Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women's Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP) 1789620228, 9781789620221

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Note on Translations
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts in Context
Part I: The Ethics and Politics of Moroccan Women’s Gendered Shahada
1. The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings
2. (Re)writing the Woman Resister: Violence, Gender, and Legitimacy in Fatna El Bouih’s and Malika Oufkir's Testimonies
3. Speaking for the Voiceless: Political and Ethical Considerations of Moroccan Women’s ‘Collective Testimonial Self'
Part II: Trans-Acting Moroccan Identity and Femininity: Auto/Biography, Testimony, and Subjectivity in the Transglobal Age
4. Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women
5. Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery: Remembering, Reframing, Disfiguring, and Embellishing the Past
6. Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings: Contemporary Discourses of Contestation in Naïma Zitan’s Play Dialy and
Fedwa Misk’s Webzine Qandisha
Conclusion: The Future of Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biography and Testimony
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Revisionary Narratives Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 64

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board

TOM CONLEY Harvard University

JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

DEREK SCHILLING Johns Hopkins University

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary

57 Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque

51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel

58 John Patrick Walsh, Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017

52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod, Locating Guyane 54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017 55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean 56 Julia Waters, The Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging

59 Ari J.  Blatt and Edward J. Welch, France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture 60 Nicholas Harrison, Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education 61 Joshua Armstrong, Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel 62 Thomas Baldwin, Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations 63 Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction

NA Ï M A H AC H A D

Revisionary Narratives Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts Revisionary Narratives

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2019 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2019 Naïma Hachad The right of Naïma Hachad to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-022-1 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-438-0 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

To Papa, Maman and Anouar, Zachariah, Miriam Safia

Contents Contents

Note on Translations ix List of Figures x Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts in Context

1

Part I  The Ethics and Politics of Moroccan Women’s Gendered Shahada 1 The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings

27

2 (Re)writing the Woman Resister: Violence, Gender, and Legitimacy in Fatna El Bouih’s and Malika Oufkir’s Testimonies 60 3 Speaking for the Voiceless: Political and Ethical Considerations of Moroccan Women’s ‘Collective Testimonial Self’

90

Part II  Trans-Acting Moroccan Identity and Femininity: Auto/Biography, Testimony, and Subjectivity in the Transglobal Age 4 Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women

123

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5 Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery: Remembering, Reframing, Disfiguring, and Embellishing the Past

159

6 Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings: Contemporary Discourses of Contestation in Naïma Zitan’s Play Dialy and Fedwa Misk’s Webzine Qandisha 192 Conclusion: The Future of Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biography and Testimony

225

Bibliography 237 Index

253

Note on Translations Note on Translations

A lot of Revisionary Narratives is about translation and transmission. Offering Anglophone readers analyses of salient exemplars of Moroccan women’s auto/biographical and testimonial works meant providing them with translations of critical primary and secondary material only available in Arabic, Moroccan colloquial Darija, and French. Unless otherwise stated, all translations of primary and secondary sources are my own, including my conversations with the various artists and social actors whose work I discuss.

Figures Illustrations



1 Lalla Essaydi, Les Femmes du Maroc #1 124 2 Lalla Essaydi, Harem #1 140 3 Lalla Essaydi, Harem #16 141 4 Carolle Bénitah, La cicatrice 160 5 Carolle Bénitah, Chez le photographe 173 6 Carolle Bénitah, Le loup 176 7 Carolle Bénitah, Le déguisement 181

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

This book was five years in the making and was nourished by many discussions and projects in the United States, France, and Morocco. Thus, numerous are the people who contributed to making my initial ideas into thought-provoking analyses of testimonial and auto/biographical cultural production by Moroccan women. While it is impossible to appropriately thank everyone, some exceptional contributions must be recognized: All the artists and social actors who accepted to spend time with me, discuss their works and experiences, helped me obtain the important information and material I needed for the book, and allowed me to use examples of their works as illustrations. The talent, passion, creativity, and resilience of Lalla Essaydi, Carolle Bénitah, Naïma Zitan (and the entire Théâtre Aquarium team), Fedwa Misk, and Fatna El Bouih contributed to the successful outcome of Revisionary Narratives. I would also like to thank, my mentor and dear friend, Valérie Loichot. As is the case for many of my projects, this one was inspirited by an exhibit brochure she shared with me. Many years later, her astute comments helped me finalize the chapters and the book’s structure. No words can express how grateful I am for all Valérie has done for me. Brahim El Guabli for taking the time to read the manuscript and generously share with me his extensive knowledge of Moroccan testimonial literature. Touria Khannous for her critical feedback on Part I. Friends and colleagues at American University. During the five years it took to complete the book, I was fortunate to be surrounded by a supportive community. I am tremendously indebted to Naomi S. Baron, Nurìa Vilanova, and Brenda Werth for reading chapters and drafts of proposals and for providing constant advice for the various perspectives of this transdisciplinary project. Participating as a member

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of the Humanities Lab Transnational Humans/Transnationalism in the Humanities gave me the opportunity to test, enrich, and calibrate my research on globalization, transnationalism, and translocality. I am also indebted to other members of the group including Max Paul Friedman, Jeffrey Middents, Ludy Grandas, and others already mentioned above for providing me with a stimulating atmosphere to discuss my research and present some of my chapters. I am also thankful to the Dean of Academic Affairs, Mary Clark, for organizing a symposium on Critical Race, Gender, Class Theory and inviting me to share my research with a group of enthusiastic and supportive scholars. I am particularly thankful to Amy Oliver, Jayesh Rathod, and Malini Ranganathan for their careful reading of my chapters and their invaluable feedback. I am also grateful to Lisa Leff for her friendship and for being a wonderful mentor. My thanks also go to Chip Gerfen for his support as Chair of World Languages and Cultures. Valérie K. Orlando. Academic projects are always inspired by previous and ongoing ones. Mine would not have been possible without her pioneering, thoughtful, and thorough research in Moroccan literature and cinema. Her numerous books and articles have enriched every step of my research and provided me with a role model to look up to. I am tremendously grateful to her for shaping the field and showing so many of us the way forward. I am also indebted to Susan Slyomovics for her research in testimonial literature and human rights discourse. Liverpool University Press and their collaborators. I would like to thank everyone for a smooth and timely process, particularly Chloe Johnson and Sarah Warren. Geoffrey Bennington, Philippe Bonnefis, Cathy Caruth, Elissa Marder, Dalia Judovitz, Claire Nouvet, Deepika Bahri, and Jacob Vance for the unparalleled intellectual environment they fostered at Emory University. Even if this book was conceived and written post-graduation, I would not have been able to complete it without the exceptional education and support I received from them as a graduate student. I also thank Christiane Chaulet-Achour for being part of this education from afar and for sharing with me her expertise in Maghrebi Francophone literature. Molly Slavin for her smart edits. My family. My deepest gratitude to my parents for their love and for broadening my horizons and teaching me that everything is possible. In the five years it took to complete this book, I gave birth to my children Zachariah and Miriam Safia. I thank them for being wonderful

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companions and for their hugs, kisses, and happy babbling. I am grateful to my husband Anouar and the unwavering support he provided throughout the process. To all the great Moroccan women who shaped my life—my grandmothers, my mother, my mother-in-law, and my sisters—I am indebted.

Introduction Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts in Context Introduction

Marking Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Literature as a Field of Inquiry in Postcolonial and Transnational Studies Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts and contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women’s engagement with patriarchal and (neo-)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal, and translocal perspectives. The primary purpose of this project is to mark auto/biography and testimony as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women’s

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postcolonial cultural productions. The book builds on innovative explorations of recent developments of autobiographical discourse originating from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) which demonstrate that the expression of identity, self, selfhood, and subjectivity in contemporary autobiographical production offers important and personalized insights into the recent major sociocultural and political transformations in the region. The book further underlines the importance of Moroccan women’s auto/biography and testimony to postcolonial and feminist studies within and beyond MENA sociocultural zones. It departs from previous studies that have traditionally analyzed Moroccan women’s cultural productions within categories determined by language, media, and discipline, or within national boundaries. Instead, it emulates Moroccan women’s practices and looks in multiple directions to examine the intersections between auto/biography, testimony, and gender. In particular, it brings into focus the construction of collective and individual subjects in the making, inflected by gender, spatial, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, ideological, socioeconomic, and religious differences. The analyses of exemplars of women’s auto/biographies and testimonies underscore how women mobilize their plural affiliations to disrupt traditional legal and sociocultural definitions of testimony and gender roles while simultaneously revising canonical literary definitions of autobiography and articulations of selfhood that marginalize the experience of women and other minoritized categories.1 The structure of the book corresponds to two needs: first, to revisit, complete, and revise research on testimonial literature produced during the Years of Lead (1961–1999)2 and the ‘era of the witness’ that followed and which began in 1999;3 second, to explore media and material that have been overlooked previously and, in so doing, uncover formal and thematic genealogies that differ from those found in studies that privilege fiction, autobiographical fiction, and cinema. This dual approach brings into focus two phenomena that have profoundly shaped women’s auto/ biography: the experience and the memorialization of political violence, and the prominence of the image and the concurrent resurgence of documentary art and social activism in the global digital age of the new millennium. The proliferation of testimonials written following King Hassan II’s death and the official end of the Years of Lead in 1999 contributed to the visibility of auto/biographical content, styles, and structures that undermine notions of honor and shame as they relate to inflexible gender roles and divisions between private and public spheres. Political

Introduction

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prisoners and former political prisoners Saïda Menebhi, Fatna El Bouih, and Malika Oufkir became prominent authors of life narratives that relate their and other women’s stories of state-sponsored gendered and sexualized violence, as well as political resistance. Though their writings have no legal status as official testimonies, by offering eyewitness accounts of the Years of Lead to Moroccan and international publics, Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir challenge legal and religious interpretations of shahada (testimony) that limit women’s capacity to testify. Their revisions of the conventions of shahada undermine other norms that limit women’s speech and influence in public matters. Their actual and narrative transgressions challenge the foundations of Moroccan patriarchal society by integrating aesthetics of everyday life practices, valorizing orality, creating plural narrative voices and sites, and forming narrative and ideological connections beyond the local and the national. The close reading of gendered narrative devices in testimonies by Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir and a transdisciplinary approach to the intersection of gender, testimony, and sociopolitical resistance establishes Menebhi not only as an exemplary political resister, but also as an exemplary narrator. Menebhi’s writings represent an important model for the construction of a feminine Moroccan testimonial voice and a feminist aesthetics. The book also provides a comparative study between El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s testimonies. Representing the most well-distributed and influential testimonies by women during the Years of Lead, the two memoirs have generally been read separately because of their authors’ socioeconomic and political backgrounds. While El Bouih is one of a very small group of women who were targeted by the regime for their direct involvement in leftist opposition movements, Oufkir was sent to various secret detention camps with her mother and siblings for twenty years in retaliation against her father’s alleged involvement in the 1972 coup attempt to overthrow the monarchy. Reading the two documents side by side, I broaden the understanding of gendered violence and post-detention testimonial production’s role in generating an important feminist discourse in the era of transition out of authoritarianism. I also show that excluding Oufkir from studies on women’s literature of resistance participates in the hierarchizing of victims and ignoring of the patriarchal foundations of women’s punishment during the Years of Lead. Finally, including alternative and previously overlooked oral testimonies by anonymous women from different socioeconomic backgrounds, transcribed in Arabic and in French, I contribute to broadening the understanding of the intersection of sociopolitical violence and gender,

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especially in regard to the reiteration of hierarchies based on class, ethnicity, education level, and geographical location. My analysis of these documents contextualizes and complicates the idea of speaking for the voiceless in single- or multi-authored testimonies, a common and often unproblematized assumption in the criticism of testimonies by renowned victims of state-sponsored violence such as Menebhi and El Bouih. Behind the conceptualization of this book is the goal to show that Morocco’s ‘era of the witness’ exceeds the memorialization of the Years of Lead. Women’s use of auto/biography and testimony to challenge patriarchy, authoritarianism, and (neo-)imperialism have spread to virtually all forms of cultural expression originating from Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora. The works used as case studies in the second part of this book exemplify how women’s cultural production in the twenty-first century blurs the frontiers between auto/biography, art, testimony, documentary, and political discourse to allow for the emergence of new ideals of womanhood, as well as new models of narrative and sociopolitical resistance. Women’s auto/biographical acts are not merely structured by the different modalities in which they represent actual events and experience, but also by the different media they use to transform them. The different chapters of the book discuss the various ways in which subjectivity is constructed through and mediated by writing, photography, body tattoos, embroidery, orality, performance, and digital media. For instance, Naïma Zitan’s play Dialy (2012) (‘mine’ or ‘my vagina’), based on interviews and workshops, brings to the stage Moroccan women’s conversations about their bodies and sexualities, which have been traditionally circumscribed to private and domestic spaces. The analysis of the play’s subject matter and its reception highlights the processes of transforming biographical content into performance and private discourse into public discourse, as well as these discussions’ impacts on the perception of gender and women’s issues. Part Two also looks at the contexts, power relations, and negotiations that animate gendered subjectivity and identity revisions and formations in transnational, exilic, and virtual spaces. Using the work of MoroccanAmerican visual artist Lalla Essaydi as an example, particularly her use of Orientalism and photography, the book problematizes the appropriation of dominant discourses in the age of global cultural production and consumption. By analyzing neo-Orientalism in contemporary art by women originating from the so-called ‘Orient,’ Revisionary Narratives articulates a transcultural space of innovation that disrupts traditional understandings of space and gender as they pertain to the binary East/

