representation enact the role of the submissive and passive bride, that Lawza el-Bhiya makes him realize he does not want that kind of bride. Therefore, even while she remains hidden under the bed,12 she is the one who impels him to chop the candy bride’s head off and thus it is the patriarch who ends up dismantling that stereotype of femininity and enabling the real woman to deconstruct that perception of the self and to therefore recuperate her position on top of the bed. “Lawza el-Bhiya” in the Context of Women’s Narratives Unlike “The Sleeping Beauty,”13 who at the outset of that tale is cursed by the fairy who was not invited to her christening, the protagonist of this women’s tale is not named in the customary manner or given the equivalent of a christening. In fact, the European tale appears to contain a patriarchal reaction to women’s tales such as Lawza elBhiya’s; significantly the harm done to the Sleeping Beauty comes from an old woman’s spindle, the instrument of spinners (and by extension of storytellers). Unlike the protagonist of the European fairy tale, Lawza el-Bhiya is neither blessed by all the good fairies that come to her christening nor cursed by the one who feels she has been left out of the ceremony and festivities.14 By foregrounding the fact that it is the protagonist who names her own self—which she significantly does in verse—the tale suggests that from a young age she has the gift of manipulating words. This woman is thus revealed to be from the outset empowered in a manner that is normally reserved for men. For the power of naming, as Susanne Kappeler points out, “has been men’s for and in recorded history.”15 The fact that she announces her name in verse furthermore implies that she is a talented poet; it is these features of her personality that enable her to both articulate and creatively give shape to her own identity. Such an ability to control language proves to be more empowering to Lawza el-Bhiya than the intervention on the part of fairies proves to be for the Sleeping Beauty. Lawza el-Bhiya contains within herself the source of her own blessings, which is what



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enables her to make the self her subject and to creatively represent or translate it to the prince in his own terms. Such an ability to control the symbolic, which becomes associated with control over their own destiny, is the outstanding feature that distinguishes the protagonists of these Andalusi-Moroccan women’s tales from those of more Westernstyle tales such as “The Sleeping Beauty.” A protagonist such as Lawza el-Bhiya furthermore appears to enact dilemmas that resemble those which have preoccupied more modern Anglo-American women writers, although the storytellers involved in her tale arrive at resolutions that appear to be somewhat different from those envisaged by the latter writers. Thus, in a manner similar to what occurs in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we have in the tale both a central protagonist and what could be termed her double. Whereas Jane Eyre’s double is the (mad) woman from the colonies who has been confined to the attic, Lawza el-Bhiya’s double is her own representation of a candy bride that depicts the kind of woman in terms of which her society would like to envision her. Unlike Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, to whom are relegated all the attributes that do not conform to English society’s notion of femininity, Lawza el-Bhiya’s double is precisely the image of femininity that her society upholds but to which she herself does not wish to conform. Unlike the (mad)woman from the colonies, whose apparent transgressiveness warrants imprisonment in the attic, Lawza el-Bhiya’s double consists of her society’s archetypal image of femininity—the highly stylized Moroccan bride in all her glory—to which she herself refuses to conform. Her triumph at the end consists of the fact that she is able to acquire all the advantages associated with being a bride without having to change herself or compromise her standards. The use of the candy bride in this tale makes it resemble Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman in which the protagonist, Marian, starves herself in an effort to escape the relationship with the socially ambitious Peter. Marian’s anorexia becomes a subconscious reaction against the reality with which she only gradually comes to terms and with which she confronts Peter when she tells him: “You’ve been trying to assimilate me.”16 Her body practically starves itself in an effort to escape that relationship. What both the tale and novel share is the perception of the male gaze as entrapping. In Atwood’s novel, Marian begins by feeling hunted; she feels trapped in Peter’s gaze. Similarly in the tale Lawza el-Bhiya feels threatened by the prospect of being gazed at by the prince, which is why she diverts his gaze to others. However, what makes the two protagonists resemble each other the most is the way



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each presents the man in her life with her own creative representation of the self, a readily consumable woman in each case. Thus Marian in Atwood’s novel finds that the only way she can avoid being reduced to Peter’s version of femininity is by baking a cake in the form of a woman, which she offers him as a substitute for her self. Only by refusing Peter’s construct of femininity, and representing it creatively, can she escape from her peculiar dilemma, which appears to have affinities with the way Lawza el-Bhiya escapes from hers by presenting the prince with a candy bride that she manipulates from under the bed. Whereas Marian in Atwood’s novel ends up becoming involved with another man, the antiheroic Duncan who is quite different from Peter, Lawza el-Bhiya’s major accomplishment is her ability to transform the authoritative prince into a man who can appreciate her as she actually is. What becomes evident here is that the traditional women’s tale, by attempting to come to terms with feminist issues similar to those dramatized in the more recent novels, demonstrates the extent to which the more traditional conceptualizations of female sexuality appear to be on par with the conceptualizations of more recent women writers, who have had exclusive claims to being considered feminist. Is There an Essence to Female Sexuality? Lawza el-Bhiya’s ability to represent or translate her self—including her sexuality or inner core—into the prince’s terms lies at the heart of the tale. Rather than allowing herself to remain trapped within the encompassing patriarchal context that the prince represents, she sets out to contest the distinction between inner and outer by in fact drawing attention to it. The distinction between outer meaning and inner reality in this tale becomes reminiscent of Conrad’s claim in Heart of Darkness: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze.17

Apart from the similarity between the women’s tales and the yarns that such seamen as Marlow spin, another similarity becomes apparent here in the distinction this tale makes between the inner core, that becomes representative of the personal, and the outer glow, which is associated



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with the political, and that becomes evident in the very name that our protagonist chooses for herself. It is by taking hold of language and naming herself that she transforms the inner core into the outer context, or the political dimension with which the prince is associated. The name she chooses for herself, Lawza el-Bhiya, like all names, in fact defies translation. However, if we attempt to transliterate it, what we get comes very close to being The Glorious (or Brilliant) Almond. Here, as in Nedjma’s novel, the almond comes to be associated with the female sex organ. By qualifying as glorious and externalizing (using it to name herself ) that part of her self which is meant to remain hidden, Lawza el-Bhiya in fact endows the inner core with an outer glow or brilliance. Such a notion of sexuality appears to conform to Foucault’s view that: [s]exuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check. . . . It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies etc. . . . are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.18

The view that even such a seemingly core personal reality as sexuality can be conceived of not as part of the inner kernel, but of the external representations projected by those in power, is one which the storytellers appear to have also grappled with, although they may not have articulated it in quite the same terms. The aim of such women was precisely to take control of the language of those in power—suggested in the tale by the ability to name the self—and to transform it in ways that would enable them to represent themselves creatively. Such storytellers wished to represent their personal identity, even the inner core of their sexual identity, in terms of the political without reducing themselves merely to eroticized objects. Lawza el-Bhiya’s creativity is what enables her to strategically uncover the nature and meaning of the prince’s gaze, which recalls Alloula’s first step in dismantling the stereotypes inherent in the colonial gaze,19 touched upon earlier. In the tale, it is the prince’s position of authority that becomes associated with the power of the gaze. The protagonist realizes that his “assumptions of cultural supremacy,” 20 in Homi Bhabha’s words, must be desacralized before her own perceptions of the self can become apparent. By taking hold of the political



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to represent the more personal aspect of her identity, Lawza el-Bhiya enables herself to control artistically what the prince gazes at and thus to manipulate the meaning of what he sees. The fact that he conceives of her in terms of the different parts of her body, which he wishes to see, is reductive; this suggests that for him she is just an assortment of parts, a perception that relegates her to the realm of object. It could even be argued here that the prince’s requests suggest that he wishes to reduce her to an object of pornography, which as Susanne Kappeler has pointed out “is not a special case of sexuality; it is a form of representation.” 21 However, Lawza el-Bhiya, who is not to be outwitted so easily, withholds herself from his gaze by submitting to it instead such disparate entities as a radish and another woman’s hair and leading him eventually to believe that he has obtained knowledge of her—even carnal knowledge—while in fact withholding that knowledge from him. In this way she rejects the object position he wishes to impose on her and proves to be in control of the perception of her identity, which adds up to more than just the sum of different parts. As the tale has suggested from the outset, she is a poet who can expertly manipulate the very process of signification; this is what enables her to associate the prince’s signifiers with different signifieds from those that he intends. In fact, she is able to take control of the prince’s process of signification—of the symbolic itself—and enable his words to acquire different meanings. By taking the process of representation into her own hands she transforms the meanings that the prince wishes to impose on her, including his desire to eroticize her body, and thus ensures that she is not reduced to a mere sex object. Lawza el-Bhiya manages to do all this by in fact mimicking the role that the prince imposes on her. This is what enables her to control his perceptions and to thus position him as the spectator, rather than the artist, who could have pronounced words similar to the spectator referred to by Jacques Lacan who states “what I look at is never what I wish to see,” in which the relation between the artist and the spectator becomes one of “trompe-l’oeil.” 22 When Lawza el-Bhiya finally presents the prince with the candy bride she is in fact doing something very similar to what Lacan refers to when he claims that “when a human subject is engaged in making a picture of himself, in putting into operation that something that has as its centre the gaze . . . it is as subject, as gaze, that the artist intends to impose himself on us.” 23 This is actually what Lawza el-Bhiya does by confronting the prince with a picture of her own self in the form of the candy bride. She is the true artist at the



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The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of the painting which . . . might be summed up thus—You want to see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. 24

This is exactly how Lawza el-Bhiya positions the prince when she presents him with the gloriously made-up candy bride, which is really something to look at. He is appeased and in fact lays down his weapon only once he becomes so enervated at this bride that he ends up chopping her head off. It is only then that Lawza el-Bhiya emerges from under the bed to confront him with another artistic creation: her kharja-style finale. This is what actually allows for the final insight that enables him to at last see her as she actually is. From Sight to Insight The lyric that Lawza el-Bhiya delivers at the end, which spells out to the prince the strategies that she has used to outwit him and which also reveals her identity to be quite different from the kind of woman to which he thought he had reduced her, is what allows for the transition from an emphasis on sight to one on insight. This finale can be seen as an instance of the kind of kharja or refrain that often appears in muwashshah poetry, which not only tends to be in the vernacular and in a woman’s voice but also implies the exit from that work of art. This instance of the kharja may not conform exactly to that quoted and translated by Luce López-Baralt as: “I shall not love thee save / thou joinest the bangle of my ankle to my ear-rings.” 25 Such eroticism is also evident in a kharja noted by Malek Bennouna in his introduction to Kunnāsh al-Hā’ ik, which goes something like this: “Habi¯ bi¯ (my love) if you have finished your desert, come and do me a pleasant hurt.” 26 Yet it performs a similar kind of function, especially when we consider that it provides an exit from the world of narrative to that of live action. The typical end rhyme, which can also be found in some of the other tales, formed part of Arabic poetry, even before the advent of the literate muwashshah as well as the more popular zajal—which are specifically Andalusi. Robert Briffault points out that the Andalusis



heart of this tale, and in effect she usurps the subject position from the prince—enabling herself to perform the supreme function of art, which Lacan explains as follows:

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With Oriental poetry, as with Oriental music, rhythm is everything. Quantities being only lightly marked, rhyme was used as a further means of stressing the cadence. The complicated rules of prosody in traditional Arabic poetry bear no relation to those governing Greek and Latin verse, in which accent was pronounced, and owning to the uniformity of inf lections, rhyme would have produced a banal and monotonous effect. It was the Arabs who introduced rhyme into Europe. 27

Lawza el-Bhiya’s poetic intervention at this point, which is not so much a recitation of a memorized verse as a supposed improvisation in accordance with the circumstances that dictate it, also becomes reminiscent of the improvisations of the jawāri¯ in medieval al-Andalus, whom the Sultans at times ended up marrying due to their ability to respond expertly to the Sultan’s verses with improvised verses of their own. One other, seemingly minor, feature that suggests a close affiliation between this tale and the broader medieval tradition to which such writers as Chaucer belonged is the use of the go-between, such as the lady from the court in this tale who mediates the initial exchanges between the prince and Lawza el-Bhiya. Although her role here, unlike that of Orsino in Twelfth Night, appears to be rather limited—partly due to the fact that it may have been taken for granted by the storytellers who told me this tale and therefore not given much emphasis—she does form part of an extended tradition of go-betweens in these tales, such as the khat tāba in “Aisha Jarma” (chapter 5) and the old woman in “The Female Camel” (chapter 6) as we shall see. The use of these go-betweens could contribute to such studies as that carried out by Rouhi in which she uncovered: “a number of less well known Spanish go-betweens, and most importantly, a substantial chapter on Arabic and Persian go-betweens. Rouhi presents many interesting parallels between the neareastern and western-European traditions, although she does not show that one is the source of the other.” 28 These Andalusi-Moroccan gobetweens, confined as they are to women’s oral narratives, are much less likely to have come to the attention of scholars such as Rouhi, although like the vernacular zajal poetry, or perhaps along with it, their tradition could have easily seeped into Western Europe. The custom of the go-between, which makes more sense in the Muslim context where men and women’s spaces tend to be segregated, could have been absorbed by such artists as the Troubadours and Chaucer along with the rest of



were the first to introduce end rhyme into medieval European culture. As he puts it:

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the tradition to which it belonged including the whole Courtly Love convention. It is the kharja-style repartee with which Lawza el-Bhiya faces the prince at the end, even more than the strategically essentialized image with which she presents him or his action of cutting off the bride’s head that reveals to him her true identity. Significantly, it is the reality with which she confronts him in her kharja that completely disarms him and makes him realize the extent to which his ways of seeing and knowing have been f lawed. For her kharja-style ending, like the final couplet in Shakespeare’s sonnets, both summarizes what has happened and reveals to the prince what has remained hidden from him. Her repartee in verse furthermore foregrounds her position as artist, which has been evident to the audience from the beginning of the tale. As a poet she is not only able to enhance the beauty of the words themselves through such means as rhyme, but to also demonstrate that such words are not completely divorced from any lived reality. By having a protagonist who is a poet at its heart, this narrative in fact affirms the extent to which poetry is not something entirely removed from life but is rather connected with it in the most intimate manner. For as we have seen, Lawza el-Bhiya is not only able to take control of language as a form of ornamentation, but such control is what enables her to affect her circumstances— particularly those associated with her romantic relationship—most dramatically. It is in fact her creative power that enables her to transform the authoritative prince into the kind of man who can see her as she would like to be seen. This is what highlights Lawza el-Bhiya’s strategy, truly diverting the prince’s gaze and allowing for that moment of insight in this tale that makes it resemble the final epiphany in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as well as that which occurs at the end of “Ali and a Spinner Too?” as we saw in chapter 2. The Difference that Allows for Signification Unlike the Sleeping Beauty, Lawza el-Bhiya does not simply wait passively for the prince’s kiss to wake her up. Rather, she is the one who manipulates the construct of femininity in such a way as to force the prince to discard his perspective and his claim to knowledge by revealing her identity as it is—or at least as she would like it to be—rather than as he would like to impose it on her. What finally attracts the prince to Lawza el-Bhiya is that she differs from the construct of femininity he has dismantled, as she differs from the other women, with whose parts she presents him. It is precisely this difference that enables



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her to signify and that valorizes her in the prince’s eyes. The idea of difference is stressed throughout the tale, where it becomes apparent above all in terms of how her own perception of her self differs from the way the prince at first perceives her—as just another sex object. This is reinforced by the way that she herself takes on the role of the signifier who differs from the other signifiers within the same system, such as the Jewish woman and the Gnāwi¯ slave woman, from whom she differentiates herself. For the Jewish woman it would have been more acceptable to allow a man who was not a relative to see her hair than it would have been for a Muslim woman. Lawza el-Bhiya’s difference from the Gnāwi¯ slave woman is depicted more in terms of skin color, thus exposing one stereotype that is not dismantled in this tale. The racist attitude is evident not only in the fact that this black woman is relegated to the eastwing toilet, along with the lustful inclinations of the prince, but also in the insistence that the prince enter and leave in the dark. This strategy may have helped to call into question the idea that seeing is knowing, but the role of the Gnāwi¯ woman, as well as that of the Jewish woman, is not limited to that. This tale, which performs the whole process of taking hold of language and representing the self, like the other women’s tales discussed in this book, belongs to an art form crafted by different women collaborating with each other. These would have included women such as the Jewish woman and the Gnāwi¯ slave woman in this tale. Here we see the different women collaborating with each other, in spite of their differences, to outwit the prince. This collaboration is what allows for the final union at the end, which becomes a union with a prince who has been stripped of the authority of his gaze and enabled to give play not only to his own desire but also to that of Lawza el-Bhiya. This is an outcome at which all the women involved in the tale would have triumphed. For although these women may have differed as far as religion or social class is concerned, such difference did not exclude them from the process of creativity—that, in this case, of crafting and narrating the tale itself. Such collaboration on the part of all segments of the society in the creative process is also evident in the distinctively Andalusi poetic forms, the muwashshah and the zajal, reverberations of which we have in this tale. The zajal poems, you may recall, which have all the formal qualities of the muwashshah, differ only in that they are in the spoken vernacular—thus having allowed all segments of the society in medieval al-Andalus, even those women who may not have spoken standard Arabic or who may have been illiterate, to take part in the highly creative process. It is perhaps such collaboration on the part



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of a variety of different women that could render a tale such as “Lawza el-Bhiya” worthy of being described as a manifesto for women artists; the tale verges on the erotic without losing sight of the artistic or of a specifically woman’s perspective. Given the feminist concerns of such tales it is interesting to note that their tradition may have had a considerable impact on some canonical male writers, but not as much on women writers. The Courtly Love tradition, along with the vernacular zajal poetry, could have contributed to the poetry of the Troubadours, and by extension to that of such well-known European writers as Shakespeare, as we saw in chapter 2, as well as Petrarch and Dante—who are often credited with being the first to use the vernacular in serious poetry. Yet this tradition would be more difficult to trace to the work of such European women writers as Charlotte Brontë or Margaret Attwood, even though they were concerned with similar kinds of feminist issues. Significantly not even such contemporary Maghrebi women writers as the pseudonymous Nedjma, who are presently writing about very similar subject matters, appear to have had recourse to the kind of strategies that were available to Lawza el-Bhiya. Nedjma’s The Almond: Essentialism without Strategy The extent to which the storytellers involved in Lawza el-Bhiya’s tale were identity builders who succeeded in the distant past in enacting the process of representing the woman’s self by dismantling the binaries between Self and Other on the level of gender relations could make their techniques especially useful to postcolonial women writers. Such techniques would be greatly beneficial to a variety of women writers, ranging from Beur to more distinctively Moroccan writers. Beur writers—those trans-cultural Europeans whose families came originally from North Africa—face similar types of dislocations as the Andalusi women originally involved in Lawza el-Bhiya’s story, who migrated from Europe and from whose experience they could benefit considerably. For the concern of such writers, according to Alec Hargreaves, is “the articulation of a sense of personal identity,” within a trans-cultural context; in this case one “forged in the particular circumstances which are those of an ethnic minority in France.” 29 Although Nedjma’s The Almond—the novel that I have chosen to discuss in relation to “Lawza el-Bhiya”—may not be specifically Beur since the writer is in fact pseudonymous but is believed to be a Maghrebi woman now living in France, it does appear to share common features with Beur writings in that it is preoccupied with the



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comparison between European, particularly French culture, and more traditional Maghrebi culture, especially as concerns sexuality. The decision to deal with The Almond here was actually prompted by the way its title, like that of “Lawza el-Bhiya,” draws attention to the notion of the “almond”, which becomes associated with the female sex. Nedjma’s The Almond appears to be centrally concerned with representing a female identity caught between the seemingly dichotomous poles of tradition and modernity, and thus treats a specifically postcolonial problematic. Due perhaps to the erotic nature of its topic, modernity is depicted as the space where women can express (or at least freely experience) their sexuality, and tradition as the space where they are deprived of such expression as they are of the whole process of coming to terms with their own sexuality. Such a view upholds modernity, which tends to be understood as being in opposition to and superior to all that is traditional. Thus the protagonist, Badra, can be seen as escaping from the traditional village life associated with Imchouk to Tangier, with its more Europeanized norms that she ends up absorbing and taking back to her native Imchouk in an effort supposedly to enlighten it. What makes Tangier here appear to be so closely associated with modernity is its cosmopolitanism, characterized as it is by a seeming secularity and allowing for a greater sense of individuality, features of which have come to be closely associated with Western-style modernity. The association of modernity with what is specifically European characterizes the perspective projected by the novel throughout. Thus, although it is set in the Maghreb, it upholds predominantly Eurocentric norms especially as concerns the erotic. This appears to have been merged here with the seemingly exotic, which could be why the novel has been so highly praised by some Western media. The Western Media as the New Prince The very language that certain Western media have used to describe the novel serves to reinforce the binary logic that the novel upholds. Thus Romain Lieck claims that “[a] Muslim woman breaks the taboos of her culture: using a pseudonym, she publishes an erotic tale divulging the secret sexual lives and cravings of Muslim women. The book was a phenomenon in France, but conservative Muslims have attacked it as trash. If her identity were revealed, she fears she would be stoned in her native Morocco.”30 The media here maintain their stereotypical perspective of such a supposedly Oriental space, where women need to have recourse to Western norms in order to liberate themselves. The binarism that



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Anger, says enigmatic author Nedjma, was probably the main motivation that propelled her book. Anger over the backwardness, the fanaticism, the delusion, the ignorance, and violence in the Arab world. Sexuality, pleasure in her own body, the separation of love and sin showed her the way to freedom. All the evils of an Islamic society that feels itself threatened by the West . . . are mirrored in the oppression of women.31

This is one of the ways in which the West continues “to other” the Muslim world and in the process to vilify it. One way it attempts to maintain an image of its self as superior to this “Other” is by excluding all that it does not wish to be associated with from its image of the self and by imposing it on the “Other.” This is the case of the idea that sex is a sin, which becomes evident in the novel especially in association with Imchouk but which may be basically a Christian belief.32 Such a notion cannot be realistically associated with the Muslim world, where as Abdelwahab Bouhdiba has noted not only is carnal knowledge lawful, in accordance with God’s will and with the earthly order of things, but it is the indication of divine power itself.33 In fact, the tales in this book reveal women who were seeking viable ways of expressing and enjoying their own sexuality. It is misunderstandings of the kind that are evident in the novel which appear to reinforce the thrust of statements such as “L’Amande reads like an erotic manifesto for modern women who want to break free from the repressive bonds of cultural tradition to unashamedly demand their right to pleasure,”34 which rest on the assumption that such cultural traditions, unlike the more liberating Western ones, are unquestionably repressive to women. The fact that this Muslim society is perceived to be so constraining has not, however, prevented the Western media and Western readers in general from wishing to catch a glimpse of it. Thus The Times has described The Almond as “[a] window into a closed world,” which it qualifies as “highly sensuous and extremely explicit.” It is, of course, what Alloula has termed “the scopic desire”35 of the Western reader here that designates this world as closed. By permitting this kind of reader to look into this world, the novel satisfies his voyeuristic inclinations. Such an inclination is particularly evident in the statement by The Independent that the novel “[s]its squarely—with legs spread—in the tradition of French erotica.”36 By referring to this manner of sitting the statement merges the text with the woman, whose sex is thus



serves to depict the so-called Orient in terms of Western norms is evident here:

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rendered visible. The text is moreover revealed to have the supposed merit of coming up to European standards; it is in the tradition of French erotica. This tradition is what exposes the woman/text to the voyeur/reader’s gaze, which neither the writer of the novel nor the narrator attempts to divert. By thus being positioned as voyeur, the readers/ media here are cast in the role traditionally relegated to the male in authority, such as that of the prince in the tale. Yet, unlike Lawza elBhiya, who is able to control the prince’s gaze, the writer/narrator in this novel does not hesitate to indulge the gaze of such a viewer. Nor does she attempt to creatively transform the object of his gaze, the woman herself, to conform more with the way she views herself and less with the way he wishes to eroticize her body. The writer here appears to be satisfied with claiming to uncover the extent to which the traditional Maghrebi society is oppressive to women and by doing so appears to both endorse and conform to the Western discourse, which Spivak has argued constructs an image of the West as upholding the values of good society worldwide by claiming to protect the women of other cultures, or as she puts it, by saving “brown women from brown men.”37 Reinforcing Stereotypes It is true that The Almond does not actually dramatize the process of saving brown women from brown men. What it dramatizes is the process whereby the protagonist, Badra, wrenches herself from the clutches of one “brown man” and delivers herself to the embraces of another “brown man,” or a variety of others. The first is Hmed, Badra’s impotent but socially empowered older husband from whom she escapes to the Europeanized Tangier where she meets the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan Driss. It is the latter who initiates Badra into European culture, by such means as supervising her reading and her way of making love. Although he is not European as such, he is the one who represents the Western values that are assumed to be capable of saving “brown women from brown men.” It is by failing to dismantle such stereotypes that Nedjma positions herself within Western discourse, which, as Spivak has pointed out, is what serves to silence third-world women. The process of silencing that Spivak refers to, you may recall, is of a discursive nature; third-world women, or Muslim women in this case, become the objects of that discourse within which they are deprived of a subject position. By failing to divert the gaze of the Western reader, a narrative such as The Almond in fact demonstrates the extent to which the woman here comes to view



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herself the way the West (or Western discourse) views her—basically as its “Other.” So why does a writer such as Nedjma cede so much to the Western perspective? One reason could be that she is, as some Moroccan readers believe, actually a French woman who is capitalizing on the whole aftermath of September 2001 as of the so-called war on terrorism, and the Islamophobia to which this has given rise, to further victimize the Muslim world and its women. This theory would explain the numerous anomalies in the novel about how things are said and what kinds of sayings can be realistically attributed to places such as Tangier.38 Such anomalies, however, could even escape a Moroccan woman, whether living in France or in a Moroccan city. Regardless of whether she is French or Maghrebi, Nedjma could be upholding the Eurocentric perspective due to her concern with the market and with selling her book. In fact, this writer, who makes heavily disguised TV appearances, had 50,000 copies of her book sold in France in 2004 alone.39 Her mode of veiling not only remains un-condemned by the French, but may even have contributed to her success. Indeed, Nedjma, who exposes the sex of the Muslim woman at the heart of her narrative while she disguises her own self in exotic fashion, may have aspired to become a star—as the name Nedjma suggests—in the style of movie stars. This would explain why she eroticizes the woman’s body as movie stars eroticize their bodies, in their efforts to conform to the demands of the market. What becomes evident here is the extent to which writing in modern societies, unlike the oral-based tales, has been transformed into a marketable industry, taking on a role similar to that of the cinema or even of the postcards described by Alloula, which simultaneously present both the veil and what lies behind it. The aim within this context is more to sell to the largest number of people by such means as satisfying their voyeuristic inclinations, rather than to conceive of viable ways of expressing a specifically woman’s perspective or of emancipating the women in the audience. This could be one reason why both the woman who has written this novel and the one who narrates it have not only failed to dismantle the repressive stereotypes associated with Muslim women, but appear in fact to have reinforced them. And yet, the writer of this novel claims at the outset that her ambition is “to re-endow the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers and husbands.”40 She appears to think that by attempting to write a French-style erotic novel from a Muslim woman’s perspective she will endow the women of her blood with the power of



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speech from which they have been deprived by their men. However, her narrative, which begins with a quote from Sheikh Nefzaoui’s The Perfumed Garden, with its predominantly male perspective of the erotic, does not suggest particularly viable means of empowering women, any more than it provides any plausible explanation of how she herself managed to become a writer. The story involves an escape on Badra’s part from the stifling village life, where she had been forced to submit to the rape-like embrace of a sterile husband, twenty years her senior, to the Western-style sophistication of Tangier, where she is taken under the wing of the seemingly emancipated Aunt Selma, and where she eventually meets the bourgeois Driss. There is nothing very original about this story; a mistreated village wife escapes to a bigger town to become a kept mistress and derives a sense of material independence as a result of her liaison with Driss, her lover, as well as with others. In fact, the material advantages of the relationship with Driss are not purely incidental; significantly Badra was initially reluctant to get involved with the physically attractive but socially inferior Sadeq, the first man she met in Tangier. In this novel, as in Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down, Tangier itself appears to play a dominant role. Its sophistication may appear to enable Badra to fulfil the romantic dreams of her adolescence. However, although Driss initiates her (within a perfumed garden in Tangier) into a more pleasurable form of sexual experience than that to which her husband had submitted her, it is difficult to see how this concentration on the purely erotic proves to be liberating or how it can endow the women of Badra’s blood with the power of speech. Driss’s imposition on her of more adventurous forms of sexuality as well as his progressive pursuit of more aggressive expressions of it do not appear to be particularly emancipating to women as even Badra herself comes to realize. They are, of course, meant to suggest that the attitude in this novel, as well as the cosmopolitan life it represents, are on par with what is now considered the most chic stance on such matters in the so-called modern cultures. However, by submitting Badra to such forms of sexuality Driss does not enable her to become the subject of her own sexuality or of her own perspective, but in fact subjects her to his as the novel subjects her to that of all the readers whom it positions as voyeurs. To this extent, the sexual activity at the heart of the novel, which furthermore serves to reinforce the Eurocentric perspective of non-European women “as libidinally excessive, and sexually uncontrolled,”41 instead of providing a source of emancipation proves to be rather a cause of entrapment.



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Given the precedence that appears to be granted to men in this narrative, not only Sheikh Nefzaoui but also Driss, one can truly wonder whether there is a woman character in it who is authentically Moroccan. One glimpse of such a character is evident in the character of Badra’s Aunt Selma. She is the older and in some ways more traditional woman whom one would expect to have been steeped in such women’s tales as Lawza el-Bhiya’s, but who does not appear to be so. It is in her household that Badra takes refuge when she first arrives in Tangier and where she finds both the nurturing and understanding that she needs. Aunt Selma’s household in the medina appears to be a space of women’s solidarity, at least of the way such solidarity has been conceptualized by some contemporary feminists. This suggests that the achievements of this woman are perceived predominantly through the falsely homogenizing standards of Eurocentric feminism, such as the one against which Mohanty warns, which reinforces the idea that this writer may very well be French. Thus we are told that Selma is the one who takes care of Latifa, the young woman in the neighborhood who falls on hard times and becomes pregnant. Latifa is contrasted with Souad, Badra’s sister-in-law in Imchouk who became pregnant prior to her marriage with Ali and ended up dying as a result. Such a contrast is meant to reinforce the essential difference between the supposed traditional society and the more modern one. Yet a character such as Badra’s Aunt Selma could be representative of a wide category of traditional older women who have lived in just such households in places such as Tangier, and who would have had recourse to a variety of more socially sanctioned strategies aimed at emancipating women than those that Nedjma suggests. For although Selma instructs Badra about ways of avoiding getting pregnant, and reminds her later that she should get Driss to grant her the ownership of the apartment where he had installed her, such strategies, useful as they may appear to be to some Western feminists, do not endow Badra with a true sense of autonomy. Rather, they suggest that this woman’s space, one version of the “harem” in the Western imaginary, has in fact been transformed into a kind of bordello, despite Selma’s insistence at the outset that it is not one. The kind of older women who traditionally raised young girls from the countryside in such northern towns in Morocco as Tetouan and Tangier, who married them to appropriate young men as they would their own daughters, usually tried to teach them useful crafts and often sent them to school, thus ensuring that they would have the means to



Is There a Moroccan Woman in This Text?

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A Framed Novel This novel is in fact a framed narrative, told by Badra in her fifties about her life as a young woman. What frames the novel is not only a matter of the citation from Sheikh Nefzaoui at the beginning and Driss’s words at the end, but also the Eurocentric perspective it projects. The action begins in Imchouk and returns to it along with Badra when she is middle-aged and wants to be next to the oued Harath that she loves. Although the novel keeps taking us back to the time when Badra was a young girl in Imchouk, in italicized f lashbacks, the framed section is more directly concerned with her escapade in Tangier and all that she experiences there. During this period, and to a large extent due to her contact with the Europeanized Tangier society represented by Driss, we are meant to believe that Badra acquires more sophistication or at least becomes well read, especially in French culture, as she becomes well versed in various ways of making love with a variety of different partners. Yet this section, which is meant to be liberating to Badra, is the one that ironically appears at the center of the framed narrative. Such a structure serves to reinforce the idea that the escape which Badra seeks by going to Tangier becomes associated with an inward journey, one involving moreover a process of memory, which essentially constitutes a journey of self-discovery in which she comes to terms with her own sexuality. However, by framing the episodes in Tangier, the novel appears to inadvertently suggest their more confining impact on this particular experience of self-discovery. This woman’s expression of the erotic, by which the writer wishes to reinvest the women of her blood with the power of speech, is furthermore framed—as noted earlier—by the words of two men, those of Sheikh Nefzaoui at the beginning and those of Driss at the end. Sheikh Nefzaoui in his book of erotic tales, The Perfumed Garden, had no problems, in the sixteenth century, dealing with the erotic in a detailed and explicit manner from a predominantly male perspective. There is, however, little in Nedjma’s novel—which models itself more on French erotica—to suggest some of the picaresque brio of Nefzaoui’s



make at least some pocket money if not a living. Among such women is the one to whom the Moroccan writer of L’enfant endormi, Noufissa Sbai, dedicates her novel: “À Rahti, qui m’a mise à l’école.”42 The fact of sending Sbai to school provides a better explanation of how she becomes a writer than any we get in The Almond concerning the process of how Badra is supposed to have acquired that skill while in Tangier.

