Tales of Benshasha
Created | Updated Nov 5, 2008
If they had a beautiful wife, other men would look at her and want her.
Male Jealousy
For all my years in Arab countries, I have never been able to really understand the male attitude towards women and the insane jealousy they have over them. Benshasha gave me the chance to gain a little first-hand insight, for all the good it has done me.
Hamid, (not me, but one of Fatima's 'complicated' cousins), has four daughters and two sons. The eldest two, Najiah (17) and Fatima (14), are both lovely, but totally different as (it later transpired), they are actually only half-sisters for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here. Fatima is drop-dead gorgeous and, by local standards, of a perfectly marriageable age. Though quite plain, when compared to her sister, Najiah is also lovely. Both girls dress in tight jeans and skimpy tee shirts and both are very flirtatious, as attractive young ladies of that age are wont to be. Their presence certainly brightened up the otherwise squalid surroundings of my building site and I, for one, had no objections to their being around 'helping'.
In October - 'Wingnut' - a neighbour and distant relative, had some of his even more distant relations staying, amongst whom was a teenage youth. The lad stood out from the rest of the similarly aged slubberdegullions, by dint of the fact that he was the proud owner of a new Peugeot moped. This was, and still is, a veritable status symbol in Benshasha, like having an MGB was in my youth. Quite understandably, the young man had the 'hots' for young Najiah (even though he younger sister was far prettier) and, also perfectly understandably, the feelings were quite obviously reciprocated. As Wingnut's house was just next to ours and which was then a building site, it was possible to watch the courtship without being in the slightest bit nosy.
The romance started innocently enough. In order to dump the morning's bucket of family waste in the wadi, the young maiden had to pass the beau's temporary abode. This was a very necessary, if not exactly the most romantically aromatic task, and certainly not within the EU's guidelines for the disposal of human excrement. However, as if by some sixth sense, but probably just a good sense of smell, the lad knew exactly what time she would pass by and would materialise, as if by magic, just as she passed the door.
At first coy smiles were exchanged, which developed into a few words until, within two weeks, she would stop and chat - albeit from a demure distance. It was not long before this developed to the point where she would find any excuse to be around and the best excuse for this was for her to help Fatima (my Fatima, not her sister) load up the barrowette with stone for my work, and thus it was that I got to see rather more of both girls than I would otherwise have done.
During these trysts Najiah had the wariness of a browsing leveret and even the slightest hint of her father's approaching tricycle would send her scurrying off round the other side of Wingnut's house whence she would eventually arrive home from the opposite direction.
If her younger (but eldest), brother approached, she would just stop talking and get on with 'working' and he would shout at her and throw stones at her boyfriend. However, when anybody else, male or female, family or friend came by, she took not the slightest notice, not even when it was her mother.
This I found more than a little curious until I questioned Fatima about it. At first, she didn't want to say anything and tried to change the subject but I pressed her and eventually managed to get the reluctant response, Nobody, (but nobody) say nothing to Hamid.
Why? I asked, to which she replied:
Maybe them want talk one lady.
And therein lies the answer to an awful lot of unanswered questions about the Arab way of life. Nobody trusts anybody at all. Your best friend will not tell you that your daughter has just been raped because the chances are that either he did it, or he is jealous because he didn't, and anyway, you might have been looking at his daughter, so it serves you right. The whole thing festers on an incredible mixture of mistrust and jealousy that totally defies logic and beggars belief. Not even the likes of holier-than-thou Ibrahim would say anything, and for exactly the same reasons.
The other aspect of it is, that whatever happens, it is all the girl's fault and however much we argued I could not get Fatima to see that this is in any way odd. The boy, somehow, is behaving perfectly properly but the girl is doing something which will elicit a sound thrashing from her father at best and death in more extreme (but not that rare) cases, and this behaviour is also, somehow, entirely proper.
It was similar when Ayanne got over-excited by young ladies's presence in the spring. At that time he was making a vague attempt to 'help' - sorting out the usable stone and grading the rest. I am afraid that I got more than a little irritated when he would just drop everything and go charging off in pursuit of a girl - ANY girl - in a manner not that far removed from the way in which the male donkeys were behaving, although, it has to be said, his penis was not dragging along the ground underneath him and - as far as I am aware - he did not forcibly rape any of the girls.
The only reaction I got to an irate, where the f§§k's he gone to now? was a giggle and maybe him want talk one girl as though it was perfectly all right.
However, after one of these chases I got to hear that the girl in question had been beaten black and blue by her father. Why, I asked do you not say anything to Ayanne? It's his fault, not hers. No response.