Introduction

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West delimitation. At the same time, the book also addresses the limitations Moroccan women face and the fact that, often, they find themselves in a position where in order to get through to a transnational audience, they must at least partly reiterate imperial and stereotypical discourses. Similar issues are raised with Zitan’s attempt to appropriate and localize Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996). The analysis of the online magazine Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazine, founded in 2011, also explores the possibilities and the limits of the internet as a tool to disrupt power relations shaped by gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, language, and sexual orientation. With the inclusion of Essaydi and French-Moroccan and Jewish multimedia artist Carolle Bénitah’s work, the book confirms Brinda Mehta’s convincing affirmation that spaces of diaspora and displacement are sites of knowledge production in the North African context.4 Auto/ biographies in diverse languages and media by women who live and work both in Morocco and in the Moroccan diaspora allow for the exploration of gender and women’s issues in Morocco as well as in transnational and transcultural spaces. For instance, the analysis of Bénitah’s photobiographies addresses the intersection between acts of memorializing displacement and reworking definitions of femininity, masculinity, and modesty. Bénitah’s work illuminates the patriarchal socialization of Moroccan women from different religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds while also articulating a translocal feminist discourse that extends beyond national and cultural boundaries. To account for the various connections deployed in women’s auto/ biographical and testimonial acts, the book incorporates descriptive tools, analytical perspectives, and methodologies that have redefined literary and cultural studies in recent years. Paul Jay’s meticulous approaches to globalization in Global Matters: The Transnational Turn and Literary Studies (2010) and the way in which his examination of globalizing processes contextualizes and reinvigorates postcolonial studies inform the methodology of Revisionary Narratives. The analyses of women’s auto/biographical and testimonial acts work similarly to Jay’s analyses of contemporary novels in English in that both underscore how engagements with contemporary forms of globalization are connected to the exploration of the ongoing effects of colonialism. The study of transnational historical forces at work in postcolonial writings thus opens up new possibilities for the understanding and the conceptualization of difference, while still accounting for imperialism, colonialism, and decolonization. Jay’s insights and methodology help uncover how

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Moroccan women’s auto/biography and testimony, through their styles, narrative strategies, aesthetics, and sociopolitical messages, transcend national categories and paradigms. For instance, engagement with socialism, universal and transnational ideals of women’s rights, and Moroccan sociopolitical patriarchal norms and practices in Menebhi’s and El Bouih’s prison narratives in French and Arabic highlights subjectivity formations that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders and which complicate the distinction between the postcolonial and globalization perspectives. Revisionary Narratives underscores the difficulty of constructing the local, translocal, transnational, and global into distinct categories. At the same time, the book attends to minor and major flows and circulations across geopolitical, cultural, and political boundaries, as well as their varied outcomes. To bring into focus negotiations of gender concepts and norms between local/regional contexts and global discourses that are at work in women’s expressions, the book draws on ‘translocality,’ defined by historians Ulrike Freitag and Achim Von Oppen as ‘an intermediary concept which helps to better understand and conceptualize connections beyond the local which are, however, neither necessarily global in scale nor necessarily connected to global moments.’5 A translocal analytical practice allows for the study of Moroccan women’s cultural production as a cohesive yet diverse body, engaging with the Moroccan context while also inscribing a multitude of relations to other locations. The book also uses the insights of authors who explore national and transnational forces specifically in the works of cultural producers from the Maghreb and Maghrebi diasporas. To account for the ‘multiple shifting positionings’ at play in the transnational cultural productions and the ‘differences and imbalances of power’ between Moroccan women, the book relies on the concept of ‘transvergence’ as applied by Will Higbee to describe postcolonial and diasporic Francophone cinema.6 Building on postmodern architect Marcus Novak’s notion of transvergence in his field and the Deleuzian rhizomatic network, Higbee identifies ‘a cinema of transvergence’ as an approach to better appreciate how postcolonial diasporic cinema functions and produces meaning within and across national and transnational locations. The analyses of the various case studies extend Higbee’s concept to other media. I implicitly mobilize Higbee’s methodology and conceptual framework to demonstrate how the work of Essaydi and Bénitah operates within specific local contexts (the traditional Muslim urban and upper-class milieu in Marrakesh and the closed Casablancan Jewish community,

Introduction

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respectively), and within multiple national contexts (Morocco and France for Bénitah and Morocco, Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States for Essaydi). I show that Essaydi’s and Bénitah’s ambiguous images are transvergent and glocal because the meanings they produce are constantly evolving under the pressure of a network of relations, including the context, the location, and the viewer’s position. I also problematize this positioning in relation to the artists’ conditions of privilege that allow them to cross borders, geopolitical and other. Situating Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts within Moroccan Women’s Cultural Production and Its Criticism Revisionary Narratives builds on the research of scholars such as Jean Déjeux (1994), Marc Gontard (2005), Khalid Zekri (2006), Valérie K. Orlando (1999, 2009), and Suellen Diaconoff (2009), who have produced work in French and in English in which they underline the autobiographical dimensions of Moroccan women’s literature in Arabic and French. The groundbreaking work in Moroccan women’s cinema by Orlando (2010) and Florence Martin (2011) also discusses, explicitly and implicitly, how the autobiographical experiences of women directors, particularly their transcultural and often transnational positions, influence the narration and the production of their films. These scholars convincingly link the ubiquity of the autobiographical mode in literature and film to women’s efforts to write their experiences in the public sphere and denounce patriarchal structures and norms that marginalize them and their stories. Revisionary Narratives reiterates Orlando’s assessment that women’s cultural production underscores ‘the fact that women’s literary production is as much rooted and invested in historical and revolutionary events and contemporary social issues as that of men.’ 7 It also accounts for the importance of what Martin diagnoses as ‘the virtual global dimension of cultural production today.’8 By considering recent women’s works beyond literature, the book underlines how Moroccan women’s auto/biographies, especially in visual arts and digital media, represent examples of transnational and interdiscursive practices that involve individuals from not ‘only diverse national groups, but also diverse ethnicities and classes and different genders’ (Martin 2011, 19). However, this book also significantly departs from previous studies. First, it distances itself from earlier academic research that views women’s propensity for the autobiographical mode as a sign of lack

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or absence. For instance, it deconstructs Déjeux’s hierarchical vision of literary production that leads him to see the autobiographical ‘I’ in Maghrebi literature written in French, especially women’s, as a form of failed exile, that is a failed migration towards a new genre that reflects modernity by exploring the individual and individuality and which is, according to him, foreign to Oriental and Muslim societies and cultural traditions.9 What Déjeux presents as a failed appropriation of Western modernity (1994, 67) has had a lasting effect on the analysis of Maghrebi cultural productions, especially women’s, in that they have often been viewed as works of lesser quality in comparison to Western productions or men’s. For instance, in 2005, despite the fact that Moroccan women have been writing in French since the late 1970s, Gontard affirms that women’s works after 1995 represent ‘une littérature en cours de constitution’ (an emergent literature). Gontard suggests that the lack of maturity in women’s works is due to a late passage from testimony to fiction. Like Déjeux, Gontard affirms that women’s works are rooted in the social and calls them ‘une littérature de combat’ (a combat literature) that is primarily centered around contestation. However, he warns against reading them through the lens of gender and postcolonial studies and proposes instead formal analyses.10 As a number of essays in Gontard’s edited volume show, formal analyses, like Déjeux’s attempt to classify Maghrebi women’s literature, are often comprised within a framework of comparison and hierarchization either between women’s and men’s works or between Maghrebi and Western literatures. The primary purpose of marking auto/biography and testimony as a specific field within women’s postcolonial cultural production is not to affirm a strict and/or an artificial division between auto/biography and fiction. Revisionary Narratives recognizes that fiction is intrinsic to representation and self-representation. However, it seeks to disrupt the association between autobiography and testimony, broadly defined as any work rooted in the sociocultural context of its emergence, and what Zekri describes as ‘propension à la redite, et au déjà-admis-parle-consensus’ (propensity for repetition of that which is accepted by consensus).11 The idea that women’s autobiographical works are aesthetically inferior, because they merely reinscribe in their texts realities and opinions without transforming them, ignores the complex interactions involved in the construction of autobiographical subjectivity. Scholars of autobiography Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue for situating the autobiographical act ‘in a story, a story in time and place’ and explain that, because life narratives are rhetorical and engaged in contextualized

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arguments about identity, autobiographical acts ‘are anything but simple or transparent.’12 Recent studies of autobiographical identities and modalities in the MENA region also insist on the importance of paying attention to internal identity-making processes in autobiographical discourse and various modes of self-representation. For instance, in addition to the authors’ personal preference for a particular mode of artistic self-expression, Valerie Anishchenkova argues that ‘their choices of autobiographical modalities are also informed by a particular environment surrounding the production of this autobiographical work and by its geographical locality with its distinct cultural and political history.’13 By interrogating the conflation between auto/biography and testimony in women’s works and their criticisms, Revisionary Narratives attends to the transformative processes involved in narration, be it autobiographical or other. It affirms that women’s presence in the public sphere has brought about a feminine writing that not only writes ‘patriarchy back thematically […], but adopts new strategies’ that question and transgress the frontiers set by patriarchy.14 This book accounts for the complex cohabitation between the reinscription of patriarchy and its contestation. It does so by situating the works it examines as case studies within the history of the relationship between protest and women’s writing, be it literary, academic, or journalistic, and by highlighting new forms and modes of expression and their potential for transgressing patriarchy, imperialism, and neo-imperialism in a variety of cultural productions by women. Women’s Cultural Productions and Sociopolitical Resistance This book claims that the distinction between auto/biographical and testimonial acts and other cultural productions by women, especially fictional and semi-fictional literature, is necessary for attending to a number of under-researched and under-theorized aspects of women’s works. However, far from suggesting a neat divide between these categories, Revisionary Narratives highlights the specificities of life narratives analyzed as case studies while constantly situating them within other forms of narratives of contestation. Moroccan women’s cultural production of all forms in all media, including auto/biography and testimony, is rooted in the country’s recent history marked by political and legal decisions to institute and institutionalize both women’s

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marginalization and a strong connection between sociopolitical activism and writing. The absence of democracy in the aftermath of Morocco’s independence in 1956 and unbridgeable economic gaps between those who sacrificed for the country’s liberation and those who benefited from it pushed marginalized categories of the population to activate and/or invent storytelling strategies that could challenge dominant ideologies and discourses. Among the groups who saw their participation in the struggle for national liberation and later for democracy and social justice overshadowed by nationalist agendas, a patriarchal ruling elite, and male-dominated opposition movements are women. Indeed, renowned feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, in one of the earliest postcolonial life narratives that conflates biography, autobiography, and testimony by a Moroccan woman, denounces the fact that the authors of the 1957 Mudawana (family code), an important set of laws also known as the Code of Personal Status and which regulates women’s status within the family, marriage, divorce, and child custody, were all men.15 Reflecting on this foundational moment in Moroccan history, sociologist and women’s and gender studies scholar Zakia Salime explains that the postcolonial codification of the family law served two sociopolitical goals: first, the reaffirmation of the values of the agrarian patriarchal society; second, the institution of the sovereignty of the king over the territorial state and the reinforcement of national unity by inscribing it in Islamic sharia at the expense of ethnic customary laws favored by the colonial regime.16 This articulation of the family law, combined with a consideration of subsequent national discussions and attempts to reform the Mudawana, led Salime to rethink gender in Morocco ‘as a field of struggle and a marker of specific shifts in power arrangements’ and to affirm that ‘women’s interactions are mediated by these struggles and grounded in the particular history of the nation-state formation’ (2011, 2; italics in the original). Women’s cultural production in the postcolonial era, especially women’s life narratives of various types and in different media, is a response to the codification of unequal relations between the sexes and the exclusion of women from nation-state building. As early as the late 1950s and early 1960s and much like their counterparts in North Africa, who were also subjected to discriminatory codes, Moroccan women began to write poems, short stories, and novels that addressed concerns that were specific to them.17 Their access to education and positions of power in the following decades, though initially very limited and subsequently slow-paced, resulted in increasing their use of writing to record their