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tales, apart from perhaps her presentation of a catalogue of every kind of sexual activity. This woman writer’s attempt to convert such male attitudes to a woman’s perspective appears to result simply in the woman viewing herself as she is viewed by the men; it results in fact in her reducing herself to her different parts, particularly to what the novel refers to as her “almond,” in ways that Lawza el-Bhiya refuses to do. The tendency to give precedence to the male perspective becomes particularly evident in the way the novel ends on Driss’s words, which he is able to utter even after his death. In fact Driss, who is already dead when Badra begins her narrative, continues to possess both Badra and her sex even after his death as it is he who refers to her at the end, as he does throughout the novel, as “mon amande.” It is also Driss who perceives her as a “houri,” that angelic woman to be found in heaven who as soon as she is deflowered regains her virginity. Repeated references to such terms as “almond” and “houri,” suggestive of a specifically Muslim male-fantasized perspective of women, like the term “harem,” have also come to be associated with how Westerners have tended to fantasize the Muslim world as well. Unlike “Lawza el-Bhiya” this novel fails to endow the protagonist with viable strategies that would enable her to dismantle the essentialized images of the self imposed on her by the masculinized/Westernized perspective. In fact, although the speaker in this narrative is actually a woman, the subject position is given to the male lover as well as to the male reader who is able to indulge in his gaze. This is in line with what Kappeler maintains, referring to the ostensibly female narrators of pornography, when she claims that: [t]he so-called female point of view is a male construction of the passive victim of his own scenario, the necessary counterpart to his active aggressor: whether “she” resists her own violation, whether she enjoys it in involuntary bodily response and against her will, or whether she is voluntarily and infinitely available to his impositions—all available alternatives serve to enhance the pornographic pleasure, the active subjectivity of the male, his feeling of life.43

Even though it is the woman who actually speaks in this novel, by positioning herself within a masculinized Western discourse and representing herself as she is perceived by the different males in authority who have come to replace the prince in this narrative, she becomes the victim of that discourse. The woman here does not appear to be empowered in the way that the protagonist of the traditional women’s tale is,



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which suggests that this writer’s perception of the relationship between tradition and modernity, particularly as concerns women’s roles, could benefit from considerable revision. The writer here does appear to be grappling with some authentic problems facing Moroccan women; women who suffer fates similar to that recounted by Badra do exist as do those who could benefit considerably from a greater understanding of their own sexuality. However, Nedjma is unable to empower such women, in the way Lawza el-Bhiya is empowered, to take hold of the symbolic order of language that serves to imprison them within patriarchal norms and transform them to their own ends. Unlike the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” who disguises herself as a man but is able to transform the male symbolic from within, Badra in this novel appears to confine herself within male words—which she is unable to take hold of and use to truly transform her circumstances or to emancipate “the women of [her] blood.” In fact, by writing a novel that was meant to serve as an erotic manifesto for modern women, Nedjma appears to have failed to distinguish between the essentially artistic and the merely pornographic. Her efforts to reendow Muslim women with the power of speech result in an outcome that achieves the opposite of what was intended. Her novel, rather than granting such women the kind of power with which the traditional women in Lawza el-Bhiya’s tale were endowed, ends up trapping them, along with her own self, not only within men’s words but also within a predominantly Eurocentric perspective of Muslim women. This is why it is so important that we re-member tales such as the ones that form the corpus of this book. They present characters such as Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter and Lawza el-Bhiya who are true artists, and in whose art Moroccan or Beur women writers can find inspiration. Rather than feeling that they need to write in the style of such modes as the French erotica they can obtain a degree of assurance from knowing that there is an authentic women’s tradition, which has been deeply rooted in the Maghreb for centuries and which has dealt with erotic matters that remain well grounded in the Maghreb’s own sense of identity. This tradition can suggest viable ways of dismantling the repressive stereotypes associated with Muslim women as it can suggest particularly amenable ways of empowering such women. The tradition of these tales can enable Moroccan or trans-cultural Maghrebi women writers to speak in their own voices and to come to terms with their authentic sense of identity, which does not depend on any Orientalized version that others have constructed for them. For, like Antaeus, this tradition has been well rooted in this soil for centuries, and only once it



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is completely uprooted will it be crushed. By disregarding it and allowing it to be uprooted, Moroccan women writers might be depriving themselves of one model that could enable them to strategically represent themselves without feeling compelled to essentialize them. Having recourse to this tradition can help them avoid the risk of “othering” their own selves.




A

t that time there was a young boy whose father had died, leaving him and his widowed mother on their own—just like Jack and his mother in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” They lived off what the father had left them for some time until all they had left of it was three hundred mitqāls.1 The mother then decided that she was going to save that sum against any hard times that might ensue, so she refused to spend any more. Shortly after this the boy went to the marketplace where he heard a public crier announcing: “Who’ll buy a Word?” Very surprised at such an announcement the boy listened carefully and again heard: “Who’ll buy a word for 100 mitqāls?” Intrigued by this announcement, the boy wanted to find out more but the man refused to tell him anything until he had the money. So he went home and begged his mother to give him one of the three hundred mitqāls she had saved. The mother told him at first that he was crazy, but eventually gave in to his pleading. The boy then rushed to



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the marketplace and gave the man the money. Only then did the man tell him:

The boy considered this but could not fully grasp its significance. When he went home his mother wanted to know what he had bought and she too was puzzled by his purchase. Not too long after that the boy was again in the marketplace and heard the man shouting: “Who’ll buy a word?” and specifying as before: “Who’ll buy a word for a hundred mitqāls?” The boy was again very curious and very tempted to hear the word, but the man refused to tell him anything until he saw the money. So the boy again went to beg his mother for the second hundred mitqāls, pleading with her that this second word may help to explain the enigma posed by the first one. The mother again gave in to his pleading; so he was able to provide the man with the money and was then told: If you have the courage to conquer Have mercy on those who are under

The young boy was as puzzled by this word as he had been by the former one, and kept pondering it as he did the first. However, he was really intrigued by the man and his words so he did not fail to recognize him when he heard him on a third occasion crying in the marketplace: “Who’ll buy a word?” Ascertaining that it was not the same word that he had already bought, the boy was told that he needed another hundred mitqāls to buy this new word. Again he pleaded with his mother and again she gave in, this time handing him the last hundred mitqāls that she had. The boy did not hesitate to present the money to the man in the marketplace and was then told: Once in possession of peace and pleasure There’s no need to toil, enjoy your leisure

At this point the boy and his mother had spent all their money and he desperately needed to find work; so he became apprenticed to a barber. Eventually he started accompanying the barber on his trips to all his clients, including the Sultan. One day the barber was ill and the boy had to go and shave the Sultan himself. He put all his implements



Before you perform a deed Consider what it will breed

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in his basket and set out for the Sultan’s palace. When he got there he was asked to enter and to proceed upstairs to the Sultan’s quarters. On his way up the stairs he was met by the Qaid el-Meshwār responsible for the whole palace, who wanted to know what he was up to. The boy explained to him that he had come to shave the Sultan. The Qaid then looked into his basket and turned away in distaste. “Are you going to shave the Sultan with that old blade?” he asked. “Wait for me,” he told the boy. The boy waited for the Qaid until he returned: “Here is a blade more suitable for a Sultan,” the Qaid told him as he handed him a bright and shiny golden blade. As the boy continued on his way he pondered what had just happened. He wondered whether he should really use the golden blade that the Qaid had given him or his own blade, to which he was accustomed. The blade that the Qaid el-Meshwār had given him looked very impressive, but he had never tried it out. As he was thus preoccupied he recalled the first word he had bought: Before you perform a deed Consider what it will breed

He decided to make use of the advice it contained and to use the blade that he was accustomed to using and which he had cleaned carefully for the occasion, rather than to try the new one about which he knew nothing and the effect of which he could not assess. So he proceeded upstairs and shaved the Sultan as he had been taught to do by the old barber. When he had finished the Sultan happened to look into his basket and perceived the golden blade in it. He was surprised and asked him why he had not used the golden blade to shave him instead of the ordinary old one. The boy told him what had happened and how he had arrived at his decision. So the Sultan summoned the Qaid and asked him why he had given the boy the golden blade. The Qaid replied that the golden blade was a more appropriate blade with which to shave the Sultan. At this point the Sultan replied that it would then be equally suitable for shaving the Qaid; he then asked the boy to shave the Qaid using the golden blade. Soon after the boy finished shaving the Qaid, the latter became ill and died. The Sultan then praised the boy for his wisdom and rewarded him by giving him the job of the Qaid el-Meshwār. The boy did very well in his new position, which involved supervising the Sultan’s palace. After some time he started noticing a strange phenomenon taking place there. He noticed that a trunk was at times carried in at night into the quarters of the jawāri¯ (those women who were more like indentured servants than slaves and who tended to be




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If you have the courage to conquer Show mercy to those who are under

Deciding to make use of the advice these words contained, our protagonist let the singer go. However, he also decided to bring to the Sultan’s notice what the jawāri¯ had been up to. The latter, who felt threatened, decided to revenge themselves on the protagonist by telling the Sultan that it was he who was bringing the singer in every night. The Sultan was very angry and decided to put a stop to such misbehavior. So he sat down and wrote a letter to the royal brick-maker asking him to wrap the person who delivered the letter to him up into a large cloth and throw him in the kiln with the bricks. Then he sealed the letter and gave it to his messenger asking him to find the protagonist, give him the letter, and ask him to deliver it to the master brick-maker. The messenger went looking for our protagonist, who in the meantime had been invited to the house of the Jewish singer for whom his father had planned a party to which he also invited the protagonist by way of demonstrating his gratitude to him. The young man had just entered the house and was beginning to enjoy himself, when the messenger appeared there. The host asked him what he wanted and the messenger told him that he had come to deliver the Sultan’s message. Upon hearing it the protagonist wanted to leave immediately but his host urged him to stay, telling him that the party had just started and that there was no reason for him to rush off so quickly. In fact the host, thinking that there was something to be gained from delivering the message, suggested that his son be sent to deliver it. The new Qaid was at first reluctant to agree to this, but then he remembered the third saying: Once in possession of peace and pleasure There’s no need to toil, enjoy your leisure

It was the advice contained in the saying that finally convinced him to remain at the party; so he stayed and enjoyed the festivities and it was



expert musicians) and then carried out again in the mornings. One day he decided to intercept it and find out what was in it. What he found was a Jewish singer who was being brought in to entertain the jawāri¯ and who then left in the morning. The singer begged him to have mercy on him and at this point our protagonist recalled the second word he had bought:

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the son of his host who eventually set out on his way to the brick-maker once his guests had left. While all this was happening the Sultan was informed by his daughter that the protagonist had had nothing to do with bringing in the trunk, which was entirely the jawāri¯ ’s fault. The Sultan became upset with them but feared for the young Qaid ’s life; so he immediately sent a letter to prevent the brick-maker from burning the messenger. Soon after he dispatched this message the protagonist arrived at the palace, having participated in the festivities. The Sultan, who was surprised to see him, asked him how it came about that he had not gone to deliver his message to the brick-maker. The protagonist told him what had happened, explaining to him how he had again relied on one of the words he had bought in deciding to remain at the party. In this way, the Sultan, who was very relieved to see him alive, was even more impressed by the breadth of his wisdom. In fact he considered the protagonist to be much wiser and in a better position than himself to be a ruler; so he rewarded him by allowing him to marry his daughter and to become the new Sultan. And so we left them with their deed And came back home to eat our trid.

An Andalusi Version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” The three tales discussed so far have centered on young women, who through their control of language were able to win the esteem and love of the princes or Sultans in their realms; however, this tale presents a male protagonist who appears to have usurped his mother’s position at the center of the tale, and who himself becomes the Sultan due to his ability to take possession of the wisdom of certain sayings he acquires— which enable him to reestablish order in the realm. The movement from “Lawza el-Bhiya” to “Who’ll Buy a Word?” can enable us to perceive the extent to which these women’s tales were not concerned exclusively with the romantic, or purely erotic, dimension of human experience but also with broader political issues, in which the women appear to have been quite well versed. In fact, they appear to have been concerned with political issues in ways that have only begun to be articulated recently within the context of contemporary feminism which, according to Ania Loomba, “has most insistently and radically questioned as well as appropriated psychoanalysis to question both its constitution of female sexuality and to interrogate the very division between ‘inside’ and




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‘outside,’ personal and political, biology and culture, individual and society.” 2 The extent to which the women storytellers were preoccupied with the relationship between the personal and the political was evident in “Lawza el-Bhiya,” which called into question the distinction between the inner core, associated with the woman’s sexuality, and the outer glow related to the political context from which the language she used derived. By taking control of that language to represent herself the protagonist was able to transform the perspective of the prince in the highest political position. The method used by the young man in “Who’ll Buy a Word” appears to be similar, for he also manages to take effective control of the political dimension—depicted here not only in terms of the sultanate whose throne he ascends at the end but also in terms of the language of which he takes possession. However, his strategy is in effect somewhat different from the one used by Lawza el-Bhiya as it is different from that used in the English tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” as we shall see. Moreover, a close look at “Who’ll Buy a Word” enables one to perceive the extent to which the tradition of storytelling from which it emanates may not necessarily be inferior to Western theater, as Jorge Luis Borges has suggested in one of his short stories. It is in “Averroes’ Search” that Borges depicts Averroes translating Aristotle’s Poetics and struggling with the meaning of two words: “tragedy” and “comedy.” Borges suggests that the Andalusi’s difficulty is not surprising given the fact that he came from a culture that was not familiar with the idea of theater, but only with storytelling. He maintains that Averroes was so circumscribed by his culture that he had set himself “a goal not inaccessible to other men, but inaccessible to him.”3 This raises interesting questions not only about the extent to which “comedy” and “tragedy” are exclusive to Western theater, but also about the extent to which a writer such as Borges can really shake off the West-centric perspective enough to do full justice to Andalusi culture, some of whose ideas and traditions appear to have found resonance in the work of even such mainstream European writers as Shakespeare himself. The Philosopher at the Heart of the Narrative Ibn Rushd (1126–1196), the personage on whom Borges based his story, was one of the foremost—if not the foremost—philosopher, physician, and man of learning in al-Andalus. Although he was born in the period following the political and military height of the Andalusi Ummayads, and during that chapter of Andalusi history dominated by the taifas or petty kingdoms, which also corresponded to the time



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when the Almohad dynasty was in control of both the Maghreb and al-Andalus, this did not prevent him from contributing to Córdoba’s cultural eff lorescence and becoming internationally renowned for his commentaries on Aristotle and Plato. For, as you may recall, the taifa states may have been politically weaker than the Ommayad dynasty from which they became separated but they were transformed into scholarly and literary centers of the first order, where Sultans vied with each other for the best astronomers, poets, and philosophers in the realm. This is the context within which Ibn Rushd was able to affirm that there was no incompatibility between rational reasoning and religious revelation. Dominique Urvoy argues that he was concerned with showing “the agreement of true wisdom (hikma) of a religious kind with a philosophy derived from Aristotle,”4 and was thus able to reconcile between a theological view of the world and that associated with the Greek philosophers. According to Maria Rosa Menocal: “The series of commentaries he wrote on these philosophers and their work, the major thrust of which was a defense of the philosophical study of religion as opposed to that of the theologians, was disseminated throughout Europe with astonishing rapidity.”5 The way Ibn Rushd viewed philosophy as being essentially compatible with a theological understanding of the world was of great interest to European thinkers of the Middle Ages who were in search of just such forms of intellectual reasoning that would help to free them from the excessive control of the church; in this way his ideas contributed considerably to the development of European secular humanism. This great theologian and philosopher, who was in many ways a Renaissance man before his time, was moreover not above being well acquainted with more earthly matters, such as poetry and music. Thus as James Monroe recounts, while commenting on Aristotle’s Poetics around the year 1174, he discusses a passage in which Aristotle distinguishes among three means of artistic representation: rhythm, language, and tune. Aristotle indicates that they may be used either separately or in combination. To illustrate this point to his Arab readers, Averroes resorts to an example taken from Andalusi literature: Each of these means may occur separately, like tune in f lute-playing; rhythm in dance; and representation in utterances, I mean, in imitative non-rhythmic statements. Or all three might be brought together, like what is found among us in the kind of poems called muwashshahāt and azjāl, these being the ones the people of this peninsula have devised in this tongue. 6




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Our society allows no scope for the development of women’s talents. They seem to be destined exclusively to childbirth and the care of children, and this state of servility has destroyed their capacity for larger matters. It is thus that we see no women endowed with moral virtues; they live their lives like vegetables, devoting themselves to their husbands. From this stems the misery that pervades our cities, for women outnumber men by more than double and cannot procure the necessities of life by their own labours.7

Such a statement on the status of women within a predominantly patriarchal context appears to foreshadow those of Mary Wollstonecraft who was to claim some six hundred years later that the manners of the women of her culture evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the f lowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed for beauty; and the f launting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers. 8

Such perception of both the heights and drawbacks of his society serve to exemplify the breadth of Ibn Rushd’s knowledge as well as the way he was able to harmonize different forms of knowing, particularly Islamic theology and Greek philosophy. As far as the actual translation of the Greek works into Arabic is concerned, this was a strenuous undertaking, much of it undertaken by the Abbasids in the East, that lasted for generations.9 Ibn Rushd was more directly involved in synthesizing the essence of what was translated. The great Andalusi thinker was able to come to terms both with the Greek ideas and with the form of knowledge they involved, despite the fourteen centuries that separated him from the men whose work he was studying. He was trying to read the work of those early thinkers through a specifically Andalusi lens and to respect it—not to “other” it. His analysis and synthesis of that philosophy with Andalusi culture had widespread inf luence on all the



Not only was he well versed in the poetry and music of his time, but he appears to have even been a feminist avant la lettre as is evident in the following statement by him:


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The Women Artists Involved in the Narrative In fact, the culture that produced Ibn Rushd is the same one that produced the storytellers who were involved in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” which, although it belongs to the more popular Andalusi tradition, yet contains ideas of such an erudite nature that they could have been worthy of Borges’s protagonist himself. Although Ibn Rushd might not have been aware of the women storytellers involved in these tales or of their concerns their tales appear to have absorbed some aspects of his philosophy, including the way he reconciled that of the Greeks with that of Revelation. The Andalusi women involved in these tales emanated from the same circumstances that had given rise to Ibn Rushd and later either immigrated or were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Inquisition.10 The fact that “Who’ll Buy a Word?” is the product of such immigrants could make it conform to Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that “transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of world literature.”11 It can be argued that these women’s tales belonged to the terrains of world literature long before the advent of contemporary theory. Although their tradition has become marginalized due, among other things, to the fact that it is deemed to be popular and oral—one moreover that was expressed in the vernacular—it is precisely those features, particularly the use of the vernacular, which inspired European artists, including such noted poets as Dante, who is usually credited with first using the spoken form of language as a mode of written literary expression.12 The women originally involved in such tales were not entirely excluded from the site of the highest political, philosophical, and poetic debate, in places such as the courts of the taifa states. Thus although such tales were oral and popular, that did not prevent them from being concerned with some of the most pertinent issues of their times. Within the context from which they emanated the popular was not excluded from the elite just as the oral was not considered to be necessarily inferior to the written, even though the latter tended to be associated more with men.



different components of his society so that we can find indications of it even in such women’s tales as “Who’ll Buy a Word?” Thus the idea that such a great thinker could have been incapable of comprehending “tragedy” and “comedy” because he came from a culture where there was only storytelling, as Borges suggests, is surely one that merits further consideration.

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The women involved in the tales are revealed to have been identity builders who did not limit themselves to the sexual or personal facet of identity, but were also quite aware of its political dimensions. What is of particular significance here is the extent to which the control over words appears to be as central to how they viewed the political as to how they viewed the personal. Thus the political dimension in this male-centered women’s tale is developed through an educational process—that of the male protagonist—involving the acquisition of certain words or sayings and the absorption of their wisdom. To this extent the women involved can be said to have realized not only the extent to which “the personal is the political” long before twentiethcentury feminists started formulating that slogan, but also the extent to which language is of central importance to that link. For the words of which the protagonists in these tales take control belong to the political and public domain; they represent the male symbolic order par excellence. Significantly, the words of which the male protagonist in this tale takes possession do not pertain to Revelation, but more to the realm of philosophy. His acquisition of these words is moreover not completely independent of the role of women such as the mother in this tale, who consents to give up what is left of the boy’s heritage so that he can buy the words. The role that women played in the education of young boys was often of a more direct nature in al-Andalus as noted by Ibn H azm: “Women taught me the Qur’an, they recited to me such poetry; they trained me in calligraphy.”13 This type of teaching has resonance in the woman protagonist of “Ali and a Spinner Too?” who tutors the prince. Such women, particularly those associated with the households of spinners and storytellers, would have been well aware of the need that young men had for control over the symbolic, which is what they needed to be taught. However, the nature of this young man’s relationship to words, as well as of his control over them, is quite different from that of young women such as Lawza el-Bhiya. Unlike Lawza el-Bhiya, the young man in this tale is not the artist at the heart of the tale, even though the process of his maturation is also depicted in terms of his acquisition of words. Whereas Lawza el-Bhiya had to transform the prince’s words in order to make them truly represent herself, the young man simply acquires words that already encapsulate the kind of reasoning of which he is in need. This suggests not only that the women involved in this tale were quite aware of the disadvantages of being women in such a patriarchal society, which simplified the acquisition of knowledge for young men, but they were also aware of the way they could turn such drawbacks to their advantage. They must



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have realized that although they could not simply obtain the words on which to model their behavior and thus arrive at the pinnacle of both political and personal success, they had the ability to manipulate words in ways that could be empowering to them. The power of words was one of which the storytellers were very much aware; it is what allowed for their artistry—something that they had to create, not what they could simply obtain. They were aware of the extent to which a character such as Lawza el-Bhiya had to transform the prince’s words themselves in order to make them capable of representing her the way she wished to be represented. Such man-made words were not conceived with her in mind, or with the view of solving her particular dilemma. The words— constituting the symbolic order that is basically male and phallic—were made to serve the interests of the male subject. As mothers the women storytellers would have been pleased at such possibilities for their sons, but as disinterested observers they would have been aware of the unfair advantage that men had—since they could simply buy the kind of wisdom and wit with which they themselves had to struggle, spinning them out of their very being, so to speak. Yet such women storytellers were also aware that the ability to spin words was what endowed them with the power that they had over men; they understood the extent to which such ability was empowering to women. This is one of the ways in which their male-centered narrative, “Who’ll Buy a Word,” is different from that of Lawza el-Bhiya, as it differs from the male-centered English tale “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The Women’s Narrative in the Global Context That a tale such as “Who’ll Buy a Word?” is a women’s tales is significant; this highlights the extent to which the Andalusi culture, which appears to have had so much impact on Western civilization, was gendered. Yet the way that the women themselves, along with their storytelling, have been marginalized and rendered invisible has served to obscure this fact. Despite their craftsmanship and wittiness such women’s narratives have to a large extent become invisible and the achievements of the women associated with them tend to be completely overlooked. Such Muslim women have tended to be depicted as completely oppressed and silenced by their culture. This has served to obscure the extent to which women have been active contributors to their culture, where they were not just the ones who inspired the male poets or were simply the objects of their poetry. These women in fact took an active part in the creative process and were the ones who truly endowed the political with the




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personal dimension. Yet, it is, among other things, the fact that these tales are associated with women, and reveal feminist intentions on their part, which has resulted in their being looked down upon as “old wives’ tales . . . rather than serious literature.”14 The very mode with which they are associated, that of khurāfa, as Mernissi notes, has been qualified as “loosely meaning ‘delirium of a troubled brain’ ”15 and is thus denigrated precisely because it is associated with women. The denigration of storytelling was further exacerbated by the broader structural facets of scholarship, such as the division of literary works into well-defined genres, which have served to shape the way that scholars both perceive and judge artistic productions. The tales themselves actually contain a number of different genres, combining poetry, drama, and fiction, in a manner resembling some postmodern works. This, however, rather than suggesting that they were mixing genres avant la lettre, reminds us that they were crafting their tales at a time prior to the European construction of strict generic divisions—which really only began in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries. As M.H. Abrams has noted, nineteenth-century critics, by basing themselves on such Greek works as Aristotle’s Poetics in defining different “poetic ‘kinds’ as they were then called,” firmly believed that they were designating “fixed literary types, somewhat like species in the biological order of nature.”16 In this way they believed they were endowing literary criticism with a more scientific kind of rigor, which among other things frowned upon mixing modes such as “comedy” and “tragedy.” It is such divisions of works into genres that has contributed to the West-centric perspective enabling a writer such as Borges to arrive at the assumption that Western theater is superior to storytelling. Significantly, the term “folklore” itself was only coined in the mid-nineteenth century to denote “verbal materials and social rituals that have been handed down solely, or at least primarily, by word of mouth . . . rather than in written form.”17 By thus perceiving it exclusively in terms of the fact that it is oral—and by extension a sign of illiteracy—such a denotation served to oppose its art forms to all written European literature. This suggests the extent to which the positioning of oral literature, like that of what constitutes canonical works, was a construction on the part of Western scholars, who have been reluctant to acknowledge the cultural output of the so-called global South.18 One of the reasons why I decided to compare “Who’ll Buy a Word?” with “Jack and the Beanstalk” is that the latter cannot be said to form part of the canon; it is an oral tale just like the former, although the message it conveys is quite different. Even though both Jack and the



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young man in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” are raised in women’s households where there is no father, they differ as concerns the method they use to solve their problems. The latter succeeds in life by acquiring the words that appear to propel him into success. By following the wisdom encapsulated in the words he gives precedence to the political dimension and is able to eventually attain considerable personal satisfaction as well. His process of reasoning is quite different from that in “Jack and the Beanstalk” where the political dimension takes on much more colonial/ imperial implications. “Jack and the Beanstalk” stems from the same Western tradition that contributed to the expulsion of the Andalusi Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula and to their eventual depiction as the “Other” of the West. This process of denigrating Andalusis could be at the source of later efforts “to other” Arabs and Muslims on the part of the Orientalists such as those studied by Edward Said.19 The tendency to overlook the contributions of Andalusis, as well as of their descendants, and to render their culture invisible is evident, for example, in the fact that Marco Polo’s famous travels on the silk road in the early twelfth century have been dealt with extensively whereas less attention has been paid to the equally great Moroccan traveler, Ibn Batūta, who set out on his travels one year after Marco Polo’s death and who traveled just as far and even more expansively. Such tendencies on the part of European scholars to undermine the accomplishments of Arabs and Muslims are evident in the scholarship of such well-known European works as Boccaccio’s Decameron, about which Maria Rosa Menocal states: While it has long been known and accepted that a fair number of Boccaccio’s sources were “oriental,” Decameron scholarship, for all its rich multiplicity and wide variation of opinion on the nature of the text and its plausible interpretations, has usually not gone beyond such source studies as far as an Arabic inf luence is concerned. It has not, in general, explored the possibility that the centrality of the European-Arabic world and its multiple manifestations may be embodied and ref lected in that text. The very use of the term “oriental,” in fact, obscures even the nature of the sources involved in certain cases. 20

Here we note again how the use of the term “oriental” served to divert the attention away from al-Andalus, which was right on the European continent, and to associate any inf luence that derived from it with what appeared to be much further away and more fantasized. One view of such a fantasized “Other” appears in “Jack and the Beanstalk.”




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In “Jack and the Beanstalk” 21 when Jack and his widowed mother fall upon hard times, he ends up selling their only asset, the cow, for five curious-looking beans. His mother throws them outside in anger and they grow overnight into a huge beanstalk on which he could climb up to a new and enchanting country. The route represented by the beanstalk could be interpreted as a much faster version of the routes taken by Marco Polo and Ibn Batūta; it corresponds more to the one taken by the European colonial powers, on which Jack sets out in his quest for wealth and which leads him to a land that is on a higher plane than his native England. To this extent it becomes an apt image of a land such as India, representing a higher level of wealth and sophistication to the common English mind. Jack discovers a giant’s palace that is full of wonders and which he visits in the three central episodes of the tale, each time appropriating some aspect of it. The comparison with India is appropriate at this level too for its vastness and large population would have appeared gigantic to the common English mind, which conceived of the giant—one version of the “Other”—as speaking thus: “Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.” The giant, who is obviously not an Englishman, speaks in rhyme, his verse beginning significantly with nonsense syllables. Such a disclosure of the “Other” as speaking in rhyme would appear to suggest that for the English mind the use of end rhyme was a practice associated with the “Other,” the closest version of which were the Andalusis to whom the Troubadour poets are believed to have been heavily indebted for their poetic style. 22 To this extent, the giant here takes on the role of a lyric poet who is a foreigner; in fact an “Other” who is depicted as monstrous. The use of rhyme forms an integral part of the importance given to words by Arabs, who not only gave great importance to poetry but who made use of end rhyme (as well as meter and music) much as they used calligraphy to enhance the beauty of the words themselves—quite apart from what they may have signified. So, by having the giant speak in rhyme the English tale appears to confirm the idea that the use of rhymed verse is the province of such “Others.” By having him threaten to eat the Englishman whom he smells this “Other” is furthermore depicted as a cannibal, which is how many colonized peoples, particularly Africans, were represented by their colonizers. This alone would have justified to the colonial mind Jack’s appropriation of the moneybags, but the giant is furthermore depicted



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as not knowing how to make use of his money apart from counting it. At this point the tale enacts the logic that impelled the Spanish conquistadores, for instance, to steal the gold in the holy temples of the Incas and elsewhere in the “new land,” which they felt justified in doing since they believed that they could make better use of it. Jack, who in this tale, appears to be motivated mostly by curiosity and the desire for material acquisition, is not satisfied with the money but ends up visiting the giant’s castle again and appropriating not only the giant’s golden eggs but also the very hen that lay them. This sounds like the archetypal colonial process; the colonialist is not satisfied with depriving the native of his wealth, but wishes to acquire the very resources from which that wealth emanates. And he does not hesitate to take advantage of the native’s generosity—in this case that of the giant’s wife who shelters Jack in the castle—in order to do so. After acquiring the little black hen, Jack and his mother have more money than they can spend. Despite this, Jack returns to the giant’s castle this time to steal the giant’s harp: the “Other’s” music being one manifestation of his cultural output that, like his use of rhyme, is also suggestive of Andalusi culture and which the Western mind, like that of Jack, both despises and wishes to acquire. 23 However, the harp at once starts calling “Master! Master!”; so the giant wakes up in time to catch sight of Jack running out of the kitchen-door and he runs after him. Thus it is the giant’s very culture that beckons him, awakens him from his deep sleep, and forces him to run after Jack to retrieve it. Such appropriation of the culture of others has resulted in both the attempted erasure of many indigenous cultures and the imposition of Western values on numerous others. And what does Jack do to prevent such retrieval? He cuts off the very route that had enabled him to go to the giant’s land in the first place, just the way that Western countries have now cut off the routes that would allow formerly colonized peoples to follow them to their lands and take part in some of the benefits that have been gained from their wealth. Significantly, by cutting off his route, Jack kills the giant. The fate of the giant in Jack’s tale continues to be enacted by the drama of those who keep being drowned in their efforts to attain the European coast in flimsy pateras.24 If we look at it from the giant’s perspective, this tale becomes a real tragedy. However, the giant’s perspective is not what we get in the tale, which represents a rather Eurocentric perspective of the “Other”—whose exploitation it appears to justify. To that extent, “Jack and the Beanstalk” can be said to epitomize colonial discourse and to provide an added dimension to Edward Said’s




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argument that Western disciplinary fields and the texts they produced served to construct identities in accordance with imperialist aims. 25 Said was among the first to affirm that even such seemingly innocent texts as nineteenth-century novels are not neutral or transparent media, but are heavily implicated in ideological practices. Such texts convinced the common people in Europe to accept the idea that it is all right to subjugate people in distant territories, who were depicted as inferior. One could add that the strategy of manipulating the opinion of common people into an imperialist way of thinking was not limited only to such canonical works as those of Jane Austen or George Eliot, as Said has argued. It extended even to such popular modes as folktales, which are capable of reaching a larger segment of the population—particularly children. Such means have ensured the naturalization of colonial discourse, contributing to the fact that Jack’s project is one that is still being carried out by contemporary globalization, in which the giant is not only being deprived of his wealth and culture but significantly also of his own perspective so that he has come to view himself the way he has been constructed by Westerners such as Jack. Who’ll Buy a Word? The perspective that we get in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” is very different from the one that appears in Jack’s tale, as are the interpretations to which the tale gives rise. After the young boy in this tale buys the three different sayings for one hundred mitqāls each, you will recall, he becomes apprenticed to a barber, thus acquiring a skill that would enable him to earn a living. That is how he ends up going to shave the Sultan and meets the Qaid el-Meshwār, who provides him with a golden blade with which to shave the Sultan, which he decided not to use basing himself on the wisdom in the first saying that he had bought: Before you perform a deed Consider what it will breed

This is the choice that results in his becoming the next Qaid el-Meshwār, as the one who had offered him the golden blade is revealed to have poisoned it with the aim of killing the Sultan. In this way the threat of disorder within the Sultan’s palace is averted by the young man. The gold in this tale is not valued for its material worth, nor is it what the boy wants to acquire for its own sake. What the golden blade here does is to depict the protagonist as a superior being according to the myth



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of metals mentioned in Plato’s Republic. 26 The young man’s superiority here, enabling him to overcome the vice inherent in the very site of power, is furthermore associated with Ibn Rushd’s idea of wisdom, or hikma, which is encapsulated into the very words he has bought, but of which he cannot come into full possession until he has made use of them. The young man thus proves to be capable of harmonizing the words and his deeds, of reconciling contemplation and action, and by doing so he saves both the life of the Sultan and his own and thus restores order and prosperity to the realm. In the next episode, you will recall, he intercepts the trunk that he has seen being brought in at night and taken out in the morning and discovers the Jewish singer in it. When the musician begs him for mercy, he recalls the wisdom of the second saying he had bought: If you have the courage to conquer Show mercy to those who are under

And he decides to make use of the advice it contained, thus letting the singer go free. During this second episode, which is reminiscent of the Platonic element of silver associated with courage, the protagonist is shown as using his position of power mercifully rather than tyrannically, even though by doing so he exposes himself to danger. Significantly, the Jewish musician, who could be read as representing one version of the “Other,” 27 is here treated with lenience. The symbolic significance of the music becomes furthermore associated with the protagonist himself—rather than with the Jewish singer who introduces it illicitly into the palace. The latter represents another threat to the order of the palace, one more closely associated with the inner life of the court—the women of the household—thus suggesting another source of vice at the heart of the court. Yet the music here takes on a more active and redeeming role than it does in Jack’s tale since the Jewish musician here and the jawāri¯, who were known to be accomplished musicians, had comprehensible reasons for wanting to meet in the evenings, when the best Andalusi music has normally been produced. The music here furthermore suggests the protagonist’s ability to harmonize—harmony being an outstanding feature of music—the different components of his culture, represented here by the Sultan’s court. As a faithful subject, the protagonist at this point also decides to bring to the Sultan’s notice what the jawāri¯ 28 had been up to. Feeling threatened, the latter decided to seek revenge by telling the Sultan that it was the protagonist who was bringing the musician in every




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night. Here we arrive at a climactic moment in the narrative, in which both the Jewish singer and the protagonist’s lives are threatened with destruction. The Sultan’s jealousy and suspicion are aroused, resulting in intense anger and the decision to both end and punish such misbehavior. This is when the Sultan sits down to write the letter to the royal brick-maker asking him to wrap up the person who delivered the letter to him and throw him into the kiln with the bricks. The tragic implications of such an outcome would have been quite evident to the audience, even if the protagonist himself was ignorant of what was happening. When the messenger went looking for him he found him partying in the house of the Jewish musician, from where he considered leaving to deliver the Sultan’s message but then remembered the wisdom in the third saying he had bought: Once in possession of peace and pleasure There’s no need to toil, enjoy your leisure

