Houses, Households, and Harems: Reflecting on Morocco

Walking through the narrow alleyways in the old part of Moroccan cities, the medina, what dominates are the high walls around you, except in the marketplaces, with their tiny shops, shallow stalls shelved from floor to ceiling with goods. What is behind the walls? Author and scholar Fatima Mernissi describes her house in Fez, in the 1940’s:

“First, there was the square and rigid courtyard, where symmetry ruled everything. Even the white marble fountain, forever bubbling in the courtyard center, seemed controlled and tamed. (…) Then, facing one another in pairs, across the courtyard, were four huge salons. Each salon had a gigantic gate in the middle, flanked by enormous windows, opening onto the courtyard. In the early morning, and in the winter, the salon gates would be shut tight with cedarwood doors carved with flowers. In the summer, the doors would be opened and drapes of heavy brocade, velvet and lace let down, so breezes could flow in while light and noise were kept away.” (p. 4)

Our group’s entree into old Morocco was in a building like this, which houses the Centre for Cross-Cultural Living (CCCL) in the medina in Rabat. Their three-story building is roofed, unlike Mernissi’s home, so that the weather does not intrude, allowing the participants in its short- and long-term programs to use the “courtyard” space for large-group meetings and meals. The salons in CCCL had become offices and smaller meeting rooms. Narrow staircases in several corners took us to those upper-level rooms, many opening to the balconies on each floor, overlooking the first floor below. It is an architecture we saw repeated in more public buildings in several Moroccan cities and one familiar to visitors of (Al-) Andalusia in Spain, and even in monasteries in the Balkans I had seen.

In our second night in Morocco, when we ate with different families in the medina, Wendy Brandon and I entered our hosts’ house through the courtyard, this one opening up to the stars, and followed the corner stairs up, and up, to a cozy apartment and its long kitchen and eating area. I could see that its dimensions mirrored those of the salons-cum-offices in the CCCL. The next day as our whole group toured the same courtyard, we saw that there was also an adjacent riad, another square-walled structure of gardens. The former Sultan’s house in Rabat was similar, but much more sumptuous of course.

What I didn’t quite understand until revisiting this type of house in Mernissi’s book was that it allowed for an extended family to pool their resources, to live together (a patriarch, his sons and their families) instead of each son’s family going off to live on their own.

And of course, these walled houses could enforce the other aspect of traditional life in Morocco, and perhaps in most Islamic countries: that of keeping the women secluded. Often these women’s only view of the sky would have been from their courtyard, or occasionally from the roof of the building, when they went to hang up the laundry. With walls surrounding the house, and windows opening up only to the courtyard, what happened within the family stayed in the house. Still today, walls keep out those who should not enter, and back then, kept in those (women and girls) who should not leave. And those who stayed inside then had to make much of what they were allowed. Mernissi’s creativity as an adult was no doubt fueled by the stories she heard from her aunts and mother, and by the appreciation the older women showed when the little cousins would perform plays of their own making. As the title of Mernissi’s book implies (Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood), girls and women longed for the freedom to leave these walls, and since she wrote of life under French colonial rule, freedom from those uniformed foreign soldiers who kept watch at various corners of the medina and beyond.

On our study tour, we must have passed by people who still live in these houses, in extended families. Our hostess for that evening meal, on her third floor apartment in her family’s house, worked with the sub-Saharan refugees in Rabat. Her husband is a teacher. She wears a hijab, a scarf, but is not secluded by the standards of sixty years ago or more. Now I wonder what aspects of her life are similar to her mother’s or grandmother’s? How many meals do the various family units share? Is childcare a family enterprise? How much of every nuclear family’s income is pooled for the larger, extended family? And what of those who live in the Ville Nouvelle, in apartment buildings? What aspects of shared life with close relatives do they still enjoy?

I also realized on this trip just how much we learn in layers, that finding a truer meaning is like peeling an onion, that there’s always more to it. So my understanding of the word harem is now more elaborated. Mernissi speaks of her traditional upbringing as in a domestic harem: Extended families, sharing most activities (meals especially), but very often without polygamy. Quite bourgeois, she says. In contrast, what I had understood the word harem to mean was what obsessed the Western imagination for centuries: the imperial harems, of the Ottoman Turks among others, with hundreds of slave girls.

Now I’m contemplating this domestic harem, especially the extended family part. When did we in the U.S. stop living with our parents? Or near them? I grew up with two grandmothers living in my house, and that was already rare in the late 60’s. My children did not, my parents not wanting to impose on their children what had been forced on them. Both sets of grandparents lived 1,000 miles away, until they moved south near the end of their lives. Our long-distance relationship was also a product partly of social class, of educated children following their careers.

We learned that Moroccans have been crossing the Strait of Gibraltar (from the Arabic Jebel Tariq, meaning Mountain of Tariq) for a millennium and a half, first to conquer the Iberian Peninsula and then rule there for 700 years. And for the last fifty years perhaps, to find work in the harvests, since both Morocco and Spain have thriving citrus groves and truck farms. And not only migrant agricultural workers: many of Morocco’s educated elite understand as we do in the U.S., that in a globalized economy, their economic well-being demands that they travel once more across the Strait, to the European Union, or to follow the trail of so many others in these last 500 years, from Europe and the countries bordering the Mediterranean to the now somewhat different “New World” of North America.

- Susie Robertshaw, Thomas P. Johnson Student Resource Center, Rollins College