Introduction

11

experiences and impact the public sphere of decision-making. The surge in auto/biographical and testimonial writing in French and Arabic in the 1970s and 1980s is a part of this history. Women started archiving their experiences in memoirs, autobiographical novels and poetry, prison narratives, and journalistic and academic writing based on the life stories and interviews of other women. Pioneering authors, academics, and journalists like Mernissi and Leila Abouzeid were undoubtedly influenced by the flourishing of autobiography in the second half of the twentieth century in the MENA region, highlighted in a recent study by Tahia Abel Nasser who links the rise of autobiographical writing by Arab authors during the 1970s and 1980s to ‘the creation of new conceptions of subjectivity, the role of the author, and political agency in response to colonialism, nationalism, and independence.’18 Moroccan women’s increased production of auto/biographical and testimonial works is also linked to Morocco’s distinct cultural and political context. The increasingly oppressive atmosphere, socially and politically, gave rise to a growing number of dissenting voices. Women turned to auto/ biography and testimony as direct and indirect sites of confrontation with the patriarchal foundations of Moroccan society. Most of those engaged in writing avoided direct and violent censorship during the Years of Lead. However, a significant number of women used their life narratives to directly challenge the repressive state and political regime, and, later, Morocco’s transitional democracy. During the Years of Lead and more recently, women’s specific modes and levels of sociopolitical engagement had an impact on the themes, styles, and forms of their auto/biographies and testimonies. For instance, women who wrote fictional and semi-fictional autobiographies concentrated on shedding light on women’s systemic victimization in deeply patriarchal familial and social environments, without directly attacking the political system and its role in the perpetuation of patriarchal norms. The dominant theme of their works was sociocultural violence in the form of forced marriages, rape, repudiation, economic marginalization, and lack of personal freedom. Novelists, academics, and journalists described women’s marginalization within the family, the workplace, and the street as well as women’s daily battles to survive in a hostile patriarchal society. Some, like Mernissi and Abouzeid, also wrote autobiographies, biographies, and semi-fictional auto/biographies to provide women with models in their struggle against gender and sexual inequality. In comparison, women political prisoners and former political prisoners like Menebhi and El Bouih transformed their auto/

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biographical testimonies into political manifestoes that represented an extension as well as a development of their activism against the ruling elites before and after their incarceration. Women authors, academics, artists, and journalists, even when they do not denounce the regime outright, tend to focus on decentering patriarchal norms and practices that hinder women’s rights and personal freedoms. For instance, throughout her career, Mernissi used her writing to interrogate gender politics and the use of religion. In ‘Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries in Morocco,’ she fuses interviews and academic analysis to show how, in addition to the regime’s use of religion to justify the subjugation of women, certain religious and ritual practices also sustain patriarchal systems that marginalize women. She notes that the ‘saint in the sanctuary plays the role of the psychiatrist in the capitalist society, channeling discontent into the therapeutic processes and thus depriving it of its potential to combat the formal structure. Saints, then, help women adjust to the oppression.’19 In other works, Mernissi further develops this idea and explains that the major factor in women’s subjugation is their economic reliance on men. Men, through specific laws and in everyday interactions, interpret Islam in ways that justify greed and the economic domination of women. 20 Mernissi’s pioneering works have greatly and visibly influenced Moroccan women sociopolitical activists in the way they articulate feminist political agendas in their life narratives as well as in their public demands within political organizations and women’s movements. For instance, El Bouih dedicates a chapter of her prison memoir to Mernissi and explicitly credits her with inspiring her writings and helping her to acquire an education during her incarceration (1977–1982). 21 Even though El Bouih’s auto/biographical testimony is much more radical in its confrontation of the political system and the ruling elite, it presents narrative strategies and themes similar to those explored by Mernissi. For instance, El Bouih uses a plural narrative voice and posits writing and storytelling as important modes of survival and resistance, ideas rooted in A Thousand and One Nights and its heroine Scheherazade. She also highlights the use of tradition and religion to ensure women’s exclusion from the country’s economy and politics. The conceptualization of new forms of feminine/feminist subjectivity and identity constructions that rely on images, orality, performance, digital narratives, and social media in the twenty-first century have shifted our understanding of women’s auto/biographical and testimonial narratives and acts. Women’s cultural productions are

Introduction

13

more and more shaped by translocal, transnational, and transglobal circulations, exchanges, and transfers of people, goods, ideas, practices, and technologies. However, these works, as the analyses in Part Two show, are thematically, structurally, and aesthetically influenced by the use of auto/biography and testimony to voice women’s experiences and instigate social change. They also depict personal and collective experiences of women through the redeployment of personal archives, stories, and rituals and, in so doing, they expose and disrupt patriarchal and (neo-)imperial norms and practices. In short, they also rectify women’s historical exclusion from the country’s written history and the processes of its composition, and revise ‘the official narrative’ by engaging and reinterpreting tradition and religion from a feminine/feminist perspective (Mernissi 1991, 10). As such, women’s auto/biographies in various forms and media are not much different from literary, journalistic, and academic feminist writings in that they also represent crucial tools in the feminization of the public space22 and in the articulation of a discourse of women’s rights and the emergence of a feminist discourse that counteracts Morocco’s culture of silence. 23 In Revisionary Narratives, women’s agency and their narratives’ potency in regard to the dialectic between speech and silence, empowerment and disempowerment, are analyzed in relation to the languages and channels of distribution that are available to them. The book considers women’s life narratives within an interactive framework of ‘producers, coaxers, and audiences’ similar to the one sociologist Ken Plummer identifies in his analysis of autobiographical and intimate stories. 24 In so doing, it not only accounts for the various strategies women devise to articulate and transmit their stories, but also the power relations that exist between storytellers, stories, and the particular coaxers that elicit them. Mindful of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussions of the subaltern (more specifically, her doubts about the possibility of recovering the voice of the subaltern, particularly the subaltern woman), 25 Revisionary Narratives rethinks the dialectic between silence and speech and women’s agency in relation to the media—literary auto/ biography, photography, calligraphy, embroidery, theater, the Internet— women choose to transmit their and other women’s life experiences. It also problematizes women’s ability to instigate change taking into account the relationship between the individual and the collective, as well as solidarity between women and the idea of ‘giving a voice to the voiceless,’ involving those who have access to writing and speech and those who are silenced.

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Revisionary Narratives

(Auto)biography and the Politics of Truth-Telling Though it does not draw a strict division between auto/biography and fiction, Revisionary Narratives examines women’s claims to a specific relationship to the ‘real,’ the material world, exploring aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical implications of the overlap and interplay between the ‘real’ world and auto/biographical narrative. The analysis of auto/ biographical material relies on Leigh Gilmore’s affirmations in her various works that autobiography derives a specific form of authority from ‘the cultural power of truth-telling,’26 while it also remains haunted by the limits of representativeness and the ‘compulsory inflation of the self to stand for others.’27 The book further argues that, within the Moroccan context, auto/biographical life narratives that relate events and situations experienced or witnessed by authors represent transactions between them and the public that are sociopolitically and affectively different from those derived from fictional and semi-fictional narratives. This is particularly true for auto/biographical political testimonies in which the auto/biographical ‘I,’ even when it takes a plural form of self-representation, constitutes a different form of civic and political engagement. In these narratives, women not only expose themselves to public scrutiny in a predominantly patriarchal society that expects them to be modest and silent, they also take the risk of being revictimized as a result of political censorship and retaliation. Even though they share with literary works rooted in Morocco’s sociopolitical history their use of writing as a form of contestation, they represent intrinsically heterogeneous acts. For instance, the women whose works are explored in Part One do not merely challenge legal and sociocultural definitions of testimony within the Moroccan context in direct and radical ways, they reverse them by publicly testifying and telling their stories of arbitrary arrests, torture, and prison. From another perspective, their reticence about discussing their sexuality, including their experience of sexual violence, also distinguishes them from texts written by men and from fictional texts by women. For Pauline Homsi Vinson, this aspect is not only common in Arab women’s autobiographies, but also reveals ‘their adherence to Arab notions of privacy’ and an ‘understanding of the role of autobiographical writing that has its roots in Arabic literary traditions.’28 Thus, political auto/biographical testimonies such as those written by Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir demand a different reading and a different interpretative framework from those applied to literary fiction. They also demand the revision of a significant portion of Maghrebi

Introduction

15

literary criticism, as well as dominant criticism of Moroccan women’s prison narratives. The chapters in Part One dialogue with criticism of testimonial literature, which has been developing in the North American academy since the 1980s, especially in the context of Latin America (testimonio), and which has influenced the study of Morocco’s prison writings. The analysis of Menebhi’s, El Bouih’s, and Oufkir’s testimonies deploys definitions and methodologies of leading scholars in the field, such as John Beverley (2004), but also Barbara Harlow (1986, 1991), George Yúdice (1991), and Doris Sommer (1991). At the same time, Part One identifies what makes Moroccan women’s prison writings a specific form of cultural and literary expression that thematically and formally embodies local modes of struggle. Doing so, the chapters in Part One test the findings of these leading scholars by integrating findings from a variety of sociological and anthropological studies produced before and after Morocco’s 2004 Instance équité et réconciliation (Equity and Reconciliation Commission, IER), such as those by anthropologists Susan Slyomovics (2005a; 2005b; 2012) and Nadia Guessous (2009). This approach also allows me to establish connections with auto/ biographical and testimonial acts by different women and/or of different kinds. The book situates narratives by well-known former political prisoners within a larger production, which has been emerging since 2005 but remains somewhat absent from the scholarship of the Years of Lead. The cross-analysis of Menebhi’s, El Bouih’s, and Oufkir’s texts with less-well-known testimonial documents relating to political violence against women during the Years of Lead provides novel insights into the ideas of transnational secularism, representativeness, and collective testimony. In particular, it shows that relying on the testimonies of a few prominent authors, who are educated activists living in urban areas, and on decontextualized critical concepts, not only leaves unexplored localized narrative patterns in women’s writings, but also overlooks reproductions of hierarchies based on ethnicity, class, geographic origin, linguistic identity, and level of education. The structure of this book makes the claim that there is a connection between testimonial accounts of political violence and the use of testimony in contemporary auto/biographical narratives in various media. Part Two explores works that mobilize auto/biographical material that includes family photos, domestic spaces, personal stories, interviews, diaries, and testimonies. In doing this work, the chapters show that the affect, the politics, and the ethics mentioned earlier exceed auto/biographical narratives that present themselves as testimonies and

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that are generally received by the public as such. Works such as those by Essaydi, Bénitah, Zitan, and social activist and journalist Fedwa Misk, in which women deploy fragments of personal histories and intimate and familial objects as well as works and performances in which the female body is the primary vehicle of the auto/biographical discourse, also represent a different affective transaction with the public. In addition, these narratives also ‘involve an urgency to communicate’ similar to what John Beverley sees in testimonial literature. 29 The works analyzed as case studies in this book show that women appropriate testimony to make political claims or claims that can be interpreted as political because they question laws and practices that regulate women’s bodies, sexuality, and individual rights. Their examination as auto/biographies and testimonies shows the historical importance of testimonial political literature and its influence on women’s contemporary cultural productions. The analysis of auto/biographical and testimonial acts in visual and performing arts also further complicates the distinction between the aesthetic and testimonial qualities of women’s cultural productions found in some studies. Book Structure Part One: The Ethics and Politics of Moroccan Women’s Gendered Shahada Part One specifically addresses women’s auto/biographical prison narratives as prompted and structured by the Years of Lead (1961–1999) and Morocco’s transition from authoritarianism to semi-authoritarianism, initiated by King Mohammed VI after his succession to the throne in 1999. The chapters in this part analyze the styles, languages, and narrative structures women use in prison life narratives to bear witness to gendered sociopolitical violence and construct subjectivities that destabilize dominant gender definitions and norms. Chapter 1, ‘The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings,’ reaffirms the historical importance of political prisoner and martyr Saïda Menebhi, who died in prison after her hunger strike in 1977. However, unlike previous studies that emphasize Menebhi’s biography, my analysis also focuses on her writings, particularly the inscription of the people and the revolution in her poetry and unfinished essay on the prostitution of women. In doing so, the chapter uncovers the nego-feminist30 strategies Menebhi used to circumvent restrictive