The advice contained in the saying, as well as his host’s pleas that he remain until the end of the festivities, finally convince him to remain at the party. It is the son of his host, the Jewish musician himself, who sets out to deliver the message from which he believes there was something to be gained. However, in the style of a proper host, who could not conceive of leaving before his guests had gone, he waits until they had left and then sets out on his way to the brick-maker, and to a seemingly tragic destruction. The notion on which the protagonist relies here is that of al-qanā‘a, which signifies not only contentment but more significantly satisfaction with what one has. This constitutes a higher form of temperance, which Ibn H azm upheld as the rule of life that is most conducive to happiness, 29 and which contrasts the protagonist here with Jack in the English tale. Such temperance, which is associated with iron in Plato’s myth of metals, becomes in the tale the quality that the Maghrebi protagonist arrives at only at the pinnacle of his development, thus reversing Plato’s hierarchy—which associates iron with the common people at the lowest end of the hierarchy. This reversal significantly transforms the gist of Plato’s symbolic argument by having the protagonist arrive at this iron stage only after passing through the golden and silver ones and furthermore by incorporating all the different qualities that Plato associates with the different segments of the society into one individual. Such incorporation furthermore suggests the Muslim ideal of unity in diversity, which endows the protagonist



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with the strength of character as well as the wisdom to succeed in all his endeavors. The protagonist’s success is what allows for the resolution in this tale in which not only the protagonist, but also the Jewish singer, is prevented from meeting a terrible fate. Moreover, the wisdom, or philosophy, on which our protagonist relies in order to arrive at all his decisions, meets with the Sultan’s great admiration, as it contributes to the process of reestablishing order and wholeness to his court. In fact the Sultan is so impressed by the breadth of the young man’s wisdom that he considered him to be much wiser and in a better position than himself to be a ruler; so he rewards him by marrying him to his daughter and making him the new Sultan. The kind of Sultan that the young man becomes appears to conform to Plato’s idea of the philosopher king, who in the tale is depicted as synthesizing the notion of haki¯m (or wise person) with that of hākim (or ruler), thus demonstrating a true accord between these two qualities. Having acquired the wisdom of the words he now truly possesses and having demonstrated his ability to synchronize the different parts of his personality—in that the tale synthesizes into one character the three elements with which Plato designates three social classes—the protagonist here becomes richer than a king, in ways that would have been incomprehensible to the materially oriented Jack. Interestingly, the depiction of the protagonist’s character in terms of a synthesis between different metals serves to transform Plato’s view of society as consisting of a hierarchy of metals into a more egalitarian view of society. To this extent the tale can be said to have absorbed the Greek thinker’s ideas not only through translations from the Greek but also through reinterpretations such as those of Ibn Rushd, who was able to reconcile the ideas of the Greek philosophers with the values of the Muslim Andalusi context. From Andalusi Storytelling to European Theater The way that this tale is concerned with words and their meanings not only shows it to be in line with the women’s tales I have discussed, which all place a great emphasis on the role of language, but furthermore reveals other distinctively Andalusi facets of its identity. One specifically Andalusi feature, which it highlights, becomes evident when we consider that it is by adjusting his circumstances to the words—by making his actions conform to the utterances—that the protagonist




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there existed a remarkably sophisticated and unexpectedly prophetic school of Islamic philosophic grammarians, whose polemics anticipate twentieth-century debates between structuralists and generative grammarians, between descriptivists and behaviourists. . . . One small group of these Andalusian linguists directed its energies against tendencies amongst rival linguists to turn the question of meaning in language into esoteric and allegorical exercises. . . . all belonged to the Zahirite school, . . . [which] argued that words had only a surface meaning, one that was anchored to a particular usage, circumstance, historical and religious situation.30

This appears to be the kind of concern that informs the tale, which foregrounds the complex nature of meanings. In the tale the true meaning of the words that the protagonist buys only becomes evident once he makes use of them within specific circumstances. As in present-day structuralist analysis, the meaning is perceived to be not so much in the text itself as it is in the context. Even while the words that the protagonist has bought determine the actions, or give them shape, it is the actions that clarify the true meaning of the words—which cannot “be mimetically read off from the content.”31 The young man in the tale has the ability to reason and to interpret; he has the ability to base himself on the wisdom of words, even if he does not come across as being particularly witty, as does Lawza el-Bhiya. He is in fact endowed with method, or ta’wi¯l, as Ibn Rushd would have called it, enabling him to become a philosopher rather than an artist. Furthermore, the meanings here are revealed to be not fixed and definite entities, but fluid and shifting ones, as is the case in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” whose understanding requires both a special intuition and a growing sense of wisdom. The tale thus conceives of meanings in ways very similar to those that have become familiar to us nowadays with the advent of contemporary critical theory. These are what Homi Bhabha terms “the Olympian realms of what is mistakenly labeled ‘pure theory’ [which] are assumed to be eternally insulated from the historical exigencies and tragedies of the wretched of the earth.”32 This tale appears both to have absorbed some of the concerns of the linguistic debate associated with the Zahirites and to have demonstrated that such theoretical concerns were not exclusive to the Olympian realms of the elite, but did in fact form an integral part of even such popular modes as women’s oral tales.



of the tale succeeds in coming to terms with their meanings. Such a feature corresponds to Edward Said’s assertion that in the eleventhcentury al-Andalus

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What is particularly significant about a tale such as “Who’ll Buy a Word?” is the way it dramatizes the process by which the young man obtains his wisdom. While there is no “play” here in the sense of a flirting courtship or of playing music, there is much in the tale that makes it a performance—although the kind of performance it represents appears to be different from that associated with Western theater the way it eventually developed in Europe. However, although such a performance did not conform to the norms of Western theater, it still enabled the women to achieve essentially similar ends. Interestingly enough, like the lyrics that can be found at the heart of these tales, whose tradition appears to have answered to the needs of some canonical European poets, the tales themselves, which may seem to be trivial, also appear to have answered to the needs of such a mainstream dramatist as Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare, we should recall, was very much a popular playwright who not only made use of tales from a variety of backgrounds as sources for his plays, but also employed the spoken vernacular. Like the storytellers who crafted the tales recounted in this book, he tended to relegate the more central roles in some of his comedies to women characters, such as Rosalind, as we saw in chapter 2. This is also the case in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, where Imogen and Perdita appear to be more central and more vividly presented than the male characters. Thus Harold Bloom informs us that both Hazlitt and Tennyson fell in love with “The enchanting Imogen,”33 wife of “Posthumus, who is not, alas, very clever, and who joins that large company of Shakespearean husbands and lovers totally unworthy of their women.”34 This could also be said of the princes and Sultans who figure in the women’s tales. What’s more, Imogen in Cymbeline disguises herself as a man in the manner of Rosalind, Viola, and the protagonist of “ ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?” Other features here reminiscent of those discussed in chapter 2 include the use of lyrics. The most beautiful of these, according to Bloom, occurs in Cymbeline (IV: ii, 258–281), which he qualifies as “one of the darkest of elegies, centering on ‘fear no more’ as the only consolation for dying.”35 As for The Winter’s Tale, he qualifies the whole play as “a vast pastoral lyric.”36 Moreover, the way that women’s households in the women’s tales resemble the pastoral settings in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, as we saw in chapter 2, is also evident here if we compare the male protagonist in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” to Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, whose very title draws attention to the idea of storytelling. Just as it is the young man who is brought up in a women’s household, normally associated with the spinners and storytellers in the tales, who is able




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to restore order to the Sultan’s court in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” so it is Perdita in Shakespeare’s play who is able to reestablish harmony in her father’s court by endowing it with pastoral virtues acquired from her upbringing as a shepherdess. Like the young man Perdita combines within herself both the courtly and more popular traditions, which serve to alleviate the destructive potential of her father’s jealousy and to seemingly reincarnate Hermione at the end. One reason for Leontes’s threat of destruction is his disregard for the words of the oracle: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found” (III: ii, 131–134). This serves to contrast him with the young man in the Andalusi-Moroccan tale who arrives at the pinnacle of success by taking into consideration the advice in the words that he buys. In fact this is what enables the young man to attain the status of royalty that he does, not by virtue of his blood but through a marriage, which serves as an apt image of harmony bringing together the “personal” (associated with the women’s households in the tales) and the “political” (associated with the court). Thus, at the end he is able to enter the women’s quarters legitimately, not illicitly in the manner of the Jewish singer, and to take on the role of Sultan judiciously, not in the treacherous manner attempted by the old Qaid el-Meshwār. This is also what makes his outcome resemble that in The Winter’s Tale where the well-deserving Florizel ends up marrying Perdita, thus enabling them to inherit her father’s crown. Other echoes of features similar to those that occur in this tale and also in Shakespeare’s plays include the treacherous behavior of characters whose aim is to undermine the integrity of others. This characteristic appears in Cymbeline, where Iachimo convinces Posthumus that Imogen has been unfaithful to him. Such treachery is reminiscent of Iago’s behavior in Othello, however, as Bloom notes: “Though it abounds with self-borrowings from earlier plays by Shakespeare, it scarcely resembles Othello, to which it owes most, particularly in its ‘little Iago,’ Iachimo, a mere trif ler compared with the more-thanSatanic greatness of Othello’s destroyer.”37 The Jewish musician in the tale appears to be even less of an Iago than is Iachimo, the resemblance between them being more a matter of such a technique as the use of the trunk. Like the Jewish musician in the tale Iachimo enters Imogen’s bedchamber hidden in a trunk, which enables him to describe the place intimately to Posthumus—making him furious with the desire for revenge. This technique is what Bloom refers to as “the absurd Trojan



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Horse strategy.”38 Rather than being borrowed from the Greeks, however, this strategy could very well have come from the Andalusi tradition to which these women’s tales belong, where it appears to have been standard; a trunk also figures in “Aisha Jarma” (chapter 5), in which the protagonist places the prince and takes him back home with her. What’s more, in Cymbeline, the kind of destructiveness that Iachimo’s action could have brought about is averted, in ways that resemble what happens in “Who’ll Buy a Word?” where the protagonist uses good judgment to arrive at the decision of forgiving the intruder, in this case the Jewish singer, and where the Sultan himself ends up forgiving the protagonist for his seeming transgression. Interestingly, Posthumus in Shakespeare’s play also decides to forgive Iachimo, after having been ready to kill him, when he tells him (V: v, 418–420): The pow’r that I have on you is to spare you; The malice toward you to forgive you. Live, And deal with others better.

Forgiveness, which overcomes the detrimental consequences of jealousy, is the attitude that enables the threat of destruction to be averted and order to be restored at the end in both the tale and the play. There are even features in The Merchant of Venice, apart from the inclusion of a Jewish character, which are reminiscent of this tale. This is the case of the caskets with which Portia presents her suitors. Thus the gold casket that contains the inscription: “Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire” (II: vii, 5) recalls the first episode in the tale in which the young man, by following a wisdom similar to “All that glisters is not gold” (II: vii, 65), decides not to choose the golden blade and thus ends up obtaining what many men desire. Similarly, by deciding to be lenient to the Jewish singer, the protagonist runs the risk of incurring the kind of threat referred to in the silver casket which proclaims: “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves” (II: vii, 23). The final episode of the tale appears to resemble that of the lead casket, which Bassanio ends up choosing. Like the words that convince the protagonist in the tale to stay and enjoy the festivities, the words that Bassanio discovers proclaim (III: ii, 131–134): You that choose not by the view Chance as fair, and choose as true, Since this fortune falls on you, Be content and seek no new.




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This is the kind of logic that prevents the young man in the tale from rushing off to the brick master and being destroyed in a most horrible manner. Interestingly the way that the tale transforms Plato’s hierarchy by culminating in the least precious metal, and therefore appearing to give it more importance, is also the way that it appears in Shakespeare’s play. The more significant resemblance, however, between the three Shakespearean plays and the tale becomes evident when we consider how they are all structured on basically three episodes or movements that take us from an initial state of harmony to a possible horrible destruction of that harmony, and thence we arrive at a final denouement in which the threatened order is reestablished. In the same way that threat of death and horrible destruction in the second episode in the tale is only diverted in the final one thanks to the princess’s intervention, the death that Antonio faces in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is reversed at the end thanks to Portia’s control of language and judgment. In this way the tragic potential is diverted, allowing for the kind of union at the end that is usually associated with comedies. This is the type of development that is also evident in the tale, revealing it to contain in fact elements of both “tragedy” and “comedy,” which Borges believed to be exclusive to Western theater.39 Moreover, the way that the tale conceptualizes the notion of “comedy” and “tragedy” appears to be similar to the way that they are conceptualized in the three Shakespearean plays mentioned, which like the tale itself can all be read as tragicomedies. For as Harold Bloom reminds us: “Shakespeare, as I keep insisting, writ no genre.”40 Thus his plays, like the tradition of these tales, not only mix genres such as poetry, drama, and fiction, but also those such as “tragedy” and “comedy” in the kind of way that the nineteenthcentury critics should have frowned upon. Moreover, the way that the tragic catastrophe is transformed into comedy suggests that the women involved in the tales were seeking, among other things, to mitigate the negative implications of male politics in ways that appear to be more auspicious for women. The fact that resemblances and reverberations of these women’s tales can be found in Shakespeare suggests that there was more than a coincidental resemblance between the work of that great dramatist and the tales. The tradition of the latter could have easily been gradually introduced into Northern Europe, along with the zajal poetry and music, by the Troubadours whose art form was eventually absorbed by the jongleurs who replaced them. Concerning the latter, Robert Briffault



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The medieval popular jongleur, once the universal provider of entertainment, had practically died out. More exactly, he had modified the form of his activities; he enacted, on the boards of fairs, thrilling scenes of miracle or murder, scraps of patriotic history, clowneries and buffooneries. The play was the thing which filled the gap in popular entertainment. The theatre which thus sprang up had little connection, save in name, with Greek drama or even Roman comedy. It was a form of entertainment which supplied a popular need.41

So could it be that Western theater itself, which Borges associated with the superiority of the West, may have derived from the same storytelling that he appeared to denigrate? If it did develop out of a tradition of storytelling, such as the one that resonates in Shakespeare’s plays, then that tradition is most likely not the one that produced “Jack and the Beanstalk” but rather the one that produced “Who’ll Buy a Word?”



has noted:




Aisha Jarma

There was upon a time until there was A world that exists not and really does

A

t that time there was a medina whose Sultan and his son the prince, who was of a marriageable age, were looking for a suitable young woman to whom he could get married. So one day they officially declared their intentions to start the marriage process and sent out a khattāba (traditionally the woman sent by the family of a young man to see the family of a young girl and start the process of asking for her hand in marriage) to take a look at all the young women in the realm in order for them to select a prospective bride for the prince. Among the young women that this older lady from the court in her capacity of khattāba was asked to visit was one called Aisha Jarma who, as her name suggests, was known for her audacious but also industrious nature. Even as a young girl she had made herself noticeable due to her capacity for hard work as well as her somewhat daring behavior and speech. As she grew up Allah had endowed her with every grace so that she had become an extremely capable, though outspoken young woman, who had come to the notice of many around her due to this. This is how she had been brought to the attention of even the prince himself, which is why the khattāba was sent to find out what she could about her.



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She went to wrench from the living The other life it was giving

The khattāba then asked her where her father was. To which Aisha Jarma responded: He went to accompany The one on his last journey.

The woman then continued by asking her where her brother was. This time Aisha Jarma told her: He went to deliver the air In exchange for what is fair.

Finally, puzzled by the answers she got and seeing that she was not getting anywhere with the young woman, the khattāba asked whether she could have a glass of water. At this point Aisha Jarma excused herself by claiming that she could not get up because she had “a small basket of roses” in her lap. So when the khattāba returned to the Sultan and prince to give them her impression of the young woman, she did so with mixed feelings. She told them that Aisha Jarma was neat, well proportioned, and on the whole a pleasant young woman. However, she felt compelled to add, she spoke in enigmas that were difficult to understand, and she recounted to them the younger woman’s responses to her questions. After she finished, the prince and Sultan appeared to be very interested in this young woman; their curiosity had been aroused by what the khattāba had said, making them decide that they wanted to see the young woman for themselves. So one fine day, both the prince and the Sultan set out to visit Aisha Jarma in her father’s house. They were received by a composed young woman who did not appear to be in any way intimidated by the arrival of her royal guests. For, as soon as they entered the house, she shouted unabashedly, as if addressing a nurse or servant (often referred to as “Dada”): Dada, bring the feather cushions For the masters with the large shins.



When the khattāba went to visit Aisha Jarma, she found her sitting on a small mtarba (a raised mattress serving as sofa) in the sitting room, sewing. By way of making conversation, the older woman eventually asked her where her mother was. To which Aisha immediately responded:

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You see, Aisha Jarma had no problems recognizing who they were and yes, she was not at all surprised or perturbed by their visit. Nor was she at a loss for words. Both the prince and the Sultan were intrigued by this young woman, whose capacity to string words as one would pearls they found to be particularly appealing. They eventually took their leave, but shortly after that sent the khattāba to ask for Aisha Jarma’s hand in marriage. She accepted to marry the prince, but only upon certain conditions to which he graciously agreed. One of her conditions was that he would build her quarters on top of the royal court, allowing her to see what went on immediately outside it. The prince had no problems complying with her wishes, to the letter. When they got married and Aisha Jarma settled herself in her special quarters over the court, she was able to see much of what went on below her immediately outside the court where the prince, who had by then become the next Sultan, now judged the citizens of the town. This is how it came about that from her elevated position she could view all the people who brought their cases to him. One of these cases involved a Jebli¯ (an inhabitant of the Western Rif mountains) and an ‘Arbi¯ (an inhabitant of the plains south of the Rif mountains). Now the Jebli¯ , who had a donkey, coveted the camel that was owned by the ‘Arbi¯ . It so happened that the donkey and the camel gave birth at around the same time; this is when the Jebli¯ exchanged the baby camel for the donkey’s colt claiming that his donkey had given birth to it. This is what initiated the conflict, which they eventually presented to the Sultan in his capacity as judge. The latter, who was especially busy that day, considered the case hastily then pronounced that each one of them must accept what Allah had given him and sent them both home. Such a verdict was very unsatisfactory to the ‘Arbi¯ , who was understandably angry as he left the courtroom. Aisha Jarma called him from her upstairs abode as he was leaving the court and asked him what was bothering him. When he explained to her what had happened she was amused. So she told him that he should return with another case to the Sultan the next day and when presented to him he was to tell him the following: On the river bank, I planted a field of grout, Which was all eaten up by the river trout.

And when the Sultan exclaimed: What a wonder it is that the trout now eats the oat.

He was to respond: What a wonder it is that the camel now breeds a colt.



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This is what the man did and it is how he ended up eventually retrieving his baby camel. However when Aisha Jarma’s husband, the Sultan, heard about the way she had prompted and abetted the ‘Arbi¯ , he was upset and felt that she had overstepped her position. So he told her that she could take whatever she loved most with her from the court and return to her father’s house. Aisha Jarma then gave him a sleeping draught with his tea, placed him in a trunk, and took him with her. When he woke up and found her sitting nearby, he asked her why she had not left yet. She informed him that she had and that she had brought him with her since he was what she loved best in the court, leaving him speechless. And so we left them with their deed And came back home to eat our trid.

Narrative Generations: From Precolonial Folktale to Postcolonial Film Whereas the tale “Aisha Jarma” has been told within the confines of old medinas such as that of Tetouan, its film adaptation “Douiba” was produced in the much larger and more (post)colonial city of Casablanca. One difference between the two places occurs in a comment by a woman who lived in Tetouan in the first half of the twentieth century and who had the opportunity to accompany the household of a judge to Casablanca. When she returned to Tetouan a few years later and was asked by the women there what Casablanca was like, she thought about it for a moment and then pronounced: “To Saint Belyout I direct my calls, in Casablanca there are no walls.” Beginning by invoking Casablanca’s patron saint she then went on to voice the most outstanding feature of the city for her, that it had no ramparts around it. What seems to have attracted her attention the most is the way the city just appeared to sprawl out indefinitely, in obvious contrast with the old medina of Tetouan, whose ramparts served to both protect its community and also define it. The lack of walls in Casablanca may have made it difficult for that woman to describe, yet it is such a lack that served in the final analysis to define it. In “Aisha Jarma” the relationship between words and walls is dramatized in ways that both resemble and also go beyond the way it appears in the tales that have been dealt with so far. The emphasis here is not only on the way the protagonist’s special manipulation of



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words enables her to transgress the different walls confining her. The words themselves in this tale become associated with certain barriers, literally with the walls of buildings representative of different social classes, each associated with a different linguistic feature. Such a distinctive perception of language, however, appears to have been much more difficult to portray in the film Douiba, based on one version of the tale. In this chapter, I analyze the tale as it was told in Tetouan, paying particular attention to the different audiences at which it was directed, before going on to compare it to the film adaptation as produced in Casablanca. Some space will be devoted to specifically male audiences and how they have reacted through the ages to such a woman’s art form in the mother tongue. The capacity to manipulate words and transgress walls is what enables Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter, you may recall, to position her prince as the spectator of her art work even while she remains ostensibly buried in the metmora. She does this in ways that both resemble and also differ from the way Lawza El-Bhiya manages to position her prince as spectator of her art work while she herself remains hidden under the bed. Both strategies call attention to the way they subvert the symbolic order associated with male authority. This is also what the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” achieves by embodying the person of the ‘ālim—one version of the archetypal male in authority—and manipulating that position from within. What that protagonist accomplishes is in fact very similar to Aisha Jarma’s accomplishment in this tale, which represents yet another strategic way in which such women, even in the remote past, managed to take hold of the authoritarian male symbolic and transform it from within. What this tale appears to emphasize, even more than do the others, is the way that the barriers in question are inscribed in the words themselves, whose meanings can be traversed by some and not by others in the audience. Those barriers begin to be evident when we consider Aisha Jarma’s responses to the khattāba, the go-between sent by the prince and Sultan, who finds it difficult to interpret her riddle-like answers. It is in those answers, which the women in the audience would have been in a more privileged position to understand, that Aisha Jarma describes the different occupations undertaken by her relatives. Thus, you will recall, concerning her mother she claims: She went to wrench from the living The other life it was giving



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Only to the knowledgeable audience is it evident that her mother is actually a midwife. Similarly, when she claims concerning her father that

The khattāba may not have been able to understand, in the way that the women in the audience could, that he is in fact a tāleb (one who seeks knowledge by memorizing the Qur’an), who accompanies funerals in order to read the Qur’an over the grave. This is similar to what she says concerning her brother, about whom she tells us: He went to deliver the air In exchange for what is fair.

It takes a certain kind of insight—one that the person who initially told me the tale quizzed me on to make sure that I got the point—to perceive that he is a musician who plays a wind instrument, in this case the ghayta (a kind of f lute closely associated with the folk music of northern Morocco). This is what he performs during certain religious holidays, such as Ramadan, or during other festive occasions in exchange for money. In this way all her family members are revealed to be workingclass folk, whose occupations she promotes through the beautified language she uses—endowing it with rhyme and rhythm, thus refusing to let them be demeaned. The fact that such explicit details about the working-class conditions of this family only become clear to those in the audience who are in the privileged position of being able to comprehend their meaning suggests not only that the tale is directed at different levels of audiences, but also that it lends itself to different interpretations. Only by identifying with the women in the audience at whom the narrative was originally directed can we place ourselves in the best position to understand the tale. For it is by associating ourselves with those women, who would have originally consisted to a large extent of spinners and storytellers, that we can gain a privileged understanding of both Aisha Jarma’s words and of the tale itself. That female audience would have had no problems identifying with a protagonist such as Aisha Jarma, even though her hands are occupied with sewing rather than spinning, and would have appreciated the way her answers puzzle the khattāba. They would have been particularly amused at the way



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Aisha Jarma excuses herself to her visitor when she asks for a glass of water. Although as the daughter of the house and as the younger woman it would have been expected of her to be at the service of the older woman guest and to in fact offer her a drink or serve tea even without being asked, she declines such a role. She excuses herself from such servitude by making use of another seeming riddle; that she had “a small basket of roses” in her lap, which prevented her from complying with her visitor’s wishes. In fact Aisha Jarma excuses herself by pointing out her state of being a woman (one with a small basket of roses in her lap, or one who is menstruating), thus turning her identity as a woman to advantage and refusing to allow the older woman to make use of it in order to reduce her to a subservient role. Such language use—involving a symbolism that associates rose petals with numerous intimate matters specific to women—is also evident in “The Female Camel,” as we shall see in chapter 6, and appears to have been a fairly well-established metaphor among these women storytellers. The use of such symbolism, referring as it does to the natural cycles of blood and birth, draws our attention not only to the protagonist’s position as artist but also to the specifically feminine nature of both her art form and her language. It is by highlighting a language that is specific to women, which may not therefore be comprehended by everyone, that the tale draws our attention to the layers of meanings which it contains. The narrative appears to self-consciously flaunt the idea that special interpretive skills are required to fully understand Aisha Jarma’s words, which the khattāba appears to lack since she finds it difficult to decipher her riddle-like answers. In fact, the khattāba here, even though she too is a woman, is contrasted with the women in the audience who were in a more privileged position to grasp Aisha Jarma’s meanings. The khattāba, even though she too comes from the court, is also contrasted with the prince and the Sultan in the tale and with their comprehension of Aisha Jarma’s words. Those words that she conveys to them, whose full meaning she herself is incapable of grasping, could not have been interpreted by them the way that the women in the audience interpreted them. Yet, it is the special significance that they perceive in them that prompts both of them to go and visit this audacious young woman in her humble home. What could have struck such royalty about Aisha Jarma’s words may remain somewhat enigmatic to the twenty-first-century audience. If her words drew attention, as they did for the original women in the audience, to the basically working-class circumstances and the specifically feminine language used by this eloquent protagonist, how could that



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have been of interest to the royalty? Yet even the details that the tale provides concerning the prince and Sultan’s visit to Aisha Jarma’s home confirm those feminine and working-class conditions, for it is during their visit that we are provided with information concerning some of the furnishings of that house—normally arranged by the women of the household. Thus we are told that some special feather cushions had to be brought or at least would have been considered more appropriate for the royal visitors. This suggests that the furniture of the workingclass home may not have been considered good enough for them, for although Aisha Jarma herself, we are told, is seated on a small mtarba— such a mtarba would have been filled with softened hay, or at best with wool, but certainly not with feathers. By asking for a soft cushion that would be more suitable for her royal guests she acknowledges their superiority (or at least their habit of using superior furnishings) while at the same time refusing to demean her own circumstances. Just because her working-class home could not allow for such luxuries did not mean that it would not have been as clean and neat as any; it too would have aspired to the level of comfort and beauty associated with more elegant houses, albeit in its own simple way.1 Thus Aisha Jarma’s reaction demonstrates her refusal to be intimidated by the modesty of her circumstances, in which she appears to take pride. However, it is unlikely that those working-class circumstances, elegant or otherwise, would have in any way aroused the royalty’s interest, much less prompted them to go and visit such a young woman. What in fact raises their interest in Aisha Jarma can only begin to be apparent once we consider the kind of prince and Sultan in question here. The Taifa Court Culture The prince and Sultan in “Aisha Jarma,” like the other royal personages who figure in these women’s tales, represent the kind of royalty associated with the taifa states who began to dominate al-Andalus as of the eleventh century. In her study of the courtly culture in al-Andalus and Provence, Cynthia Robinson distinguishes between the pleasurable realm of those courts and the more ceremonial one.2 The latter is the one to which someone like the khattāba would have belonged, since she is involved in arranging for such ceremonial events as weddings—to which large numbers of people were normally invited. The inner, more pleasurable realm of such courts, which according to Robinson was “a very small and a very specific one, and it took its pleasure—in the most literal sense possible of the phrase—very seriously,”3 was of a much



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more intimate nature that bore, moreover, a special relationship to language. Robinson makes an interesting parallel between the visual effects achieved by the architectural and ornamental features of those taifa courts and that achieved by the metaphors employed in the lyrical verses often recited within them, both of which were characterized by infinite intricacy. Such a relationship between the actual physical places and the kind of words articulated within them is evident in “Aisha Jarma,” both within the protagonist’s family home as we have seen and also after the prince brings her to inhabit the court and to form part of its inner circle. It is within such inner circles that gatherings such as those over which Wallāda, who not only wrote poetry but was also a princess, would have presided and where jawāri¯ would have improvised verses of their own in response to those of the male poets. Such gatherings would have integrated the members of all the social groups, allowing all of them to take part in the highly creative process. Not only did they consist of those who had a special capacity to manipulate words, but also those with special capacities to interpret those words. Significantly, and as Robinson points out, within such gatherings “mimesis was diligently avoided.”4 This aspect of language, which would have revealed to the women in the audience the occupations that Aisha Jarma’s relatives performed, was not the one that was valued within the inner circles of these courts. What were more likely to have been appreciated there were the kind of “lyric compositions on ‘courtly’ themes” that contributed to “the intimate relationship forged and f launted between ‘courtly’ sovereigns and their ‘courtly’ courtiers.”5 Moreover, the kind of Sultan or prince who inhabited the center of such a court and formed an integral part of that courtly culture was not only “ardent lover and pliant beloved,” but was also himself a poet whose companions were bound to him “by the silken knots of love rather than the rough cords of obligation.”6 Those are the kind of princes and Sultans who would have gone running to Aisha Jarma’s modest home to meet this particularly eloquent woman, and they would have been driven there not by the mimetic content of her words but more by the lyrical form in which they were couched. The distinction that this tale makes between the content and the form of words is further highlighted by the two contrasting locations in which it is set. Even while Aisha Jarma is still well within the confines of her working-class home she comes to the notice of the royalty due to the formal qualities of her language use, her special ability to versify. This ability, associated as it is with rhyme, rhythm, and the more lyrical aspects of language, represents the space of orality in general, highlighting its specifically auditory nature. This in fact is what prompts the



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prince and Sultan not only to go and hear this exceptional young woman in her humble home, but to also transform her to their court within which she is endowed with a superior perspective. Although it is her eloquence that allows her to cross the barrier between her humble home and the royal court, within which she becomes legally entitled to her superior position,7 it is the view with which she is endowed that takes on a special significance here. By making an association between the legal marriage contract and the superior perspective with which it endows Aisha Jarma, the tale in fact stresses the association between the written word—such as that of the marriage contract—and the sense of vision, like that which her new quarters permit her. That kind of association appears to conform to Walter Ong’s argument that “the shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space.”8 However the process here differs from that described by Ong in that the tale does not dramatize the shift from an auditory to a visual space so much as it dramatizes the process whereby the woman, who is closely associated with the popular auditory features of language, comes to inhabit the center of the more authoritarian male structure— the court—which is more closely associated with the written word. By doing so she in fact complements the written text with more lyrical and feminine features and shows how the one can form an integral part of the other. The process here is very different from that undergone by Ma in Driss Chraibi’s La Civilization ma Mère! . . . who has to transform herself completely before she can enter the world associated with literacy, as we shall see. Like the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” the woman in this tale is seen as having come to inhabit a predominantly male structure, that of the authoritarian court itself, which she manipulates from within. Unlike the protagonist of the former tale, however, Aisha Jarma does not have to mask herself as a man in order to do so. She has, rather, to draw attention to her lyric art form, which in effect is what enables her to position herself at the heart of the royal court. From Courtly Culture to Court of Law As soon as Aisha Jarma transgresses the barrier separating her workingclass home from the court, a transition for which we have been prepared by reference to the marriage contract, the court in which she finds herself is revealed actually to be a court of law, over which the prince, who has now become the Sultan, presides. In this way it becomes closely associated with the written legal text and with male authority in general. Within that space, the protagonist is endowed not only with a view



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but with a superior position. The tale here not only enables the protagonist to see all that goes on around her, but by having her partake in the process of seeing—which is most closely associated with that space—it significantly enables her to take part in the very process most closely associated with vision, the more literate legal process with which the court is associated. Thus, by being able to inhabit that structure and to endow it with the oral qualities of her feminine art form, she in effect is able to render it more amenable to the common folk, such as the Jebli¯ and the ‘Arbi¯ who bring their cases to the Sultan. It would be difficult to interpret what Aisha Jarma does for them in this tale as suggestive of the storytellers’ desire to punish the males or to judge the judges as the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Bouhdiba has argued about the women’s folktales that he analyzes.9 Nor is Aisha Jarma’s intercession here a matter of pure fantasy on the part of those women storytellers, for in fact women who were well versed in juridical matters were not completely unknown in al-Andalus, where, for instance, “One woman, the wife of a qād¯i of Loja (Granada) in perhaps the 8th/14th century, was outstanding for her juridical knowledge—according to Ibn al-Khati¯b she knew juridical sources better than her husband.”10 Although Aisha Jarma here does not herself defend the interests of the man who has been unfairly treated, in the way that Portia does in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, she shows him what he must do in order to defend himself. Significantly, she provides the man not only with the content of the message that he needs to convey to the Sultan, but also with the form in which it should be couched. The fact that the form here— significantly lyrical—is perceived as constituting an integral part of the content suggests that the tale conformed to tenets comparable to those upheld by the New Critics who claimed that the form is the content. This woman, who comes to inhabit the male structures, is moreover not entirely constrained by them but is in fact the one who manipulates those structures from within. It is she who comes to embody the male text, which she endows with her own lyrical qualities. By endowing the written legal process with the more pleasing, feminine features associated with orality and her lyrical art form in general Aisha Jarma is able to bring justice back to the common people and to thus demonstrate that the capacity to versify is not purely ornamental but could have very practical uses. It is by rendering the authoritarian legal process less arbitrary that she makes it capable of giving the folk back what is rightfully theirs. This brings us back to the working-class circumstances, representative of the popular dimension associated with the woman who comes to inhabit the center of the court.



