Female spaces, cross-cultural encounters, Elizabeth Fernea and the Moroccan experience

Elizabeth W. Fernea (1927–2008) left an impressive body of writing on Arab social structures and cultural practices. Her studies involve a fascinating amalgam of biographical narrative and shrewd ethnographic observations. This paper focuses on her experience in Morocco as reflected in A Street in Marrakech (1975). The salient quality of Fernea's writings on Morocco is her sensitive and highly complex construction of Moroccan female identity not so much as a fixed and pure category perceived as alien and irreconcilable with ‘Western values’, as a nebulous entity always in the making. Fernea's term ‘encounter’ is symbolic of this phenomenon. While writing about Moroccans she demonstrates a high degree of awareness of her problematic position as a foreign scholar. In her lived experience as in her writing she assumes the posture of a curious subject who resists the lure of Manichean divisions of Self and Other, and shuns the ideological rhetoric in which these fixed and disparate identities are often couched. While she perceives her encounter with Moroccans as a form of contestation and discovery, she ultimately appeals to an all-encompassing, humanistic vision that transcends spatial and ethnic divisions. The subjective quality which dominates her writing and her distinct interest in female subjects emanates from the conviction that knowledge and understanding of foreign cultures comes at best through a considerable degree of sympathy and deep, personal involvement.