Last night, I finished reading Fatema Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood about a girl growing up in a conservative 1940’s Fessi family at the time of the Moroccan nationalist movement and social change.
In one of the latter chapters, entitled “American Cigarrettes”, the girl describes the arrival of American troops with fascination. For the young Moroccan girl, it was hard to fully comprehend why Christians of different nations were at each others’ throats. Why did the Allemanes hate people with dark hair, and who were their Christian cousins that arrived by sea from the west? “The French and the Spanish were rather small and had black mustaches, while Americans were very tall with devilish blue eyes.”
The Americans arrived with Operation Torch handing out chewing gum, cigarrettes, and chasing all of the women. And so it was that the American occupation was much friendlier than that of the French and Spanish. As a matter of fact, there was a local folk singer, Hussein Slaoui, who sang “Al-‘Ain az-zarga jana b-kul khir”, meaning “the blue-eyed guys brought all kinds of blessing”. Continue reading
Grave Error 