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These circumstances may not have been of primary interest to the prince and Sultan; however, they are not purely incidental in this tale. As noted earlier the importance of those circumstances would not have been lost on the women in the audience, who would have appreciated the extent to which the occupations pursued by Aisha Jarma’s family members, who administered to births, accompanied the dead to their graves, over which they delivered their blessings, and who also played their music at such ceremonial events as weddings, are ones that may at times go unnoticed or appear to be insignificant but that are in fact fundamental to the functioning of society. The auditory nature of what they do is furthermore stressed by the fact that the father chants the Qur’an and the brother plays the ghayta, both of which call attention to the role of music in such working-class occupations and the life of the folk in general. The way that music here becomes associated with working-class occupations furthermore draws attention to the industry, patient training, and creativity or craftsmanship that such an art form requires, as does that of storytelling itself. By stressing the workingclass nature of Aisha Jarma’s art form the tale in fact stresses the extent to which the popular as well as the feminine are at the heart of that elite courtly lyric to which she ends up contributing. The extent to which the art form to which our attention is drawn here is both popular and feminine is of central importance and one that I come back to in chapter 7. What I would like to take up here is the fact that this art form is in the vernacular. The use of the vernacular along with the mixing of orality and literacy within the context of such courtly culture is one that in reality was evident not only in matters of a legal nature—as depicted in the tale— but also, you may recall, in the way that Andalusi music and poetry, as exemplified by the way the zajal and kharja in the vernacular and the muwashshah or ring song in the standard Arabic were so closely interlinked in al-Andalus, where the highly elite was often mixed with the purely popular. As María Rosa Menocal notes: As a structure that would far outlast the Andalusians themselves, the ring song was an ode to the sort of union so electrifyingly visible in the Great Mosque: the back and forth of two contradictory strands, in love with each other, tied to each other indissolubly, and yet their languages autonomous, each with its own place within the capacious House of Islam and the even more capacious House of Arabic.11

“Aisha Jarma” appears to enact the kind of process that gave rise to that art and to present the kind of artists who were involved in it. The art in



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Male Writers Who Employed the Vernacular Those who, like the Troubadours, appear to have had no problems embracing this basically popular and feminine art form in the vernacular, were the ones who could enable that art form to cross the barriers between al-Andalus and Europe and to inhabit the center of their own written art forms. By allowing for such a process as that enacted by Aisha Jarma, they were in effect enriching their art with the more lyrical feminine and popular qualities associated with the women’s art form and with the vernacular in general. For as Menocal has stressed concerning the kharjas in the ring songs: the distinctive feature was vernacularness as such, and its abiding contrast with the formal language of the rest of the song. This was the artful and inspired combination of Ibn Hazm’s world—the refined universe of the courts, with its ultra-refined poetic tradition—with the world just outside those courts—that of the popular women singers who performed to the stirring beats of a whole repertoire of instruments that would soon become standards in the European musical picture. . . . As if it, too, were a new instrument, the vernacular, the antidote and rival to the classical languages, was brought into the courts.13

Those who adopted the vernacular were, at any rate, not trying to measure themselves against the women with whom it was associated and to exclude them from the creative process in which they themselves were involved. The fact that it is the auditory traits of that oral art which attracted the prince and the Sultan to Aisha Jarma’s humble home, and the Troubadours to that anonymous oral tradition, suggests that there is something intrinsically vital about it. The vernacular mother tongue in this case is contrasted with the written classical Arabic, which, like the learned Latin, tends to conform to more canonical forms and norms. As Walter Ong has noted, the latter languages “were all no longer in use as mother tongues. . . . They were never first languages for any individual, were controlled exclusively by writing, were spoken by males only.”14 The distinction that Ong makes here between the oral mother tongue and the exclusively written male language, which is no longer a living language, can begin to explain the attraction of such a popular form to later European writers who were indebted to the Troubadours.



the tale, which is closely related to the one that Menocal describes, may very well have been the one that contributed to that of the Troubadours which, according to Roger Boase, was believed by some to have been “rooted in a popular and anonymous oral tradition.”12

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The latter themselves had no problems transgressing the barriers between those two media and embracing the specifically feminine art form, which enabled them to produce what Briffault qualifies as “not great poetry. They are but songs; songs of which for the great part, the words have come down to us amputated from their musical stem, but which were not composed to meet the eye in the written form.”15 It is nevertheless that lyricism which seduced the Europeans and fired their imagination, enabling them to revel in the rhythms of the sounds themselves—which they realized could be reproduced in their own mother tongues. Petrarch and Dante were among the first canonical writers to start using the vernacular in written form. They were affected by the twelfthcentury Renaissance, which according to Briffault “brought barbaric Europe to life, and made the efflorescence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries possible, . . . this so-called Renaissance continued to follow even more closely in some respects than did Dante the tradition inaugurated by the troubadours of Provence. Its founder in Italy was Petrarch.”16 It becomes evident, then, that these writers were influenced not only by the Troubadours and the whole Provençal tradition, but also by the one that emanated from Italy where it had flourished in Sicily under such rulers as Frederick II whose court “cultivated and translated things Andalusian. Even the domestic aspects of the court were heavily Arabized, from harem to body guard to clothes—and who can doubt that music was as well?”17 As Menocal further elaborates, “the beginnings of Italian literature are dominated by . . . Frederick II. Under his patronage was born and thrived . . . the first lyric poetry in an Italian vernacular.”18 Those Italian writers’ genius was their ability to adapt the oral art form to the written mode, and to gain inspiration from the vernacular mother tongue. By writing in the vernacular, they were able to incorporate the lyricism and music of the mother tongue into their written poetry. They appear to have been following in the footsteps of the Andalusis, whose writers had no problems incorporating the woman’s art form, at the heart of whose popularity was the revolutionary gesture of bringing “the mother tongues . . . up to share the stage with classical Arabic poetry, a language and a poetry that had never had to share the stage before.”19 Maghrebi Male Writers’ Uncomfortable Alliance with the Mother Tongue Menocal points out concerning the muwashshah: “In these new songs, the mother tongues thus literally run rings around the classical



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poets and their fine language . . . these final lines were the key to the Andalusian proclamation of cultural ascendance and uniqueness, no less than the horseshoe arches in the Great Mosque.” 20 In spite of the uniqueness to which they contributed, the mother tongue with which they were closely associated was never wholeheartedly accepted by all. Unlike Petrarch and Dante, who employed the vernacular in order to enhance their creative powers, Maghrebi male writers appear to have a more uneasy relationship with the mother tongue as well as with the literature to which it has given rise. This uneasy relationship was evident even as far back as twelfth-century al-Andalus when zajal poetry was looked down upon by some because it was couched in the vernacular. Hence, Briffault quotes ‘Abd al-Wali¯ d al-Marrakishi¯ , the historian of the Moroccan Almohade dynasty, who said concerning some zajal poems that “I should have liked to quote some of the strophes that occur to my recollection, were it not contrary to literary usage to cite such compositions in works of serious character intended for the perusal of scholars.” 21 This would suggest that the marriage between popular and elite art forms was not equally well received by everyone at the time and that denigration of the vernacular has a long history. Attitudes such as that expressed by al-Marrakishi¯ , ones that have furthermore tended to associate orality with the illiteracy of the mother, are no doubt at the source of the negative attitudes that persist in the Maghreb concerning the khurāfa, or the kind of women’s tale that constitutes the corpus of this book. These vital feminist texts, serving as forms of consciousness-raising connecting generations of women and endowing them with an effective source of empowerment, appear to have been particularly daunting to male audiences, who have tended to look down upon them or denounce them. This denigration is evident, although it is expressed indirectly and very differently, in such works as Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s L’Imaginare Maghrébin and in Driss Chraibi’s La civilization ma Mère! . . . Whereas Bouhdiba’s book is more directly involved with women’s tales, Chraibi’s novel is not about storytelling at all. Yet the figure of the mother, who is at the heart of his book, reveals much about how the mother tongue is perceived by that writer within the Moroccan (post)colonial context. Both books view the effect of the mother tongue, as well as the art form associated with it, as less than entirely beneficial to the male son. Such an attitude appears to differ considerably from that which prevailed in al-Andalus and which Menocal describes as “the invigorating cultural mixtures characteristic of the taifas, [where] this new song form f launting Andalusian hybridness became widespread, and just fashionable enough to entice



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the court poets themselves to sing in its accents—or to write so that the qiyān could sing.” 22 Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s involvement in the tales he presents is evident in the way he recalls and analyzes them, which suggests that he is not completely indifferent to them. In fact, he acknowledges that the tales are communal treasures that may be in the process of getting irretrievably lost. 23 The way he situates the tales within the larger contexts of tales in the Arab world is particularly instructive. However, he appears to be uneasy about the fact that these tales are basically women’s tales. He does acknowledge that the women protagonists are obliged to exert enormous efforts to survive within their predominantly patriarchal society in which the odds are very much against them. In fact, he explains that they have to be particularly intelligent and resourceful to overcome the numerous adversities that threaten to annihilate them. Yet he cannot qualify the efforts of the women storytellers as being more than just deliriums or fantasies. 24 These tales, like the zajal poetry looked down upon by alMarrakishi¯ , have been denigrated, according to Bouhdiba, because they are expressed in the vernacular oral tongue rather than in the noble classical language of the Qur’an. 25 Moreover, he points out, they are told by older women, who tend more often to be grandmothers than the mothers themselves. 26 It is these storytellers who appear to make Bouhdiba feel most uncomfortable for, he points out, their tales have a great impact on the collective imaginary of the children at whom they are directed. The fact that the imaginary—particularly that of the male child—is affected by this woman-centered process is what he appears to feel most uncomfortable about. For the aim of such storytellers, he asserts, is to basically punish the males, to cut to size the dignitaries, to judge the judges, and to outwit the bandits. 27 That such objectionable motives should be allowed to shape the imaginary of young Tunisians, and by extension of Maghrebis, is what he appears to find most objectionable. Bouhdiba cannot view the older women’s involvement in such tales as anything more than their desire, as he puts it, to relive a world that they are obviously reluctant to quit. 28 Such a view overlooks not only the extent to which storytelling, as Walter Benjamin has noted, involves the ability “to reach back to a whole lifetime” 29 but also the extent to which it may be empowering to the women involved, who are relegated that role precisely because they have traversed the stage of youth, during which women are particularly constrained by their femininity. Only in middle age do such women attain the kind of self-confidence



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and leisure that enable them to come into their own voices so to speak and to invest in such storytelling. Nor is their aim simply to punish the males, as the tales in this book demonstrate. The way that Bouhdiba depicts the Maghrebi imaginary, as being at the mercy of women storytellers trying to obtain in fantasy what they cannot in real life, suggests that it is a kind of battle ground between the two sexes. Rather than perceiving it as a space within which the aspirations and art forms associated with both sexes could complement each other and f lourish—one in which both the male and female child can obtain a vital source of identity—he perceives it as a space within which the male child, at least, needs to be protected from the oral medium associated with the mother tongue, which he needs to exclude from his notion of the self. Such a view suggests that the son can only come to terms with his own identity and creativity by measuring himself against the mother and women in general. Even though Driss Chraibi in La civilization, ma Mère! . . . is not directly concerned with storytelling as such, the character of the mother there can be read as enacting the shift from orality to literacy, within a predominantly (post)colonial context. The mother, who is initially a traditional woman involved in such activities as spinning wool and making her own clay braziers, is the one who asks her son when he comes home from school to go and wash his mouth in order to clean it from the effects of the French language that he is learning. This mother, who speaks the vernacular, becomes associated with illiteracy and it is the way that this becomes transformed into literacy that the novel focuses upon. It is her sons who “civilize” the mother, and it is Chraibi’s genius which depicts that “civilization” in terms of the different mechanical gadgets that enter the house one by one and end up completely transforming it as well as the person most closely associated with it: the mother herself. Ironically, she does not attempt to exclude the different media, such as the radio and the telephone, that enable that language and its “civilization” to invade her home. The task of civilizing the mother becomes so extensive that the son has to even teach the mother her own body; he ends up teaching her even about such matters as menstruation.30 The context of this novel does not allow for a woman’s language such as the one that appears in “Aisha Jarma” since the very symbolism of blood and birth has to be transformed into a male type of rationality to even be understood; there is no possibility of speaking the body for this woman. Within this context it is the different media that best represent the “civilizing” process, which begins in such seemingly indirect ways.



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Only once the infiltration of gadgets into the house has taken place, and the first-person narrator of the first section of the novel has graduated from high school and gone to France to become an engineer, that the actual “civilizing” of the mother begins. In the second section, the other son, Nagib, takes on the task of narration, addressing his brother in written form, as it were. Here we learn how after her sons leave school, the mother decides to go to school herself and to learn how to read and write, in French of course. In this way she becomes transformed into an altogether different person, who acquires a political conscience and even becomes a feminist, but who can have no recourse to any background or roots other than those of the so-called civilization française. This is the transformation that prompts Najib to announce that it was not only a new woman that he saw in front of him but, through her, a new man, a new society, and a young new world.31 The son perceives that the mother here, who is particularly representative of the mother tongue, has had to be completely transformed in order for her entire society to become “civilized.” In the process, and as the title suggests, it is that “civilization” (both colonial and French) which becomes his mother. The woman herself does not in any way endow that center with her own oral virtues as does Aisha Jarma in the tale; she is not allowed to blow the life force into it, so to speak, but can only come to inhabit it (and the novel ends significantly at the point when she is traveling to France) by completely transforming herself and conforming to the norms of the literate medium that imposes itself on her. In the process, of course, it is not only the vernacular mother tongue that becomes completely lost both to the mother and to her sons, but the Arabic itself for when the son takes up the pen to write he writes in French. Even if he had written in Arabic it would not have made that much difference, for as Walter Ong explains “a literary text in Latin [or Arabic or French], however complex and however learnedly understood, was bound to be opaque by comparison with a text in one’s own mother tongue, written out of a richer mix of unconscious and conscious elements.”32 The son here excludes the mother tongue from him by transforming the very character of the mother to that of an “Other.” Writing in the Mother Tongue Although the view of the mother tongue evident in Bouhdiba’s and Chraibi’s works may be said to represent that of male writers in general, there are some male writers who appear to have viewed the mother tongue more positively. Even at the time of al-Andalus, and despite the



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The only effect it produced was to break the obduracy of certain circles of grammarians and to bring about, in their despite, the lifting of the interdict they had pronounced against vernacular poetry. Men of letters felt freer than before to apply themselves, without loss of dignity, to the composition of azajal. In Aragon, Abū-Bakr Ibn Malik distinguished himself particularly in this lyrical form, which came to replace almost entirely the Muwaashshaha couched in the traditional language.33

By writing in the vernacular, and submitting an oral art form to the norms of literacy, a writer such as Ibn Quzmān was in fact going against the standards of his time. This suggests that such a process was being carried out by men who were not afraid to transgress the norms of literacy and to thus allow an oral art form to inhabit the center of their writing as Aisha Jarma comes to inhabit the center of the prince’s court. The advantages of using the mother tongue may not have been as evident to a writer such as Chraibi, who was among the first generation of Moroccan writers to start writing after independence, as they appear to be to a more recent Moroccan writer. This is Youssef Amine Elalamy, who started off writing in French and is best known for the novel Un Marocain à New York. More recently, however, he has ventured into writing a book in Moroccan darija called Tqarqi¯ b annāb (Chattering Teeth). This little book, consisting essentially of vignettes based on characters taken from the so-called Tarot cards, which have traditionally been most often played in the north of Morocco, heralds a new direction in writing in Morocco, which appears to be going very much in the right direction. This does not mean, however, that I am advocating that the classical Arabic be replaced by the vernacular. It is only right that the language of the Qur’an will always continue to f lourish and that there will always be scholars, both male and female, who can perfect it and use it in their scholarly writing. However, the classical or standard Arabic need not exclude the vernacular from use in written form, particularly for creative purposes. If we were to begin to write creatively in the vernacular, this would enable us to integrate all that revelry of sound and symbol, associated with darija, into a written form and in the process have recourse to the rich collective imaginary that can enrich the conscious



objections mentioned earlier to the vernacular being used in the written form, we find instances where poetry in the vernacular was actually written as is the case of the much-cited Di¯ wān (collection of poems) of Ibn Quzmān, about which Briffault says the following:

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with a rich layer of subconscious sediment. Furthermore the use of the vernacular in the written form would answer the needs of all those who are now lumped under the heading of “illiterate,” who do not have the time or the means to devote to the proper study of classical Arabic— which is often an altogether new language for them. Yet those people need to be able to read and write in their mother tongue in order to take part in and contribute more significantly to modern life. We need to find ways of transgressing the barriers between the elite classical forms and the more popular ones, endowing the former with the latter’s own special vitality. Like Aisha Jarma, we must enable the popular to inhabit the center of our more elite structures (particularly those associated with creative writing) and in the process invigorate both of them. From Oral Tale to Film Adaptation One medium where this has begun to happen, where the vernacular is beginning to be taken seriously, is that of cinema. However, cinema presents Aisha Jarma with other problems. For although she had no problems crossing the barriers between her working-class home and the royal court, she seems to be having problems traversing the formidable barriers separating her feminist tradition and the contemporary medium of cinema. This raises questions about how such adaptation into film can be carried out without allowing that medium to transform the original character of tales in ways similar to how Ma is transformed in Chraibi’s novel. As I pointed out in chapter 1 my intention is not to find fault with the filmmakers, for the problem is not only a matter of mediation but also of medium. A protagonist such as Aisha Jarma appears to be more difficult to depict within the context of the medium of cinema geared as it is to a mass audience and where the message is to such a large extent a matter of the medium as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out.34 The film Douiba, which was produced for the Moroccan television station 2M by Fatima Ali Boubakdi in 2003, begins in the manner of numerous Moroccan women’s tales where the father leaves, often to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and the young girl is left to her own resources. The father here informs his three daughters about the three eggs, with which he does not know what to do since he has to go and lead a caravan. He is obliged to leave the three girls alone, although he feels reluctant to do so. Only ‘Uwi¯ sha understands his allusion to the three eggs and encourages him to go, which is why he leaves her in charge of her sisters even though she is not the oldest. This is one of the ways in



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which the film depicts ‘Uwi¯ sha’s cleverness and her special facility with words. Fifteen months pass after the father leaves and the girls start running out of food. So ‘Uwi¯ sha, ever resourceful, goes out and catches a goat, which she brings back to her sisters. As it turns out, the goat belongs to a woman in the neighborhood who comes looking for it and whom ‘Uwi¯ sha outwits through her special capacity to manipulate words. The woman ends up demanding that they present their case to the qaid Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd; however ‘Uwi¯ sha informs her that she is so poor she does not even have a h ā’ ik (the voluminous white outfit with which north Maghrebi women traditionally covered themselves before going out) with which to appear in front of Mawlāi ‘Abd. So the woman lends her a h ā’ ik and they set out. When in front of Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd, ‘Uwi¯ sha insinuates that the woman is crazy, that she is now laying claim to ‘Uwi¯ sha’s goat and pretty soon she would be laying claim to the very h ā’ ik on her back. In this way her resourcefulness with words is depicted as a matter of swindling the woman not only out of her goat, but her h ā’ ik as well. So, is ‘Uwi¯ sha reduced to a mere trickster because the postcolonial and global mass audience cannot be expected to imagine a Muslim woman who has a facility with words and who is not in some way devious? In the film, the woman’s facility with words is interpreted repeatedly as a matter of lying, usually in order to defraud someone out of something. In one of the central episodes of the film ‘Uwi¯ sha outwits Sidi Ja‘far, a well-placed shopkeeper in town, and appropriates a donkey load of fabric from him—which she tries to make up for by tricking a number of women in town into going and buying cloth from him. In this episode, it is Sidi Ja‘far that the film endows with eloquence. And he does justice to the tale in that he, along with the other characters, speaks in the vernacular. Like many people who speak in the vernacular he makes use of an impressive number of sayings and proverbs. This is also the case of some of the women in Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd’s household; however, such a language use does not make them come across as being particularly lyrical or creative as is the case in “Aisha Jarma.” Hence the film has a hard time conforming to the original spirit of such a tale, which like the other women’s tales in this book sets out to empower women by allowing them to express themselves artistically and not by just repeating preexisting sayings. By reducing Aisha Jarma’s verbal dexterity and eloquence to a mere means of acquiring material goods through devious means, the film has completely misinterpreted what it could mean for a woman to be articulate.



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Whereas Aisha Jarma in the tale is at the center of the narrative and her world is very much at the center of the world, ‘Uwi¯ sha’s centrality in the film is continuously called into question in the film—which retains the central position for men such as Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd. The woman’s centrality in “Aisha Jarma” has been reduced considerably in the film Douiba; even the name of the protagonist has been reduced to ‘Uwi¯ sha, the diminutive of Aisha. Mawlāi¯ Abd’s desire, as he tells her, is to transform her from a douiba (the diminutive of a female wolf or jackal) to a qti¯ta (a kitten). This use of animal imagery reveals his unwillingness to cope with her seemingly untamed ingenuity; he feels that even that aspect of her character must be subdued and reduced to what he himself can manipulate. The fact that it is the men who are placed at the center is very much in line with the tendency of cinema to create a subject position for the male spectator, from which it deprives the woman viewer, as I noted in chapter 1. In this film the position of the woman appears to have been even further denigrated by the fact that Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd, with whom ‘Uwi¯ sha becomes involved, already has two wives, Shāfiya and S fi¯ ya. These two are depicted as belonging to two different social classes; however, the issue of class is not exploited in the film as it is in the tale. Although Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd listens to the advice of the working-class Shāfiya, who is noted for her wisdom, he by no means allows himself to be overpowered by her, nor is she revealed as having any special means of affecting him. The conversation between them comes across at times as less that of a husband and wife than that of a master and servant. This idea is accentuated at one point by showing her washing his feet. So, for this patriarch, ‘Uwi¯ sha would at best be a third wife, a notion that is not at all apparent in the tale—nor in the other women’s tales I have collected, which do not appear to dwell on the notion of polygamy. In one of the final episodes of the film, where ‘Uwi¯ sha overhears two young men discussing her husband’s problematic judgment, which corresponds to the episode in the tale in which Aisha teaches the ‘Arbi¯ what to tell the Sultan in order to get his camel back, ‘Uwi¯ sha escapes to the terrace of the house almost by accident and is not shown as inhabiting it due to her own strategies, as does Aisha Jarma. Furthermore, her verbal dexterity becomes a matter of interpreting a written endowment, which is in the form of a riddle indicating the exact position of a particular piece of land, for a young man so that he can obtain his inheritance from his uncles. Thus in the film her manipulation of words is at best reduced to a matter of interpreting the words of men for the benefit of other men. There is no space in this film for interpreting the protagonist’s position



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as being anything more than a matter of situating herself within male discourse and placing herself at the service of the men. As in the tale, the film ends with ‘Uwi¯ sha giving Mawlāi¯ ‘Abd a sleeping draught, placing him in a trunk—a technique that seems to have been found useful in tales, as well as in drama and film—and taking him with her to her father’s house. In the film version, however, she refuses to let him out of the trunk when she returns to the house and her father finally comes back from his long trip. Her action becomes more that of a naughty girl than that of a young woman who is completely in control of her actions. In the tale the fact that Aisha Jarma brings the Sultan back with her to her father’s house suggests that the contexts from which they emanate, as well as they themselves, have become irretrievably linked (especially when we consider that she represents the popular and oral woman’s art form that has come to inhabit the inner structure of the written text) and that there is no going back; the two can no longer be separated. In the film, ‘Uwi¯ sha’s action becomes difficult to interpret in this way. Rather than enabling the tale to inhabit the center of structures such as that of cinema, in the way that Aisha Jarma ends up inhabiting the structure of the court itself and enriching it with her oral qualities, the film here can only detach the text from its original context. Texts, such as “Aisha Jarma,”—which were told by the communities of women within the households of the walled-in medinas for whom the tales involved a dialogic process enabling them to come to terms with their position within their society—appear to be out of place in the context of cinema, within a postcolonial city such as Casablanca that has been defined in terms of its lack of walls. Thus the film, unlike the women’s tales, does not seem to be able to depict a woman who can transform the male symbolic to create a self more in conformity with her own aspirations than with those of the patriarchal order. It is therefore not surprising that the tale’s feminist narrative has been transformed into a conventional patriarchal comedy in the film, where we are meant to laugh as much at the woman as at what she says. The uneasy question this raises is whether the art forms that emanate from the postcolonial city, and in accordance with the norms of Western media, can only trap Moroccan women into demeaning constructions of the self in ways that the walls of the precolonial medina failed to do.



Aisha Jarma




The Female Camel1


A

t that time there was a Sultan who had an only daughter whom he greatly cherished. He was so concerned about her and her welfare that he kept her hidden behind seven hijābs (curtains) in her lavishly furnished room. Although he saw to it that she had everything she needed one day the princess fell ill and started to pine away, losing her vitality day by day. Very upset, the Sultan tried all within his means to find a cure for her. He summoned all the best doctors in the realm, one by one, but not one of them could cure her. Now in that same medina, there lived an old woman who had heard about the princess’s illness. Deciding to try her luck with the Sultan, she set out one fine day for his palace, at the gate of which she was asked about her business and treated with much amusement by the guards once she had explained her mission. However, when they perceived how resolved she was they consulted with each other and eventually sent to inform the Sultan, who was at first annoyed but then realized that



CHAPTER 6

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since his other efforts to cure the princess had failed it would not hurt to try the old woman’s remedy. So the old woman was allowed to enter the palace where she was led to the princess’s quarters. On the way her mouth practically dropped open at the beautiful f lowers and different colored birds that she encountered. At the entrance of the princess’s quarters the servants left her and, asking permission to enter, she was told, with all the respect due to her age, “Lift the hijāb and enter, dear aunt spinster.” The Sultan’s daughter kept repeating this phrase until the woman had lifted all seven hijābs. Finally she found herself faceto-face with the princess, whose pale face provided a marked contrast with her sumptuous surroundings. The woman started asking her about what might be ailing her. Shortly, she found out that the girl had never been outside the palace. When the old woman asked her whether she would like to go out the girl’s face became alive with excitement, but she pointed out that her father would never permit such a thing. The old woman mused over this and finally she assured the girl that she had devised a plan to deal with the Sultan. The Sultan was very surprised to see the old woman come to see him after only a short consultation with his daughter and even more surprised to hear that she knew both what ailed his daughter and how it could be cured. He immediately wanted to know what she proposed. So she told him that it was very simple; she said what his daughter needed was to visit a saint’s shrine, that she herself knew the exact one where she could find the cure she needed, and was ready to accompany her there. It seemed such a simple and appropriate solution that the Sultan wondered why he had not thought of it himself. So they agreed upon a proper time when the old woman could take the girl to the shrine; then the Sultan recompensed the old woman generously and bid her goodbye. On the appointed day the old woman came to take out the princess, who was in a state of great excitement as they set out, hardly able to believe that she was finally going out. The old woman took her to visit all the places she had heard of and wanted to see. After that she took her for a long walk in the countryside. When they became tired, they sat down to rest next to a f lowing river. They had not been sitting there gazing into the river for very long when they noticed a rock lifting itself up and a female camel emerging from under it. The camel was laden with dirty dishes, which it brought into the river and addressed: “Get down my little dishes; get cleaned with all the fishes.” At which point the dishes proceeded to get down from its back and to clean themselves thoroughly in the river. Once they were spotlessly



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clean, she again told them: “Get back my little dishes; you’ve fulfilled all my wishes.” At this the dishes all piled themselves neatly on its back again and the camel exited through the same opening from which it had emerged. The princess, thrilled by this whole spectacle, could contain her curiosity no longer, but wished immediately to follow the camel. So they both followed it through the narrow passage-way under the rock. As soon as they did so they found themselves in an enchanting garden. What fountains there were and what exquisite f lowers of every color! The further they proceeded into the garden the more dazzled they were with its beauty. Finally they sat down to contemplate the magnificent scene in front of them. At this point, they saw two pigeons come f lying from some distance. One dived into a fountain of milk and emerged as a handsome white prince. The other dived into a fountain of tar and emerged as his black servant. The two young men came forward and started talking to them. Having discerned the relationship between them, the prince soon asked the servant to take the old woman away and kill her. Then he and the princess sat in the garden where they talked and talked to their hearts’ content. When night fell the prince spread for her a bed of roses and covered her with narcissus once she had fallen asleep. When the princess woke up in the morning, she found herself in a wilderness where there was not a soul. The only thing that remained from the previous night was the bed of roses and narcissus that the prince had spread for her, so she got up and started walking. She had on her nothing apart from her fine clothes and jewelry, which, it finally occurred to her, she should hide. So after walking for some time, she came upon a shepherd herding his sheep and goats. She asked him to give her the skin of one of his goats in exchange for one of her bracelets. The shepherd, who was only too pleased to oblige her, immediately proceeded to slaughter one of his goats and skin it. She then covered herself with the goatskin and proceeded on her difficult journey in the wilderness. As she walked she kept repeating: I have neither the shelter of my father’s house, Nor nourishment for my love and a future spouse, I would rather that my beloved had left me with kisses Than spread my bed with roses and cover me with narcissus.

After walking for many days, she finally began to see the lights of and to hear the sounds of a distant medina. As she approached it she could



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see that the people were preparing for some big event. She stood at the town gate for some time before she summoned up the courage to ask what was happening. They informed her that they were preparing for the wedding of their prince. So she offered to help them in exchange for room and board. Mistaking her for a poor goat-skinned girl, they let her come into the medina and help with the preparations and often made fun of her due to her strange appearance. She spent some time thus serving them, when one day she had the opportunity to see the prince who was getting married. She was amazed to find out that he was the same prince she had met in the enchanted garden. At this point the princess began to lose all hope, as it had been the possibility of finding him that had kept her going. Now she had found him but he was getting married. After the wedding, her position in that medina became more precarious than before and the teasing from people around her had increased considerably. Finding herself in such a plight, she one day went into the garden of the palace and started going from one flower bush to the next. The first one she visited was the rose bush with whom she pleaded: “I’m weary of this life; pray strangle me with your bough.” To which the rose bush responded: “I’m a rose and you’re a rose; I can’t make such a vow.” So the princess proceeded to the jasmine bush, which responded in a similar manner. She visited all the different f lower bushes before she arrived at the prickly bush, which had no compunction about sending one of its rough boughs around her neck and strangling her. The prince, who happened to be passing by soon after that, saw her dangling from the bush and recognized her. He was so upset at her death that he too asked the bush to strangle him, which it did. Finally, his bride, who came looking for him, found herself confronted by the sad spectacle of their dangling bodies. So she too asked the bush to strangle her and she died by their side. All three were buried on the same day in three neighboring graves. Eventually, a beautiful rose bush grew on the princess’s grave, while on that of the prince there emerged a sweet smelling jasmine. On the third grave, however, there grew only a prickly bush. And the people of that medina often heard a nightingale come to sit on a tree overlooking the graves. In its song it kept repeating: “The lover’s with his beloved / but prickly bush’s none of it.” And as my tale approached the river fork I came back home to be with my own folk



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Unlike Aisha Jarma who moves from her working-class home to inhabit the prince’s court, the protagonist in this tale is herself a princess who manages to move out of her father’s court, in an effort to form part of the world outside it; in the process she becomes reduced to an image of common womanhood that eventually leads to her death. This tale, which constitutes a tragedy, is concerned with the fall of a princess and would appear to support Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “[i]n the ancient world and in medieval times, the most popular of all stories were those dealing with The Falls of Princes.”3 Moreover, the princess’s journey in this tale, fateful as it appears to be, becomes representative of a narrative of identity—a quintessential narrative of female identity— which presents striking similarities with the concerns of more recent Western women writers and feminists ranging from the eighteenth- to the twentieth century. A Narrative of Female Identity The very title “The Female Camel” foregrounds the specifically female dimension of this tale. The camel is a more precious beast of burden than the donkey or mule commonly used in the north of Morocco because its meat is edible and its wool is usable. It is also more valuable when it is female as it can also provide milk. The camel in this tale is not depicted as carrying burdens across the desert, but appears on a lush riverbank carrying a burden consisting of dirty dishes, normally washed by women, suggesting that the tale itself is about matters that are of special concern to women. In fact, the tale relates the process involved in becoming a woman that is suggested by the different stages that the princess in the tale traverses, which are basically three. The first is the one where she is hidden behind the seven hijābs. The second consists of the episode when she is led outside by the old woman and witnesses the spectacle involving the female camel on the riverbank. The final stage is the one where the princess is forced to take on the disguise of the goat-skinned woman, which culminates in her suicide. What makes the tale an archetypal narrative of subject formation is the way the three stages can be read as corresponding to Lacan’s real, imaginary and symbolic orders, which the child traverses in the process of individuation.4 This process, furthermore, is perceived as taking place within a paradigmatically Muslim



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public sphere, which is depicted in terms of an image of social imaginary that very closely resembles that theorized by modern Western theorists even while it remains distinctively Muslim.