Introduction

17

sociocultural gender norms of the 1970s and to feminize and localize the internationalist and seemingly genderless Marxist-Leninist ideology, thus offering a narrative and a political model for other Moroccan women. Even though they arguably represent the most well-known women former political prisoners and authors at home and abroad, Malika Oufkir’s and Fatna El Bouih’s testimonies have not been considered comparatively. In Chapter 2, ‘(Re)writing the Woman Resister: Violence, Gender, and Legitimacy in Fatna El Bouih’s and Malika Oufkir’s Testimonies,’ I argue that, despite significant differences in their socioeconomic and ideological backgrounds, El Bouih and Oufkir offer two literary representations of gendered political violence that seek to ground their individual experiences within the collective history of violence against women in Morocco. Even though El Bouih’s Hadith Al Atama (Talk of Darkness) (2001) takes the form of a fragmented memoir that constantly shifts from first- to third-person narration and Oufkir’s La prisonnière (Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail) (1999) is a retrospective and linear narrative, both narrators recast themselves as feminists who speak for silenced women. Focusing on the commonalities in Oufkir’s and El Bouih’s testimonies not only allows us to uncover the tenets of a female-gendered Moroccan testimonial voice, but also addresses the politics of the narration, memorialization, and criticism of political violence in Morocco’s era of democratic transition. Chapter 3, ‘Speaking for the Voiceless: Political and Ethical Considerations of Moroccan Women’s “Collective Testimonial Self,”’ contemplates the collective dimensions of testimonies by renowned victims of political violence, something that has been emphasized by previous studies. 31 The analysis focuses on the literary devices and content that Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir chose in order to merge their experience of political violence and resistance with the collective experiences of Moroccan women. In doing so, the chapter questions the assumption that testimonial writing is an ‘extraliterary’ or ‘antiliterary’ discourse (Beverley 2004, 42) and demonstrates the ethical and political limitations of the idea of a ‘collective testimonial self.’32 The chapter also integrates alternative testimonial documents that have not been analyzed previously, as well as recent studies on women and political violence and resistance during the Years of Lead. Because of this, the chapter revises and complements previous research on the Years of Lead in two major ways. First, it demonstrates that dividing resisters and victims in testimonies by renowned women political activists and former political

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prisoners can promote a simplistic account of women’s experiences, as well as articulating a very reductive representation of victimization and resistance. Second, it addresses how the narration and memorialization of violence are impacted by class, ethnicity, religion, language, and education level—important differentiating factors that intersect with gender. Part Two: Trans-Acting Moroccan Identity and Femininity: Auto/Biography, Testimony, and Subjectivity in the Transglobal Age Part Two continues to explore women’s use of the auto/biographical mode in their destabilizing of dominant gender norms in Morocco. The various chapters analyze a variety of elements that are specific to Moroccan women’s life narratives, regardless of the media they use or the specific experiences on which they choose to focus. However, the second part of the book also underlines how women appropriate orality, the ubiquity of the image, new media, and the public’s obsession with the ‘real’—what the public views as authentic and unmediated experience— to create gendered translocal expressions that address various spatialities and cater to different publics. Chapter 4, ‘Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women,’ offers analyses of several images from Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Converging Territories (2004), Les Femmes du Maroc (2006–2008), and Harem (2009), which exclusively depict women from Morocco or the Moroccan diaspora. The chapter focuses on the feminist transnational discourse that emerges from Essaydi’s inscription of her biography—more specifically, her experience growing up in a harem and living as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia and the United States—and her training in Western art. The chapter is structured around a set of key questions. Does Essaydi’s juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes and poses from canonical nineteenthcentury European Orientalist paintings with the veil, calligraphy, henna tattoos, and Moroccan architecture disrupt or reinforce stereotypes in the depiction of Arab and Muslim women? Can Essaydi’s hybrid language be read as a form of feminist ‘double critique’33 that resists Western and Islamic patriarchy? How do Essaydi’s images intervene in relation to the transnational and transcultural discourse and positioning of the ‘Muslimwoman’?34 What is the economy between the transnational, transglobal and translocal, and the simply local in Essaydi’s images? How do Essaydi’s photographs contribute to the critical (re) thinking of gender in the context of globalization?

Introduction

19

In ‘L’enfance marocaine’ (2009), Carolle Bénitah scans, reframes, and embroiders over black-and-white family photographs from her childhood in Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 5, ‘Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery: Remembering, Reframing, Disfiguring, and Embellishing the Past,’ analyzes Bénitah’s photo-embroideries, using theories on family photography and its ability to capture traumatic shifts that shape postmodern mentalities, as developed by Roland Barthes ([1980] 1981), Marianne Hirsch (1997), Patricia Holland (1991), and Annette Kuhn ([1995] 2002). In tandem with these theorists, I draw on Sam Durrant’s analysis of the postcolonial narrative as a mode of mourning and an action partly meant to come to terms with traumatic historical events, 35 and Mireille Rosello’s notion of ‘reparative mourning’ in her study of the reparative in postcolonial narratives. 36 I read Bénitah’s images as a postmodern narrative that testifies to a fragmented subjectivity, situated at the intersection between public and private history and memory—the artist’s personal story against the backdrop of the twentieth-century history of Morocco and its Jewish community. The chapter analyzes spatial, temporal, visual, and cultural hybridity as a way of working through history while also engaging with transnational feminist strategies that women use to undo gender hierarchies naturalized and perpetuated by photography and the family photograph. The public debates preceding the 2004 Mudawana (family code) reform and the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings have opened new spaces and engendered new languages for women to intervene in issues of gender, space, sexuality, citizenship, individual freedoms, and religion. Chapter 6, ‘Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings,’ analyzes Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazine, a webzine founded by Moroccan journalist and blogger Fedwa Misk in 2011 and Naïma Zitan’s Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan Arabic (Darija), as exemplars of how women’s activism and cultural production have reinvigorated and gendered contemporary discourses of contestation. Dialy, originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), uses testimonies collected during encounters and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to inscribe in the public sphere the major transitions in a woman’s life, such as menstruation, sexual relations, marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing. Qandisha has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators who post their texts about sexuality, rape, sexual orientation, and

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Revisionary Narratives

individual freedom in French, Arabic, Darija, and English from all over Morocco as well as from Algeria, France, and Tunisia. Anonymity, easy access, the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) have all provided women with endless possibilities for self- and collective representation. This chapter analyzes the content and the reception of Dialy and Qandisha to illustrate contemporary divisions around women’s rights and sexuality in the Moroccan context, as well as the uneasy cohabitation between Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies. The conclusion, ‘The Future of Moroccan Women’s Auto/biography and Testimony,’ highlights the ways in which a transdisciplinary interpretative lens in Revisionary Narratives allows us to connect the specific devices that women use to produce auto/biography to larger and ongoing demands for social change and their impact on gender and women’s issues in Morocco. Notes 1 See, for example, the definitions of selfhood by influential theorists, such as Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,’ trans. James Olney, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 28–48; Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Paul J. Eakin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 2 The expression ‘Years of Lead’ refers to the period of extreme social and political repression that began as early as the country’s independence in 1956 and intensified under King Hassan II’s reign (1961–1999). During this period, thousands of Moroccans were disappeared, tortured, and arbitrarily detained. 3 Anthropologist Susan Slyomovics uses this expression to describe individual, collective, and state-sponsored efforts to testify to the Years of Lead’s violence after 1999, relying on victims’ testimonies. See Susan Slyomovics, ‘Fatna El Bouih and the Work of Memory, Gender, and Reparation in Morocco,’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 8.1 (Winter 2012), pp. 37–62, 42. 4 See Brinda J. Mehta, Dissident Writings of Arab Women: Voices Against Violence (New York: Routledge, 2014). 5 Ulrike Freitag and Achim Von Oppen, ‘Introduction. Translocality: An Approach to Connection and Transfer in Area Studies,’ in Ulrike Freitag and Achim Von Oppen (eds), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 1–21, 3.

Introduction

21

6 See Will Higbee, ‘Beyond the (Trans)National: Towards a Cinema of Transvergence in Postcolonial and Diasporic Francophone Cinema(s),’ Studies in French Cinema, 7.2 (2007), pp. 79–91, 86. 7 Valérie K. Orlando, Francophone Voices of the ‘New Morocco’ in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (New York: Palgrave, 2009), p. 71. 8 Florence Martin, Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 15. 9 Jean Déjeux, Littérature féminine de la langue française au Maghreb (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1994), p. 64. 10 Marc Gontard, ‘Introduction,’ in Marc Gontard (ed.), Le Récit féminin au Maroc (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), pp. 7–8. 11 Khalid Zekri, Fictions du réel. Modernité romanesque et écriture du réel au Maroc 1990–2006 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 15. 12 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 63. 13 Valerie Anishchenkova, Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 3. 14 Hassan Zrizi, ‘Narrating Domestic Frontiers: Unbecoming Daughters of Patriarchy: Moroccan Women Writers of French Expression,’ in Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil (eds), Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 64–73, 65. 15 Fatima Mernissi, Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 2. This is a translation of Le Maroc raconté par ses femmes, originally written in French. 16 Zakia Salime, Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 4. 17 See Mohammed Berrada, ‘Arab North Africa,’ in Radwa Ashour, Ferial Ghazoul, Hasna Reda-Mekdashi (eds), and Mandy McClure (trans.), Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873–1999 (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2008), pp. 235–253, 237. 18 Tahia Abdel Nasser, Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 2. 19 Fatima Mernissi, ‘Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries,’ Signs, 3.1 (Autumn 1977), p. 112. 20 Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Perseus Books, 1991), p. vii.

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21 Fatna El Bouih, Talk of Darkness, trans. Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 41. 22 Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, ‘The Feminization of Public Space: Women’s Activism, the Family Law, and Social Change in Morocco,’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2.2 (2006), pp. 86–114, 91–92. 23 See Amy Evrard, The Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement (Gender and Globalization) (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014), p. 22 and Loubna H.  Skalli, Through a Local Prism: Gender, Globalization, and Identity in Moroccan Women’s Magazines (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 61. 24 Kenneth Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 21. 25 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 66–111 and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,’ History and Theory, 24.3 (1985), pp. 247–272. 26 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 6. 27 Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 8. 28 Pauline Homsi Vinson, ‘Political History, Personal Memory, and Oral, Matrilineal Narratives in the Works of Nawal El Saadawi and Leila Ahmed,’ NWSA Journal, 20.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 78–98, 92. 29 John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 32. 30 Obioma Nnaemeka, ‘Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,’ Signs, 29.2 (Winter 2004), pp. 357–385. 31 See, for instance, Susan Slyomovics, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Orlando (2009); Laura Menin, ‘Rewriting the World: Gendered Violence, the Political Imagination and Memoirs from the “Years of Lead” in Morocco,’ International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 8.1 (2014), pp. 45–60. 32 Doris Sommer, ‘Rigoberta’s Secrets,’ Latin American Perspectives, 18.3 (Summer 1991), pp. 32–50, 43. 33 Abdelkebir Khatibi uses the term ‘double critique’ to describe a critical positioning that operates beyond the dichotomy of West/Islamic culture to bring about ‘une pensée autre’ (another way of thinking) that both questions and promotes difference. See Maghreb Pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983), p. 21. 34 See Miriam Cooke, ‘Deploying the Muslimwoman,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 91–99. Cooke uses the term ‘Muslimwoman’ to describe what she sees as the formation of ‘singular religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity’ (91).

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23

35 Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 11. 36 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narrative: Works of Mourning in Progress (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).

part one

The Ethics and Politics of Moroccan Women’s Gendered Shahada

chapter one

The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness in Saïda Menebhi’s Prison Writings The Rise of a Feminist Consciousness

Saïda Menebhi: A Trailblazer Mother, I want you to know that being in prison does not mean that my life was taken away from me. In fact, my life has various meanings and, as it progresses, it can take various directions. Prison is a school and an alternative form of education.1

Political activist Saïda Menebhi composed the above message while she was in prison in 1977, during Morocco’s notorious Years of Lead. At the time of writing, she was serving a seven-year sentence for undermining the security of the state, a common charge used by the Moroccan regime against political opponents at the time. Born in Marrakesh in 1952, Menebhi was a high school English teacher and a member of l’Union marocaine du travail (the Moroccan Work Union) and the MarxistLeninist group Ila al-Amam (Forward). Like many young activists of her generation, she was targeted by the Moroccan regime, and on January 16, 1976, she was forcibly disappeared and secretly detained in Casablanca’s infamous torture center, Derb Moulay Cherif, for three months. In January 1977, she was brought to trial in Casablanca along with a hundred and thirty-eight other political opponents and sent to the Casablanca civil prison. On December 11, 1977, Menebhi died at Ibn Rushd hospital in Casablanca at the age of twenty-five as a result of a forty-day hunger strike that she and other activist prisoners in Kenitra and Casablanca observed to protest their status of political prisoners and to call for the end of the isolation of detainees such as Abraham Serfaty, Rabea Ftouh, Fatima Oukacha, and Menebhi herself (Slyomovics 2005b, 149). 2

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As Menebhi’s declaration and biography suggest, prison, incarceration, and torture have played fundamental roles in subjectivity formation— the construction of identity in a particular time and place and in relation to available ideological discourses—for political activists in postcolonial Morocco. Institutionalized political violence has also had a significant impact on how personal and collective identities are constructed in recent Moroccan autobiographical production. For decades, the Moroccan ruling elites targeted members of the left-wing Marxist-Leninist parties, student unions, intellectuals, trade unionists, and anyone perceived as a threat to the monarchy. 3 A significant number of these political prisoners wrote prison memoirs and other forms of prison narratives in which they articulate their experiences of political violence, survival, and resistance from the point of view of victims and activists. Like Menebhi’s work, some of these narratives were produced in prison and were made known to the public through various channels, including local and international political and press organizations. Others were published abroad after their authors’ liberation or in Morocco after the country entered a period of relative liberalization in the 1990s. These narratives became not only sites of memory and resistance, but also spaces and media in and through which new constructions of subjectivity have emerged. Moroccan women have used their experiences in prison and in the torture room to interrogate cultural constructs of gendered identities, as well as their roles in the infliction of institutionalized violence. In so doing, they have transformed their prison writings, in various forms, into opportunities for the revision of dominant visions and representations of women, producing a feminist aesthetics of gendered violence and resistance that reflects and sometimes perpetuates, but also interrupts, social formations of gender in Morocco. Women activists like Menebhi, Fatna El Bouih, and Malika Oufkir challenged women’s domesticity by deconstructing the separation between the public and private spheres and between women and politics that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s. Their representation of women as resisters who actively participated in the production of a revolutionary political discourse and worked to construct an alternative vision of society in which women wield public political agency questions the sociopolitical order in Morocco; it also challenges writing, by both men and women, that ‘capitalizes on outdated and deeply rooted gender stereotypes, closeting the female figure in male phantasmagoric visions.’4 Instead, women who participated in the resistance and were victimized by the regime carved out narrative spaces and voices that, even intermittently, disrupt dominant

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gender norms behind gendered sociopolitical violence as well as behind what Soumia Boutkhil describes as the ‘exclusion [of women] from the process of meaning-making’ in 1970s and 1980s literary texts (2006, 58). Menebhi’s Poèmes, lettres, écrits de prison (Poems, Letters and Writings from Prison) was composed in prison and posthumously published in 1978 in France by the Comité de lutte contre la répression au Maroc (Committee against Repression in Morocco), a group founded by left-wing activists in 1972. The collection is pivotal for the understanding of the intersections between auto/biography, testimony, gender, and subjectivity formation in Moroccan women’s postcolonial cultural production. It comprises twenty-six poems, fourteen letters to different family members, and an unfinished essay on the prostitution of women in Morocco. The volume is marked by a plural narration that testifies to political violence against men and women and to cross-gender solidarity that marked the opposition’s socialist project. At the same time, the narrative styles and structures, as well as the vocabulary and images that Menebhi uses to represent women, express the rise of a feminist consciousness out of the experience of resistance and gendered violence; they also make her collection the type of writing that Hèlène Cixous describes as ‘true texts of women—female-sexed texts’ in the Moroccan context, and more broadly in the Arab and African contexts. 5 For instance, Menebhi’s autobiographical poetry captures the pain caused by sociopolitical violence while sublimating it into a trenchant critique of social injustice against the Moroccan people. While the author’s consistent use of examples of women to illustrate suffering can be seen as a reiteration of women’s victimization and their description as subjects may deprive them of agency, her depiction of romantic desire, as well as patriotic and political activism, interrupts the dominant representation of women and their bodies as mere objects of the male desire and gaze. In her unfinished essay, Menebhi adopts a scientific style, providing an ethnography of prison and prostitution that highlights the ills and the hypocrisy of Morocco’s patriarchal society, which marginalizes, exploits, and then criminalizes women. Yet, combining personal observations and biographical fragments of female common-law prisoners in the form of transcribed oral testimonies deconstructs the representation of women as merely subject to patriarchal authority. Instead, through Menebhi’s work, women, including marginalized sex workers, are able to analyze their subalternity and therefore reclaim their positions as speaking subjects. Because of this, despite her early death and the fact that her writings never attained the same international visibility, Menebhi

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is counted amongst the North African and Middle Eastern women pioneers who, in response to turbulent sociopolitical events in the region, crafted a feminine model of self-realization. Like the Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi, Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, and Algerian Assia Djebar, for instance, Menebhi relied on orality, a particularly feminine heritage of storytelling, and personal memory to inscribe the experience of women in written Arab and African histories. The dialogic nature of Menebhi’s writings, highlighting women’s marginalization while also depicting them as agents of change, situates her within existing traditions of Moroccan postcolonial literary production, including testimonial literature, autobiography, and fiction in Arabic and French; it also marks her as a trailblazer. As is the case for many testimonials produced during or after the Years of Lead and most autobiographies and novels in French and Arabic published after the end of the French protectorate, Menebhi’s writings depict postcolonial Morocco’s sociopolitical struggles and participate in the processes of nation-building and democratization. At the same time, Poèmes occupies a unique position within this rich body. The author’s identity, the fact that she writes in French (as opposed to literary Arabic), her mobilization of the auto/biographical and testimonial modes, and her concentration on the intersection of gender and social justice give her prison writings a particular historical and literary significance. First, as Jean Déjeux notes in his renowned anthology of Maghrebi women’s literature, Poèmes is one of the first literary pieces written by a Moroccan woman in French—only second to the novels of Moroccan Jewish author Elisa Chimenti (Déjeux 1994, 45–50). Both the French language and the publication of the collection in France testify to sociopolitical and cultural connections between Morocco and its former colonizer. As a result, despite thematic similarities with literary productions in literary Arabic, such as Layla Abu Zayd’s ‘Am al-Fīl (Year of the Elephant, 1983), Menebhi’s writings remain tied to the Moroccan Francophone literary tradition in general, including prison literature by renowned authors such as Abdellatif Laâbi, and Moroccan women’s literature in particular. Her influence on Moroccan women authors of the 1980s and 1990s is visible in the prevalence of the autobiographical and testimonial modes and the attempt to bear witness to Moroccan women’s experience and to inscribe those experiences in the public sphere.6 Poèmes also holds a singular position within Moroccan testimonial literature in French and Arabic. One of the first testimonies composed by a woman political prisoner in the late 1970s, Poèmes is a clandestine

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narrative that defies the Moroccan authoritarian state’s efforts to contain political opposition while also transgressing sociocultural norms of the time by forcefully putting gender and women’s issues on the agenda of the leftist opposition. At the same time, because it was not published in Morocco until 2000, Poèmes is also part of Morocco’s various private and public initiatives to memorialize the Years of Lead after the period ended and especially after King Hassan II’s death in 1999. As such, the collection is an integral part of the large body of testimonial literature that emerged in the late 1990s and flourished after 1999.7 Situating Menebhi’s writings within these two historical periods uncovers their influence on the rise of a new Moroccan feminist consciousness and their role in challenging what Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji call ‘male feminism.’ An ideology that appeared during the French protectorate and was espoused by the newly independent Moroccan state, ‘male feminism’ promoted a relative emancipation of women for the benefit of society at large without being interested in gender equality (Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006, 96–97). In contrast, Menebhi’s writings claim gender equality and women’s full participation in decision-making processes, thus challenging the claims of these male feminists (either implicitly or explicitly). This dual perspective builds on Valérie K. Orlando’s and Susan Slyomovics’s works analyzing Poèmes in relation to texts that appeared in the 1990s and 2000s, such as El Bouih’s Talk of Darkness (2008). The goal of this chapter is to highlight thematic and ideological continuities in Moroccan women’s testimonial literary production and to reaffirm the importance of situating and analyzing Menebhi’s writings in relation to testimonials by El Bouih, Latifa Jbabdi, Widad Bouab, and Malika Oufkir, but also in relation to the emerging body of testimonial literature by less well-known Moroccan women. In addition, by offering a close reading of Menebhi’s writings, this chapter seeks to establish Menebhi’s role as a pioneer in the articulation of a feminine testimonial voice in Moroccan literature and, more largely, in the articulation of a feminine auto/biographical voice across media and genres. The influence of Menebhi’s writing—and, by extension, the influence of prison memoirs and testimonials by women—on Moroccan women’s postcolonial literary endeavors has been addressed, albeit often indirectly, by various scholars, who have highlighted the testimonial and autobiographical dimensions in criticism of Moroccan women’s literary production, especially in Francophone texts.8 In this chapter, I will extend the discussion of Menebhi’s writings well beyond the confines of Francophone Moroccan literature by women. My textual analysis will rely on various feminist

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critical approaches while also drawing on a broad body of criticism on testimonial and auto/biographical literature in an attempt to underscore Menebhi’s influence on Moroccan women’s modes of self- and collective representation in various media and languages in the decades following the publication of her collection. Violence, Crisis, and Auto/Biography Valerie Anishchenkova convincingly argues that in North Africa and the Middle East, authors’ particular modes of self-expression reflect personal choices, but are also ‘informed by a particular environment surrounding the production of [the] autobiographical work and by its geographical locality with its distinct cultural and political history. In other words, these modalities situate the autobiographical within a specific sociocultural context’ (2015, 3). These remarks are particularly relevant for Moroccan women’s auto/biographical productions born of prison experience. Anishchenkova further defines a novel ‘as autobiographical when the principal function is the making of autobiographical identity’ (2015, 10; italics in the original). Positing Menebhi’s writings as auto/biographical takes into account this idea as well as Gillian Whitlock’s attention to ‘the making of the human in and through testimonial transactions,’ an idea she draws from Frantz Fanon’s thinking on human being and which she uses to underline the transformative potential of testimonial narratives.9 Menebhi’s eclectic writings blur the boundaries between individual and collective life narration, thus not only redefining and broadening traditional understandings of autobiographical modes, but also reflecting the unique strictures and the opportunities brought about by the context of the Years of Lead. Like the authors whose work Anishchenkova explores, Menebhi’s auto/biographical prose and poetry transmit and counteract, ‘in the process of narrative self-representation channeled through a particular modality,’ cultural, social, ideological, gendered, religious, ethnic, and linguistic perceptions of collective and individual identities (2015, 5; italics in the original). Menebhi’s writings further mobilize the sociocultural importance of the collective self in Moroccan social organization and identity perception in order to write around a crisis of witnessing caused by gendered and violent sociopolitical and cultural conventions. The first poem of Poèmes, composed in January 1976, exemplifies the author’s plural auto/biographical ‘I,’ mediated by the Moroccan

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sociocultural and historical contexts as well as by the flexibility of the poetic mode: It was exactly six pm when two black dragons two cops from the secret police clouded our clear horizon in our house, mine and yours the walls turned pale because of so much hatred hatred directed towards all fascists things do have hearts the black dragons have caused so much suffering to our chair the chair on which you and I sat so often do you remember? you used to call me beautiful and we used to begin working reading our newspaper In the evening the black dragons come to darken our memories with their wings they come to rip apart our future with their talons but their eyes are dead burnt to a cinder by the strength of our love by the red star they are blinded … (Poèmes, 13–14)10

The autobiographical ‘I’ is interconnected with the ‘you,’ referring to the author’s male companion and co-activist and to the community of revolutionaries, symbolized by the ‘red star,’ to which they both belong. Such a construction of narrative self-representation recalls those by other women autobiographers who, according to Natalie Edwards, ‘both recently and further back in history, display a self that resists the traditional notion of an individual, unitary self at the heart of autobiography and instead inscribe subjectivity as in some measure non-unitary.’11 In Menebhi’s poem, the violent interruption of the narrator’s ordinary routine is inscribed as a collective assault and a political act targeting a community rather than individuals. However, the style, structure, and vocabulary of Menebhi’s poems

