Ructions in the Seraglio

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

• The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi
  Doubleday, 254 pp, £16.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 385 40542 1
• Ramza by Out el Kouloub, translated by Nayra Atiya
  Syracuse, 201 pp, £13.50, July 1994, ISBN 0 8156 0280 4

In a little-known film of 1985 called Harem, a yuppie female stockbroker (Natassja Kinski) is drugged and kidnapped on the streets of New York, only to wake up in the harem of an enigmatic oil tycoon (Ben Kingsley) in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Given its wildly implausible plot and clumsy editing – not to mention Kinski’s permanently drugged performance – the movie more than deserves its present obscurity. But as a testament to the shifting status of the harem in the Western imagination, this particular work of fantasy has much to recommend it. Harem begins with a shameless exploitation of all the old clichés of the menacing and lustful East, from the smoothly sinister black eunuch who welcomes the heroine to captivity to the impassive and vaguely threatening faces of the other women, their exotic caged birds serving as familiar symbols of their confinement. Yet even as Kinski wanders the maze-like corridors and anticipates her rape by the unknown despot who has abducted her, both heroine and audience come to realise that this place has little in common with the erotic prison they have anticipated.