The seven hijābs, behind which the princess is hidden at the beginning, conform to the original and literal meaning of hijāb, which, according to Fatima Mernissi, is three-dimensional: “The first dimension is a visual one: to hide something from sight. . . . The second dimension is spatial: to separate, to mark a border, to establish a threshold. And finally, the third dimension is ethical: it belongs to the realm of the forbidden.”5 All three dimensions of the hijāb are apparent in the tale, where they are viewed from a specifically female perspective. Concerning the visual dimension, the hijāb is shown to be not only what hides the princess from sight, but also what hides from her the rest of the world, which only begins to be revealed to her in the imaginary phase. The spatial dimension, which takes on a special significance in the symbolic, is at this stage reminiscent of “the curtain behind which the caliphs and kings sat to avoid the gaze of members of their court.”6 This is what defines the princess as belonging to royalty rather than to the world of common people. This becomes significant in a tale that depicts a princess who escapes from behind her numerous hijābs to take part in the trials of common womanhood. The third dimension of the hijāb situates it within the whole of Sufi discourse, which people such as the Sultan used to sanction their confinement of women—including their own daughters. By making use of such religious discourse to confine his daughter, the Sultan imposes a veil of subjectivity on her, which limits her view of both the reality around her and of her own self. To this extent, her experience behind the hijāb becomes representative of the real order, within which the child has no means of coming to terms with reality as it actually is, particularly since the child at this stage has not yet acquired the language that would enable her to do so. Such confinement is what leads to the princess’s illness, which takes on the dimensions of both a psychosis and a riddle. Only the old woman, who serves here as another version of gobetween and could have been a storyteller of the kind who would have made Bouhdiba particularly wary, can solve this riddle, since she is the only one in a position to “see” what lies behind the hijābs and to “transgress” the boundaries they represent, thus enabling the princess



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eventually to come to terms with the reality that is her own self. She is also able to take hold of what Mernissi calls the “ethical dimension” of the hijāb, when she uses the same religious discourse that the Sultan uses to sanction his confinement of his daughter, against him. Her wisdom resides in the fact that she perceives such discourse to be both what helps to sanction the action of those in power and the site where that power can be contested. By assuring the Sultan that his daughter needs to visit a saint’s shrine she plays on the Sufi belief in saints, whom one could ask for intervention with all kinds of problems. By doing so the old woman takes on the role of both the midwife who delivers the princess from the womblike world behind the hijābs and the analyst who finds out what is ailing her by enabling her to express her wishes, which she satisfies—thus facilitating her passage into the next stage of her development. This old woman, one version of the mother figure, is very different from the mother in Driss Chraibi’s novel. The older woman here works within the linguistic and cultural norms of her society in her attempt to help the princess escape from some of the more confining aspects of those norms. The Imaginary or the Order of the Female Camel Once they go outside, the princess and the old woman find themselves in a world that is diametrically opposed to that behind the hijābs. This world, which enables the princess to make use of her visual capacity previously restricted by the hijāb, is characterized by wide open spaces and a f lowing river, on the bank of which they end up sitting. The river here suggests that watery medium at the threshold of other-worldliness; however, this one does not include the world of jnūn (pl. of jin) often associated with water. Nor, for that matter, does it include saints or their shrines. The world in which they find themselves “frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiastic dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of the character of magic and prayer.” 7 Significantly it is in this world that they are able to view the spectacle of the female camel, which becomes emblematic of their identity, emerging from under a rock, with its burden of dirty dishes that it brings to wash in the river. Dishwashing is not something that the princess would have had to do herself, any more than it is what camels normally do. However, it is what would have been performed regularly by many of the women in the audience, who would have derived pleasure vicariously from having the task performed effortlessly by the camel. What would have been even



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more enchanting about the camel’s performance is the fact that by taking the dishes to be washed outside, the distinction between the domestic and the public worlds is blurred, as is that between the ordinary servant and the princess, thus stressing the common lot of all the women. This blurring between private and public spheres would appear to anticipate the process that Habermas associates with the modern development of civil society, which is characterized by the emergence of activities that had been relegated to the household economy into the public sphere. 8 However, even while dissolving the distinction between the different worlds involved, this phase places a specific emphasis on one temporal dimension, that of cyclical time. The emergence of the camel is a spectacle of special interest to the audience, stressing its festive nature that is “always essentially related to time, either to the recurrence of an event in the natural (cosmic) cycle, or to biological or historic timeliness.” 9 The fact that this dimension is associated with cyclical time is furthermore suggested by the dishwashing itself, which, by reinforcing the idea of washing, recalls the ritual ablutions performed by women at specific phases in their lives, as after menstruation or childbirth. Such a notion of time as that suggested by ablutions, which mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another, reinforces the idea that this whole episode is itself a phase. The phase it represents becomes apparent when one considers that the river is what both the old woman and the princess are gazing into when the camel appears. Having enabled the princess to escape from her confinement and to also obtain a spectacle of the world at large, is the old woman not now allowing her a perspective of another kind? Is the river not the archetypal mirror into which the princess gazes to obtain an image of her own self? And is this not what she perceives in the form of the female camel, which emerges to confront her? The phase suggested here is the one that conforms to Lacan’s mirror stage, as the camel is both recognition and misrecognition—“méconnaissance”—of the self, which is why it is imaginary.10 In the tale the image perceived is even more illusory than the one suggested by Lacan, since it ref lects not only the princess and the old woman but also all the women in the audience. The collective image they perceive further suggests degradation in the status of the princess: “that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; . . . to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”11 This becomes particularly evident when one considers that the princess, like the camel itself, is a more dignified being who has become burdened with the concerns of a common servant, enabling her to identify with the more comprehensive vision



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of womanhood she perceives, as it enables the women in the audience to identify with her. In this way the tale conforms to Bakhtin’s theory of narrative as an “attempt to transform the relationship between performer and crowd ‘in dialogic rituals so that spectators acquire the active role of participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may symbolize or even create a community.’ ”12 The dialogic relation between performer and crowd in this phase furthermore becomes reminiscent of Charles Taylor’s contention that human identity is created dialogically.13 By enabling such identification between the spectators and the protagonist, one manifestation of a public “relation among strangers,”14 this stage reveals itself to be the social imaginary, through whose “collective agency . . . a society is created, given coherence and identity, and also subjected to auto-alterations, both mundane and radical, within historical time.”15 This is the phase that emphasizes the protagonist’s profound identification with all that is around her, especially with the community of women involved in the storytelling, who belong to “a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time.”16 The river here furthermore becomes particularly reminiscent of that “f luid middle ground between embodied practices and explicit doctrines,” which Dilip Gaonkar associates with the modern social imaginary.17 The one in the tale brings together the imagined community of women—both present and absent, young and old, royal and common—into one unified image. The satisfaction that the princess derives from the fact that she is one with all that is around her, and forms an integral part of the community of women, explains why she, as well as the old woman, is eager to follow in the camel’s footsteps and enter the next phase. The Symbolic or the Logic of the Cultivated Garden When the princess and the old woman succeed in following the camel through the narrow passageway under the rock, you may recall, they find themselves in an enchanting garden. This process recalls the Quranic āya, which states that only once the camel becomes capable of passing through the eye of the needle would it be possible for those who “reject our Signs and treat them with arrogance . . . to enter the Garden.”18 The two women here are evidently not among those who disregard the signs. Their ability to perform the difficult task of following the camel through the needle’s eye, so to speak, confirms their moral impeccability and stresses the genuineness of their faith.



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The fact that the garden in which they find themselves depends on the interpretation of signs suggests that it is the symbolic order itself. Unlike the world depicted in the previous phase the one in which they find themselves now is not a natural space with a river, but a highly cultivated garden with fountains. The interpretation of signs is foregrounded by the arrival of the two pigeons that dive into two different fountains, one of milk and the other of tar, and emerge as a white prince and his black servant. The fountains here represent much more socially constructed types of “mirrors” than the river in the previous stage. Rather than just enabling the pigeons to obtain a view of themselves by ref lecting them, these “mirrors” completely reconstruct them into young men and according to specific social norms, which conform to the unfair dictates of power. In this phase, it is their difference that is stressed as it is essential to signification. This order thus reveals itself to be “the social contract [which,] far from being that of equal men, is based on an essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences which in this way produces communicable meaning.”19 Whereas the previous stage—representative of the women’s social imaginary—stressed the sense of wholeness and feeling at one with nature, this stage—representative of the male symbolic—becomes characterized from the beginning by difference and separation. It consists of two fountains that produce two very differently positioned social beings, where it is the powerlessness of the servant that highlights the power of the prince. Both are revealed to be signifiers; the prince being “le signifiant privilégié ” 20 (the privileged signifier) who takes control of the situation when he orders the death of the old woman and then proceeds to seduce the princess. The old woman’s death suggests the extent to which the symbolic is fraught with danger for women; it is the violent nature of the symbolic that this tale expresses. The significance of this death becomes evident when one considers that she is the mother figure who must be excluded from the symbolic, which comes under the law of the father. 21 Within this male order, the notion of subjectivity is much less communal than that which united the women in the previous stage. By killing the old woman, the prince separates the two women, thus depriving the princess of the communal sense of identity and facilitating her seduction. The fact that she is now within the symbolic, or the order of language, is further confirmed by the way she and the prince talk and talk. This is what seduces her and transforms her, not only into a subject, but into one who is subjected to that order. Within this order, the princess becomes constructed into



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an image of femininity that, significantly, involves the loss of her original identity. The idea of loss begins to be apparent when she wakes up in the morning to find out that the enchanted garden has disappeared and she is alone in a wilderness where all that remains of the previous night is the bed of roses and narcissus. The symbolic significance of that bed would not have been lost on the adults in the audience, well acquainted as they were with such imagery involving roses and their petals as we saw in Aisha Jarma’s tale, who would have grasped the fact that the princess had been def lowered. This becomes a good index of the extent to which “sex is . . . a symbolic arrangement structured like language.” 22 It is at this stage that her identity becomes split, just as the world in which she finds herself becomes radically transformed from the beautifully cultivated garden into the wilderness. Here she feels obliged to adopt a mask, which marks her as a subject “divided by the effects of language.” 23 Her entry into the symbolic constitutes her not so much as an entity with an identity, but as a being who becomes split between two different versions of femininity: her original identity as the princess who is pure and virginal has to be masked by that of the goat woman suggestive of animal lust and a more demonic version of femininity, which is what the symbolic order imposes on her. This division, however, is not what leads immediately to her death. She only kills herself much later, after traveling for some time and arriving at the “other” medina. Only after she discovers the prince and he gets married does she decide to commit suicide. What we have here is not just another version of the archetypal myth of the fall, but an original Muslim version of the Courtly Love tradition. Here the erotic dimension is not entirely missing as it is in some of the European versions in which the knight idealizes a lady, often another man’s wife, in a kind of Platonic relationship. The quest in this version is for legitimate sexual fulfillment, which prompts the protagonist to go in search of the prince and the possibility of a properly sanctioned relationship with him. What is interesting is that the courtly lover here—the equivalent of the European knight—is a Muslim woman, who once she finds out that her prince has taken another bride feels compelled to kill herself. This narrative, which is a real tragedy, is also a cautionary tale. The protagonist is a member of royalty who has been degraded and drawn to a death that would have invoked the audience’s pity and their terror, especially as she is led to it by forces that are essentially beyond her control and prompted by the fact that she is a woman. The women in the audience would have recognized similar possibilities of error in their



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own lesser selves, making the tragedy particularly cathartic. However, the tale does not end on the note of death. After they all die, the nightingale comes and sits on the graves to eulogize their love. By suggesting Ziryāb himself, the great musician who is said to have initiated Andalusi music and whose name meant black bird, the nightingale here serves to further reinforce the connection between Andalusi musicians and storytellers. Significantly, the tale ends on the note of narration, which continues after the central characters die and is prompted by them, thus suggesting that it is a form of history. The notion of history is further stressed by the temporal dimension that characterizes this phase, which is not the cyclical time of the imaginary phase but “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.” 24 This notion of time conforms to that during which the princess sets out on her journey, a form of migration. A subtext becomes evident here when one considers that by assuming the disguise of a goat woman, the protagonist is shown to have been deprived of her “origins” and to have taken on an “acquired identity” that is less desirable. This looks very much like a Moriscan strategy demonstrating that the original and ideal identity—the one associated with the true faith—has had to be repressed as a mode of survival and due to circumstances that have forced on her a less desirable identity, which is why she dies. It is her insertion into historical time that leads to her death, since such a temporality implies the idea of both a beginning and an end; it “renders explicit a rupture, and expectation, or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal. It might also be added that this linear time is that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences . . . and that this time rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation—death.” 25 Her entrance into the temporal linearity of historical time and the “[a]wareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity . . . engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity,’ ” 26 which is what the tale provides. By ending on the note of narrativity, it calls attention to itself and the “imagined community” of women, including those involved in its telling. Those storytellers are the women who, unlike the princess, were able to acquire the hybrid vision that comes with reconciling between the different identities available to them, thus allowing them to inhabit multiple women’s time—both cyclical time and the linear time of history—and to achieve what Kristeva calls “the demassification of the



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problematic of difference.” 27 Like present-day postcolonial and feminist theorists, the women involved in telling the tale were seeking “to redefine the symbolic process through which the social imaginary—nation, culture or community—becomes the subject of discourse, and the object of psychic identification.” 28 Although their position as women within the male symbolic was also fraught with danger, they could articulate themselves in ways that were not accessible to the princess— they could both express the kind of dilemma she faced and also survive it—thus keeping the spirit of the past alive through their ability to transform the symbolic to their own ends. Of Storytellers, Women Writers, and Feminists The protagonist of this tale, who is a princess, does not appear to be endowed with either the resourcefulness or artistry of the working-class Aisha Jarma. It is protagonists such as Aisha Jarma and Lawza el-Bhiya who best resemble the storytellers themselves. The aims of such artists, like that of the protagonist in “ ‘Ali and a Spinner Too?”, appear to have foreshadowed the concerns and strategies not only of the French feminists, as I suggested in chapter 2, but also those of some Anglo-American women writers as they have been expressed from the eighteenth century to more recent times, about which Mary Jacobus has stated: “Of course the category of ‘women’s writing’ remains as strategically and politically important in classroom, curriculum, or interpretive community as the specificity of women’s oppression is to the women’s movement.” 29 Like the Andalusi-Moroccan storytellers, what these women appear to have been concerned with are ways in which they could take hold of the male symbolic and manipulate it in such a way that it could become capable of representing them and their specifically women’s concerns. The search for a woman’s form of writing began in England in the eighteenth century, when women were roused by the revolutionary spirit of their age to seek ways of inscribing themselves within basically patriarchal modes of writing. It was the desire to come to terms with adverse narrative modes, within which they wished to find a space for themselves, that led large numbers of women to turn to the Gothic at that time. This mode of writing is what allowed them to represent more marginal, less conformist, versions of reality. As Anne Williams has argued: To “write in Gothic” was not only to find new subjects, themes, and literary models, a change revolutionary in itself, and one Wordsworth, for



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“The Female Camel,” in a style similar to that of Gothic fiction, appears to have been concerned with those facets of reality that are most to be feared, and to which women tend to be subjected due to the fact that they are women. Significantly, it is the princess’s entry into the symbolic order that comes to have such catastrophic implications for her. This is similar to why the Gothic was so appealing to some women writers in England, who could use it because it provided them with a means of articulating aspects of patriarchal “reality” that they found to be particularly scary. This is what becomes evident in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, where she problematizes those very institutions that the emerging bourgeois culture tended to view most positively, such as marriage. Thus in the novel Maria claims that “[m]arriage had bastilled me for life,”31 using a poignant metaphor of wives as prisoners of the Bastille, which becomes central to Wollstonecraft’s aim. That early British feminist was able to perceive that women’s problematic position in society was not the result of some inherent quality in being a woman, as it was a matter of the different institutions within which women found themselves trapped and the discourses associated with them. Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the need for women to have access to narrativity as one means of enabling them to escape from their entrapment within male discourses appears to be similar to the storytellers involved in these tales who also have depicted marriage, which they equated with the metmora, as entrapping to women as we saw in “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter.” Gilbert and Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic, discuss similar attempts on the part of nineteenth-century women writers to come to terms with their position, claiming “And just as the male artist’s struggle against his predecessor takes the form of what Bloom calls revisionary swerves, flights, misreadings, so the female writer’s battle for self-creation involves her in a revisionary process. Her battle, however, is not against her (male) precursor’s reading of the world but against his reading of her.”32 The concerns of those women writers, as articulated by Gilbert and Gubar here, appear to be similar to those enacted by the women protagonists of the tales discussed in this book. Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter and Lawza el-Bhiya, for instance, set out to



instance, was clearly conscious of effecting. It was also to subvert and reshape, indeed rebuild “that dome in air,” to “reorder the garden of Kubla Khan’s ‘decree.’ ” The poem describes a cyclical re-formation of the Law of the Father: the garden expresses Kubla’s “decree” (in a kind of écriture féminine).30

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present the princes in their lives with versions of their own selves which do not conform to the images that the princes have of them. It is the way the princes viewed them, and not just how they viewed the world, that the protagonists wanted to change. This is in line with Gilbert and Gubar’s claim that what the nineteenth-century woman writer had to confront were male definitions of herself as a woman, and the way she had been constructed by patriarchal culture. Among the twentieth-century women writers, Angela Carter and Jenny Diski appear to me to come closest in their concerns to what the storytellers under study here were doing. These women writers are much more radical than their nineteenth-century predecessors in the way they relate to patriarchal texts. They not only expose the latter as being basically constructs to which women have difficulty conforming, but they also disrupt them, break them down, and transform them— which is what enables them to begin to reconstruct them. In Carter’s Passion of New Eve, Mother’s group, of which she is critical, serves to construct women by making use of the phallic symbolic (a knife in this case, which she uses to literally operate on Evelyn and reduce him to Eve), which results in the fact that she can only create a woman who thinks like a man. Similarly, Diski in The Dream Mistress depicts Bella as trapped within her own fantasies that conform to patriarchal narratives including fairy tales such as “The Sleeping Beauty.” She is only able to escape with Mimi’s help when the latter comes to inhabit the tower representative of the phallic symbolic (responsible for the narratives and tales within which Bella finds herself trapped), which she subverts from within. What each writer does is to devise ways which would enable women writers to transform the patriarchal constructions that serve to trap them. These more recent women writers were trying to devise not only a style of writing but more what Christine Battersby has termed “a ‘feminine’ form of discourse that must always and necessarily undermine the authority of a ‘masculine’ symbolic language.”33 Such a desire to devise a feminine form of discourse is also evident in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” and “Aisha Jarma,” where the former comes to embody the male figure of an ‘ālim and the latter to inhabit the patriarchal structure of the court representative of the male symbolic, which they both manipulate from within. The aims of such storytellers, like that of Carter and Diski, concur with Shoshana Felman’s claim that “the challenge facing the woman today is nothing less than to ‘reinvent’ language . . . to speak not only against but outside the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy



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of masculine meaning.”34 “The phallacy of masculine meaning,” which recalls the gaze to which the prince wishes to submit Lawza el-Bhiya, is what both Carter and Diski set out to subvert. It is what Diski associates with even those narratives that constitute one’s own memory of what actually happened in the past, which, as she demonstrates, can be improved upon by the woman writer once she is able to come to terms with her dreams and inhabit the male symbolic, transforming it from within. However, the image that best exemplifies the similarity of concerns shared by Diski and Carter as well as by the storytellers is the use of mirror images to represent certain facets of “the phallacy of masculine meaning.” Through the Looking Glass Whereas the river and fountains that serve as mirrors in “The Female Camel” may not be real mirrors, a real mirror does appear in “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter,” you may recall, which she places in front of the prince after having shaved him and made him up. This is what she uses strategically to reflect to the prince a certain reality about his own self, which reveals it to be different from his own perception of it. By thus transforming his perspective of the self Aisha enables him to eventually come to see her differently. Something similar occurs in Carter’s The Passion of New Eve where she symbolizes patriarchal discourse in terms of the image that one perceives in the mirror, which she would enjoin women to smash. Carter, who claimed that she was “in the demythologizing business,”35 perceived that women were particularly trapped within a masculine way of viewing reality, including that involving their own selves. The novel begins by being grounded in a male perspective, that of Evelyn who perceives Tristessa as the archetype of femininity and bills her “the most beautiful woman in the world,”36 whereas in fact she turns out to be not a woman at all but a man. The notion of femininity that Tristessa represents is simply an extension of Evelyn’s own perspective, which is reinforced by the image perceived on the silver screen—and later in the mirror. It is this view of subjectivity, as represented by patriarchal discourse, symbolized here by a masculine narrator’s point of view, which Carter’s use of mirrors highlights. This becomes explicit in the scene set in the heart of Manhattan at night, where Evelyn watches Leilah watching herself in the mirror and we are told: The ref lected Leilah had a concrete form and, although this form was perfectly tangible, we all knew, all three of us in the room, it was another



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The ref lection perceived in the mirror is a ref lection—much like that in the queen’s mirror in “Snow White”—of a patriarchal construct of femininity, consisting here as much of a reflection of Evelyn’s desire as of any ontological presence. Unlike Lawza el-Bhiya, and to some extent like the princess, Leilah does not hesitate to project herself as the desired “Other” or the object of the male gaze, serving among other things to reinforce Evelyn’s sense of masculinity. Later, when Evelyn is transformed into Eve, his body becomes that of his own former, glamorized image of a woman. He becomes another version of Tristessa and/or Leilah, although his perspective remains that of a man. This transsexual transformation recalls not only such English novels as Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, but also the one suggested by the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” in which it is the woman who takes on the guise of a man but who significantly retains the woman’s perspective throughout. Even in “The Female Camel” it is the perspective of the women storytellers that we get. What initially serves as a mirror here is a much more natural medium, a river, allowing for the dialogic communication between all women in the social imaginary. Only in the section more closely associated with the male symbolic do we get the unnatural (in the sense of man-made) fountains. The latter mirrors in the tale are entrapping to both men and women, for not only do they contribute to the different ways in which the prince and his black servant are positioned socially, but also to the way these two men deal with the women. Even the river as mirror takes on negative connotations since, by following the female camel to the other side of the mirror that it represents, the princess becomes transformed into the fallen woman, an image that, in the logic of the mirrors, points to the opposite direction of what she originally is. Like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, the princess even comes across flowers that can speak. The way that the mirror appears to be entrapping both to the princess and prince, who end up dying, is similar to what happens in Carter’s novel where by trapping Leilah into the definition of femininity that corresponds to his fantasy, Evelyn ends up trapping himself into the construct of masculinity that corresponds to it. Lorna Sage has noted: “The Passion of New Eve is about melting the mirrors and setting symbols in motion. This assault on a vitrified culture has as its own central symbol a glass mansion where Hollywood goddess Tristessa St. Ange has retired to brood on her immortality”38



Leilah. Leilah invoked this formal other with a gravity and ritual that recalled witchcraft; she brought into being a Leilah who lived only in the not-world of the mirror and then became her own ref lection.37

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Tristessa’s glass house is one that Carter herself described as “the kind of place in which you shouldn’t live if you throw stones—which is an image of a certain kind of psychic vulnerability”39 The house, the form, or dominant patriarchal representation is revealed to be rigid and therefore easily breakable. Only by breaking the glass can characters such as Tristessa and New Eve release themselves from the confining constructs imposed on them by such patriarchal forms. After smashing through the mirror, as it were, New Eve is able to note: “I had become my old self again in the inverted world of the mirrors. But this masquerade was more than skin deep. Under the mask of maleness I wore another mask of femaleness,”40 thus stressing the extent to which femininity and masculinity are masks that one adopts. The relationship between masks and mirrors that this novel brings to our attention is also evident in Diski’s novel. The mirror imagery in Diski’s The Dream Mistress may not appear to be as central as it is in Carter’s novel; however, where it does appear it also becomes associated with the patriarchal representations imposed on women. This becomes clear in the section entitled “Mask,” which highlights the tendency not only of institutions such as hospitals but of men such as the one who figures in that section to impose identities on women. The man in this section, who provides Bella with a house when she leaves the hospital, like Bella herself, presents a divided self. The part that Bella serves to mirror for him is his night self, which, we are told, remains unconscious of his daytime self. Here it is the woman who serves to mirror for the man an image of himself that he loves; she becomes what in her story “Housewife” Diski calls “the mirror of his dreams.”41 Though the man may be unconscious of the process of mirroring, yet the image reflected back to him is self-enhancing. This is no doubt why the house he sets up for her is one he goes to pains to divest of mirrors “(except for the mirror in the bathroom cabinet).”42 He has no need of one so long as the woman is there to mirror him flatteringly back to himself. The mirror here becomes closely associated with the mask, as it is elsewhere in Diski’s work. A mask, for instance, is what Charlotte in Monkey’s Uncle perceives when she looks into the mirror: “It seemed to her that the creased face and dim eyes set in an aura of crinkled grey hair was no more than a mask.”43 The unpleasant nature of the reality in which this woman finds herself resembles that of the princess in the tale who in face of the unpleasant reality to which she has been submitted feels compelled to use a goat skin as a mask. Unlike the one that the princess assumes, the one with which the man presents Bella in The Dream Mistress, after he hides all



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the mirrors from her, is “a beautiful object.”44 Only once she puts on this mask does she look at herself in the mirror. What she sees, which scares her, is the construct of the self as “Other.” Thus, despite the apparent difference of the masks involved, in both the tale and the novel they come to represent the construct of femininity imposed on women who submit themselves to the male order. The man in Diski’s novel is the one who invented Bella in his dreams: You are exactly what I imagined when I was an adolescent. I lay in bed on Saturday mornings, masturbating, trying to think up the woman of my dreams. What you are, what you do, your hunger, your greed, your shamelessness are exactly what I invented. She was you. I’ve never met her before. You belong to me. We belong to each other.45

The woman here, who has been constructed by the man’s fantasy of a dream mistress, has to learn how to become the mistress of her own dreams. This is why the woman artist, Mimi, is eventually able to break through the male constructions and reinvest both herself and Bella with significance. Mimi thus becomes a storyteller, empowered by the ability to tell not only her own story, but Bella’s as well. The way Mimi empowers both Bella and herself is by inventing one version of Bella’s past, the version that constructs her as her own mother. Significantly both Bella and Mimi disconnect themselves from their biblical names, Leah and Miriam, and name themselves, in a manner that recalls Lawza el-Bhiya, who was empowered, among other things, by the ability to name her own self. Such empowerment is available to Mimi only toward the end of the novel when she can remember her dream. This is the dream that truly represents the vocation involving the Word that Bella has been in search of and that Mimi supplies her with. Writing, like dreaming, becomes one way of telling a story to oneself, and of endowing oneself with a voice in this narrative. It is one way of using the Word to define one’s inner wildness and to allow oneself to truly exist. The mode of writing that Mimi fashions is the kind that can allow women to represent themselves differently from the way they have been represented within patriarchal discourse, from whose confines it allows for escape. Such an escape is not available to the princess in “The Female Camel,” who, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, is able to follow the image of communal womanhood through the looking glass—the river in this case—to the inverted world on the other side, where, as we have seen, she



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becomes radically transformed from the princess to the other extreme of womanhood, the fallen woman. Alison Milbank has pointed out that such allusions to the mirror in women’s writing call attention “not only to Carroll’s Alice, but to . . . Luce Irigaray, whose Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un, opens with the description of the life possible to women once they cross through the flat looking glass of patriarchal vision to a new ‘wonderland.’ ”46 What the tale demonstrates is that crossing through the looking glass, which represents a predominant patriarchal perspective, is in itself not sufficient; this is in fact what ends up trapping the princess into a negative construct of femininity. What women need to do is to smash the looking glass, as Carter enjoins them to do in order to begin to perceive “reality” and themselves differently. This, of course, is what the princess fails to do, which leads to her death. The princess who follows the camel, one image of femininity, through the archetypal looking glass, comes in fact to conform to an image of femininity as constructed by the male symbolic, in which she is allotted burdens that are not entirely hers. By submitting to the prince’s desire, which is not revealed to be radically different from her own desire, or that of some of the other women protagonists in these tales, she comes to conform to the patriarchal construct of the woman as fallen or to the stereotypical image of how patriarchy views such women. The fall here is not depicted as a punishment for any transgressive action on her part, for she has passed the test of following the camel through the eye of the needle, as it were. Unlike Lawza el-Bhiya or Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter, who both transform the princes’ perspective of them artistically, forcing them to actually see them as they are rather than as they have stereotypically perceived them, the princess here conforms to the patriarchal image that she is not in a position to change. It is the fact that she is not in a position to change this image—that she is not an artist or storyteller—but conforms to the stereotype as it were that leads her to a tragic end. The aim of the artists and storytellers as of the women writers under discussion was not only to approach patriarchal narratives in re-visionary ways but to disrupt and deconstruct them before they could begin the task of reconstruction that is the task of creativity, central to what it is to be a woman writer or a storyteller. The stereotypical representations, like that of the candy bride in “Lawza el-Bhiya,” are the ones that must be disrupted if women are to escape from entrapment within them. Only by transforming them can women begin to envisage more liberating narratives, which need not impose their definitions on them but which can enable them to represent themselves as they would like to be viewed.



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Such a transformation could allow for a much more fluid perception of identity, as opposed to the rigidity—as of the mirrors—associated with male constructs. The fluidity of the sea is what the protagonists of The Passion of New Eve and The Dream Mistress both find themselves in or near at the end of those novels, rather than within the predefined society of land creatures. Such fluidity is evident in “The Female Camel” in terms of the river, which is central to the phase associated with the female imaginary in that tale. The notion of fluidity suggests the ability to continuously come to terms with a sense of identity, which need not conform to the rigid or breakable images associated with the glass mirrors that become more closely associated with the male symbolic. The form of escape that these women writers and storytellers envisaged is somewhat different from that devised by some recent women writers who have conceived of it in terms of different utopias, or what Carol Kessler has termed “eutopia” by which she means “a good place, a society better than the one we know, a society in the process of becoming—not a perfect or finished place.”47 One of the oldest of these is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, which is inhabited only by women who have completely overcome their dependence on men. Joanna Russ’s utopia in The Female Man is called Whileaway, from which Janet Evason, a visitor to Earth from the future, comes, and which is radically different from earth itself. Both of these are Amazon Utopias in which women can exist completely outside the structures of male society. Conversely, Marge Piercy’s Mattapoisette in Woman at the Edge of Time is not exclusively female. Instead of eradicating men, Piercy changes them so that they have bodies and attitudes that make them different from real, contemporary men. In Mattapoisette men mother babies who have been gestated within machines. Utopias such as those envisaged by Piercy and Russ are speculative fantasies that emphasize and offer alternative images of gender roles. What Carter and Diski do, which makes them resemble the storytellers discussed in this book, is different. These writers were not concerned with alternative societies that offer women extremely attractive possibilities of escape, but which remain difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain. Rather than the construction of alternative futures, the means of escape they suggest consists of alternative modes of writing, or of representing the self, which are potentially empowering to all women. This involves the transformation of existing modes with particularly feminist ends in mind, in the same way that Aisha Jarma ends up transforming the language associated with the court of law. Such women must learn to endow language with their own qualities, which is



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what Aisha Jarma does when she endows legal language with more lyrical and feminine qualities so that it becomes capable of doing justice to women and ordinary folk. Like the women storytellers, Carter and Diski have attempted to create a form of discourse that is not biased against them, but is potentially empowering to women. In this way they demonstrate the extent to which, as Linda Alcoff has noted, “the category ‘woman’ is a fiction and that feminist efforts must be directed toward dismantling this fiction.”48 It is such fictions that these writers reconstruct by representing their own narrations of them. By doing so, they demythologize the myths imposed on them, as Carter has advocated, and begin to inscribe themselves in history. This is what marks their movement from oppression—such as that depicted in these tales in terms of confinement within the met mora—to expression, which includes becoming proficient storytellers. In order to partake in this extremely positive and empowering movement women have to learn how to take hold of the symbolic order, to inhabit it from within and thus transform it to suit their own ends. The princess’s tragedy in “The Female Camel” derives from the fact that she cannot perform any of these feats. She is not an artist; so although she is enabled to escape from the confines of her father’s court where she was kept hidden behind the seven hijabs, she cannot actually escape from the construct of femininity to which patriarchal society—as represented by the prince—subjects her. Her tragedy is to a large extent due to the fact that she cannot reveal to the prince a version of the self that is radically different from the stereotypical one that he has of her, as can Lawza el-Bhiya and Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter regarding their princes. Unlike them she cannot creatively reinvent the self for although she speaks in verse, what she keeps repeating to herself is a lament—not in any way a challenge to the way the prince views her. By submitting to the prince’s stereotypical image of her, without questioning it or trying in any way to readjust it, the princess succumbs to her fall. It is her decline into a fallen woman, a victim of the patriarchal system, that transforms this version of the female camel into a “goat woman,” or scapegoat, who has to bear the brunt of burdens that are not entirely hers.



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There was upon a time until there was A world that exists not but really does

A

t that time there was a jāriya who lived in a Sultan’s court and was in the habit, once she had finished all her tasks in the afternoons, of going down to the end of the garden of the court and looking out over it to see what was happening in the world outside. One day she saw a woodcutter coming back from the forest with his load of wood. Since he had caught her attention, she looked out for him on other days, and never failed to take good note of him when he appeared. His shabby clothes and demeanor in general gave her the impression that he was not well taken care of and not very well off in general. This is how it came about that he began to occupy her thoughts so that when she happened to be talking to the Sultan she mentioned the woodcutter, noting that the poor man could not have a proper woman to take care of him otherwise he would not be in such a worn-out condition. The 10.1057/9780230100732 - Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives, Hasna Lebbady


CHAPTER 7

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Sultan laughed at her and told her that a man was what he was and that women had very little to do with it. The jāriya, however, was not convinced of his answer nor did she generally agree with those in the court whom she at times heard denigrating women and designating them as the source of sharr (evil). She was convinced, on the contrary, that women were the source of khayr (good, particularly of a material nature) and would often bring up the subject of the woodcutter in front of the Sultan, expressing her concern for him and the fact that he did not have a proper woman to help him out. One day the Sultan decided to look out for the woodcutter with her and when she pointed him out, the Sultan called him. When the woodcutter approached, the Sultan asked him whether he was married and whether he had a family. The man replied that his wife had unfortunately died, but that he had a family of seven children who all depended on him for their livelihood. So the Sultan, who had become annoyed by the jāriya’s references to him, pointed at her and told him to take her home and add her to his children. The woodcutter was surprised at this; he could not help but perceive the jāriya as an additional burden, given his already meager means. However, he felt compelled to comply with the Sultan’s wishes, so he accepted the jāriya in the spirit of a godsend and treated her with all due kindness. Once in the woodcutter’s home, however, the jāriya proved to be much more helpful than he could have foreseen. She immediately set out to ingratiate herself with his children, whom she began to teach many useful things. They quickly learned to love her due to the numerous improvements that she brought to their lives. Running the household according to the norms of ta’wi¯ l she made sure that absolutely nothing was ever wasted.1 For instance, rather than let the small pieces of bread that were not eaten by the children go to waste, she would soak them in a bit milk and fry them in a little oil, sprinkle them with honey, and thus transform them into appetizing treats for the children. By such means, and in spite of their very limited means, the jāriya was soon able to transform the woodcutter’s household from a hovel into a clean and comfortable home. Then, she started taking note of the ‘ūd (wood) that the woodcutter brought home at night, which was their main source of livelihood, and to see what improvements she could bring to bear on that. While inspecting it one night she began to distinguish between the different types of wood involved. She soon began to notice that some of it was actually ‘ūd (sandalwood), the kind of wood that had been used at the court for incense, about which the woodcutter knew nothing. She separated these pieces from the rest and treated them as she had seen them being treated in the court. Then she put them in



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the suitable kind of boxes that she instructed the woodcutter on how to buy and advised him to take them to the appropriate places where they could be sold. The woodcutter was surprised to see the enormous sums of money that he was able to get for such small pieces of wood. In this way the woodcutter and his family were eventually able to improve their situation considerably. Following the jāriya’s advice they were able to build a fine house, which she helped them to furnish appropriately and where they started living instead of the hut in which they had lived. She instructed them in personal cleanliness so that the house would not get messed up, pointing out such simple matters as the fact that they should remove their shoes before entering the house, wash up, and change their work clothes once inside the house. She, in fact, instructed the children and their father in all manner of useful ways. Soon after they settled in their new house, the jāriya began to long for the music to which she had been used at the court—which she would have liked to bring into their new home and teach the children. She talked to the woodcutter about her wish to have an ‘ūd (lute) and about the kind of wood that she needed to make it. So one day she accompanied him to the woods to try and find the kind of tree trunk that would be most appropriate for the instrument. Eventually she was able to find the right kind of trunk, which when hallowed would make a good ‘ūd (lute), and set out to make one, commissioning the shops she knew in town for the other parts that were required. When the lute was ready and she could play all her favorite pieces of music again; the jāriya asked the woodcutter to invite the Sultan for dinner. The Sultan was quite impressed when the woodcutter went to invite him for dinner; the latter was so neatly shaved and appareled that he appeared to have been completely transformed. In fact, the Sultan’s curiosity was so greatly aroused that he readily accepted the woodcutter’s invitation. He was even more impressed when, on the appointed day, he arrived at the woodcutter’s new house—which was spotlessly clean and pleasantly perfumed. The food that was set in front of him, which included all his favorite dishes, delighted the Sultan. Nor did he fail to enjoy the music with which the jāriya regaled them during the dinner, from behind a partition. In fact, the Sultan was so amazed that he asked the woodcutter how it came about that his circumstances had been transformed so dramatically. The woodcutter then explained to him that all the transformations he may have noticed were due to the jāriya with whom the Sultan himself had presented him. It was then that he asked her to come and meet the Sultan, who greeted her warmly and thanked her for providing them with such a wonderful meal and such entertaining music. His curiosity




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was so great by this time that he could not help proceeding to ask her how she had managed to transform the woodcutter’s circumstances in such a spectacular manner. It was at this point that the jāriya reminded the Sultan of how she had repeatedly insisted that woman was the source of good when she was at the court. After explaining to him the basics of what she had done, she asked him to consider whether it was not a good proof of what she had always claimed. By then the Sultan had no choice but to agree with her and to acknowledge that woman was indeed the source of good. He then told her that since she had proved her point, it was time for her to go back with him to the court. The jāriya, however, refused to do so. And so we left them with their deed And came home to eat our own trid.

