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Mounia Belafia discusses role of proverbs in perpetuating women's status in Morocco

07/03/2008

Writer and journalist Mounia Belafia spoke with Magharebia recently about her new book, "Women in Moroccan Proverbs". Belafia suggests that everyday phrases contribute to negative attitudes towards women.

Text and photos by Farah Kenani for Magharebia in Washington – 07/03/2008

Mounia Belafia, author of "Women in Moroccan Proverbs", says many commonly-used proverbs espouse negative opinions of women.

In the lead-up to the March 7th-8th Women's Book Fair in Fez, Magharebia spoke with Mounia Belafia about her new book "Women in Moroccan Proverbs". An expert in public perceptions and gender studies, the writer and journalist said that proverbs – even those used and created by women – reinforce popularly held negative perceptions about women and their role in society.

Magharebia: What prompted you to research the field of popular proverbs and their relation to women?

Mounia Belafia: My book was based on a conviction that the in-depth changes we desire for women's status in Morocco can't be achieved if we don't work on changing mindsets. A working woman would soon find herself no more than a housewife facing relatives that haven't necessarily witnessed the same development as the rest of society.

Based on that, I think we should work more profoundly in order to change mindsets and to achieve equality, not only on economic, political and other issues, but also in the patterns of behaviour that shape our conditions and influence our daily lives.

From this came the project of studying images of women and their relation to all types of discourse. I became interested in the topic at the media level, and I'm now preparing a study on women and theatre as part of my post-graduate studies.

The topic of popular proverbs, however, has intrigued me in a special way. I spent a lot of time studying it before I came to the conclusion that these popular proverbs, which are used by many of us in conscious or unconscious ways, embody many negative values regarding women. These negative values are passed from one generation to the next, and are reproduced in different ways. Popular proverbs and pop culture as a whole play a role in establishing and preserving traditions. This makes them act like established, deeply-rooted structures that are difficult to uproot.

Magharebia: Do you think that some women play a role in perpetuating the ideas contained in these proverbs?

Belafia: I was also concerned with the role women played in promoting offensive images of themselves. In my study, I posed the question of whether women used proverbs in their daily lives. The answer was yes. I posed another question, about whether they themselves were producing proverbs, and the answer was also yes.

Women are both consumers and producers of proverbs. Based on that, they are contributing, either consciously or unconsciously, to the dissemination of negative and offensive ideas about themselves.

In analyzing the body of these proverbs, we find ourselves faced with women who play a role in preserving traditions and passing them on accurately and honestly. A woman will replicate with her daughter-in-law what her mother-in-law did when she was young, in order to ensure that her son lives the same way his father did. The bride in turn hates the mother-in-law. Other differences within the community of women present an image of turbulence which resides in and engulfs that society.

Belafia's new book, "Women in Moroccan Proverbs", is based on the author's conviction that change in women's status in Morocco "can't be achieved if we don't work on changing mindsets."

Magharebia: What is the purpose of your study?

Belafia: My goal in this study was to attempt to transform the popular proverb from a product of its characteristics and status in society, outside the sphere of accountability and criticism, and from a product upon which society has imparted a type of sanctity, into a cultural product that is linked to social structure, justifications of behaviour patterns and existing hierarchal relations. In this way, we can approach the product in a critical way. We can read it based on a methodology of accountability that deals with it as a cultural product which perpetuates many social concepts and values and reproduces them in similar fashion to the way poems and wisdom are reproduced.

One of the conclusions of the study was that stereotypes about women are consistently repeated. These images take the typical form drawn by the type of thinking prevalent in the society. This "typical form" is dominated by negative images of women derived from a traditional culture that works to perpetuate women's inferior status in the social hierarchy. They are also derived from certain interpretations of religious thinking and from a special construction of tales and superstitions whose common divider justifies the inferior standing of women in the social hierarchy and in the predominant values surrounding them.

Even when a woman is mentioned in a positive way, we rarely find any other positive qualities except those that are related to her body and her "natural roles". Her standing is derived from her body, beauty, ability to give birth, care for her family and children, and skill in manual and domestic work.

Magharebia: As readers, what can we learn from this study? What are the points that must be dealt with?

Belafia: We can say that there are three major issues that can be presented through our study of prevailing popular proverbs about women. The first issue is that the proverbs produced by men and women alike reflect the balance of power within society. In this society, women are considered the weaker link, and they tend to be dominated by a masculine culture. Men are the stronger party, and everything revolves around them. Within this gender hierarchy of men and women there is another social hierarchy where the rich prevail over the poor, the strong over the weak, the master over the slave, the fertile over the infertile, the married over the divorced and widowed, and other steps on the ladder of prevailing social values.

The second issue is that no society can be studied based on its social and class relations alone. The prevailing culture must be taken into consideration. More importantly, my study of proverbs shows the extent of the role culture plays in preserving tradition. This brings us to a deep dilemma linked to the role of culture as a comprehensive anthropological concept in influencing social shifts.

The third issue is that pop culture often conforms to popular religious thinking in such a manner that it becomes difficult to discern between social cultural products, such as proverbs, and religious beliefs as understood by the public. As an expressive structure, the proverb is similar to wisdom. As we have shown in this study, the proverb, with its different time and place changes, is no more than a cultural product related to a certain historical situation with its own conditions and determining factors.