Les Femmes du Maroc establishes more overt references to Orientalism than Converging Territories. Displaying the same subdued palette, focus on veiling and women, and metatextual calligraphy, its images exhibit a more painterly composition and the favorite orientalist fantasies of the odalisque and the harem. The series probes, in Essaydi’s nuanced manner, the West’s problematic exoticization and reductive sexualization of Muslim women. Les Femmes du Maroc unpacks the fiction surrounding life in the harem; its women, clothed and engaged in domestic activities, radically contrast with the lustful universe conjured up, for example, by the octogenarian Ingres in his famous orientalist painting, The Turkish Bath (1862). Essaydi’s counterview emanates from the artist’s own recollections of living in the female quarters of a traditional Muslim home: “My home life was domestic, full of children running through the halls, and moms attending to housework.” Some works in Les Femmes du Maroc reenact and thus reinterpret orientalist “masterpieces” like La Grande Odalisque (1814). By appropriating orientalist iconography, Lalla Essaydi lays bare its voyeuristic nature. However, the appropriation also reclaims it as
part of her own cultural memory, not only because minoritized subjects internalize stereotypes as w. E. B. du Bois rightly recognized over a hundred years ago
in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but also because orientalist painting captured authentic facets of Islamic culture such as the ornamental artistry of its architecture, ceramics, and textiles. Orientalist art, therefore, constitutes a double signifier for Essaydi.
Mirroring her own bicultural vision, it allows her to comment, as both insider and outsider, on Middle Eastern and Western cultures and traditions.