A Tale of the Artist as a Young Woman The last chapter has left us with little doubt as to the feminist nature of these tales, which all form part of a distinctive artistic tradition. Strategies such as those used by the protagonist in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” or of “Aisha Jarma” reveal them both to have been concerned with ways in which women can embody the world of law and justice associated with the ‘ulamā’ and judges and thus envisage ways that would make it more amenable to women. The artists Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter and Lawza el-Bhiya both demonstrate ways in which women can effectively represent themselves by transforming the perception that the men in their lives have of them, and in the process taking control of the romantic relationships that they have with those men. Feminist strategies are evident even in “The Female Camel” as we saw, which presents us with the poignant image of a princess who is unable to reconcile the desires of a women’s social imaginary with the demands of a predominantly male symbolic order. By envisioning transformations in aspects of the legal system that appear to them specifically oppressive to women as well as novel ways of envisioning the relationship between men and women, the Islamic feminism at the heart of these tales—that appears to be older—reveals itself to be on par with Western feminism. Thus, these tales, also in translation, may, as María Rosa Menocal has suggested concerning Andalusi poetry in translation, enable us “to establish Andalusi¯ culture as central” and “to imagine an aesthetic surprisingly like our own.” 2 This, however, may be difficult to do unless we can take into consideration Gayatri Spivak’s notion of planetarity, whereby she



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asks us to “imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities,”3 and thus arrive at a broader perspective. It is that perspective which may enable us to perceive that there is more to these narratives than even their vital feminism. However, before attempting to come to terms with what, apart from their feminism, they appear to be most centrality concerned, we need to take a close look at “Woman as the Source of Good.” The Artist at the Heart of the Tale Jawāri¯ or qiyān in general,4 such as the jāriya in this tale, played a social role that, according to Roger Boase, was “comparable to that of the geisha girls of Japan.”5 Such women were often highly trained in all the arts, particularly in music, as is the case of the jāriya in this tale, the only protagonist in this selection of tales who is an actual musician. Thus, she differs from the other protagonists who are artists, even while she appears to resemble them. Like Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter and Lawza el-Bhiya, for instance, she demonstrates that her artistry is what allows for success on the level of deeds. However, unlike those protagonists the jāriya here does not use her know-how or art to primarily transform the Sultan’s perception of her own self or to reveal to him her true identity. In fact, she does not appear to feel any need to measure herself against the Sultan in order to define herself. Rather, she appears to have broader aims, which begin to become evident when we consider the intimations in the tale of some of the debates—possibly between Christian and Muslim scholars—taking place in the court about the fact that woman could be the source of sharr (evil). That was the kind of debate that prompted the jāriya to demonstrate that woman is really the source of good, her point in this case being about women in general, revealing it to have been more broadly feminist. Indeed, the feminist project with which she appears to be associated—one that is of a political nature like all feminist projects—is more theoretical and generally didactic than it is a simple matter of her own personal interests. And yet the feminism in these tales, unlike some more recent conceptualizations of it, does not preclude the expression of feminine attributes or even more seemingly romantic concerns. Due to the fact that she is a jāriya and a musician the protagonist of “Woman as the Source of Good” is the kind of woman who has been most closely associated not only with the Arabic lyrical tradition but also with a certain construct of femininity as ordained by that society, where in Boase’s words “[t]he description of the beloved in Arabic




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love-poetry owes much to the ambivalent figure of the qayna [or jāriya], who was taught by her master to play the role of the courtly beloved: she was coquettish and modest, demanding and deceptive, raising hopes, but rarely fulfilling them, giving each man the illusion that her words were addressed to him alone.”6 Such women tended to project a certain image of the feminine, which also becomes associated with the lyrical tradition itself that tended to be sung to the accompaniment of music as this tale reminds us by having a musician as protagonist. Thus although the jāriya’s journey here takes her in the opposite direction of the one undertaken by Aisha Jarma, who moves from the outside world into the world of the court, this jāriya’s tale provides us with further evidence concerning the extent to which such music and lyricism had a predominantly feminine basis. The similarity with “Aisha Jarma” does not stop there, for this tale further indicates how such distinctively feminine artists, whose voices greatly enriched and enhanced the orchestral sound of Andalusi music, also came from a “popular” background, although this may not accord with the way that it has tended to be understood by Western scholars. Thus Menocal explains: [M]any of the salient—and “revolutionary”—features of these lyrical traditions are conscious and direct appropriations of popular forms . . . (These appropriations, of course, must not lull us into believing that the lyric, either in the 12th century or in our own, thus becomes a “folk” or truly “popular” tradition, since we would thus be confusing, as many traditionalists are wont to do, “revolutionary” with uncultured, vernacular and sung with illiterate or primitive.)7

One has to keep in mind that the jāriya here is not the one who brings her art form with her to the court, as was the case with Aisha Jarma, but she is the one who would have been trained in the court to perform the courtly art to best advantage. This jāriya, although she is a woman at the other end of the social scale from the princess in “The Female Camel,” is depicted as emanating from the court onto the world outside the court like the princess. However, unlike the princess, the jāriya would not have originated in the world of the court but would have no doubt been brought there (possibly by her own parents) from a world very similar to the one associated with the woodcutter, where she finds herself at the end. Unlike the princess, who is at first completely restricted behind the seven hijābs in her father’s court, the jāriya here, even when she is still living in the court, is in the habit of looking over a wall and trying to



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satisfy her curiosity about what is happening in the world outside. This suggests a kind of yearning on her part for the world outside the court and for those who inhabited it, such as the woodcutter. The fact that she takes interest in that representative of the peasantry implies her kinship with his world for which she longs in spite of being situated at the heart of the court. This could be why, unlike the princess who ends up dying once she escapes from behind the seven hijābs in her father’s court and finds herself in the world outside, the jāriya in this tale is the one who not only thrives in the outside world but considerably improves the life of those who belong to it. Once she crosses the barriers between the two worlds and finds herself in the world outside the court, the jāriya brings to it all the know-how and artistry associated with the court to which she refuses to return. This protagonist, with roots in the most popular social class, unlike the princess, is shown to be an expert woman artist and musician belonging to the Sultan’s court. The fact that she is a musician reminds us not only that the lyrics at the heart of the courtly tradition, such as the ones that Aisha Jarma had the ingenuity to create, tended to be sung in accompaniment to music, but that this art tended to be a group product. In fact, such an art was a communal effort, bringing together working-class creativity and professional acquisition of music on the part of those who emanated from the peasantry. By concentrating on the peasantry, moreover, this tale appears to reinforce some of the ideas already suggested in “Aisha Jarma.” A Feminine and Popular Art Form I am reverting here to the point that I made in chapter 5 in relation to “Aisha Jarma,” which appears to go to such pains to demonstrate the extent to which the courtly art with which that protagonist becomes involved had both a feminine and popular basis. The courtly culture to which Aisha Jarma becomes affiliated, I argued, appears to conform to that depicted in Cynthia Robinson’s study of taifa culture. 8 The extent to which that tale depicts the feminine and the popular to be at the source of the more elite courtly lyric, however, would appear to contradict Robinson’s argument concerning the origins of that art form. She argues that the poets responsible for the lyrics that inf luenced the Troubadours “were not simple singers of popular ditties from the ‘folk’ tradition who broke spontaneously into song as they sold eggplant in the local market.” 9 It is true that the folk as depicted in these tales, whether it be those in the working class from which Aisha Jarma sprang or the peasantry with which the jāriya in this tale becomes associated,




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are quite different from the way Robinson conceptualizes them in her statement. In fact, this jāriya, who comes from the lowest social class, is an artist whose art is not a matter of folk ditties into which she breaks spontaneously while selling vegetables. Such a jāriya would have undergone strenuous training in both vocal and instrumental music and would have known a lot more about music than even those members of the upper classes for whom she worked. Like Menocal and Boase, it is also ways of doing scholarship that Robinson blames for what she perceives as a misconception concerning the source of the kind of lyric that may have influenced the Troubadours; however, she does so for reasons that are different from those advanced by either Boase or Menocal. She believes that “the commonly held view of al-Andalus’ contribution to the ‘Troubadour lyric’’s formation as a ‘popular’ or ‘vernacular’ one if in fact a contribution recognized at all, to be a misconception which has seriously impacted the study of early developments of ‘courtly’ culture in the Mediterranean region.”10 Such a misconception, in her opinion, is “at least in part, a response to the current gender-preoccupied, high/low anxious concerns of the humanities at large. Medievalists who accept the possibility of Arabic ‘influence’ on the quasi-sacred Provençal ‘inventio’ are compensated by the knowledge that their position privileges both the ‘popular’ and the feminine.”11 In this way Robinson perceives the possibility of influence as being to a large extent a construct on the part of the scholars involved, whom she perceives as being swayed by present-day concerns with both class and gender. These tales, however, prompt me to raise a number of questions. Does the fact that their storytellers highlight issues related to gender as well as to class not suggest that such concerns are not specific to recent times, but appear to have had a long history? Could the fact that “Aisha Jarma”—told as it was well beyond the confines of the “humanities” and academia in general—goes to such pains to stress both the feminine and the popular basis of the courtly lyric be a matter of pure accident? What about the fact that the jāriya in this tale is revealed to be an artist who has formed part of the Sultan’s court but who prefers to live among the peasantry; could this be a matter of pure coincidence? The storytellers involved in these tales appear to have been much more conscious of what they were doing than storytellers are normally given credit for. For not only have they demonstrated themselves to be ingenious feminists but they also appear to have been making a point about their art form that they did not want their audience to miss. I have noted how they tend to send messages to the audience—the privileged readers as it were—that become apparent not only in the scene



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in “The Female Camel” where the dialogic relationship between all the women in the imaginary order becomes evident, but also in the use of dramatic irony in “Ali and a Spinner Too?” where the storytellers address the women in the audience differently from how they treat the men in the tale. A similar point is also made in “Aisha Jarma” where the women in the audience are in a more favorable position to understand the protagonist’s words than someone like the khattāba. And the message that they did not want that audience to miss was related to the feminine and popular nature of the courtly art. However such women, though they were quite aware of what they were doing, would not have conceived of themselves as authors, for as Roland Barthes has argued: “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual.”12 The women involved in these tales were much less interested in their identity as individuals or in any sense of authority that they could derive from it than they were interested in the special message they did not want their audience to miss about their role as women. This is the case of the message they appear to be sending the audience in “Woman as the Source of Good” about the protagonist, who, although she is the only one presented as a musician, is not completely indifferent to the nature of words. Her special relationship to words, though, is somewhat different from that of the other protagonists. For one thing, there is no actual dialogue here—the exchanges between the jāriya and the Sultan or the woodcutter appear in reported speech—nor is there any use of lyrics. Rather than an ability to versify, what we note in this tale is the jāriya’s ability to perceive the special significance of certain words that can be said to constitute homonyms, demonstrating her awareness of the underlying structure of language itself. This is what enables her to perceive the connection between the ‘ūd (wood) that the woodcutter brings home and ‘ūd (sandalwood) that can be sold at very high prices. Wood is also at the source of the ‘ūd (lute), which she needs as a musician, and the fact that she is actually able to make the instrument further stresses her craftsmanship. The jāriya’s ability to distinguish between the meanings of words that sound exactly the same is what she uses not so much to transform the Sultan’s perception of her, as do some of the other protagonists, but to prove her point about women in general—thus stressing her broader didactic aims. The point that the storytellers did not want us to miss is that this woman, who is in a position to instruct the Sultan himself, was herself not of




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the Sultan’s milieu or particularly interested in it. Rather, she is able to significantly improve the woodcutter’s situation and thus make her artistry, in a manner that resembles present-day artists, remunerable. This idea is highlighted by her ta’wi¯ l (or special method), which makes her efforts appear to be more satisfactory than the effortless possession of wealth. Rather than aligning herself with the Sultan and the life of wealth associated with the court, the jāriya appears to prefer the kind of life in which she has to work hard to acquire that kind of prosperity which she manages to endow with her artistry, even with her music. In spite of this protagonist’s final decision not to return to the court, aspects of the courtly tradition are not entirely lacking in this tale. Its conventions become evident not only in the way the jāriya here ends up rejecting the Sultan at the end, but also in the way the Sultan himself does not force her to return to his court. This considerateness on the part of the Sultan becomes an indication of what Briffault refers to as “ ‘Gallantry,’ as it came to be called in the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘courtesy,’ ‘druerie,’ as it was termed in the twelfth, [which] rested primarily on the privileged immunity claimed by the ruling and leisured classes.”13 Such gallantry, according to Briffault, was associated with “the gift of music and poetry”14 —which are the courtly arts par excellence. Characters such as the Sultan here were acting according to the norms associated with the courtly tradition, which gave rise to the concept of Courtly Love. Even such a dignitary as the Sultan himself treated a musician such as the jāriya respectfully; that appears to be the kind of homage that even the royalty paid such artists. Moreover, even though this tale about the jāriya does not end in a union between the protagonist and the Sultan, as do some of the other women’s tales discussed in this book, it does not preclude the possibility of a union with the woodcutter. The fact that this jāriya prefers to remain with the woodcutter lends itself to different interpretations. One possible reading of this would be that the tale enacts the role that such Jawāri¯ played in how the Andalusi lyrical and musical tradition could have been conveyed to the Troubadours. In this way she can be said to represent women such as those abducted from al-Andalus as booty by those “northern warriors” after such battles as that of Barbastro,15 which “included many accomplished Moorish female singers,”16 who came to inhabit the heart of the courts of such princes as “Count Guilhem of Poitiers, the oldest troubadour.”17 Those women took with them a whole way of life as well as a considerable repertoire of lyrics and music. As Roger Boase puts it: “If singing-girls in the 5th/11th century, were still expected to have



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‘a repertoire of upwards of four thousand songs, each of them two or four verses long,’ then one can imagine the inf luence which several hundred of these girls must have exerted on the society of Lanquedoc.”18 As was the case of the prince and the Sultan in “Aisha Jarma,” it was the lyrical form and the whole musical tradition with which it was associated, rather than its purely mimetic content, that seduced those northerners. This is what Robert Briffault confirms when he states: “The troubadours attached as much importance to the music of their songs as to the words” and he verifies that “they frankly referred to the music of their songs as ‘Saracen.’ ”19 Another possible reading of the role of this jāriya is that she formed part of those Muslims who were eventually exiled from their homes in al-Andalus and ended up in such places on the North African coast as Tetouan. The Imagined Community of Storytellers The process undertaken by the so-called Moriscos who were expelled from Spain, four hundred years ago this year (2009–2010), can be said to be enacted by the protagonist here who is expelled from the court by the Sultan. Like them, she ends up reestablishing some of the features of that court in her place of exile—thus both remembering and commemorating that past way of life. What enables her to do this is the fact that she is a true artist, for not only is she a musician but she is also depicted as being endowed with considerable craftsmanship. The fact that she prefers to stay in the world outside the court at the end rather than return to the court with the Sultan, even though he appears to have learned the lesson that she has set out to illustrate for him and agrees with her that woman is the source of good, makes her stand out from the other protagonists of the tales discussed. Some scholars may find it difficult to take the jāriya in this tale, and indeed this whole storytelling tradition, seriously and to consider her a true artist. This difficulty, as Menocal has noted within a different context, is due to the fact that the notion of the artist “is a model that smacks of a British don’s view of himself, a model that conceives of the artist as a scholar.” 20 This jāriya may not measure up to those scholars’ sense of self. However, due to her craftsmanship and artistry, as well as to her didactic intentions, she is the protagonist who appears to be most representative of the real artists in these tales: the storytellers actually involved in crafting them. Although the narratives that these storytellers came up with would have been the products of a communal effort on the part of a number of different women, it is such women as




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those represented by this jāriya, the equivalent of the modern-day professional artist, who appear to me to have been most centrally involved in their actual crafting. These are the women who knew not only how to make use of verse, but were well acquainted with the very building blocks that underlie the verse. The jāriya here comes across as being particularly suggestive of Walter Benjamin’s idea, in his renowned essay on the storyteller, that “peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling.” 21 This jāriya, who would have been of peasant origins but had become part of a courtly culture, can be compared to the seamen who traveled to faraway places and then returned to tell those at home about those places. Moreover, and as Benjamin goes on to explain in his essay, “[i]n every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.” 22 Although the jāriya here is not a man, she does have counsel for her audience, quite apart from the lesson that she ends up teaching the Sultan concerning the extent to which woman is the source of good. Like the original storytellers themselves including those who were expelled from Spain, she has been banished from the court, but ends up preferring the world outside it where she finds herself, and which is closely associated with the peasantry. One can imagine such a storyteller counseling her audience to learn how to value what they had and to improve on it by becoming endowed with the kind of ta’wi¯ l (or method) that she had acquired. This woman, with roots in the peasantry, who had formed an integral part of the court and its culture, would have had much to tell about that life to those back home who had not experienced it, ensuring that they did not miss the point about the role that she herself had played in that court. Hers would have been a journey—like those storytellers originally from al-Andalus—as extraordinary as that of the seamen referred to by Benjamin, if not more so. One way that such storytellers managed to come to terms with the past that they had left behind them, or which had been lost, was by recapturing or perpetuating the whole artistic tradition that formed an integral part of it. One aspect of this tradition is depicted in this tale in terms of the jāriya’s music, as well as the lyrical poetry with which that is associated and her know-how in general, that she is able to reinstall in her new circumstances. That the jāriya in this tale, although she comes from the lowest social class, is revealed to have been empowered in ways that were not available to the princess in “The Female Camel” is significant. She becomes associated with the world of the spinners and storytellers who were able to survive the princess’s catastrophe and were in a position to retell it; this idea is reinforced by the fact that she is



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revealed to be a musician who may have even been able to sing about it like the nightingale in “The Female Camel,” who becomes suggestive of Ziryāb himself. Such women were not only able to perceive the underside of the words themselves, as it were, but to also bring their own sense of craftsmanship—highlighted in the tale by the jāriya’s actual making of the lute—to bear on those words, enabling them to both remember the past and also narrate it, even sing about it in their specifically lyrical manner. In fact women such as the jāriya in this tale, who may not have originated in the world of the court, but who had formed an integral part of it, were in the best position to tell others about the lives of those who belonged to the court, such as the princess, as they were in the best position to make use of aspects of the art form most closely associated with the court. Women such as this jāriya, would have become storytellers, making use of narrativity as a form of self expression, even before their exile from al-Andalus. These were the kind of women who would have originally lived in such places as those taifa courts where in Menocal’s words “Aristotle was brilliantly commented on in the 5th/11th century,” 23 where they would have come into contact with some of the foremost scholars and artists of the time. It is the knowledge and artistry acquired in that kind of atmosphere which characterizes the tradition that the storytellers were able to preserve in their narratives. Aspects of the way of life described in their tales may have begun to be lost even before the final expulsion of the storytellers, which made it all the more imperative that they preserve them in their tales. Their stories were perpetuated by the descendents of those Andalusi women who came to Morocco from different regions in Spain and where they tended to belong to the large households of such medinas as that of Tetouan, in which women from different backgrounds and social classes lived, and who all in turn became involved in the process of storytelling. In this way the women involved in these narratives, who speak to us through the ages in their own voices, were in the process of coming to terms with a past way of life within their new circumstances. Their narratives served as one means for them to preserve their own sense of identity, including the fact that they were artists, by expressing features of that past in their own voices and preserving aspects of that past courtly art form in their narratives. For these women were not only identity builders, given their new circumstances, but they were also holding on to and trying to come to terms with a past sense of cultural identity, which they were preserving from getting lost. What is most interesting about their tales is not only the extent to which they have enabled them




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to come to terms with their identities and to express their aspirations, but more the extent to which the tales have themselves served to shape the women who have managed to safeguard this tradition for generations. It is by keeping the tales—as well as the tradition with which they are closely associated—vitally alive that these women have been able to maintain their own specifically Andalusi identity, which is one way of keeping the past alive. One question that this raises is whether in the process of safeguarding that cultural sense of identity these women were not also safeguarding a vital “trace” to the origins of Troubadour art. A Courtly Love Debate This question regarding the source of Troubadour art and the whole Courtly Love tradition is one that has become particularly difficult to deal with. The difficulty is not only a matter of the extent to which, as Mikhail Bakhtin has noted within a different context, “[a]ll such judgments and appreciations are, of course, relative.” 24 What makes the question particularly difficult in this case is the fact that it has become a highly charged academic one, seemingly affected more by contemporary politics than by any disinterested desire to come to terms with the truth of the matter. The kind of politics at issue here are similar to the ones that have prompted Gayatri Spivak to promote the notion of planetarity, which could enable us to broaden our perspective. Acquiring such a planetary perspective could, among other things, enable us to begin to perceive the extent to which “the view of Islam that rules the globe today” is “monolithized” as well as the extent to which “Islamic feminism has also been relegated to its own ghetto.” 25 This is certainly the case of the Islamic feminism that figures at the heart of these tales, which becomes closely aligned with the Courtly Love tradition that they portray. That such feminism has tended to be overlooked is closely associated with the way that scholarship tends to be undertaken as well as the way in which areas of knowledge have been compartmentalized or disciplines demarcated. By acquiring a more planetary vision, we could begin to cross the borders created by such disciplinary definitions, and thus to acquire a more comprehensive perspective, enabling us to take into account both the distant past and the present, and in the process to realize the extent to which, as María Rosa Menocal reminds us, “we are remarkably Andalusi¯ , always expatriates, always polycultural.” 26 Such a vision may even enable us to begin to see things from the perspective of women such as those involved in these tales and not necessarily from the perspective of the disciplines within which they may or may not



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poems such as the muwashshahāt are divvied up along the language lines that define modern departmental structures—and which result in grotesque internal divisions within the poems themselves. How many other cultural/literature study areas can one name, or even begin to imagine, where the divorces and schisms of the present age are permitted so to impinge on a past, or at least a part of the past, so that its very poems are divvied up, strophe by strophe, among different departments?27

Here she is referring to the way that some scholars have tended to extract the kharja from the rest of the poem to which it belongs, the muwashshah, in order to study it as a distinct entity. Since the kharja tends to be in the vernacular so that part of it, or all of it, is at times in Romance, those scholars have tried to demonstrate that this poetic form actually has its origins in a Romance tradition and it is that tradition which inf luenced the Andalusi muwashshah. Efforts on the part of Western scholars to avoid facing the possibility that European culture may have been affected by that of the Arabs is also evident in the way even historians have tended to perceive their past. Thus Menocal argues: What our histories have wanted is the post-1492 European ideal: a coherent narration in a language with a codified grammar. . . . But if one tells the story from an aesthetic that can see and celebrate the riotous pluralities and the often-chaotic poetics that made up the Andalusi medieval world, the Renaissance palimpsest might be seen as the neo-classical line meant to provide relief after the baroque, a unity to restore harmony after the chaos of the post-modern. 28

It is the world of al-Andalus that Menocal qualifies in terms of the “postmodern” and the efforts of the historians to impose a linearity on it are in tune with those of scholars in other fields. Thus Castoriadis, for instance, contends that the kind of autonomy which came about through “society’s process of self-instituting and self-understanding” happened only twice in human history, “first in the Greek city-states and later in Western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.” 29 This is typical of how social and literary historians have tended to construct what Menocal calls “The Myth of Westernness”30 by, among other methods, skipping



have been studied, and to thus begin to perceive the broader impact that they may have had on planetary art in general. It is certain disciplines and their boundaries that Menocal criticizes for obscuring the position of Andalusi literature, arguing that

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The courtly love tradition would seem to be something quintessentially European because it is associated with the rules of polite society and Christian chivalric ideals—and is at the very root of the modern concept of romantic love. For this reason many people would consider it preposterous to claim that it might have developed as a result of cultural links with the Arab world.31

It would be difficult to inf luence such scholars by any argument that I can make, basing myself, as I do, on these women’s tales. Even Moroccan scholars have tended to look down on such tales; I recall the look one of those scholars gave me when he was told that I was researching these tales which he discarded with a wave of the hand as totally unworthy of study accompanied by a look that declared me to be completely mad. However, those who have been able to acquire a more planetary vision, which for Spivak “is perhaps best imagined from the precapitalist cultures of the planet,”32 may be able to perceive that these tales are more than just bio-political constructions; they do articulate a significant historical consciousness whose very modes of expression exhibit dynamic action. Moreover, these tales do contain a whole tradition within them to which the storytellers call attention and which we would do well to look at more closely. Aljamía and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Those storytellers who were involved in keeping a past way of life alive also served to preserve the tradition of an art form that was most closely associated with that past and which may constitute a major link with the Courtly Love tradition. This feature is one that appeared to be specifically characteristic of that courtly tradition which these tales appear to represent and to which even the most seemingly marginal components of that society, its feminine and popular segments, contributed. They were preserving that art form in their tales in the same way that the Moriscos preserved other features of their threatened cultural heritage in their aljamía literature. This was the special literature developed in the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries, by the Moriscos



over that millennium during which European culture was dominated by the Andalusis. Roger Boase makes a similar kind of argument concerning European scholars’ uneasy feelings about the possible origins of the European tradition. He claims:

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both prior to their final expulsion in 1609–1610, and following it for those who remained in Spain. Some of those who were expelled, you may recall, ended up in Tetouan, coming from such faraway regions as Castille and Aragon, as well as from Granada and bringing with them features of that culture which they had managed to preserve, including some of these tales. However the literature that the Moriscos have become most closely associated with is quite different from these tales, and is much more closely associated with their very distinctive history. Even prior to that brutal expulsion, exactly four hundred years ago this year, those Muslims were faced with agonizing dilemmas. “Once the Inquisition had begun to operate, open refusal to accept Christianity became a punishable offence.”33 This forced many to f lee to Muslim countries, even before the expulsion, while those who stayed in Spain were forcibly baptized. “But some of the most adamant Muslims, now ‘officially’ Catholic, went underground.”34 Among the latter are those who created the secret “literature for crypto-Muslims” which was in Spanish but using Arabic letters and “known to modern scholars as literatura aljamiada, or simply as aljamía.”35 This literature represented an effort to preserve all aspects of the community’s Islamic identity and heritage—at a great personal risk to themselves—in face of the devastation of Inquisitorial Spain. Such a tendency to hide aspects of one’s cultural heritage in order to preserve them is also evident in these tales. What they both f launt and also serve to shelter within their depths is the vivacious lyrical tradition, which was also one aspect of their cultural heritage with which women were most closely associated and that needed to be preserved. The Lyrical Tradition and the Love in Courtly Love Lyrics such as the ones that appear at the heart of these tales can be said to represent one feature of the Courtly Love tradition that they endow with a distinctive form as well as a specifically romantic dimension. They become associated with the kind of Courtly Love that Roger Boase describes as “a convenient description of a conception of love which informed a tradition of European literature from the 12th century until the Renaissance, so that, by extension, the term is applicable to this literature.”36 It is the women protagonists of these tales who represent the courtly lovers in this Andalusi-Moroccan version of the tradition. They are the ones who tend to use lyrics in the process of coming to terms with and of revealing their identities—all noticeably individualized—to the princes and Sultans in their lives. These lyrics,




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presented as they are from predominantly women’s perspectives, and endowed moreover with feminist agendas, may not be representative of the kind of lyric that “becomes the striking symbol of the newness and distinctiveness of post-classical Europe,” or those that “seem to define Europeanness itself,”37 but they do share some common features with them. They do so, however, in the kind of ways that Bakhtin has qualified Rabelais’s images as conveying “a certain undestroyable nonofficial nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness.”38 This could further account for why they have not been commemorated in the modern sense of the term or taken into serious consideration by scholars, even though they appear to have had such a significant impact. One of the characteristic forms of these lyrics is the dialogue form, such as the one that appears in “Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter” that also appears in the Sicilian school which, as Menocal notes, was “the first school of courtly poetry in an Italian vernacular,” where she found “a lengthy poem in dialogue form” in which “[a]long with the male voice to which it responds in the dialogue, the female protagonist is as interested in the union as the suitor whom she pretends, at least for a while, to reject.”39 This would appear to resemble the protracted dialogue between Aisha and the prince that enables Aisha to both measure her gender identity against that of the prince and to eventually reveal to him the extent of her involvement with him. Throughout the protracted dialogue she confronts the conventional voice of the poet-prince with a woman’s voice that is less than conventional. This happens from the outset when she is not put off by the prince’s query when he approaches her as she is tending her basil plants and asks: Lalla Aisha, the carpenter’s daughter Who is so gen’rous to her plants with water How many leaves may there be In each of the plants that you see?

Unperturbed, she immediately responds: Sidi Mohammed the son of the king You Qur’an reader who knows everything How many stars are there up in the sky? And how may fish in the deep sea lie?

Aisha’s response here is no timid acknowledgment of the prince’s presence, but suggests a more defiant attitude. Her lyrics enable her not



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only to measure her identity against that of the prince, but make her appear to refuse “to capitulate to the persuasive techniques of her male interlocutor.”40 The feminist dimension of such a use of lyrics becomes particularly evident in the way the story ends with the prince being considerably tamed by Aisha to the point where he has no choice but to acknowledge the superiority of women. Aisha’s lyrical responses suggest not only one who speaks eloquently and effectively, but also one who has been endowed with considerable space for maneuver and agency. She is not the kind who can be easily confined within the strictures of the metmora, but is much more a shaker and mover, who defies such traditional constraints in ways that appear to resemble Menocal’s assessment of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, in which she claims: “Dante is mimicking the sort of literary history inscribed in the muwashshaha corpus: the life and death struggle between tradition and revolution, and their dependence on each other for real meaning.”41 Such a revolutionary reaction to traditional modes becomes particularly evident in the way these women storytellers were attempting to break away from the patriarchal discourse that they found to be particularly suffocating. Not only were they questioning the written legal documents that may have served to oppress them, and the different stereotypical representations in term of which they may have been viewed by those in authority, but they were doing so by making use of an artistic mode or convention that could subvert the very forms of the discourses that served to oppress them. These are the women who did not want us to overlook the fact that their lyrics had both a feminine and popular basis. Such lyrics, in fact, appear to be very much in the style of what Menocal describes as “a vigorous sung tradition that in crucial ways thumbed its nose at the most basic rules of classical Arabic poetry and was not written down for a number of generations, at least in part because its poetics mitigated strongly against incorporation into the written canon.”42 The lyrics that appear at the heart of these women’s narratives are the ones that truly enable us to hear the women speak in their own voices; the very form of the lyrics allowed women to defy the norms of patriarchal discourse and to thus begin to speak “otherwise.” These lyrics, which draw attention to the form and not just the mimetic content of their language, are the ones that appear to have excited the Europeans, for whom the whole idea of rhyme was a novelty and which they could appreciate even if they could not actually speak the language. Moreover, it is these lyrics with their emphasis on form, which characterize the romantic scenes in these tales. This is the case of “Ali and a Spinner Too?” where the very name of the tale suggests an




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oxymoron, and by extension a possible kinship with “the Spanish lyric [which] is passionate rather than lachrymose, involving frequent recourse to oxymora.”43 The protagonist here decides to become an ‘ālim and has to disguise herself as a man, you will recall. As an ‘ālim, she becomes the tutor of a certain prince, a task at which Ali is very good until the prince begins to suspect the source of his admiration for the young ‘ālim. This sets him in search of the ‘ālim’s gender identity, which culminates in his following Ali to his hometown where he reverts back to being a woman and sits spinning wool with the women of the house. This is when the prince asks his titular question: “Ali and a Spinner Too?” to which she responds: “If stuck, what can he do?” thus transforming their exchange into a kharja-style lyric. The kharja here, which is one way of exiting the narrative, suggests a movement from the world of words to that of action. It is this final couplet on which the tale ends, which enables the protagonist to finally reveal herself to be a woman and to thus suggest a coupling of a more romantic nature. Before she can do so, she has to bring him to her predominantly woman’s space, associated with the spinners and storytellers, since the language of the lyric is diametrically opposed to the one that the ‘ālim would have spoken in the court. This woman, as I demonstrated in chapter 2, is revealed to be speaking her body, or using a form of écriture féminine to counter the constraining effects of the male symbolic order. In fact, this is also the case of the other protagonists in these tales who speak in lyrical form; the lyrics enable them to speak their bodies in ways that the predominant patriarchal forms cannot. Thus, although the kharja-style lyric that appears in “Lawza elBhiya” is quite different from the one in “Ali and a Spinner Too?,” it too enables the woman to bring her body into play in strategic ways. This protagonist is endowed with artistic creativity from the outset when she names herself in lyrical form: My name’s Lawza el-Bhiya and I’m free To outwit others who can’t outwit me.

She is the one who refuses to reveal herself to the prince in the manner that he would like, or to conform to his stereotypes, preferring to represent herself in her own special manner. Even on the day of their wedding, she makes a candy bride and puts it on the nuptial bed, which is what the prince actually beholds when he enters the chamber on the wedding night. The bride keeps nodding demurely to everything he says, so the prince ends up chopping her head off. Only then does



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Lawza el-Bhiya emerge from under the bed to confront him with her true identity, which she discloses through a kharja-style verse, which like the final couplet in Shakespeare’s sonnets both summarizes all that has happened and explains all that has remained obscure. Moreover, like the kharja-style ending of “Ali and a Spinner Too,” it allows for the movement from the world of words to the world of actions. In this case it reveals the extent to which her true identity differed from what the prince may have been led to believe: The finger you saw was a radish red The tresses belonged to a Jewish head In the east wing toilet you lay in bed, With a Gnāwi slave woman in my stead.

