Mother and her henna vs scientific men and laboratories, 1-0
Posted by Catherine Cartwright Jones on November 10, 1999 at 03:21:53:
Fatima Mernissi wrote "Dreams of Trespass, Tales of a Harem Girlhood"
published by Addison-Wesley Publishing company, 1995. She has written
several wonderful books, and this is a wonderful read! It begins,
"I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco..." Grab this one
and curl up with it!!!
Quoting from this book, chapter 22. "Henna, Clay and Men's Stares"
"Father hated the smell of henna, and the stink of the argan and olive
oil treatments that Mother used to fortify her hair. He always looked
ill-at-ease on Thursday mornings when Mother put on her horrible,
previously green but now dirty grey quais (an ancient gift from Lalla
Mani's pilgrimage to Mecca, which had taken place before my birth) and
started running around with henna on her hair and a
chick-pea-and-melon mask smeared on her face from one ear to the
other. Her hip-long hair, moinstened with henna paste and then
braided and pinned to the top of her head, looked like an impressive
helmet. Mother was wholeheartedly of the school that the uglier you
made yourself before the hammam, the more beautiful you came out
afterwords, and she invested an incredible amount of energy in
transforming herself, so much that my little sister would fail to
recognize her through her masks and shriek whenever she approached.
"Already on late Wednesday afternoons father would start looking
gloomy. "Douja, I love you as natural as God made you", he would say.
"You needn't go through all this trouble to please me. I am happy
with you as you are, in spite of your quick temper. I swear, with God
as my witness, that I am a happy man. So, please, why don't you
forget about the henna tomorrow." But Mother's answer was always the
same. "Sidi (my lord), the woman you love is not natural at all! I
have been using henna since I was three. And I need to go through
this process for psychological reasons too - it makes me feel reborn.
Besides, my skin and hair are silkier afterwards. You can't deny
that, can you?"
"So, on Thursdays, Father would sneak out of the house as early as he
could. .....
"At the beginning of their marriage, Father had tried to keep Mother
away from traditional beauty treatments by getting her to use the
French beauty products which took much less time to prepare and had
immediate results. Beauty products were the only area in which Father
favored the modern over the traditional. After long conversations
with Cousin Zin, who translated the beauty ads in the French newspaper
and magazines for him, he made a long list. Then they went shopping
in the Ville Nouvelle, coming back with a big bagful of beautiful
packages, all wrapped in cellophane and tied with colorful silk
ribbons. Father asked Ain to sit down in our salon while Mother
opened the padkages, in case she needed help understanding the French
directions, and looked on with a great deal of interest as she
carefully opened each item. It was evident that he had spent a
fortune. Some packages were hair dyes, others, shampoos, and there
were three kinds of creams for both the face and the hair, not to
mention perfume in jewel-like bottles. Father especially disliked the
musk fragrance that Mother insisted on putting on her hair, and so he
eagerly helped her open the bottle of Chanel No 5, swearing that "It
has all the flowers in it that you like the best." Mother looked at
everything with a lot of curiosity, made some inquiries about their
composition, and asked Zin to translate the instructions. Finally she
turned to Father and asked him a question he did not expect. "Who
made these products?" He then made the fatal mistake of telling her
that they had made by scientific men in clinical laboratories. Upon
hearing that, she picked up the perfume, and threw everything else
- Re:dreams of trespass Natasha Paposusek 14:23:25 11/10/99
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- Re: Mother and her henna vs scientific men and laboratories, 1-0 Kenzi 03:38:23 11/10/99
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