“Mina said that you always had a choice, when stuck in a pit, between pleasing the monster by looking down and screaming, or surprising him by looking up. If you wanted to please him, you looked down, and thought about all the snakes and other cold, slow-moving creatures crawling around on top of each other down there and waiting to get ahold of you. If, on the other hand, you wished to astonish the monster, you fixed your eyes high on that little drop of sky and avoided uttering a sound. Then, the torturer who was watching you from above would see your eyes and get scared. “He’ll think you are either a djinni, or two little stars twinkling in the dark.” The idea of Mina, the tiny Mina, that scared little thing, lost in the sand with strangers, transforming herself into two twinkling stars, was an idea that I never forgot. It was a vision which haunted me then and still haunts me today, and every time I manage to find the silence required to visualize it, energy and hope spring from within.”
— Fatima Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood