[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_71

The Harem within, Fatema Mernissi, 1994

“Pessimism is the luxury of the powerful.”

This is the phrase said by Aunt Habiba, one of the female characters in "The Harem Within." The book tells the experience inside a Harem from the point of view of the person who lived this experience: the Moroccan writer and anthropologist Fatema Mernissi.

My great-grandmother said something similar, even though she was Italian and didn't grow up in a Harem; she used to say, " Pessimism is a luxury for men." It's not much different, considering that power is usually in their hands.

For her, optimism was not a choice or an attitude linked to one's character; it was the only way to survive. A woman's life was not life; it was a load of work and humiliations that had to be carried out with effort, self-sacrifice, and dignity because "you have responsibilities," as she used to say, "You have to think about your children."

For peasant Italian women of the first half of the twentieth century, poor, illiterate, and inspired and oppressed by Catholicism, surviving meant inventing a reason to get out of bed, building a narrative around their lives that they could believe in to move forward.

“Men get paid for their work, go where they want and no one tells them anything. They go to the bar to drink and play cards; they go to the streets to talk about politics, travel, and give orders... What do they know about the hell that we women live in? Yet they are pessimistic," she used to say, "and do you know why? Because they have more time to think. Women don't have this luxury because we don't have time to sleep. And luckily, we don't have it. Otherwise, we would understand how miserable our lives are; if we understood it, the world would stop!"

My great-grandmother has always been a voice out of the crowd. She was the only one to have had only two children when the average for women of her social status was ten; having only two children meant having opposed her husband and denied him the sex he was entitled to. Unheard of for the time.

My great-grandmother was also the only woman in the family who could read; no one ever understood how she learned, and this mystery increased her aura of power and danger. A woman who could read in a context where almost all men used an “X” to sign was dangerous because she understood more than men and could question their authority.

My great-grandmother was also the first woman to sit at the table to eat. In the rural areas of Northern Italy until the first post-war period, families were extended, everyone lived in the same farmhouse (parents, children, grandparents, uncles, cousins), and women did not sit down to eat at the table with the men. Still, they ate standing or sitting on the stairs with their young children after serving the men. One day, my great-grandmother, against the rule, sat at the table because she couldn't eat soup while holding her newborn son in her lap. Without looking at her, her brother-in-law said, “I don't want females at the table.” According to the story, the brother-in-law repeated the phrase twice, resulting in my great-grandmother eating the soup undisturbed and sitting comfortably at the table. On the third time, he received the chair on his head. My great-grandmother smashed it on him, sending him to hospital with a head injury and a three-day prognosis. From that time, all the house's women sat at the table to eat meals. And this story remained on the lips of the whole village for generations.

From the stories I received from my aunts and grandmothers, the peasant life that they lived until the early 60s was not very distant from the life lived by Mernissi in the same period inside the Harem: there was the same sense of female community and opposition of the sexes. The same sense of mutual solidarity alternated with hierarchical respect between the different generations of women who lived together. The same feelings of anger, rivalry, and misunderstanding of those who are forced to share the same space without being able to escape and to respect the same rules without understanding them, but there were also the same feelings of altruism, admiration, and mutual respect typical of those who share the same fate and try to help each other. Even the women of my family could not move from the house without being accompanied by men, nor could the girls leave it if they did not get married first. And when they got married, they left their home-work only to move into another. Even for the women of my family, religion represented both a clock and a compass simultaneously: it marked the week's routine, guiding choices and thoughts.

Mernissi's voice is a loving and proud song to Morocco, Islam, and the women of her land; it is the song of a Sharazade. But it is also a sharp and biting glance at a West that too quickly speaks of oppression and backwardness, looking at the Muslim world as a large uniform block that represents its nemesis. Or who just as quickly idealizes it, populating the Harems of his voyeuristic imagination with passive and half-dressed women.