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also suggest that the non-unitary subject of her auto/biographical writings is a result of two specific realities: the impossibility of fully relating physical violence and pain, and the solidarity between members of a community of oppressed resisters. The amalgamation of various voices alludes to a collective experience of political violence and to solidarity in resistance to the authoritarian regime. At the same time, the elusive language used to describe pain points out the silence that is often constitutive of written testimonies relating physical and mental violence. This narrative combination bears witness to and disrupts what Susan Slyomovics describes as Morocco’s state-organized ‘politics of amnesia’ (2005b, 57). Referring to the effect of Tazmamart—one of the Years of Lead’s notorious torture and extermination camps —and other secret detention and torture centers on the Moroccan public, Slyomovics explains that the ‘subjective experience of fear, inspired by the objective existence of sites such as Tazmamart prison, encompassed an entire population to create a context that forced many Moroccans into silence and complicity’ (2005b, 57). Menebhi’s poem, reinscribing the intimacy of the couple, the security one feels in familiar spaces, and widespread solidarity and interconnectedness to a national and transnational community of resisters in the midst of a tale of extreme violence, interrupts state tactics meant to silence Moroccans and force them to surrender. The poem’s cryptic language, the elliptic inscription of pain and torture, and its plural construction of the autobiographical narrative ‘I’ thus account for an emerging testimonial and resistant voice bearing witness to a crisis of testimony and language. Menebhi’s use of metaphors to narrate torture, her personifications of objects, and the back-andforth movement between ‘you’ and ‘I’ attest to the tension that exists between the experience of physical pain and the act of testifying to it theorized in Elaine Scarry’s in The Body in Pain (1985). Scarry contends that extreme physical pain such as that encountered during torture and other forms of bodily abuse causes a rupture between the body and language, thus achieving a form of severe isolation of the individual in pain. She explains that physical pain ‘does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language,’ thus making it impossible for individuals to share their experience of pain.12 In Menebhi’s poem, the incommensurability between language and physical violence that Scarry describes is apparent in the disconnect between pain and the narrator’s body. Yet Menebhi’s narration of pain is not a mere manifestation of trauma; rather, her

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narration also impresses itself upon her written testimony and the political subject it mediates. Indeed, the physical materiality of the text, its style, and its content further express ways in which individuals are able to reverse the collapse of language and the isolation caused by the experience of pain. Even though Scarry insists on the ‘unsharability’ of pain, she lists art and testimony as examples of performative acts through which reversals are effected (1985, 10). Even if the actual experience of pain remains largely ‘unsharable,’ the testimonial act is part of what Scarry describes as ‘the human capacity for word-making’ and ‘the attempt to invent linguistic structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language,’ allowing it to enter the public realm (1985, 6). Menebhi’s narrative strategies for self and collective representation are not radical reversals that fully overcome the crises of language and witnessing caused by the experience of physical and mental political violence. Faced with the erasure of their identity and, sometimes, their corporeality in prison and the torture room, authors of autobiography and testimony take risks when turning moments of crisis into narratives that produce and transmit knowledge and meaning. Scarry also notes that the ‘human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequences’ (1985, 6). Even though Menebhi’s poetry and testimony cannot be described as mere re-enactments of trauma, they remain haunted by the collapse of language and the witness caused by physical and mental violence, which extends to the acts of reading and interpreting. Menebhi has indeed effectively been disappeared and her absence as witness—who can testify legally or otherwise against the state—affects the writings she left behind, especially in regard to the sociocultural and political parameters within which they bring stories of pain into language. As a result, the reader and the critic too have moved beyond the silencing effects of pain at the risk of misreading cues on how Menebhi and other Moroccan women navigated gendered conventions of literature, testimony, and political discourse to tell their stories of political violence and resistance. This is to say that the archiving and memorializing of violence, political and other, will always remain, in part, subjective and flawed. How we read and analyze testimonies is informed by the context of their production as much as by the context of interpretation. Feminist approaches such as Cixous’s, affirming women’s violent exclusion from writing and from history and the confiscation of their

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bodies in any patriarchal system (1976, 875), suggest that Menebhi’s construction of the autobiographical ‘I’ and the quasi-severance of the descriptions of pain from the narrator’s body may reflect and testify to the incompatibility between the composition of traditional autobiography, putting forward a unitary subject, and the Moroccan women’s situation in the 1970s. In Menebhi’s poems, letters, and essay, aesthetics of solidarity and the effacement of the female body and its experience often merge. Even though the author’s style evolves within each section and from one section to another, narrative techniques that minimize individuality and individual suffering and resistance can be found throughout Menebhi’s writings. For instance, in ‘Description of a Hunger Strike’ (Poèmes, 36–38), a poem written on January 24, 1977, instead of ‘je’ (I), the author uses ‘on’ and ‘nous’ (us) to relate the physical and mental deterioration of the body, inscribing the hunger strike as an act of solidarity and collective resistance rather than a way of using one’s individual body as a tool of resistance. In other poems, the narrator fuses her voice with anonymous oppressed masses, not only in Morocco, but also in Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Palestine, Chile, Bolivia, and the Western Sahara (25; 30). As a result, even when Menebhi focuses on women’s issues, women remain generic and their suffering is inscribed as collective. For instance, in one of her poems composed in January 1977, she writes: This woman is not alone She, like many others, is A victim of exploitation Of the lackeys’ power From New York and from Paris […] She remains there Lying in suffering Demanding justice to a thousand gods But her killers are relentless Because she belongs to the people Who, tomorrow, will resort to arms To liberate her. (32–33)13

The collectivization of women and their issues is reproduced in Menebhi’s essay when she compares the Moroccan women’s situation from all backgrounds to that of the sex worker (86) and in her letters when she describes the entire family as a single unit (105). This representation of women, mirroring their depiction in dominant discourses as a

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mass that lacks individual agency, shows that in Menebhi’s writings the passage from pain to a transnational revolutionary discourse is haunted by stereotypical representations of women. Even though Menebhi’s aesthetics of solidarity is woman-centric because it prioritizes women’s issues and gender equality, it effaces the individual woman, especially the woman-resister and the specificities of her suffering and bodily experience of violence. Autobiographical Transgressions, Testimony, and Secularism Menebhi constantly switches between autobiography, biography, and sociopolitical commentary among and within the different sections of her volume, while also mobilizing multiple genres including poetry, epistolary narratives, and essay. This diversity and instability indicate the passage from pain to what Anishchenkova describes as ‘autobiographical transmission,’ or the communication between the author and his/her audience (2015, 5). This ‘autobiographical transmission’ also manifests through the passage from conventional autobiography to auto/ biography, a hybrid and risky narrative in which self and collective subjectivity merge. For authors originating from the Arab world, especially for women or those who belong to a minority population, Anishchenkova notes that moving away from conventional autobiography is concomitant with ‘major historic events that created conditions for fundamental reconfigurations of identity discourses in Arab societies, urging a new means of autobiographical narration’ (2015, 27). Despite its inability to completely do away with patriarchal representations of women, Menebhi’s auto/biographical narration still transgresses the patriarchal order responsible for the sociopolitical gendered violence of the Years of Lead. Her work anticipates and participates in individual and collective efforts to redefine legal and religious understandings of testimony in various sociocultural contexts during the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, both in and beyond Morocco. Like most testimonial literature emerging from conflict zones and areas plagued by political, class, gender, ethnic, racial, and religious struggles, the various components of Poèmes report facts and events and describe situations as witnessed by the author. At the same time, the work departs from traditional literary and legal definitions of testimony, which imply that the witness gives an account of what s/he has experienced or observed first-hand while remaining close to the sequence of events and

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facts. Rather than focusing on factual truths, Menebhi captures the atmosphere of a particular time period and a particular political stage characterized by a transitional condition in which women are simultaneously subaltern and emerging as speaking and resisting subjects. One of the ways in which Menebhi’s writings transgress the patriarchal norms they engage and sometimes perpetuate is by destabilizing expectations shaped by conventions of truth-telling, whether in regard to testimony or to autobiography. For instance, her poems and essay deliberately blur the boundaries between the various categories that theorist Philippe Lejeune puts together in his attempt to distinguish between different life narratives within the European literary tradition. More particularly, Poèmes, as a whole, exacerbates the thin margin between autobiography and biography, an irritating matter for Lejeune, who believes in the importance of maintaining clear distinctions between the two (Lejeune 1989, 3–4). Menebhi alternates between an affirmative narrative ‘I’ that accounts for her emotional experience as it relates to life in prison and isolation, and a plural ‘I’ that weaves her experience into those of other revolutionaries and women. In addition, the fact that Menebhi’s writings were posthumously assembled by family members and other activists further undermines the distinction between autobiography and biography. The content and the journey of Menebhi’s texts show that the reality of the postcolonial auto/biographical narrative is incompatible with definitions of conventional autobiography such as those articulated by Lejeune. His autobiographical pact, consisting in the text’s affirmation of an identity referring back to the name of the author on the cover and reaffirming ‘the identity (“identicalness”) of the name (author-narrator-protagonist)’ (1989, 14), does not account for the circulation and transmission that happens between the individual and the collective in postcolonial life narratives. Nor does it account for the fact that ‘[t]estimonial transactions are transnational and transcultural, embedded in global networks of traumatic memory and witness, campaigns for social justice, reconciliation, and reparation’ (Whitlock 2015, 70). Menebhi writes in French and uses the autobiographical mode to express herself. Yet Poèmes is marked by the context of its emergence and the specific gendered sociocultural and political situation in Morocco. Its literary transgressions, consisting in collapsing the distinction between autobiography and biography and between individual and collective narration, mirror its transgression of Moroccan patriarchal sociopolitical norms that relegate women’s

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issues to the private and family spheres. In contrast with conventional autobiography, Menebhi’s plural narration enacts the author’s rejection of the idea of incompatibility between women’s experience and politics. Menebhi’s auto/biography, its particular conditions of production, and its plural narration further defy even the most flexible attempts to codify testimonial literature, including John Beverley’s widely accepted and cited literary and academic definition of testimony. For Beverley, testimonio (testimony in the context of Latin America) is a novel or novella-length narrative in a book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience […]. The situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, implicated in the act of narration itself. The position of the reader of testimonio is akin to that of a jury member in a courtroom. Unlike the novel, testimonio promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness. (2004, 30–32)

Even though Beverley articulates his definition in a specific cultural and historical context, Slyomovics contends that, since the 1970s, the Arabic word shahada and French word témoignage have come to express much the same thing in Morocco (2005b, 149). Menebhi mobilizes various genres and styles and relies heavily on the poetic stylization of violence to resist the attempt to define literary testimony and literariness and sincerity. Menebhi’s combination of transcriptions of oral histories with autobiographical narration further blurs the distinction between data, scientific discourse, and testimony, thus calling for broader and localized definitions that account for how testimonial narratives are marked by transnational and transcultural dynamics as well as by dynamics specific to particular contexts of emergence. Despite Poèmes’s unusual format, its testimonial function is indisputable and the collection has been analyzed accordingly by scholars such as Slyomovics and Orlando. The foreword to the 1978 publication also indicates that the book is ‘a triple testimony by Saïda, who testifies as a sister, as a daughter, and as a friend; she also testifies as a woman, depicting her reality and that of common-law prisoners with whom she had daily contact in prison; and finally, she testifies as a politically committed radical Marxist-Leninist’ (8).14 Menebhi’s various texts exhume a desire to vocalize the struggles and the hopes of what she

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sees as a pivotal moment in Morocco’s history. Her lyrical passages on socialism communicate the leftist opposition movement’s enthusiasm and commitment to political and social change; her emotional descriptions of isolation and separation from her partner and family members express the vulnerability of the political prisoner; her inclusion of common-law prisoners’ stories recounts women’s situation in Morocco. Together, the various components of Menebhi’s writings form an archive that bears witness to the losses suffered by a generation of young activists and the ways in which state-sponsored disappearance, torture, and isolation affected their communities and the national collective body. However, Menebhi’s testimony is not merely an archive of suffering and resistance. Considered in its context of emergence and in relation to its author’s fate, it also acts as a witness. Indeed, in Menebhi’s case, a resister and a victim who did not survive the experience of political violence, the physical materiality of her writings testifies to her martyrdom. As Slyomovics explains, the Arabic words shahadah (testimony) and shahidah, which can mean ‘woman martyr,’ come from the same root. For Slyomovics, the ‘testifying woman political prisoner and the female martyr are historically and symbolically conjoined in the life and death of Saida Menebhi’ (2005b, 149). Instead of solely a written narrative bearing witness to an individual’s life experience, Menebhi’s life, death, and her writings constitute her gendered testimony and its historical significance. Moreover, in a context where the testimony of victims and private documentation were for a long time the only proofs attesting to the disappearance of some Moroccan political prisoners,15 Menebhi’s smuggled poetry and the letters she left her family constitute documents that challenge the religious and legal meanings of testimony within the Moroccan context.16 In addition, because the author died a year before the publication of her prison writings, they not only testify to her struggle in prison until her last days, but also stand in lieu of her disappeared body. Rather than weakening their testimonial function, the stylization and aestheticizing of Menebhi’s writings add a collective dimension. The aura of authenticity projected by Menebhi’s various writings does not come from a series of verifiable facts, but from the way in which her ‘narrative projects the witness as representative not of personal, idiosyncratic experience, but of the larger community of those who remain silent, but whose silence calls out for ethical redress.’17 The language, style, and structure of Menebhi’s writings are thus material traces of the author’s physical, intellectual, and ideological journey in political resistance and political violence. The position of the