Ayanne is male and thereby can do no wrong. The girl is wrong even if she says and does nothing at all. Wrong for what? Just being there. The poor girl is wrong for walking along a road where a man is standing idly, doing nothing. If she were 'decent' she would turn round and go somewhere else, and the very act of walking past a man is construed as her making herself available and tempting the man.
None of this makes it any easier to like or respect Benshasha men and when - as they frequently do - they turn round and profess to behave thus at the behest of their prophet, I just about give up.
One of the saddest aspects of this is the disastrous effect it has on what the women end up looking like. I am not alone in thinking that Morocco has considerably more than its fair share of very beautiful young women. Benshasha is no exception and when I look at all the girls - just in my immediate (Moroccan) family - it makes a pretty impressive collection by any standards. But these beautiful girl vanish - virtually all of them - and if you look at all the women, in the same family, over the age of twenty-five - they are horrible, with the notable exception of the few that have managed to avoid marriage altogether. It is a remarkable and terribly sad transformation and not entirely due to poor living conditions and having a baby at least once a year.
Quite naturally, most of the young men grow up wanting to marry the most beautiful lady possible. Most of them do and I would be lying if I said that thoughts of 'you lucky bastard' had not gone through my mind on several occasions when attending family weddings. The girls, done up for their wedding really are stunning.
But, having got married to their beautiful brides, the grooms' priorities change drastically. Although they want a beautiful bride and are - quite obviously - incredibly proud (on the day), the very last thing they want is a really beautiful wife. The reason for this is simple. If they had a beautiful wife, other men would look at her and want her. Therefore, having the beautiful lady is for the wedding day only and thereafter she best be as ugly as sin. The really insane part of it is, that the moment that they are married, the stupid idiots set about making them exactly that.
It is a myth - a complete myth - to think that the average Arab covers his women so that he only can feast his eyes on their beauty privately. He doesn't even do that, for the simple and insane reason that were he to do so, he would be thinking that other men would want to as well and that would spoil his pleasure. Better that he looks at a toothless, fat old harridan who nobody would want to see and then you don't have to be jealous of anything. In fact, it's better still not even to look at her at all, but spend all your waking hours talking with your male friends. In this way you make sure that they are not looking at your women, and you only sleep with your wife in the safety of total darkness behind locked, barred and bolted doors.
Aicha, Fatna's daughter, is a rare exception. She has a beautiful face and is still more than a little attractive in a misshapen sort of way, having suffered four children and the rigours of being a Benshasha housewife for nine years, none of which exactly concurs with Jane Fonda's video about 'how to keep in good shape in middle age'. Miloud, her husband is a cut above the average for Benshasha in that he actually works (as a HGV driver) and is positively liberal in his attitude towards women - to the extent that he has two wives! He allows both of them 'out' as far as their household duties will permit and it is one of the very few houses where I don't feel slightly awkward sitting with the women. But even Miloud has his limitations.
It happened, one day, that Aicha and Fatima had 'hamam' together, the result of which Fatima, with both a professional and maternal instinct, was horrified about the state of Aicha's hair which is (apparently) long enough for her to sit on. As it is, it is permanently 'done up' in a scarf with the result that it is in a terrible state and has a multitude of thing both living in and growing on it, which should not really be there. Fatima assumed, to begin with, that Aicha kept her hair long because her husband liked it like that. Oh no, she said, he hasn't seen it since the day we got married. Which just about sums up marital bliss for the average Benshasha male.
Thus it is that female fashion and beauty are for women only. As the men never see them when dressed up - other than for a very brief part of the wedding ceremony, their choice of clothes, make up and the like are for their eyes only and thus there is nothing in the dresses to flatter or accentuate the female form or heighten men's idea of feminine beauty. The whole charade is geared towards the best way to display embroidery and thus the larger and more rotund the figure, the more you can display. Anorexia nervosa is therefore not a problem here.
Fatima is about the only woman - certainly the only one of her age - to ignore and break all the 'male rules'. Other than for weddings and formal occasions she dresses in western clothes and refuses to cover her head. She is quite happy to walk around the village in shorts and a tee shirt and for the six months that we were building the house dressed in very little else. This was unheard of in any such Moroccan village. Other than if going to the beach, shorts - even for teenage girls, let alone a fifty-something year old woman - are not on.
But the most curious aspect of it is that Fatima gets away with it and, as far as I know, has never been openly criticised nor had pressure put on her to change her ways. Fatima is 'Nana' and Nana does whatsoever she wants, and if that includes sitting with a group of men and drinking beer, there is nobody with the nerve or the authority to tell her not to.
