As Le Monde reports today, sixty to seventy people from Subsaharian Africa tried to cross the border between Morocco and the Spanish city of Melilla, one of the Southern entries to Europe. RNE, the Spanish public radio station, reported that several security agents were “slightly blessed”, as well as that immigrants were “armed” with stones and sticks.
It is always healthy to keep in mind that, at the end of the day, all those directives and laws, all those prejudices reproduced in street conversations, materialize in pure physicial violence. Not that symbolic violence is not relevant, not at all… But at the end, if we are brave enough to look down to the borders -all of them-, we will find actual blows and shots. The definition of who is a human, or who is entitled to rights -which is built up not only by governments or mass media, but also by all of us- has actual consequences in terms of livability for other humans. Let’s do not hide that.
Here comes a fragment from Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatima Mernissi. I use to come back to this reading when I feel anxious about borders and their violence.
MY HAREM FRONTIERS
I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth-century Moroccan city some five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women, when the hudud, or sacred frontier, is not respected. I was born in the midst of chaos, since neither Christians nor women respected the frontiers. Right on our thereshold, you could see women of the harem contesting and fighthing with Ahmed the doorkeeper as the foreign armies of the North kept arriving all over the city. In fact, foreigners were standing right at the end of our street, which lay just between the old city and the Ville Nouvelle, a new city that they were building for themselves. When Allah created the Earth, said Father, he separated men from women, and put a sea between Muslims and Christians for a reason. Harmony exists when each group respects the prescribed limits of the other: trespassing leads only to sorrow and unhappiness. But women dreamed of trespassing all the time. The world beyond the gate was their obsession. They fantasized all they long about parading in unfamiliar streets, while the Christians kept crossing the sea, bringing death and chaos.
Trouble and cold winds come from the North, and we turn to the East to pray. Mecca is far. Your prayers might reach it if you know how to concentrate. I was to be taught how to concentrate when the time was appropriate. Madrid’s soldiers had camped north of Fez, and even Uncle ‘Ali and Father, who were so powerful in the city and ordered around everyone in the house, had to ask permission from Madrid to attend Moulay Abdesslam’s religious festival near Tangier, three hundred kilometers away. But the soldiers who stood outside our door were French, and of another tribe. They were Christians like the Spaniards, but they spoke another language and lived farther north. Paris was their capital. Cousin Samir said that Paris was probably two thousand kilometers away, twice as far away from us as Madrid, and twice as ferocious. Christians, just like Muslims, fight each other all the time, and the Spanish and the French allmost killed one another when they crossed our frontier. Then, when neither was able to exterminate the other, they decided to cut Morocco in half. They put soldiers near ‘Arbaoua and said from now on, to go north, you needed a pass because you were crossing into Spanish Morocco. To go south, you needed another pass, because you were crossing into French Morocco. If you did not go along with what they said, you got stuck at ‘Arbaoua, an arbitrary spot where they built a huge gate and said it was a frontier. But Morocco, said Father, had existed undivided for centuries, even before Islam came along fourteen hundred years ago. No one ever had heard of a frontier splitting the land in two before. The frontier was an invisible line in the mind of warriors.
Cousin Samir, who sometimes accompanied Uncle and Father on their trips, said that to create a frontier, all you need is soldiers to force others to believe in it. In the landscape itself, nothing changes. The frontier is in the mind of the powerful. I could not go and see this for myself because Uncle and Father said that a girl does not travel. Travel is dangerous and women can’t defend themselves. Aunt Habiba, who had been cast off and sent away suddenly for no reason by a husband she loved dearly, said that Allah had sent the Northern armies to Morocco to punish the men for violating the hudud protecting women. When you hurt a woman, you are violating Allah’s sacred frontier. It is unlawful to hurt the weak. She cried for years.
Education is to know the hudud, the sacred frontiers, said Lalla Tam, the headmistress at the Koranic school where I was sent at age three to join my ten cousins. My teacher had a long, menacing whip, and I totally agreed with her about everything: the frontier, the Christians, education. To be a Muslim was to respect the hudud. And for a child, to respect the hudud was to obey. I wanted badly to please Lalla Tam, but once out of her earshot, I asked Cousin Malika, who was two years older than I, if she could show me where the hudud actually was located. She answered that all she knew for sure was that everything would work out fine if I obeyed the teacher. The hudud was whatever the teacher forbade. My cousin’s words helped my relax and start enjoying school.
But since then, looking for the frontier has become my life’s occupation. Anxiety eats me whenever I cannot situate the geometric line organizing my powerlessness.
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