Grammars of Disguised, Multiple, and Missing Critique in Dreams of Trespass and Tomorrow We’ll Get Our Land Back

This article extends critical analysis of Fatima Mernissi’s 1995 semiautobiographical Dreams of Trespass to Fatima al-Rawi’s 1967 novel, Tomorrow We’ll Get Our Land Back (Ghadan tatabadal al-ʾard), which shares with Dreams the trope of Moroccan women imprisoned by patriarchal power and cooperating through storytelling. Both narratives reflect their own forms of “multiple critique.” Tomorrow confronts the exploitation of the working class in postcolonial Morocco but does so in a way that disguises a frontal challenge to the masculinist context of the 1960s and the undemocratic postcolonial state. Examining Tomorrow through a gendered lens opens up a new perspective on Dreams. The harem imprisonment of the Mernissi women marks the family’s vast wealth and class privilege, which are not meaningfully addressed in Dreams. The liberation of young, privileged women in both works depends on the imprisonment of slaves and servants, whose conditions are only partly considered in Dreams and not at all addressed in Tomorrow.