Sex and the Citadel by Shereen El Feki

Author:Shereen El Feki [Feki, Shereen El]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90743-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

GOING SOLO

It doesn’t have to be this way. Faiza, a young woman I met in Morocco, is living proof that things can be different for unmarried mothers. Our paths crossed in Casablanca, where I fetched up after almost two years on the road. I had been shuttling across the Arab region with a giant duffel full of books and papers picked up along the way, and had the aching shoulders to prove it. When I reached Morocco, I took myself off to a hammam, that apex of Orientalist fantasy, for a little relief. The idea of so much naked female flesh, bathed, buffed, and perfumed, has famously turned on generations of Western authors and artists. I, however, was more interested in finding an osteopath than an odalisque, unless she also happened to be a qualified masseuse. What I really needed was someone who could turn my lumpen muscles back into long, sinuous fibers, from the anatomical equivalent of basbousa, a dense semolina cake my grandmother used to make, into golden strands of kunafa, another of her syrupy specialties. I was in luck, and after an hour’s massage, restored to far better form.

A few weeks later, I returned to talk with Faiza, who was working on the till. She’s in her early twenties, and a real head-turner: feline green eyes in a pale, heart-shaped face, set against a tumble of coppery curls. Her rare beauty comes from her unusual origins; she’s amazigh, or Berber, one of Morocco’s indigenous population. Faiza is bubbly and talkative, no more so than when she’s describing her son: “We fell in love with the first contact.… You know, my baby, we speak with the eyes.” She told me about the delivery—sixteen hours of undiluted pain, she said. Then she added, “I am a virgin. I have two papers [medical certificates] to prove my virginity.”

Welcome to the modern Middle East, where, two millennia on, virgin births are still a fact of life. Faiza’s announcement was not just a piece of wishful thinking. She met the father of her son, a man twenty years her senior, while he was working for a water company connecting houses to the main in her small town in the south. They were introduced through a mutual acquaintance: “I always thought of him as a friend. But one day he invited me [to where he was staying]; he said he was sick. [I said] I will go and see him, he’s alone there. I went, then he asked me to sleep with him. I said yes, but only [come] between my legs.”

A month later, Faiza missed her period, but thought little of it. Two more months and her mother—alarmed at her daughter’s dizziness, sleepiness, and headaches—sent her to a doctor in Agadir, 250 kilometers away. “The doctor told me I was pregnant. I didn’t believe it. I cried a lot; I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “It was the first time I was pregnant, so he thought I would want an abortion, because he saw me crying.

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