The back cover of Rêves, the French translation, starts by quoting the incipit “Je suis née en 1940

dans un
harem à Fè s” (‘I was born in 1940 in a harem in Fez’) and describes the narrative as a series of childhood
tales. This emphasis on the autobiographical quality of the narrative is then countered by a series of
questions concerning whether some of the characters of the book are real or fictitious: “Habiba, …est-elle
réelle ou fictive?” (‘Is Habiba real or fictitious?’). The only answer given is that the author herself is not sure.
However, the autobiographical aspect of the text is reinforced by an endorsement from the prestigious
French daily Le Monde that praises the authentic quality of the text: “cette enfance sensuelle et ludique est
plus vraie que nature” (‘this sensual and playful childhood is truer than life’) …Compared to the English text,
the French version has been expanded… The most significant addition is a footnote (note three, chapter
three) that contradicts the autobiographical pact established by the English version and the main text …in
Rêves, Mernissi hovers between confessing her inventions and calling them involuntary. It is only once the
reader is engaged in the narrative that the illusion of authenticity is dispelled, though not unequivocally, and
this revelation is relegated to the paratext at the back of the book in a footnote to chapter three, which
needs to be quoted at length:
“This version of the facts surrounding the demand for independence is not historical, one can guess;
it’s the version of my mother, who is a fictional character, just as the child who speaks, and who is
supposed to be me. If I had tried to tell you my childhood, you wouldn’t have finished the first two
paragraphs, because my childhood was dull and prodigiously boring. As this book is not an
autobiography, but a fiction that presents itself as tales told by a seven-year-old child, the version of
the facts about January 1944 told here is the one that was in my memories. Memories of what
illiterate women told each other in the courtyard and on the terraces. To complicate things, one
should remember that the version I presented coincided with a literary packaging I needed to seduce
my reader.”
~ Carine Bourget, “Complicity with Orientalism in Third-World Women's Writing: Fatima Mernissi's Fictive Memoirs,” Research
in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 30-49
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“What inspired my dreams as a child were the stories grandmothers and aunts told us and the magic birds
artisans embedded in their crafts, starting with Chinese ceramics. And it is this fantasy-fueled childhood I
tried to capture in my only fiction book "Dreams of Trespass". … But the passage from Mas'udi (a 10th
century Arab historian who was born in Baghdad in AD 896 who travelled to China) which enchanted me as a
child, and encouraged me to pay attention to tiny details, was where a hunchback noticed a defect in a
painting of a bird exhibited at palace which brought the king of China to dismiss the artist as mediocre: "One
day, a man presented a piece of silk with a sparrow perched on a branch which was so perfect that the
spectator took it for real. This masterpiece was exhibited for a long time. One day a hunchback noticed a
defect and started criticizing it." And when he was invited by the king to explain his criticism, his answer was
simple: "Everyone knows that when a sparrow falls on a branch, it forces it to bend. And the artist did not
reflect this in his painting." And that is how the perceptive hunchback brought the clumsy artist to lose his
chance of getting the king's prize! Decades later, when I decided to write "Dreams of Trespass", I decided to
avoid at any cost the fate of the distracted Chinese artist who forgot to reflect reality as accurately as
possible in his fiction: his invented piece. However, I have to confess that I did introduce one major change in
my childhood reality to create a more enchanting fiction in this book: my mother is very nice in "Dreams of
Trespass"! I decided to delete her ferocious dimension. In real life, my mother insulted me often and spent
her time criticizing me. Exactly like your mother did in Shanghai or wherever you happen to be born. And I
think that my decision to tamper with reality and forget about violence to focus solely on the nurturing
dimension of the mother is the source of all enchantments: it highlights our vulnerable side. And vulnerability
is what this book is about. And I guess this is why it has been translated into 30 languages: vulnerability is our
universal bond. The universal bond, which will bring us all, hopefully, to engineer a more secure globalized
planet than the one we live on now.
~ Fatema Mernissi, “Why was China an enchanted land in my childhood?”, Introduction to the Chinese edition of
Dreams of Trespass, (2007) http://www.mernissi.net/books/articles/china.html