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reader is akin to that of an interpreter, a decipherer. S/he is a part of the testimonial act. In the absence of the witness and with the fragmentary archive of the history of violence and resistance during the Years of Lead, this reconfiguration of testimony and the testimonial performance bears witness to a Moroccan ‘crisis of witnessing.’18 The relationship between the reader and the written testimony re-enacts this crisis. Poèmes’s fragmentary structure, incompleteness, and silences demand an ethical reading, one that transforms the reader into a ‘belated witness’ who must ‘cultivate not only another, more analytically informed mode of listening but a different, more ethical way of responding, a way of assuming co-responsibility for the act of bearing witness.’19 The relationship between the testimony as witness and the reader as belated witness is not a mere re-enactment of trauma caused by the disappearance of the victim and the partial disappearance of the archive of political violence. Unlike other Moroccan testimonial texts, Poèmes does not offer what Slyomovics describes as an ‘ethnographic account’ of torture and prison (2005b, 60). However, it does interrupt the authorities’ ability to appropriate the body of the political prisoner and to use this act of possessing to engender a narrative that inspires terror amongst the collective body. Indeed, in one of the earliest studies of Moroccan prison narratives, Abdesselam El Ouazzani explains that disappearing a person during the Years of Lead meant putting his or her body completely and at all times at the authorities’ disposal. 20 Slyomovics explains the meaning and impact of the Moroccan state’s ability to disappear political opponents and its imprint on the language that Moroccans use: The Moroccan Arabic verb ghabber, as uttered most frequently in the phrase Hasan ghabbru, means ‘Hasan forcibly disappeared him’ and permits the macabre causative and transitive conjugation: ghabbruh (they disappeared him), ghabberhum (he disappeared them), ghabbruha (they disappeared her), nghabbrik (I will disappear you), and so on according to the context. Literally and letter by letter, the Arabic triconsonantal root rh-b-r denotes ‘someone covered over’ as well as ‘the act of being turned to dust,’ a case in which a semantic field linked enforced disappearance to one of its gruesome outcomes, the dead missing body disintegrating beneath the sands, perhaps part of a mass grave. (2005b, 44)

Menebhi’s writings and their reconfigurations of testimony and literature engender different languages, different ways of storytelling, and different ways of bearing witness, even as the various actors are engaged in a crisis of witnessing.

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The collective and secular dimension of Menebhi’s message and project link her writings to other literary productions by women originating from non-Western societies. For instance, describing prison narratives written by Bolivian, Egyptian, Kenyan, Pakistani, Palestinian, and South African women in the 1980s, Barbara Harlow explains that women’s experiences of violence and resistance are attested to in their narratives as a collective enterprise. For Harlow, collectively, these writings constitute a literary corpus out of the particular conditions of political and social repression in the ‘Third World.’ These narratives, embodying the challenge to authoritarian structures and based ‘exclusively on neither issues of gender or race nor, strictly speaking, based on questions of class, they outline the possibilities of new secular forms of social organization.’21 For Harlow, women’s writings are thus sites in which ‘Third World’ subjectivities as well as novel narrative forms and structures are formed. She underlines this claim further by stating, ‘[i]n the prison memoirs of Third World political detainees, the challenge to the literary conventions of autobiography are concomitant with the refusal of filial ties based exclusively on gender or race, sex or ethnicity’ (1986, 505). Menebhi’s writings not only collapse the difference between the individual and the collective; at times, they also collapse gender, class, ethnic, and national difference as well as different temporalities and stages of struggle. For instance, in her poem composed on April 6, 1976, written in the form of a letter to her male co-activist and lover, she creates parallels between different moments in the history of Morocco: In your last letter you said to me: I feel our love is strong stronger than repression than the thick obscurity of the prison these words make my blood rush water my thirsty body and fill me with an invincible strength […] I am a communist my perseverance, yours everyone else’s we have it in our blood we get it from the people

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from Abdelkrim, the mountains’ ‘hero’ from Zeroual, the unforgettable martyr. (46–48)22

In this poem, Menebhi conjoins her suffering with her lover’s, who is also serving a prison sentence for his political activism. She uses poetic language to fuse their love for one another and their love for social justice and the Moroccan people, creating a symbolic flow between words and blood. The Moroccan people, anonymous resisters, and historical figures of the resistance such as Abdelkrim El Khattabi (the warrior from the Rif who defeated the Spanish army in 1921 and set up the short-lived Republic of the Rif) and Abdellatif Zeroual (co-founder of Ila al-Amam, who was tortured to death in the secret detention center Derb Moulay Cherif in 1974) form one body, united in its fight against all forms of domination and repression. In other poems she dissolves national frontiers, using her words and dreams of victory to move from Morocco to Palestine, to Eritrea, to the Dhofar region, and to Chile (64). These poems certainly make Menebhi’s writings a site for the expression of what Harlow defines as a ‘secular ideology, one not based on bonds of gender, race, or ethnicity’ in the writings of women originating from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America (1986, 503). Choosing a Marxist-socialist framework and aligning with many secular sociopolitical projects of her time, Menebhi critiques the intersection of religion, politics, and patriarchy in post-independence Morocco’s sociopolitical organization. Doing so, she counteracts the mechanisms mobilized by the ruling elites to make ‘deception an art of the state’ under King Hassan II. 23 She also further distances herself from the literary conventions of autobiography, as well as the legal and religious conventions of testimony. The fragmentary structure of her writings, her use of French, and her plural construction of the autobiographical ‘I’ are, to a certain extent, anti-autobiographical. Menebhi’s narrative techniques and the posthumous assemblage of her various writings reveal a process and a project that radically differentiates itself from Lejeune’s classifications as well as from imperialistic and gendered conventions of autobiography such as those put forward by Georges Gusdorf. Indeed, the latter confines autobiography culturally and racially when he claims that the genre ‘expresses a concern peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own’ (Gusdorf

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1980, 29). Menebhi’s plural narration and the reading modes that her testimony requires depart from Gusdorf’s unitary subject and individual consciousness. Instead, they reveal a subjectivity that is mediated by the collective and the transnational dimension of political resistance as well as by a narrative mode that has emerged out of the experience of torture, political incarceration, and prison for women. The 1978 edition of Poèmes directly addresses the anti-imperialist dimensions of Menebhi’s writing. The foreword indicates that ‘Saïda, who speaks Arabic and champions Arabization, can only write in French’ (7). 24 This information suggests that Menebhi’s writing in French is the result of colonial cultural domination. However, considering other Moroccan authors’ relationships with the language of the former colonizer and the claim that speaking and writing in French amounts to decolonizing it, 25 Menebhi’s testimony can be seen as a narrative that not only decolonizes French, but also the autobiographical mode, by stripping both of the imperialist ideology they embody. Doris Sommer explains that testimonials by authors who use a colonizer’s or a former colonizer’s language, while strongly situating their narrators as a part of oppressed and indigenous communities, are a symptom of Western cultural penetration as well as a sign of resistance to it. She explains that in these testimonials, collective subjects are not a personal stylistic choice on the part of their authors, but ‘a translation of a hegemonic autobiographical prose into a colonized language that does not equate identity with individuality. It is thus a reminder that life continues at the margins of Western discourse, and continues to disturb and to challenge it’ (Sommer 1991, 39). Using French to describe the struggle of formerly colonized peoples who are still burdened by legacies of imperial systems and cultures, Menebhi subjects French and conventional autobiographical writing to the political and life practices of historically marginalized categories of people, thus politically and culturally deterritorializing it. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘[a] becoming-minoritarian exists only by virtue of a deterritorialized medium and subject that are like its elements. There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority.’26 Similarly to the Maghrebi authors described by Réda Bensmaïa, Menebhi makes herself ‘into this medium and becomes this deterritorialized and deterritorializing subject.’27 She is a deterritorializing subject in relation to France, whose imperialism and neo-imperialism she questions and rejects. Similarly, she is a deterritorialized subject in relation to Morocco and Moroccan

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culture when she uses French and affiliates herself with global revolutionary movements to question patriarchy and authoritarianism. In this position, Menebhi’s writings also challenge the distinction between ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ that was so prominent among influential academic critics such as Harlow and Sommer in the 1980s and 1990s. Menebhi is able to accomplish these feats precisely because of ‘the transformative process of borrowing’ a dominant language that Sommer mentions (1991, 43). Indeed, in her writings, Menebhi crosses national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries which, though still recognizing the power relations between various places, exposes the artificiality of distinctions such as ‘First World’ and ‘Third World.’ Effacing the Female Resister, Feminizing the Moroccan People and Moroccan Marxism-Leninism ‘I will die a Marxist-Leninist,’ Menebhi declares in an untitled poem composed on March 11, 1977 (43). This defiant profession is a testimony to the author’s continued commitment to Marxism-Leninism even after she was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for her activism. It also testifies to a particular wave of feminism born as a result of women’s involvement in the 1960s and the 1970s in leftist and communist parties such as Le Parti de la Libération et du Socialisme (Party of Socialism and Liberation), renamed Le Parti du Progrès et du Socialisme (Party of Progress and Socialism) in 1974; the socialist Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (National Union of Popular Forces), renamed l’Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (The Socialist Union of Popular Forces) in 1974; l’Organisation pour l’Action Démocratique et Populaire (The Organization for Democratic and Popular Action); student unions such as l’Union Nationale des Etudiants du Maroc (UNEM) (The National Union of Moroccan Students); and underground Marxist-Leninist groups such as 23 mars (March 23), which was created to commemorate the riots that took place in Casablanca on March 23, 1965, and Ila al-Amam (Forward), which was created in 1970. Women like Menebhi, Fatna El Bouih, Rabia Ftouh, Latifa Jbabdi, and Fatima Okacha, targeted by the regime for their political activism, were introduced to politics as a result of their participation in social justice and anti-authoritarianism campaigns conducted by MarxistLeninist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. This is all the more true for Menebhi, who came from a family of activists, and whose brother,

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Abdelaziz Menebhi, the president of the radical UNEM, was disappeared and secretly detained for thirteen months in 1973 after his organization was banned. In their introduction to their translation of El Bouih’s memoir Talk of Darkness (2008), Susan Slyomovics and Mustapha Kamal underline the importance of these formative years. Unlike their nationalist mothers supporting men’s struggle for independence, these women ‘drew on the 1960s wave of feminism in Morocco and its theoretical readings in order to engage in activism as a means to promote democracy as well as equality between the sexes.’28 Moroccan Marxist-Leninist movements thus played a crucial role in politicizing women’s issues, mainly by incorporating women within their ranks. However, women’s issues and equality between the sexes were not central in the agenda of these movements and did not represent a priority for them. Studies have also shown that activism in MarxistLeninist parties and organizations was rather ‘consumed by the notion of class struggle and hopes to bring about a socialist system in which, at least for the time being their female members were told, there was no space for a specific women’s rights agenda’ (Elliott 2015, 42). In The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco, Slyomovics underlines how women’s involvement in politics encountered resistance on two fronts, from both the Moroccan government and Moroccan society. She draws a parallel between women’s marginalization in opposition movements and state-sponsored gendered violence and explains that ‘male comrades unwilling to include wives, sisters, and mothers in clandestine oppositional networks were matched by the persecution of authoritarian governments ferociously eliminating all opposition, both male and female, yet reserving specific apparatuses of control over women who transgress against taboos’ (2005, 135–136). Menebhi’s poetry and essay bear witness to this ambivalence towards the role and place of women in the agendas of revolutionary movements. In her poems, she minimizes gender, ethnicity, class, and national differences, and her suffering metonymically stands for the suffering of the oppressed in Morocco and beyond. This leads her to omit important details of her experience as a woman within the ranks of the resistance and in the torture room. Though she expresses her loneliness, her pain at being separated from her lover and family, and her weakened body during the hunger strikes, biographical information and specific information about the author’s torture and conditions of imprisonment are scarce. In this regard, Menebhi’s texts differ from later testimonies written by former women political prisoners in the 1990s and 2000s, in which the authors describe