By reverting to the lyrical form in order to reveal who they really are, and by contrasting themselves with who they are not, these protagonists appear to be doing something similar to what Julia Kristeva claims that the stylist does when he “assumes a different discourse; neither imaginary discourse of the self, nor discourse of transcendental knowledge, but a permanent go-between from one to the other, a pulsation of sign and rhythm, of consciousness and instinctual drive.”44 These are the means that enable the women to push the limits of the forms that have served to represent them, or to confine them, and to create modes that allow them more space for movement. Lawza el-Bhiya is the kind of artist whom Hélène Cixous would advocate; she is able to subvert the patriarchal norms in order to suit her own ends. It is her artistry that enables her to finally attract the prince to her, even while she appears to keep him at a distance. This is not like one aspect of the Troubadour tradition where “the lady’s aloofness, was principally a means of testing her lover’s sincerity,”45 but more a matter of enabling him to see that she is not what he takes her for; it is even a matter of transforming him into a more suitable partner for her. A lyric is pronounced even by the protagonist whose romantic narrative is basically a tragedy, which is the case of the princess in “The Female Camel” who at one point finds herself lost in a wilderness after having met a prince in an enchanting garden, with whom she talks and talks until she falls asleep, whereupon he spreads her a bed of roses and covers her with narcissus. As she wonders in the wilderness she keeps repeating: I have neither the shelter of my father’s house Nor fulfilment for my love and a future spouse




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What we have here is the idea of loss and lament, since the princess appears to have lost everything, and regrets her involvement with the prince. But there is more here than just regret over the loss of a possible love relationship. This lyric is meant for the edification of those in the audience, whom it warns of some of the more destructive aspects of love. For the kind of love that appears in this tale resembles the one to which Roger Boase refers when he claims: “This type of passionate love (‘ ishq) is always potentially destructive, because it is a species of melancholy.”46 This princess, whose problem was described by one of the women who remembered the tale as being a matter of ‘ ishq, was thus perceived to have been affected by it even before she meets the prince. This ‘ ishq that may have been at the source of her initial malady is also what ends up destroying her at the end when she perceives the extent to which she has lost the prince. Her lyric may not enable her to overcome her tragic outcome, but it would have been considered useful for those in the audience who could learn from it. Since entry into the symbolic, as becomes evident in “The Female Camel,” tends to be fraught with danger for women, the storytellers had to endow their more artistic protagonists with a mode of speech—the lyrical—which would be capable of subverting the symbolic in ways that would be more amenable to their concerns. The ability to manipulate words and to endow them with music makes them appear to be less formal, allowing the women to play with the words themselves and to have fun. This mode is one of the means that enabled these women to enter the symbolic and transform it to their own ends, for the lyrical is less solemn, more conducive to the movement not only of words and sounds but also of bodies. It liberates the women from the roles imposed on them by enabling them to speak in ways that are noticeably different from the way that the patriarchy speaks them. The lyrical places a special emphasis on the woman’s voice, to which it calls attention selfconsciously. No wonder it captured the imagination of the Europeans. This mode of speaking was the equivalent of écriture féminine that the French feminists formulated to challenge the oppressive symbolic order. Ecriture itself, according to Roudiez, is a type of “poetic language,”47 the kind that enables Aisha the Carpenter’s Daughter to speak her body, literally through her children. Their ability to actually speak in lyrics enabled those protagonists to arrive at much more satisfactory endings than does the princess.



I would rather my beloved had left me with kisses Than spread my bed with roses and cover me with narcissus

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Their lyrics, moreover, enable some of those protagonists to contribute to those epiphanic moments that are so charged with romance even when the amatory feelings are not expressed openly. The romance at the heart of the tales tends to remain highly stylized, in accordance with the sophisticated courtly atmosphere. Thus the actual expression of feelings remains indirect in the tales, where it is more often understood than explicitly articulated. One possible exception to this is a rare scrap of dialogue that I collected in Tetouan, which further serves to suggest the extent to which the lyrical form has become completely integral to that culture, where the speech of so many of the older women is dispersed with lyrics and where this dialogue tends to be repeated like a saying. In it I discovered an instance where the feeling of love appears to be articulated. Significantly this fragment of a dialogue is not between a man and a woman, but between two women who refer to each other as sisters: -Dear sister Hinda -Yes, sister Linda? -My insides have been pulled apart So the liver’s now with the heart -Oh, that’s only love at the start48

The fact that the speakers here refer to each other as “sister” could mean that they were actually biological sisters, but this seems unlikely given their names. The names Hinda and Linda imply that they may have come from different cultural backgrounds; Hinda being Arabic but not Linda. This suggests that they may have been jawāri¯ , who were in the habit of calling each other “sister.” What one divulges to the other is the actual feeling of falling in love which she does in terms of a description of an upheaval of bodily organs, thus evoking the process in poignant terms. The lyrics at the heart of this tradition rather than appearing to go counter to the vital feminism of these tales appear in fact to reinforce it and are in turn reinforced by it. The lyrics become particularly representative of the quintessential woman’s voice, particularly the voices of the women artists who perceived their status as artists to be particularly liberating. For the lyrics here become closely associated with the revolutionary art form that these women used to counter the traditional and classical modes that they perceived as confining. The lyrics suggest these women’s radical difference, the way they refuse to submit to the norms, the way they want to redefine themselves in ways that differ




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from how they have been represented, by such means as enabling them to speak otherwise. The lyrics represent these different women’s real voices; enabling us to hear their audacity, their daring, their playful and controversial nature as well as to perceive their more romantic inclinations. In this way, the lyrics provide us with a view of those women and their times that appears to be similar to the way the history of alAndalus, according to Menocal, “seems to be tellable only in the near incoherence of the lyric.”49 In fact, music and melody such as those associated with the lyricism are perhaps some of the best ways to evoke the past, and they probably served, more poignantly than any other feature, to help those women keep alive a past era that they did not wish to be relegated to oblivion. The women involved in these tales were not authors in the modern sense of the term, nor were they in any way concerned with obtaining a position within any kind of literary canon. However, this does not mean that they should not be taken seriously, especially now that it has become evident, as Roland Barthes has argued that, “for us, it is language that speaks, not the author.”50 This is the case not only of these women storytellers but also of more canonical writers since “[w]e know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”51 Since we have come to perceive the extent to which it is language itself that comes equipped with meanings, which are culturally constructed, we have come to realize the extent to which the idea of the author is a myth as well as the extent to which “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”52 as Barthes has noted. Can this, however, enable us as readers to truly begin to perceive the importance of these tales and their storytellers? The women who were involved in them have left us a heritage that should not be squandered, if for no other reason that it reveals those women to have been not only expert musicians but vivacious artists who were in control of both their own positions and those of the men in their lives. Moreover, they did not want us to overlook their own centrality, as women, in the courtly art form with which they became associated. So, are we going to let their point be lost just because of contemporary politics? These women’s narratives remind us of the extent to which, in the final analysis, men and women are dependent on each other, even while they engage us with their feminist strategies. The kind of genius they display is one of which we are in great need these days when the binary



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logic that predominates tends to oppose not only femininity to masculinity but also the West to the rest of the world and to represent them as exclusive of each other. The fact that texts such as these women’s narratives, which suggest numerous ways in which such binaries can be disrupted, may be denigrated by some, because they are oral or because they are associated with Muslim women, and may thus be relegated to oblivion, draws attention to some of the tendencies of globalization that need to be questioned. This tradition of women’s tales can help us to counter the extremely harmful effects of the dichotomous way of thinking, which has constructed the North as being completely exclusive of the South—thus depicting those two cultural trends as being opposed to each other rather than being interlinked and intertwined as they appear to be in these narratives. By helping to broaden our perceptions of where those of us from different backgrounds and cultures stand in relation to each other on this planet, these women’s narratives may enable us to come to terms with a more authentically comprehensive conceptualization of planetarity.







Introduction 1. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 19, where she specifies that “[t]he rift, I submit, does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).” 2. See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. 3. See Hasan M. El-Shamy, Afterward, Moroccan Tales, by Jilali El Koudia (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 149–150. 4. Quoted in Martha Norkunas, Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 84. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Nora, Realms of Memory, 20. 7. See Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 2–3 and passim. This issue has been obfuscated further by the fact that “the Arabs” tend to be associated in most people’s minds, both in the West and in the Arab world itself, with the Middle East and not with such places as Morocco and Spain, which was populated in the Middle Ages by Muslims who were also “Arabs.” 8. Nora, Realms of Memory, 2. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” at http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/ texts/frankfurt/storyteller.pdf, p. 3, accessed on January 18, 2009. 11. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000). 12. Ibid., 107, emphasis in the original.



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Notes

Ibid., 11–12. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 3. Ibid., 20. Nora, Realms of Memory, 10. This question becomes particularly pertinent when we consider that the kind of forgetting at issue here is not the kind of which Milan Kundera reminds us, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: Perennial Classics, 1996), where the ability to forget certain painful events in one’s personal past can result in a kind of relief enabling one to laugh again, at least for a while. 18. Nora, Realms of Memory, 1–2. 19. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 20. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basinstroke: Macmillan, 1988). 21. Ibid., 296. 22. See Maria J. Viguera, “Asluhu li ’ l-Ma‘āli¯ : On the Social Status of Andalusi¯ Women,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 710. 23. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 271. 24. Ibid., 281. 25. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51. 26. Ibid., 53. 27. Ibid., 51. 28. Quoted in Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 40. 29. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 75. Here again we can perceive the kind of confusion that associates the “Moor” with the Middle East rather than with Spain and Morocco, which are much closer to England. 30. Ibid., 106. 31. See Sarah Graham-Brown, “The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined: Private and Public Lives,” in Feminist Postcolonial Theory, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 510. 32. As Fadwa El Guindi asserts in Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 190: “Numerous scholars have noted that a system that separated the sexes and secluded women, who were guarded by eunuchs, is neither indigenous to Arab society nor to Islam. It was fully in place from the Byzantine period when the Ottomans took over. Goodwin observes that prior to the Ottomans women in Greece ‘were confined to a gynaecium’ (1997: 84).”



13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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33. For a critique of Fatima Mernissi’s use of the term “harem” in reference to the extended household in which she grew up in Fez, see Hasna Lebbady, “Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Self Representation or Confinement within the Discourse of Otherness,” in North-South Linkages and Connections in Continental and Diaspora African Literatures, ed. Edris Makward, Mark Lilleleht, and Ahmed Saber (Trenton, New Jersey and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2005), 129–139. 34. See Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds., Between Language and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 4. 35. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 280–281. 36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 183. 37. Ibid., 197. 38. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 228. 39. I am indebted for this idea to Nancy A. Walker, “Witch Weldon: Fay Weldon’s Use of the Fairy Tale Tradition,” in Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions, ed. Regina Barreca (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994). 40. See Husain Haddawy, trans., The Arabian Nights (New York and London: Norton, 1990), xiii. 41. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 12. 42. Ibid., 131. 43. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in New Left Review, 146 (1984): 53–64. 44. Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), 9. 45. There is rhymed verse in the heart of some of the tales of The One Thousand and One Nights; however, they appear to ref lect the concerted efforts of a poet or learned person and not the kind of seemingly improvised dialogue of young women faced with the prospect of having to respond to the princes or Sultans who addressed them. 46. Casey, Remembering, 11. 47. The time of the taifa states or petty kingdoms into which the Umayyad Caliphate of al-Andalus became divided in the eleventh century may not have been a very stable time politically speaking, but the different city-states to which that division gave rise, each with its own sultan and court, provided a haven for large numbers of thinkers and artists who thrived at that time. It would seem that the kind of city-state associated with taifa culture is the kind that the original immigrants to Tetouan attempted to reconstruct. 48. Julia Kristeva, “Postmodernism?” in Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, ed. Harry R. Gavin (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980), 140.



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49. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 84. 50. Susan Gilson Miller, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845–1846, the Voyage of Muhammad As-Saffar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). The version of this trip that is more readily available in Morocco is that of Boussif Ouasti, Une ambassade marocaine chez Louis-Philippe (Rihlah al-faqîh Assaffâr ilâ Bârîz 1845–1856 ) (Paris and Casablanca: Paris Méditeranée & Éditions Eddif, 2002). 51. Malek Bennouna, ed., Kunnāsh al-Hā’ ik: Li’abi¯ ‘Abdullah Muhammad bin al-Husayn al-Titwāni¯ al-Andalusi¯ (Rabat: Matbaat al-Maarif al-Jadida, 1999). 52. Abdellah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977), 212. 53. Muhammad Ibn Aazzouz Hakim, al-Jadi¯ d fi¯ Tāri¯ kh Titāwan: al-juz’ al-awwal: Hukkāmu Titāwan min sana 888 ’ ilā sana 1375 (1483–1956 ) (Tetouan: Al-khalij al-Arabi, 2000), 32. 54. Jean-Louis Miège, M’hammad Benaboud, and Nadia Erzini, Tétouan: Ville andalouse marocaine (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1996), 28. 55. Ibid., 29. 56. See Manuela Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), 630–631. 57. Mhammad Benaboud, “Tétouan: The Patio of Civilization,” in Andalusian Morocco: A Discovery in Living Art, ed. Mandy Gomez (Casablanca and Madrid: Museum with no Frontiers, 2002), 164. 58. See Álvaro Machordom Comins, La Expulsión de Los Moriscos: Proceso Histórico a Felípe III (Spain: Ingraval, S.L., 2000). 59. Miège et al., Tétouan: Ville andalouse marocaine, 30. 60. Jean-Louis Miège, Tétouan à travers les siècles (Tetouan: Association Tétouan-Asmir & Institut Français de Tétouan, 1996), 7. 61. Dolores López Enamorado, Cuentos Populares Marroquíes (Madrid: Alderabán Ediciónes, S.L., 2000), 15. 62. Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus, 113–114. 63. Ibid., 253–311. 64. One seventeenth-century Tetouani woman left an endowment for storks to be healed by jbi¯ rās when they broke their legs. See Muhammad Ibn Aazzouz Hakim, Titwāni¯ yāt fi¯ Dhākirat al-Tāri¯ kh (Tetouan: Al-khalij alArabi, 2001), 15. 65. Ibid., passim. 66. Fatima Mernissi in Sultanes oubliées: femmes chefs d’ état en islam (Casablanca: Éditions le Fennec, 1990), 27–36, explains that the designation, which literally means “the free lady” (distinguishing such women from the jawāri¯ ), was applied synonymously with the term malika or sultana to refer to a number of women rulers in Islam, ranging from Aïcha al-Hurra, the



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67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

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mother of the Nasrid king of Granada, Muammad Abu Abdullah (known in the West as Boabdil), to two Yemeni queens of the eleventh- and twelfth centuries, Asma and Urwa. Muhammad Ibn Azzouz Hakim, Al-sitt al-Hurra, Hākimat Titwān: bint al-Ami¯ r Mawlā’ ¯i ‘Ali¯ ibn Rāshid (Rabat: Maktabat al-sahil, 1983). Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus, 717, defines jāriya (pl. jawāri¯ ) as a young woman, a slave, or a female slave who is a singer. Ibid. In al-Andalus jawāri¯ belonged mostly to the more sophisticated milieus and tended to be both good-looking and highly educated, particularly in the liberal arts and in music. Their ability to excel in these arts could increase their value considerably as was the case of the singer T arab, who was offered for sale to the Emir al-Mundhir. After hearing her, he was so satisfied with her singing that he decided to pay twice the amount that had been asked for her, page 381. Jawāri¯ often took part in the poetic gatherings organized by their patrons, where they responded to the poetry of male poets with verses that they improvised themselves, page 643. This is similar to the situation that prevailed in the Middle East as noted by Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage from Cairo to America: A Woman’s Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 98, where she claims the following: To us, with our notions of slavery grounded in the history of American society, the very idea that slaves constituted the upper classes is so counterintuitive as to seem almost nonsensical. But in the Middle East, slaves and slave origins were so fundamentally part of aristocratic and royal life that for over a thousand years nearly all caliphs, kings, and sultans in the region were the sons of slave mothers. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 89. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 149. J.C. Burgel, “Ibn T ufayl and His Hayy ibn Yaqz ān: A Turning Point in Arabic Philosophic Writing,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 830. Marín in Mujeres en Al-Ándalus, 221, notes that the love poetry that has been conserved of Wallāda, H afsa bint al-H ājj, and other women poets is more than sufficient to confirm the liberty that Andalussi women enjoyed. Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 153. Ibid., 150–151. See Dwight Reynolds, “Music,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, eds. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60. See Owen Wright, “Music in Muslim Spain,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 556, where we are told that Ziryāb is the name



Notes

79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

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by which Abū ’l-Hasan ‘Ali¯ b. Nafi‘ was known—who is said to have incurred the jealousy of his eminent teacher Ish āq al-Mawsili¯ (150/767–235/850) as a result of his brilliant debut recital given before Hārūn al-Rashi¯ d (170/786–193/809), he was obliged to leave Baghdad and seek his fortune elsewhere . . . he was invited to the Umayyad court at Cordoba, where he swiftly established himself not only as the leading performer and teacher of the day, but also as general arbiter of taste who was to have an enduring inf luence in such areas as dress, hair-style and even culinary habits. Ibid., 566. For a translation into English of some of this poetry see Carl Davila, “Sunset in the Gardens of al-Andalus” (poetry from the Moroccan Andalusian Music in translation) 1–11, http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/AbduNoor.pdf, March 2005, accessed on January 18, 2009. Reynolds, “Music,” 60. According to Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus, 179, in al-Andalus women’s bodies were not supposed to be described and only on rare occasions were any of their characteristics specified. The only category of woman whose physical attributes were described in detail was the slave. Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus, 643. Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 2. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 2.

Chapter 1

Aisha the Carpenter's Daughter

1. The title “Lalla” is a respectful way of addressing ladies, just as “Sidi” is a respectful way of addressing men. 2. Mhamsa is a kind of dumpling, which is a by-product of the making of couscous, considerably larger in size than the grains of couscous, and which is usually cooked in a richly f lavored sauce. 3. Meqhora here implies the one who has been deprived of all agreeable or pleasurable means of livelihood. 4. Trid is a traditional Moroccan dish consisting of very thin layers of dough, with succulent pieces of chicken and nuts placed between them. 5. Abdessamad Dialmy, Feminisme Soufi: Conte Fassi et Initiation Sexuelle (Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1991). 6. Ibid., 23. 7. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago, 1990), 317–327. 8. E. Powys Mathers, trans., “The Merchant’s Daughter and the Sultan’s Son,” in Tales of Fez, ed. Khalid Bekkaoui, Jilali El Koudia, and Abdellatif Khayati (Fez: The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2007), 8–21. 9. Film review in The New York Times, January 9, 2008 (online version). 10. My own translation of the tale, including the rhymed verse in the dialogue, first appeared in a piece I wrote for Morocco Times (July 15,



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11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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2004) titled “ ‘Aisha bent Nejjar’ and the Tradition of Women’s Tales in Morocco.” See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). Geina Mhlophe, “Storytelling: A Part of Our Heritage,” in The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture as Development in Africa, ed. Philip G. Altbach and Salam M. Hassan (Trenton, New Jersey and Asmara, Eritrea: African World Press, 1996), 110. See John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 82–83. Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line,” in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), 71. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Joyce Carol Oates, “Comedy Is Tragedy that Happens to Other People,” in The New York Times Book Review (January 19, 1992): 7. Quoted in George F. Robertson, “Ephemeral Encounters, Enduring Narratives: Visitor Voices of Tangier,” in Voices of Tangier, ed. Khalid Amine, Andrew Hussey, and Barry Tharaud (Tangier: Imprimerie Altopress, 2006), 31. Jacques Lacan, Écrits 1 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 155. Martha Norkunas, Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts ( Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 130. Marie-Haude Caraës and Jean Fernandez, Tanger ou la dérive Littéraire: Essai sur la colonisation littéraire d’un lieu: Barthes, Bowles, Burroughs, Capote, Genet, Morand (Paris: Éditions Pulisud, 2002). Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Library of America, 1984), 61. The critical reception of this work, some of which was originally in the darija, as is the case of Mrabet’s Love with a Few Hairs, and more particularly of Driss Ben Hamed Charhadi’s A Life Full of Holes, by Moroccan intellectuals was rather negative. Thus as Brian Edwards notes in his Introduction to Love with a Few Hairs, trans. Paul Bowles (Fez: Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2004), iii, Abdallah Laroui, Tahar Benjelloun, and Mohammed Abu-Talib all criticized Bowles for some aspect of the work in which he was involved. Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), ix. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 286. Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 152. As I noted in the introduction, the word khrāfa, which is used in Tetouan to refer to these tales, is a shortened version of the word khurāfa, which according to Manuela Marín, Mujeres en Al-Andalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2000), 630–631, was also used



Notes

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

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in al-Andalus to denote the tales told by women in the evening while they were spinning. See Nancy A. Walker, “Witch Weldon: Fay Weldon’s Use of the Fairy Tale Tradition,” in Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions, ed. Regina Barreca (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1994), 12. See Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7–23. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 119. The word “keid ” does appear in Dialmy’s Feminisme Soufi, 77, e.g., where he claims that “Au delà du keid des femmes, il faut chercher le keid du conte,” meaning that beyond the keid of women one has to search for the keid of the tale, which is a work of art. On page 86 he goes on to differentiate the “Keid ” of Aisha from the “Keid ” of Zulikha in the Qur’an, which he qualifies as more provocative and dishonest. Stephen Snyder, The Transparent I: Self/Subject in European Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 6. Dialmy, Feminisme Soufi, 102–105. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 20, emphasis in the original. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 127. The fact that the fish vendor here is Jewish would have made it easier for Aisha to treat him playfully, since he could not have assumed the position of a possible suitor; it would not have been considered appropriate for her to marry him or for him to marry her. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 4. Cooke, Women Claim Islam, 152.

Chapter 2


1. The gellās is the person who sits at the entrance of the hammām, gets paid, and makes himself helpful by such means as keeping an eye on the clothes left at the entrance by the clients. 2. This is a revised and considerably updated version of an article that appeared in Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 12, 2 (2003): 131–140. 3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 73.



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4. For Lacan the symbolic order is the third order, after the real and the imaginary, which the child attains in the process of becoming a socialized and gendered subject. It is what he describes as coming under “le nom du père” (the name of the father, emphasis in the original), which he claims has since the beginning of historical times been identified with “la figure de la loi” (the image of the law). See Jacques Lacan, Écrits 1 (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1966), 157–158. It is within the symbolic order, he maintains, that the phallus is “le signifiant privilégié.” See Écrits 2 (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1971), 111. For a feminist reading of Lacan see Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982). 5. In fact, it would appear that these women were working within a tradition that is neither entirely “Western” nor exclusively “Oriental,” which is what makes it specifically Andalusi-Moroccan to my mind. Not only were these Moroccan women’s circumstances different from those of their “Western” counterparts but they also differed from those of such legendary storytellers as Scheherazade, since the Moroccan storytellers were not compelled to tell their tales to a male audience under the threat of death. Nor were they subjected to female excision, which never formed part of Andalusi or Moroccan culture but which exists in some East African countries. For one account of this see the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed Books, 1980), 7–11, where she describes how she and her sister were submitted to such excision. 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1990), 105–106. 7. The distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic elements of signification is perhaps Kristeva’s most famous contribution to language theory, on which she elaborates in a number of her early writings. See Julia Kristeva, Séméiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Tel Quel, 1969); La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXè siècle (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1974); and “Le sujet en procès,” in Polylogue (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1977). 8. Although Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva have all attempted to formulate a writing that could be termed écriture féminine, the term was first used by Cixous. See Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 245–264. See also “Castration and Decapitation,” Signs, 7, 1 (Autumn 1981): 41–55. For a good clarification of écriture féminine see Verena Andermatt Conley’s introduction to Hélène Cixous, Readings with Clarice Lispector (London: Harvester, 1990). 9. Orality did not impose itself on these women because they were necessarily illiterate. Some of them could read, and often kept the book in front of



Notes

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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them when they recited the Qur’an, e.g., to make sure they did not distort it. It was actually the men, who had gone to the msid (Quranic school) and formally memorized the Qur’an, who felt free to recite it without the book. However, the households in which these tales were told would have also included many women who could not read. The orality in this case, as is the case with the use of the vernacular in al-Andalus, enabled these women from different social classes to collectively take part in this creative process. By raising such questions, for which it refuses to provide definite answers, the tale appears to support Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that “essentialism is a trap” and that “the world’s women do not all relate to the privileging of essence, especially through ‘fiction,’ or ‘literature,’ in quite the same way.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 89. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1990), 132. Jenny Diski, The Dream Mistress (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996). Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. Roland Barthes distinguished between texts that are lisible (readable) and those that are illisible (unreadable) although they may be scriptible (writable). See S/Z (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1970), English trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Later Barthes described the “readable” texts, which are easily interpretable, as producing a response of plaisir (pleasure) and the “unreadable” texts, which require more effort to interpret, as capable of producing a response that verges on jouissance (a more orgasmic pleasure). See Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1973), English trans. The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narratives: The Metafictional Paradox (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), xvi. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. See Fatima Mernissi, Le harem politique: Le Prophète et les femmes. 1987. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland as The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1991), 49–81. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 67. See Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Robert S. Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 205. Charles T. Prouty, Introduction to Twelfth Night, or, What You Will, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969), 306.



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23. Alfred Harbage, Forward to the Comedies, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969), 53. 24. Madeleine Doran, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969), 146–147. 25. Noted by Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 20, in accordance with Sismondi’s Hispano-Arabic thesis. 26. Madeleine Doran, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 147. 27. Ralph M. Sargent, Introduction to As You Like It, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1969), 243. 28. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 203. 29. Sargent, Introduction to As You Like It, 244. 30. See Madeleine Doran, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 146. The description cited here is one that she uses in relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which appears to me to be equally applicable to As You Like It. 31. See Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 30–31. 32. Bloom, Shakespeare, 150. 33. Ibid., 148. 34. Ibid., 151. 35. See Briffault, The Troubadours, 38–39. 36. Prouty, Introduction to Twelfth Night, 306. 37. Ibid. 38. Bloom, Shakespeare, 233. 39. Doran, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 147. 40. Bloom, Shakespeare, 153. 41. Doran, Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 147. 42. Bloom, Shakespeare, 204. 43. Ibid., 221. 44. Ibid., 204. 45. Ibid., 218. 46. See Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 11. 47. Briffault, The Troubadours, 16. 48. See Prouty, Introduction to Twelfth Night, 305. 49. Sargent, Introduction to As You Like It, 243. 50. Bloom, Shakespeare, 231. 51. Quoted in Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 24. 52. Prouty, Introduction to Twelfth Night, 306–307. 53. Briffault, The Troubadours, 191. 54. See Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 29. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Briffault, The Troubadours, 16.



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Chapter 3

Lawza el-Bhiya

1. The Gnāwa (pl. of Gnāwi¯ ) are Moroccans who are descendents of former slaves originally from central Africa. They are master musicians and dancers whose music brings together both African and Amazigh-Arab traditions. The Gnāwi¯ women, some of whom worked in the large households within Moroccan medinas, were often centrally involved in the oral narration of tales such as “Lawza El-Bhiya”—thereby contributing to the hybrid art form its more distinctively African features. 2. In the original, the toilet is described as being in the direction of the qibla toward which Muslims direct their prayers and which in Morocco is eastward. To yolk together the idea of the toilet with that of the qibla, and to associate it with encounters of a purely erotic nature, is in effect to desecrate what should be of a more sacred nature. This is one way in which the tale differentiates between this lustful encounter and the more properly sanctioned one that eventually takes place in the union between the prince and Lawza El-Bhiya. 3. In fact, the word ‘arūsa traditionally used to designate a doll—not the plastic ones available in the market nowadays but the traditional home-made ones, concocted out of pieces of bamboo and all the small pieces of cloth left over from the making of kaftans and other clothes—was the same word used to designate a bride with all her finery. 4. Duncan Brown in Oral Literature and Performance in South Africa (Oxford, Capetown, and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), 198, claims that “[p]opular art forms generally emerge from contexts of violent social change and disjuncture,” which was to some extent the case of these tales when we consider the Moriscan expulsion from Spain. 5. This is the English title of Nedjma, L’Amande (France: Pocket, 2006), which is the version that I have used. The English version came out in 2005, but is not available in Morocco. 6. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 120. 7. Edith Wharton, In Morocco (Fez: The Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre, 2005), 101. 8. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 5. 9. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991), 51–80. 10. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 292. 11. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 5. 12. The kind of bed—referred to as nāmūsi¯ ya—that can be found in the Andalusi houses in the medina of Tetouan can usually be curtained off



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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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from the rest of the long room of which it usually forms a part. Such a bed is usually very high, so that a bride sitting on it could be easily displayed to the women sitting on lower sofas around the room. Given its height, it would not have been too difficult for Lawza el-Bhiya to hide under such a bed and pull the strings attached to the doll. One version of this tale can be found in fpx.de/fp/Disney/Tales/ SleepingBeauty.html, accessed on January 18, 2009. Fairies appear to be a feature specific to European fairy tales and do not appear in any of the Moroccan women’s tales I have heard, where it is always the female protagonist’s expert use of language as well as her wit and resourcefulness that help her resolve her problems—rather than the interference of any fairy. Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1986), 95. Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (Toronto: Seal Books, 1969), 284. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 30. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 105–106. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 5. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 228. Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, 2. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 103. (Emphasis in the original.) Ibid., 100. Ibid., 101. (Emphasis in the original.) Luce López-Baralt, “The Legacy of Islam in Spanish Literature,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 505–552, esp. 524. Malek Bennouna, ed., Kunnāsh al-Hā’ ik: Li’abi¯ ‘Abdulla Muhammad bin al-Husayn al-Titwāni¯ al-Andalusi¯ (Rabat: Matbaat al-Maarif al-Jadida, 1999), 46. Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 33. Gretchen Miezkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5. See Alec G. Hargreaves, Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991), 1. See Romain Leick, “Women and Islam: Erotic Novel Breaks Muslim Taboos,” Spiegel Online International (March 2, 2005). www.spiegel.de/ international/0,1518,344444,00.html, accessed on January 18, 2009. Ibid. For one discussion of this see Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (Orlando, Florida: Morningstar and Lark, 2001), 33.



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33. See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, La sexualité en Islam (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975), 16. 34. See Fantastic Fiction’s review “L’Amande (2005) a Novel by Nedjma” at www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/n/nedjma/lamande.htm, accessed on January 18, 2009. 35. Alloula, The Colonial Harem, 7. 36. See Victoria James, “Books: The Dance of Desire and Disguise,” The Independent (London). http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/ books/reviews/lamande-by-nedjma-trans-c-jane-hunter-502407.html, accessed January 26, 2009. 37. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstroke: Macmillan, 1988), 296. 38. See Nedjma’s The Almond by Laila Lalami posted July 27, 2005, in her blog www.lailalalami.com/blog/archives/003171.html, accessed January 26, 2009 for one discussion of some of these anomalies. One instance of this that I have noted is the reference on page 14 to “la chambre guiblia” where Driss’s crates of books were kept and that drew my attention due to its resemblance to the way the toilet is designated in the tale—which is qualified as qiblia and which I have translated as being in the east wing of the house due to the fact that it is in the direction of the qibla, which in Morocco is toward the east. A footnote in the novel to “guiblia” claims that it is “orientée au nord,” a different interpretation from mine, due perhaps to the way one can easily mix up geblia (which could be an Egyptian pronunciation of jeblia [pl. jbala] who are found in the north of Morocco). 39. See James, “BOOKS: The dance of desire and disguise,” The Independent (London). 40. Nedjma, L’amande, 7. 41. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 154–155. 42. See Noufissa Sbai, L’enfant endormi (Rabat: Edino, 1987). Since it was considered disrespectful to call older women by their names, younger women tended to call them either by the equivalent of “aunt” or by such endearing names as Rahti¯ , Fnūni¯ , and Hyati¯ . 43. Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation, 90.

Chapter 4

Who'll Buy a Word?

1. The mitqāl (standard Arabic mithqāl ) was a kind of money used both in al-Andalus and in Tetouan, some silver coins of which were minted in Tetouan in 1780/1781. See Jean-Louis Miège, M’hammad Benaboud, Nadia Erzini, Tétouan: Ville andalouse marocaine (Rabat and Paris: Kalila wa dimna & CNRS Editions, 1996), 57. 2. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 148.



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3. Jorge Luis Borges, “Averroes’ Search,” in A Personal Anthology by Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 101–110. 4. Dominique Urvoy, “The ‘Ulamā’ of Al-Andalus,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 871. 5. See María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 56–57. 6. See James T. Monroe, “Zajal and Muwashshaha: Hispano-Arabic Poetry and the Romance Tradition,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 408. 7. Quoted in Robert Hillenbrand, “ ‘The Ornament of the World’ Medieval Cordoba as a Cultural Centre,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 122. 8. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 79. 9. See Luce López-Baralt, “The Legacy of Islam in Spanish Literature,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 509, where she furthermore claims that “we know that it was through Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd that Aristotelianism and neo-Platonism came into Europe (and, of course, to Aquinas) and had their inf luence there. This remarkable effort of translation, which lasted for generations on end, was, as Jose Munoz Sendino quite correctly points out, the example followed by Alfonso X, ‘the Wise.’ ” 10. In Morocco there are oral narratives and tales that come from different traditions, such as those from the Amazigh tradition, and others more closely associated with the rural area in northern Morocco, and which involve ghouls and ghoulas (types of ogres) as well as animals who play dominant roles. For some examples of the Amazigh kind of tales see Michael Peyron, Women as Brave as Men: Berber Heroines of the Moroccan Middle Atlas (Al Akhawayn University in Ifran ed. Rabat: El Maarif Al Jadida, 2003). Some examples of the more rural kind of tales, interspersed with a few urban ones, can be found in Jilali El Koudia, Moroccan Folktales (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 11. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. 12. See Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, Ch. 5, for further elaboration on the relationship between this Andalusi tradition and the work of Dante. 13. Quoted in Robert Hillenband, “Medieval Cordoba as a Cultural Centre,” 121. 14. J.C. Burgel, “Ibn Tufayl and His Hayy Ibn Yaqz ān: A Turning Point in Arabic Philosophical Writing,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 830. 15. Fatema Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West (New York: Washington Square Press, 2001), 55.



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16. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1981), 70. 17. Ibid., 66. 18. I am using this term in the same way as Gayatri Spivak, who uses it “for want of a better term,” to describe her association with “constructive counterglobalizing networks.” Death of a Discipline (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2003), 35. 19. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 20. Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 139. 21. Three versions of this tale can be found in D.L. Ashliman’s edition in the following website: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0328jack.html, accessed on January 18, 2009. 22. Dwight Reynolds, “The Musical Legacy of Al-Andalus, Part 1: Europe.” Interview by Banning Eyre in Madrid, Spain, in http://www.afropop. org/multi/interview/ID/57/Al-Andalus-Dwight, accessed on January 18, 2009, claims that [o]ne of the most interesting things about the troubadour poetry is that it is rhymed in the way that we now think of as completely normal, and that is with end rhyme, rhyming syllables at the very end of the verse. Greek poetry did not have rhyme. Classical Latin poetry did not have rhyme. The Hebrew of the Bible does not have rhyme, nor did Aramaic, nor any surrounding languages to the north, such as the Germanic languages. The one culture in the millennium previous to the beginning of troubadour poetry, who practiced end rhyme as a standard form of poetry, were the Arabs. 23. For a further elaboration on the use of Andalusi musical instruments and their absorption into European culture see Yusef Ali, “The Music of the Moors in Spain (Al-Andalus, 711–1492 A.D.) Origin of Andalusian Musical Art: Its Development and Inf luence on Western Culture,” in Golden Age of the Moor, ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1992). 24. These are the small and f limsy boats used to illegally transport people from the Moroccan coast to Europe. 25. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). 26. See Allan Bloom, trans., The Republic of Plato (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968), 94. Whereas in Plato, this division of human beings into three hierarchical categories is presented as a lie that is necessary for “giving the hierarchy solidity while at the same time presenting men with the rationale designed to overcome their primitive inclination to value themselves at least as highly as their neighbours” (367), in the Andalusi tale the three categories constitute different facets of the same character’s wisdom. 27. The Jewish population in Tetouan, which has formed an integral part of its society from its inception, also consisted of Jews who had been exiled from Spain and who lived side by side with the Muslims, albeit in separate



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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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quarters where they could practice their own religion and laws. Due to the fact that they were a minority they tended at times to be perceived as one version of the “Other.” In spite of this the depiction of the Jewish musician here does not appear to be anywhere as negative as that of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. For a dynamic and moving discussion of Shylock see Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 171–191. These women, who tended to be impassioned and dedicated musicians, would have allowed their love of music to exceed their respect for such norms as those that forbade strange men into the palace. The fact that this stranger was Jewish would have also made his presence more acceptable than that of a Muslim man with whom the women could become romantically involved and marry, in ways that they were not supposed to become involved with Jewish men. This is why for a long time only Jewish physicians and other professionals were allowed into Muslim households to attend to Muslim women and their needs. See Miguel Cruz Hernandez, “Islamic Thought in the Iberian Peninsula,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 783. Edward W. Said, The World the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 36. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36. Ibid., 19. Bloom, Shakespeare, 618. Ibid., 619. Ibid., 630. Ibid., 639. Ibid., 616. Ibid., 617–618. In fact, the women’s narratives under study in this book each fall nicely within one of these two categories. Whereas most of them can be said to be comedies, a clear-cut tragedy is evident in “The Female Camel” (chapter 6). Bloom, Shakespeare, 639. Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 205–206.

