policing brother: each as moral watchdog partakes of a world of male domination bordering upon absurdity, a world violent and tyrannical. This tyrannical world manifests itself most forcibly in the following statement:Le « censeur » qui pouvait être un parent, ou même un inconnu était gardien de l’ordre social et un farouche défenseur des valeurs répressives 20. All women writers are now beginning to number and name the oppression they have suffered. One by one are the oppressors hauled out into the light of day. And the name women writers most frequently answer to is Man, and more particularly traditionally minded men. The man, the male, the important person, “the only person who matters”. This sentence is taken straight from the pages of any of the feminist works. Women writers’ work is informed by the terrific, almost lurid passion for stating the case of women. The majority of women live on that shabby fringe of society where the need for money, for release, for some assertion of the self as a necessity to survival leads to several kinds of financial and social offences and hence into conflict with the organised sections of the community. Women writers describe a society in which honour relations prevail with a great deal of clarity. In their books the transgression of boundaries often results in acts of brutality and violence. No matter how hard women work on their relations to society and to its major thematic preoccupations, sooner or later they necessarily return to the question of virginity. The theme has received attention from many of this period’s most distinctive women writers; it is, of course, hardly new. The concept of honour is indeed built around women’s virginity. Books about the importance of women’s virginity before marriage in the Arab world are not lacking. N. Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve is case in point 21. Muslim women according to the ideal model are expected to abstain from any kind of sexual practice before marriage. The wedding night is a turning point in a woman’s life, since it is that crucial time when society is about to make a judgment on her propriety The discourse on gender and the discourse on virginity in Moroccan culture are hardly distinguishable. To be brought up as a woman, to be a Moroccan woman, is to a great extent to be a virgin. To be a Moroccan woman means that the performance of femaleness is inseparable from the performance of virginity This, indeed, is what distinguishes the female body from the male one since the latter does not have any mark of virginity. The idea is that men are not virgins in the biological sense (men do not have a hymen »), but in the cultural sense. Again and again we see how Moroccan culture has no way of marking the male body as virginal. It is impossible to list the daily activities and practices that are described as essential for the construction of the Virgin/female body in Moroccan culture. The reader is informed that women find themselves at odds with a society that constructs them as women and as virgins. The rationale behind these prohibitive demands is not only the preservation of physical virginity, the physical attachment of virginity to the body, but also the public effect of virginity. As a
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TouriaHadraoui, une Enfance Marocaine, Editions le Fennec, p. 74. Nawal.Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve, Boston: Beacon, 1981.
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