Moorish Harem and the Tropology of the Veil

• Lahoucine Aammari ^[1]
  1. [1] Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University

     Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University

     Fes-Medina, Marruecos

     
• Localización: Hesperis Tamuda, ISSN 0018-1005, Nº. 58, 1, 2023, págs. 211-226
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • One of the significant aims of Orientalists/(would-be) colonialists is the desire to reveal the curtain and enter the “inner space” of the Moorish harem. For British travel writers, the most prominent of whom are Lawrence Harris, Walter Burton Harris, Budgett Meakin, Robert Spence Watson, and Frances Macnab, Moorish women, who are usually trammeled by the iconography of the veil, are to be “civilized” by being undressed (unveiled); they need emancipation, civilization, and freedom. In this article, I shall argue that these writers deploy some discursive poetics and politics of representation to cope with Moorish women’s veil as an opaque curtain that conceals, covers, hides, or disguises the unfamiliar and the unknown. If Moorish women are hiding behind or wearing masks, then there must be something hidden behind this mask that the travel writer aspires to discern. For these writers, Moorish women are individuals who display dissimulation and dissemblance, that is why it is so difficult to understand them and get inside their heads. These writers cannot ignore that they are being looked at as they attempt to unveil the other to satisfy their voyeuristic pleasure and thus fail to fantasize themselves as full subjects. The article also demonstrates that it is the veil which enables the Moorish women to look without being seen. Not only does the veil perturb the desire of the Western/colonial subject to fix cultural and sexual difference, but it also enables the Moorish other to turn itself into a surveillant gaze.