Chapter 5

Aisha Jarma

1. Although Aisha Jarma was seated on a small mtarba, there would have been bigger ones constituting the major furniture of the room. In Tetouan the standard covers for these were spotless white sheets to which, in some cases, colorful rugs or brocades were added. A small mtarba was often used by the women of the household for practical purposes; it could be moved around easily and it could also be washed more easily once it got dirty.



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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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That was one way of ensuring that the rest of the room remained spotlessly clean for guests and for special occasions. Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D. (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 2002). Ibid., 47. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 50. The fact that it is Aisha Jarma herself who dictates her elevated position within the court through the conditions she poses on the prince in not a pure matter of fantasy on the part of the storytellers here. Such posing of conditions was not at all unusual in the marriage contracts of Andalusi women (and by extension of some women in Tetouan). As Manuela Marín notes, these included not only such stipulations as the fact that the wife would not have to do the housework, or to breast-feed her children, but also what has become known among scholars as the “monogamy clause” in which wives stipulated that if their husbands took other wives, cohabited with slaves or concubines, they would consider their marriage to be dissolved. See Mujeres en Al-Andalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2000), 448. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 117. See Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, L’Imaginaire Maghrébin: Étude de dix contes pour enfants (Tunis: Cérès Éditions, 1994), 157. See María J. Viguera, “Asluhu li’ l-ma‘āli¯ : On the Social Status of Andalusi¯ Women,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 718–719. María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York and Boston: Little Brown and Company, 2002), 129. Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 2. Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 128. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 114. Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 13. Ibid., 190. María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 121. Ibid., 116. Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 126. Ibid., 127–128. Briffault, The Troubadours, 46–47.



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22. Menocal, The Ornament of the World, 129. Qiyān is another term for jawāri¯ . 23. Bouhdiba, L’Imaginaire Maghrébin, 167. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Ibid., 157. 28. Ibid., 24. 29. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936) on the Internet at http:// grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/storyteller.pdf, page 14, accessed on January 18, 2009. 30. Driss Chraibi, La Civilisation ma Mère! . . . (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1972), 92. 31. Ibid., 177. 32. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 163. 33. Briffault, The Troubadours, 50–51. 34. See Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7–23.

Chapter 6

The Female Camel

1. In the Moroccan darija this tale is called jmi¯ la, which is both the diminutive and the feminine of camel and also a pun on the feminine of beautiful. 2. This chapter presents a considerably revised version of an article published as “Of Women-Centered Moroccan Tales and Their Imagined Communities,” in special issue of The Muslim World, ed. Nabil Matar and Bindu Malieckal, 95, 2 (Spring 2005): 217–230. 3. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 321. 4. According to Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 197, the child at first is what he calls, in one of his numerous play on words, an “hommelette,” meaning both a little man and a broken egg, which spreads without defined limitations. The child at this stage is grounded in the real, which consists of the world of “real” objects and ideas unmediated by the structuring potential of language. Thus Lacan claims “C’est le monde des mots qui crée le monde des choses” in Écrits 1 (Paris; Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 155, implying that the very things of the reality we appear to perceive are “created” by language. This is why it is necessary, according to Lacan, to traverse the other two stages: the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The first is the preoedipal identification of the child with its mirror image in which it begins to acquire a gendered subjectivity. However, the individual only becomes a sexual being upon entering the Symbolic, the order of language, which comes under the law of the father; in Écrits 1, 167–168.



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5. Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1991), 93. 6. Ibid., 94. 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7. 8. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), 19. The emergence of the private economy into the public sphere that Habermas discusses is similar to what happened in Tetouan, where in the beginning of the twentieth century the process of raising silkworms and spinning wool became relegated to the public sphere so that the women who had formerly been engaged in it lost not only the economic autonomy with which it had endowed them but also the art of storytelling with which it had been so closely related. 9. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 9. 10. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 74. 11. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19–20. 12. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 30. 13. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32–33. 14. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” in Public Culture, 1 (2000): 15. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs, 7, 1 (Autumn 1981): 16. 17. Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries,” 11. 18. The Qur’an VII, 40. 19. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 23. 20. Jacques Lacan, Écrits 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 111. 21. Lacan, Écrits 1, 167–168. 22. Julia Kristeva, “Postmodernism?” in Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, ed. Harry R. Gavin (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980), 136. 23. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 188. 24. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 17. 25. Ibid. 26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 1993), 205. 27. Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 34. 28. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 153. 29. Mary Jacobus, “Is There a Woman in This Text?” in New Literary History, 14, 1 (Autumn 1982): 138. 30. Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 180.



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31. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975), 87. 32. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 49. 33. See Christine Battersby, “Her Blood and Her Mirror: Mary Coleridge, Luce Irigaray, and the Female Self,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 249. 34. Shoshana Felman, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics (Winter 1975): 10. 35. Angela Carter, “Notes from the Front Line,” in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), 71. 36. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1990), 5. 37. Ibid., 28. 38. Lorna Sage, Women in the House of Fiction: Postwar Women Novelists (London: Macmillan, 1992), 174. 39. See John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 86–87. 40. Carter, The Passion of New Eve, 132. 41. Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess (London: Phoenix, 1996), 83. 42. Jenny Diski, The Dream Mistress (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), 29. 43. Jenny Diski, Monkey’s Uncle (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 208. 44. Diski, The Dream Mistress, 163. 45. Ibid., 55. 46. Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (New York: Martin’s Press, 1992), 198. 47. Carol Farley Kessler, “Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel ‘To Be of Use,’ ” Extrapolation, 28, 4 (1987): 311. 48. Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs, 13, 3 (Spring 1988): 417.

Chapter 7


1. The ta’wi¯ l referred to here appears to be one version of the ta’wi¯ l or method associated with a philosopher such as Ibn Rushd as noted in chapter 4. The ta’wi¯ l here is more closely associated with a method of running households which even while advocating parsimony encourages conformity with certain aesthetic norms. 2. María Rosa Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayussi (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 1992), 484. 3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 73.



Notes

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Notes

4. You may recall that a jāriya (pl. jawāri¯ ) was less a slave than a kind of indentured servant. According to Manuela Marín, Mujeres en Al-Ándalus (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), 636, the jawāri¯ (also called qiyān, qayna in the singular), were trained in music and poetry, and could be found only in the upper social circles where they constituted a sign of wealth and social position. Their function was to contribute to the sensual enjoyment of their patrons and their guests, in front of whom they sang, recited, or improvised poems. 5. Roger Boase, “Arab Inf luences on European Love Poetry,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayussi, 466. 6. Ibid. 7. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 495. 8. Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of Song: The Making of Courtly Culture in alAndalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D. (Leiden, Boston, and Koln: Brill, 2002). 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 276–277. 12. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. K.M. Newton (London: Macmillan, 1997), 120–121. 13. Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 93. 14. Ibid., 87. 15. María Rosa Menocal, in The Arabic Role in Medieval History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 27, notes that the taking of Barbastro constituted “one of the most famous and welldocumented examples of the taking of Arabic cultural ‘booty’ by southern French Christians. . . . [in this case] Guillaume de Montreuil in 1064, during which he is said to have taken a thousand slave girls, captured women, back to Provence.” 16. Briffault, The Troubadours, 53. 17. Ibid., 51. 18. Boase, “Arab Inf luences on European Love-Poetry,” 466. 19. Briffault, The Troubadours, 74. 20. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 496. 21. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936) on the Internet at http://grace. evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/storyteller.pdf, page 2, accessed on January 18, 2009. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 499. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 2. 25. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 87. 26. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 500. 27. Ibid., 486.



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28. Ibid., 499. 29. See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” in Public Culture, 1 (2000): 9. 30. See Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, Ch. 1. 31. Boase, “Arab Inf luences on European Love-Poetry,” 457. 32. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 101. 33. L.P. Harvey, “The Political, Social and Cultural History of the Moriscos,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 209. 34. Luce López-Baralt, “The Moriscos,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 472. 35. Harvey, “The Political, Social and Cultural History of the Moriscos,” 213. 36. Boase, “Arab Inf luences on European Love-Poetry,” 459. 37. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 493–494. 38. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 3. 39. Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval History, 105–106. 40. `See Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 42. 41. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 500. 42. Ibid., 498. 43. See Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 11. 44. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 139. 45. Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 34. 46. Boase, “Arab Inf luences on European Love Poetry,” 471. 47. See Kristeva, Desire in Language, 19. 48. In the original only one rhyme is used throughout. 49. Menocal, “Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,” 500. 50. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 121. 51. Ibid., 122. 52. Ibid., 123.



Notes




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Abrams, M. H., 114 adab (literature), 7, 22 Ahmed, Laila, 63, 70 Aisha Qandisha (myth of), 46 “Aisha Rmida,” 12 see also “Cinderella” “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” 11 Alcoff, Linda, 174 Alfonse, Piers (Petrus Alfonse), 23 al-H . ā’ik, 18 see also musicians, Andalusi ‘ālim (pl. ‘ulamā’-scholars), 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 62, 66, 133, 167, 194 see also ‘ulamā’ aljamía, 190–1 Alloula, Malek, 6, 81, 82, 86, 94, 96 Almond, The, 80, 82, 92–101 see also Nedjma al-Rashi¯d, Hārūn, 24, 206 al-Sayyida al-H.urra 21 Amazigh, 14, 215 n. 10 A Midsummer Night’s Dream see Shakespeare, William, plays of Anderson, Benedict, 220 n. 26 Antaeus, 42, 43, 51, 67, 101 Arabists, 27–28 architecture, Andalusi, 14, 19 Aristotelianism, 215 n. 9 Aristotle, 108, 109, 114, 187 arūsa(doll/bride), 212 n. 3 astrolabes, 22 As You Like It, see Shakespeare, William, plays of

Atwood, Margaret, 80, 84, 85 Austen, Jane, 118 Averroes, see Ibn Rushd “Averroes’ Search,”108 see also Borges, George Luis Bakhtin, Mikhail, 161, 188, 192 Barthes, Roland, 61, 183, 198, 210 Battersby, Christine, 167 Belyazid, Farida, 39, 43 see also Keid Ensa (Ruses de Femmes), the film Benaboud, Mhammad, 19, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 144, 186 Bennouna, Malek, 18, 88 Bettelheim, Bruno, 40 Beur writers, 92, 101 Bhabha, Homi, 86, 111, 122 Bhutto, Benazir, 1 blank, use of, in Shakespeare, 71 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of Bloody Chamber, The, see Carter, Angela Bloom, Harold, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 123, 124, 126, 166 Boase, Roger, 27, 28, 73, 75, 141, 179, 184, 190, 191, 196 Boccaccio, 115 book-burning, 21 Borges, George Luis, 108, 111, 114, 126, 127



Index

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Index

Boubakdi, Fatima Ali, 148 see also Douiba, the film Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab, 94, 139, 143, 144–5, 146, 158 Bowles, Paul, 42, 43, 97, 207 n. 22 Briffault, Robert, 67, 73, 75, 88, 126, 142, 143, 147, 184, 185 Brontë, Charlotte, 80, 84, 92 Brown, Duncan, 212 n. 4 calligraphers, 21 calligraphy, 58, 112, 116 Caraës and Fernandez, 41 Carroll, Lewis, 172 Carter, Angela, 40, 41, 61, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174. Bloody Chamber, The, 40, Passion of New Eve, The, 61, 168, 169, 173 Casey, Edward, 4, 5, 17 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 189 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 23, 89 Cheqara, Abdessadeq, 18 see also musicians, Andalusi Choukri, Mohammed, 42 Chraibi, Driss, 138, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 159 “Cinderella,” 11, 12 cinema, 44, 45, 46, 96, 148, 150, 151 see also films Cixous, Hélèn, 59, 63, 159, 209 n. 8 Classes, social, 16, 24, 58, 121, 133, 150, 187, 210 n. 9 Colonial Harem, The, 6, 81 see also Alloula, Malek colonialism, 6 comedy, 68, 108, 111, 114, 126, 127, 151 tragicomedy, 126 see also Shakespeare, William; romantic comedies of Conrad, Joseph, 85 consciousness-raising, 53, 143 Cooke, Miriam, 39, 43 Count Guilhem of Poitiers, 184

courtly art, feminine, 135, 139, 142, 180; feminine and popular, 140, 141, 181, 183, 190, 193 courtly culture, 136, 137, 138, 140, 181, 182, 186 Courtly Love tradition, 3, 22, 27, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 90, 92, 163, 184, 188, 190, 191, 201 n. 7 court of law, 138, 173 Cymbeline see Shakespeare, William, plays of Dante, Alighieri, 92, 111, 142, 143, 193, 215 n. 12 Daoud, Mohammad, 18 darija (dialectic Arabic), 8, 13, 16, 19, 26, 60, 64, 65, 147, 219 n. 1 see also mother tongue; vernacular Davila, Carl, 206 n. 80 d. aw el-h.ilqa (opening in the roof), 29, 30, 47 see also architecture, Andalusi Decameron, 115 Defoe, Daniel, 22 Dermenghem, E., 39 Dialmy, Abdessamad, 39, 45, 46, 208 n. 31 dialogic processes, 151, 161, 169, 183 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail discourse colonial, 43, 81, 117, 118 feminist, 82 humanist, 8 imperial, 7 Orientalist, 2, 53, 81, 115 patriarchal, 168, 171, 193 postcolonial, 43 Sufi, 158–9 Diski, Jenny, 168, 174 Dream Mistress,The, 61, 167, 170–71, 173 “Housewife,” 170 Doran, Madeleine, 68, 69, 72 Douiba, the film, 132–3, 148–51



236

drama, 27, 114, 126, 153 Greek, 127 Western, 72 dramatic irony, in Shakespeare, 72, 73 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of Dream Mistress,The see Diski, Jenny dual setting, 68, 70 écriture féminine, 59, 166, 194, 196, 209 n. 8 see also speaking the body; writing the body Edible Woman (The), 84 see Atwood, Margaret Elalamy, Youssef Amine, 147 el-Alaoui, Amina, 45 Eliot, George, 118 el-Kharraz, Mennana, 18 see musicians, Andalusi women El Koudia, Jilali, 215 n. 10 el-Mjahed, Alia, 19 see also musicians, Andalusi women El Saadawi, Nawal, 209 n. 5 El-Shamy, Hasan, 2, 13 erotica, French, 94, 95, 101 eroticism, 88 erotic, the, 27, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 163 Felman, Shoshana, 167 Female Man,The, 173 feminism, 7, 8, 53, 82, 98, 107, 178, 179, 182, 188, 197 Moroccan, 52 in tales, 8, 92, 178, 198 feminist(s) Christian, contemporary, 82, 98, 112 French, 59, 165, 196 Ibn Rushd as, 110 Islamic, 63, 65

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237

Jewish, 82 postcolonial, 6 Fez, 12, 14, 39, 57 Fiedler, Leslie, 9, 10 films (based on tales), 39, 43–46, 50, 132, 133, 148–51 see also Douiba; Keid Ensa folklore, 69, 114 Foucault, Michel, 59, 86 Gaonkar, Dilip, 161. ghayt. a (flute-like musical instrument), 134, 140 see also instruments, musical; musicians ghazal, 65 see also poetic forms ghouls (fem. ghoulas – ogres), 14, 215 n. 10 Gilbert and Gubar, 166, 167 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 173 Gnāwa- (sing. Gnāwi¯ - Moroccans of central African origin), 78, 79, 91, 195 go-between, 70, 78, 89, 133, 195 see also khat.t. āba Gothic, 165, 166 Grimm brothers, 11, 12, 44 Guilhem of Poitiers, see Count Guilhem of Poitiers Habermas, Jürgen, 160 Haddawy, Husain, 11 H.afs. a of Guadalajara, 7 h.ammām (bath), 57, 62, 208 n. 1 Harbage, Alfred, 68 harem, 9, 10, 17, 98, 100, 142 Hargreaves, Alec, 92 Hārūn al-Rashi¯d see al-Rashi¯d, Hārūn H . ayy ibn Yaqz. ān, 22 Heart of Darkness, 85 Hercules, 42, 43, 67 Herland, 173 h.ijāb, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 180, 18 see also veiling



Index

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Index

history, 1–6, 18, 27, 52, 71, 83, 108, 127, 164, 174, 189, 191, 198, 205 n. 70 Hollywood, 169 “Housewife,” see Diski, Jenny Huizinga, Johan, 69 Ibn Bat. ūt. a, 115, 116 Ibn H . azm, 22, 112, 120 Ibn Khaldun, 6 Ibn Quzmān, 147 Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 22, 23, 108, 109, 110, 111, 119, 121, 122, 219 n. 9, 221 n. 1 Ibn T.ufayl, 22 illiteracy, 15, 16, 22, 24, 91, 114, 143, 145, 148, 180, 209 n. 9 immigrants, 111 from al-Andalus to Fez, 14 from al-Andalus to Tetouan, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 203 n. 47 from the Maghreb to France, 80 improvisation, 26, 74, 89 Independent,The, on The Almond, 94 In Morocco, 81 Innocents Abroad (The), 42 Inquisition, 5, 6, 20, 21, 111, 181 instruments, musical, 24, 141, 216 n. 23 see also ghayt. a (flute-like musical instrument); ‘ūd (lute) ‘ ishq (passionate love), 196 “Jack and the Beanstalk,” 103, 107, 108, 113, 114, 115, 116–18, 127 Jacobus, Mary, 115 Jah.ā (trickster in some tales), 14 Jameson, Frederic, 12 Jane Eyre, 84 see also Brontë, Charlotte jāriya, 16, 21, 175–87, 205 n. 68, 222 n. 4 see also jawāri¯ jawāri¯ (sing. jāriya - kind of indentured servant),

compared to geisha girls, 179 as musicians, 21, 24, 119, 205 n. 69 as poets, 21, 26, 89, 137 possible impact on Troubadours of, 184 social status of, 21, 179, 205 n. 68, 222 n. 4 their quarters in court, 105–7 jbi¯ ra (setting of bones), 21, 204 n. 64 Kappeler, Susanne, 83, 87, 100. keid (ruse), 45, 208 n. 31 Keid Ensa (Ruses de Femmes), the film, 39–46 Kessler, Carol, 173 kharja, description of, 24 as exit from works of art, 88, 194–5 in relation to: muwashshah, 24, 140; popular style, 141; Shakespearean sonnets, 24, 90; tales, 25, 48, 65, 80, 88, 90, 194–5; zajal, 140 see also poetic forms kharja-style endings see tales, distinctive features of khat.t. āba, 17, 89, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 183 see also go-between khrā’ if ’ (sing. khrāfa) see khurāfāt khurāfāt (sing. khurāfāt – women’s tale), 13, 19, 114, 143, 207 n. 27 Kristeva, Julia, 59, 61, 63, 164, 195, 209 n. 7 Kundera, Milan, 202 n. 17 Kunnāsh al-H. ā’ik, 18 Lacan, Jacques, 41, 48, 50, 59, 87, 88, 157, 160, 209 n. 4, 219 n. 4 La Civilization ma Mere! . . . , 138, 143, 145–6 see also Chraibi, Driss Laroui, Abdellah, 19 L’enfant endormi, 99, 214 n. 42 Let It Come Down, 42–43



238

letter, use of, in Shakespeare, 71 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of Lieck, Romain, 93 L’Imaginaire Maghrébin, 143\ see also Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab literacy, 3, 5, 22, 23, 24, 44, 60, 64, 88, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147 compare orality “Little Red Riding Hood,” 11 Loomba, Ania, 10, 107 Lopez-Beralt, Luce, 88, 215 n. 9 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 39 Louis Philipe, 18 Lukili, Ahmed, 27 see also music, Andalusi lyrical form, 25, 147, 194, 195, 197 as opposed to mimetic content, 137, 185, 193 lyrical tradition, 27, 179, 180, 191 lyrics in dialogue form, 192 feminine and popular basis of, 140, 181, 182, 193 feminist dimension of, 193 as form of écriture féminine , 196 maktūb or muktāb (what is written or destined), 64 Marchand, G., 39 Marín, Manuela, 19, 205, 206, 218 n. 7 marriage contracts, 15, 138, 218 n. 7 Mathers, E. Powys, 39 Mcluhan, Marshall, 45, 148, 157 memory, 1–6, 9, 16, 17, 41, 99, 168 Menocal, María Rosa, 23, 48, 109, 115, 140, 141, 142, 143, 178, 180, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 198 Merchant of Venice, The, see Shakespeare, William, plays of, Mernissi, Fatima, 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, 27, 39, 63, 114, 158, 203 n. 33

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239

Met. mora (underground silo), see tales, distinctive features of Mhlophe, Gaina, 40 Milbank, Alison, 172 mimesis, 137 mimetic language, 122, 137, 185, 193 mirror(s) use of, by Carter in The Passion of New Eve, 168–70, 173 use of, by Diski in The Dream Mistress, 170–1, 173 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of mitqal (kind of money), 103, 104, 118, 214 n. 1 modernity, v. tradition, 93, 101 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 6, 7, 8, 82, 98 Monkey’s Uncle, 170 monogamy clause, 218 n. 7 see also marriage contracts Monroe, James, 109 Moors, 9–10, 184, 202 n. 29 Moriscos, 9, 20, 164, 185, 190, 191, 212 n. 4 mother tongue, 60, 133, 141, 142, 143 and Maghrebi male writers, 142–8 see also darija; vernacular Mrabet, Mohammed, 42 mt.arba (raised mattress serving as sofa), 130, 136, 217 n. 1 Mudejar, 19, 20 music, Andalusi, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 58, 119, 140, 180 musician(s) Andalusi women, 18, 24, 25, 164 ghayt. a player, 134, 140 gnāwa, 212 n. 1 jawāri¯, 21, 119, 180, 182 Jewish, 119, 120, 124, 217 n. 27 Muslim women, communities of, 3, 4, 5, 8, 16, 18, 52, 151 as educators and tutors, 66, 72, 112, 194



Index

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Index

Muslim women—Continued as harem-bound, 3, 21, 81 protagonists in tales: artistic, 135, 179, 181, 194, 196; centrality of, 11, 12, 72; as courtly lovers, 163, 191; eloquent, 2, 25, 26, 135, 213; individualized, 46, 72, 191; naming the self by, 77, 83, 86, 171; revelation of identity by, 25, 51, 52, 62, 70, 71, 74, 80, 87, 88, 90, 179, 192, 195; social class of, 16, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 158, 163, 165, 181, 186; as taking hold of the symbolic, 80, 84, 112, 133; wittiness of, 2, 12, 25, 26, 47, 48, 78, 79, 82, 88, 91, 113, 122; use of lyrics by, 17, 39, 45, 69, 123, 181, 184, 191–8; see also tales, distinctive features of muwashshah, 23, 24, 48 in relation to: Averroes, 109; kharja, 24, 48, 65; lyric poetry, 24, 58; the tales, 25; the Troubadours, 65; zajal, 9, 24–5 see also poetic myth of metals, 118–19, 121, 126 nāmūsi¯ ya (canopy bed), 212 n. 12. narrative(s), 2, 5, 9, 11, 16, 17, 41, 58, 59, 80, 167, 168, 172, 179, 187 feminist, 151 male, 60 oral, 22, 60, 89 palimpsestic, 41 patriarchal, 167, 172 precolonial, 8 women’s, 7, 8, 83, 113, 193, 198, 199 Nas.rid kingdom, 19 Nedjma, 80, 82, 86, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 212 n. 5, 214 n. 38 neo-Platonism, 215 n. 9 Nora, Pierre, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Norkunas, Martha, 2, 41

Oates, Joyce Carol, 40 One Thousand and One Nights (The), 11, 14, 203 n. 45 see also Scheherazade Ong, Walter, 12, 138, 141, 146 orality, 3, 5, 22, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 209 n. 9 see also oral tradition; oral tales compare literacy oral tales, 11, 13, 70, 122 oral tradition, 7, 12, 17, 28, 60, 141 Orlando, 169 Othello, see Shakespeare, William, plays of Ottoman Empire, 10, 17 oued (river), 80, 99 Paget, Violet, 74 Passion of New Eve, The, see Carter Angela performance, 5, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 123, 160 Perrault, Charles, 11–12, 41, 44 Petrarch, Francis, 67, 68, 92, 142, 143 Peyron, Michael, 215 n. 10 Philipe, Louis, 18 Piercy, Marge, 173 Plato, 109, 119, 120, 121, 126, 216 n. 26 see also myth of metals Platonic relationship, 163 poetic forms, 24, 27, 91 see also individual forms: ghazal; kharja; muwashshah; sonnet; zajal poetic ‘kinds’, 114 see also poetic forms Poetics, 108, 109, 114 see also Aristotle Polo, Marco, 115, 116 polygamy, 150 preservation of cultural heritage, 190–1 Priestly Tales, The, 23



240

Prouty, Charles T., 70, 74 puns, in Shakespeare, 70 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of qibla, 212 n. 2, 214 n. 38 qiyān (sing. qayna), 144, 179, 219 n. 22, 222 n. 4 see also jawāri¯ (sing. Jāriya) Quranic āya, 161 racism, 91 Republic, The, 119 see also Plato Reynolds, Dwight, 23, 24, 216 n. 22 rhyme, end, 88, 89, 116, 216 n. 22 as novelty for Europeans, 193 in lyrics, 17 patterns/schemes, 13, 26, 48, 70 Ribera y Taragó, Julián, 75 Robinson Crusoe, 22 Robinson, Cynthia, 136–7, 181–2 Romance, language, 189 theory, 27, 189 romance in tales, 27, 48, 197 rose petals, metaphoric use of see tales, distinctive features of Russ, Joanna, 173 Sage, Lorna, 169 Said, Edward W., 115, 117, 122 Sargent, Ralph M., 69 Sbai, Noufissa, 99, 214 n. 42 Scheherazade, 12, 23, 209 n. 5 see also One Thousand and One Nights (The) Shakespeare, William, 67–75, 92, 123–7, 195 Plays of: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 68, 69, 70, 72; As You Like It, 13, 60, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73; Cymbeline, 123, 124, 125; Othello,

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241

124;The Merchant of Venice, 125, 126, 139, 217 n. 27; The Winter’s Tale, 123, 124;Twelfth Night, 13, 60, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 89, 90, romantic comedies of, 68, 73, 123 sonnets of, 24, 67, 90, 195 Sheikh Nefzaoui, 6, 97, 99 silk, 20, 55, 220 n. 8 silk road, 115 silkworms, 20, 220 n. 8 Sismondi, J. C. L. Simonde de, 69, 75 “Sleeping Beauty” (The), 11, 80, 83–4, 90, 167 “Snow White,” 11, 169 sonnets, 24, 67, 90 final couplet of, 24, 90, 195 see also poetic forms; Shakespeare, William speaking the body, 59, 63, 145, 194 see also écriture feminine; writing the body spinners and storytellers, 70, 83, 112, 123, 134, 186, 194 spinster, 154 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty, 6, 7, 50, 178, 188, 210 n. 10, 216 n. 18 stereotypes, 40, 91, 194 dismantling of, 11, 52, 81–83, 86, 101; reinforcement of, 95–6` storytellers and spinners, see spinners and storytellers Sultane Mulay Abderrahmane, 18 taifa states (petty kingdoms), 108 and the tales, 17, 57, 181, 187 as centers of Andalusi culture, 26, 108–9, 111, 136–7, 143, 203 n. 47, Tetouan modeled on, 57 tales, collection of, 13–18 distinctive features of: blank page, 64; candy bride, 15–16, 79, 83, 8, 85, 87, 88, 172, 194; dishwashing, 159–60; dramatic irony, 63, 71,



Index

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Index

tales—Continued 72, 73, 183; kharja-style endings, 80, 88, 90, 194, 195; letter, use of, 62, 64, 65, 120; met. mora (underground silo), 34–39, 50–52, 133, 166, 174, 193; use of mirror(s), 33, 50, 172, 173; fountains as mirrors, 162, 168, 169; river as mirror, 160, 162, 168, 169, 171; puns, 65, 219 n. 1; rose petals, metaphoric use of, 135, 163; use of trunk, 15, 105, 107, 119, 124, 125, 132, 151 translation of, 8–13 see also Muslim women, protagonists in tales Tangier, 41, 42, 44, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 ta‘ri¯ ja (a form of embroidery), 55 ta’wi¯ l (method), 122, 176, 184, 186, 221 n. 1 T.awq al-h.amāma (The Ring of the Dove), 22 see also Ibn H{azm Taylor, Charles, 161 Taylor, Diana, 1, 5 Temsamani, Mohammed Ben Larbi, 18 Tetouan Andalusi legacy of, 17–20, 203 n. 47 27 in contrast to Casablanca, 132 cultural similarity to Fez of, 14 Jewish population of, 216 n. 27 medina of, 20 music of, 24–25, 26 rebuilding of, 14 slaves in, 15 tradition of oral narratives in, 2, 12–16, 20, 187 women of, 12, 21, 24, 57, 187, 220 n. 8 theater, 67, 68, 71, 108, 114, 121, 123, 126, 127 theorists Western, 158 women, 6, 8, 58, 165 Through the Looking-Glass, 169 see also Carroll, Lewis

Times, The, on The Almond, 94 Tiresias, 66 Tqarqi¯ b annāb (Chattering Teeth), 147 tradition, v. modernity, 44, 93, 101 tragedy, 108, 111, 114, 117, 126, 157, 163, 164, 174, 195, 217 n. 39 cathartic, 161, 164 tragicomedy, 126 compare comedy translation of Greek works into Arabic, 110, 121, and lyrics, 13, 26, 39, 88, 178, 206 n. 80, 206 n. 10 problems of, 8–13, 86 in relation to Paul Bowles, 42 as representation, 84, 85 in relation to Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 108 of tales, 2, 9, 12, 13, 39, 178 Troubadours, 27, 65, 74, 75, 89, 92, 126, 141, 142, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188 trunk, use of, in Shakespeare, 124–5 in tales, see tales, distinctive features of Tuan, Yi-Fu, 41 Twain, Mark, 42 Twelfth Night, see Shakespeare, William, plays of ‘ūd (lute), 177, 183 see also musical instruments ‘ulamā’ (sing.‘ālim), 58, 60, 63, 71, 178 see also ‘ālim Urvoy, Dominique, 109 veiling, 73, 96, 158 see also h.ijāb vernacular in relation to, Andalusi poetry, 24, 88, 140 being uncultured, 180 film adaptations, 148, 149 the illiterate, 91, 209–10 n. 9 Maghrebi male writers, 141–8 Petrarch and Dante, 92, 111 Shakespeare, 123



242

the Troubadours, 27, 92 women storytellers, 16, 26, 60 see also darija, mother tongue Walker, Nancy, 44 Wallāda, H afsa bint al-H ājj, 7, 23, 137, 205 n. 74 Wharton, Edith, 81 Williams, Anne, 165–6 Winter’s Tale, The see Shakespeare, William Wollstonecraft, Mary, 110, 166 Woman at the Edge of Time, 173 women writers, 7, 53, 80, 92, 165, 166, 167, 172, 173 Anglo-American, 84, 165 Beur, 92, 101 contemporary, 52, 58, 60, 80, 81, 85, 157, 167, 173 English, 58, 166 European, 92, 166 Moroccan, 92, 102, 147

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243

postcolonial, 92 and storytellers, 58, 84–5, 157, 172, 173, 174 Woolf, Virginia, 169 Wright, Owen, 24, 205 n. 78 writing the body, 63, 194 see also écriture feminine; speaking the body Zahirites, 122 zajal, denigration of, 143, 144 as lyrical poetry, 24, 89, 91, 92 in medieval song tradition, 23, 24, 25 origins of, 24 in relation to: Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 109, kharja, 24; muwashshah, 24–5; rhyme, 70, 88; the Troubadours, 65, 126 written forms of, 147 see also poetic forms Ziryāb, 24, 164, 187, 205–6 n. 78



Index

Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives

Feminist imagination: genealogies in feminist theory

Narratives in Psychiatry

Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives

Traditions of the Arapaho (Sources of American Indian Oral Literature)

Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

Oral History in Punjabi

Feminist Dilemmas In Fieldwork

Time in Feminist Phenomenology

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

Traditions in World Cinema

Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History

Analytic Narratives

Clinical Research in Oral Health

Remembering : Oral History Performance (Palgrave Studies in Oral History)

Analytic Narratives

The Gospel in Christian Traditions

Cirugía Oral

Oral Surgery

Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

Feminist Methods in Social Research

New Traditions

Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies: Feminist Review Issue 54 (Feminist Review)

Oral Expressions

Oral Pathology

Philosophy in a Feminist Voice

The Gospel in Christian Traditions

Microbiología oral

Feminist Traditions in Andalusi-Moroccan Oral Narratives

Feminist imagination: genealogies in feminist theory

Narratives in Psychiatry

Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives

Traditions of the Arapaho (Sources of American Indian Oral Literature)

Inconstant Companions: Archaeology and North American Indian Oral Traditions

Oral History in Punjabi

Feminist Dilemmas In Fieldwork

Time in Feminist Phenomenology

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

Traditions in World Cinema

Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History

Analytic Narratives

Clinical Research in Oral Health

Remembering : Oral History Performance (Palgrave Studies in Oral History)

Analytic Narratives

The Gospel in Christian Traditions

Cirugía Oral

Oral Surgery

Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

Feminist Methods in Social Research

New Traditions

Contesting Feminist Orthodoxies: Feminist Review Issue 54 (Feminist Review)

Oral Expressions

Oral Pathology

Philosophy in a Feminist Voice

The Gospel in Christian Traditions

Microbiología oral

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