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Mother and her henna vs scientific men and laboratories, 1-0
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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
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