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in detail the gendered forms of violence to which they were subjected because they were women. 29 Thus, even though the lack of detail testifies to the difficulty of writing pain and facilitates the construction of a plural autobiographical ‘I’ that can express suffering and resistance across gender, ethnic, racial, national, and class boundaries, it also results in a form of effacement that may, in turn, result in the production of a gendered narrative that reiterates some of the ideological and social conventions of the time. This conforms to the writing of other Maghrebi women who, according to Abdelkader Cheref, had to find narrative strategies that seemingly undermined their affirmations of difference in order for the public to accept their female voices and overcome what many viewed as a taboo and a transgression. 30 In Menebhi’s writings, the quasi-erasure of gender references among resisters is thus a reflection of what Harlow sees as a ‘secular ideology’ (1986, 503), and what Valérie K. Orlando describes as ‘the universal hope for equality along class and gender lines that socialist and communist movements fostered as they spread across continents from South America to Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.’31 At the same time, it is also a narrative device that causes Menebhi’s writings to conform to the sociopolitical expectations of her time and a response to the general consensus that the enhancement of women’s rights should be minimized to avoid divisive sentiments among the public (Elliott 2015, 43). This idea is striking in Menebhi’s inscription of resisters as either male or genderless in opposition to her inscription of women mostly as victims. Indeed, while she inscribes communism and Marxism-Leninism as ideologies that have the potential to dissolve all kinds of boundaries and facilitate the achievement of universal social justice, Menebhi uses descriptions of women’s and children’s suffering almost exclusively to illustrate social injustice. She also uses adjectives in the feminine form to describe the oppressed masses, as opposed to the masculine form for adjectives describing their tormentors (21; 25; 52). Women sharing the prison with her represent a reservoir from which to draw examples that humanize, but also feminize, the people and the oppressed: in this prison within these walls in the eyes of each woman I see hatred hatred for you torturers of my people and love for life for bread, for peace. (21)32

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Passages such as the above lead Orlando to rightly note that Menebhi’s ‘poems also expressed a serenity that seems particularly woman-centered due to the abundant references to children, birth, and the renaissance of woman as the generator of a future, utopist society’ (2010, 282). Thus, while Menebhi inscribes the figure of the resister or the comrade as mostly male or genderless, she feminizes social injustice, which allows her to legitimize women’s rights within the agendas of Marxist-Leninist movements. In her poems, she also calls out her male co-activists, reminding them of their promises to women and children through her dialogue with her partner and lover: You spoke of a wonderful world That would come because we want it to You used to say, in that world, Children will no longer live in misery Mothers will no longer abandon their babies Women will no longer be abused Despised and debased. (40)33

Poems such as this gender the struggle against authoritarianism, imperialism, capitalism, and corruption, equating them with patriarchy. Menebhi’s feminizing of the people is thus a narrative strategy that redefines the priorities of Moroccan revolutionary movements, positing women’s liberation and equality between the sexes as pillars for the achievement of an ideal society governed by Marxist-Leninist principles. She clearly expresses the interconnection between her MarxismLeninism and feminism in her unfinished essay on prostitution. Like most powerful images illustrating the suffering of oppressed masses in her poems, the essay was inspired by common-law prisoners who were, for the most part, serving sentences for their activities as sex workers. The text appears to be the development of a poem entitled ‘Les filles de joie’ (‘Ladies of the Night’) written on October 2, 1977, which depicts the scarred bodies of young women who have been turned into ageless and damaged ‘statues’ by patriarchal exploitation in the form of prostitution (66–69). In her essay, adopting the style and language of sociological studies, Menebhi denounces prostitution as a symbol of the moral, economic, and political failures of Moroccan society and the incompetence and corruption of its ruling elite. Basing her study on the stories that prisoners told her, she lists the reasons that push women into prostitution: poverty, early and/or forced marriages, domestic violence, and lack of opportunities for social and economic mobility.

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After situating prostitution as a sign of a degenerate society governed by a corrupt neocolonial elite (84), Menebhi establishes the Moroccan woman as the quintessential victim of the current sociopolitical system: In this climate that we can describe as fascist, one cannot forget women’s double exploitation in this underdeveloped country that follows the herd. This reality, particular to Moroccan women and which conjoins two forms of exploitation (exploitation by the system in the same way men are and exploitation by men), is a social phenomenon that is also necessarily engendered by the nature of existent economic, political, and social structures. It is evident that women, in this patriarchal system, remain considered as subalterns who can neither possess land nor choose or leave their husbands. Women have the status of a minor, a situation that originates from hypotheses that link their tutelage to their supposed physical and intellectual inferiority or that are based on ideological and cultural factors. (85)34

By making the sex worker the symbol of women’s exploitation, and women’s exploitation the perfect example of the failing capitalist, corrupt, and patriarchal Moroccan society, Menebhi breaks many of the taboos that have historically made women’s rights a secondary issue in the agendas of Moroccan political parties and organizations across the political spectrum (Elliott 2015, 42). She also debunks a patriarchal narrative that depicts sex workers as deviants who, like political prisoners, need to be isolated in detention centers and reformed through violence, again equating authoritarianism to patriarchy. Menebhi’s Radical Feminism and Feminism of Negotiation Menebhi’s writings are remarkable because they transgress patriarchal taboos in radical ways while also conforming to the expectations of opposition movements that can be described as patriarchal or perpetuating patriarchal norms that marginalize women. Menebhi not only effaces the woman resister in favor of a genderless comrade and spokesperson, and references men as examples of revolutionary heroes when she mentions Abdelkrim El Khattabi and Abdellatif Zeroual, but her poems also abound in images of traditional representations of women and womanhood with multiple references to the figures of the mother and the educator. Many of her poems, such as ‘Rêve en plein jour’ (‘Daydreaming’) (62–65) and the untitled poems composed on November  26, 1976 (27–28) and in January 1977 (29) address future

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generations, symbolized by the figure of a child, or describe the suffering of children neglected by the patriarchal and capitalist system. Doing so, Menebhi presents herself as a mother and an educator. Even when she talks about peasants, workers, and the land, she uses images and adjectives that evoke nurturing and giving birth (29; 54; 61). Her depiction of sex workers in prison also conforms to a traditional perception of womanhood. Indeed, she never addresses the fact that some of these women committed or were accused of committing crimes. Instead, all the women she describes are victimized by men and unjustly imprisoned. This depiction is likely a reflection of the patriarchal legal system of the 1970s. Yet other testimonies, such as Fatna El Bouih’s, while underlining the flaws of a legal system dominated by men and patriarchal norms, also describe women who committed murder and even infanticide. This indicates that Menebhi potentially chose to overlook women and stories who did not fit traditional characteristics of Moroccan womanhood and her own narrative of women’s situation in Morocco. At the same time, a careful reading of her poems reveals that Menebhi also inscribes women as agents of change and invites them to take part in what she perceives as a global revolutionary movement. For instance, addressing her mother, she writes: Mother, you brought me into the world but so did my motherland and it is to save her that I am away from you that I am in prison. (40)35

Menebhi pays homage to the mother, a venerated figure in the traditional Moroccan family structure. At the same time, the narrator deviates from the representation of the perfect and obeying daughter. Creating a parallel between the mother and the motherland, Menebhi dismisses the separation between private and public spheres as well as the separation between women and politics that prevailed in 1970s Moroccan society. In Menebhi’s poems, activism and women’s presence in politics and in prison is thus no longer a deviation and a taboo, but a duty. Articulating an ideology in which Marxist-Leninist and feminist ideals, as well as local imperatives, cohabit, emerges as a form of nego-feminism as understood by Obioma Nnaemeka. In her article entitled ‘Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,’ which takes into account the existence of diverse practices of feminism on the African continent on the one hand, and on the other

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the idea of ‘building on the indigenous,’ Nnaemeka proposes the concept of nego-feminism, which she defines as a ‘feminism of negotiation’ and as ‘“no ego” feminism.’ Insisting on the principles of negotiation, give and take, compromise, and balance she sees in many African cultures, Nnaemeka further explains: Here, negotiation has the double meaning of ‘give and take/exchange’ and ‘cope with successfully/go around.’ African feminism […] challenges through negotiations and compromise. It knows when, where, and how to detonate patriarchal land mines; it also knows when, where, and how to go around patriarchal land mines. In other words, it knows when, where, and how to negotiate with or negotiate around patriarchy in different contexts […]. Furthermore, nego-feminism is structured by cultural imperatives and modulated by ever-shifting local and global exigencies. (2004, 378)

Reading Poèmes’s ambiguities in light of Nnaemeka’s nego-feminism, it appears that refusing to distinguish between a feminist agenda that would prioritize the advancement of women’s rights and a MarxistLeninist agenda advocating for resistance across class and gender is not a contradiction; rather, Menebhi chooses to advance women’s issues while circumventing sociocultural and political limitations such as those described by Slyomovics and Elliott. Like the practices of feminism and negotiation that Nnaemeka sees unfolding on the African continent, both north and south of the Sahara, Menebhi’s approach to women’s rights uses a Marxist-Leninist platform and the Moroccan sociopolitical and cultural context in a framework of negotiation and compromise. It is a strategy that proposes radical change without alienating allies in the opposition movements. Understanding the complexity of how Menebhi approaches women’s rights and inscribes them within her larger political ideology and engagement is crucial for understanding the emergence of a localized feminism out of women’s experience of resistance, violence, and incarceration during the Years of Lead. Menebhi’s nego-feminism is not a minor form of feminism that accommodates the imperatives of the Moroccan patriarchal society, political parties, and organizations. It is an ideology and a form of resistance that is grounded in the author’s experience of politics and prison. Menebhi’s public declarations against women’s oppression in Morocco during her 1977 trial show that her commitment to women’s rights preceded her writings in prison (Rollinde 2002, 195). However, Poèmes inscribes the space of the prison

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and the writing process as formative elements that favor the rise of Moroccan women’s gender and feminist consciousness. The collection also testifies to various forms of feminism emerging from the African continent, the Middle East, and Latin America that challenge local patriarchal systems, Western patriarchy and the legacies of colonialism, and Western feminism. Menebhi’s writings and the political ideology they express are undoubtedly also shaped by her experience in prison and her contact with common-law prisoners. The change of tone and content between the three first poems, written between January 1976 and October 1976 and addressing Menebhi’s male co-activist and lover while evoking the loneliness caused by their separation and their commitment to the socialist revolution, and the subsequent poems describing the suffering of female workers and sex workers who share the space of the prison with her (18) testifies to an important evolution in the author’s political priorities. This evolution is not unique to Menebhi; it is visible in other women’s prison writings, such as Talk of Darkness (2008) by El Bouih and the writings of Latifa Jabadi and Widad Bouab, in which common-law prisoners’ stories also illustrate the ills of Moroccan society and its patriarchy. However, Menebhi’s writings also differ significantly from other women’s. Unlike testimonies written by women who survived prison and which were sometimes edited years or even decades after their incarceration, Menebhi’s writings were entirely produced in prison and remained unchanged. Menebhi’s somewhat raw literary renderings of prison life and thought more clearly gesture to the fact that, for political prisoners and prison narratives’ authors, prison is a place of self-making and self-affirmation, in resistance to what Philip Williams describes as ‘the state’s imperative of conversion or “remolding” […] of the imprisoned societal misfit into a law abiding citizen with more industrious and especially tractable habits of mind.’36 Menebhi’s aesthetics of feminist solidarity testifies to a feminist and political conversion that was experienced by many women engaged in leftist politics in the 1970s. For instance, El Bouih, who was detained in the same prison as Menebhi, confesses that, as a young activist in the 1970s, she thought of herself as merely a politician and an activist without any specific concerns for her gender. She claims that, before her kidnapping, torture, and incarceration, she believed that women’s situation would change with the country’s, declaring that her ‘feminist consciousness was only awakened in [her while] in prison’ (Slyomovics 2005b, 151). The experience of torture and prison certainly reinforced

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Menebhi’s commitment to social justice across gender and class lines. Her writings show that it also provided her with a language, an aesthetic practice, and a legitimacy to express the urgency of integrating women’s rights into the opposition’s priorities. Menebhi’s complex and multifaceted writings demonstrate what George Yúdice describes as testimonial writings’ ‘effort to recognize and valorize the aesthetics of life practices themselves.’37 The prison microcosm and marginalized women’s stories contextualize and feminize Menebhi’s commitment to the Marxist-Leninist Moroccan political ideal. The inscription of this dimension in the writings also highlights the author’s transformation mediated by the writing process, a function also underlined by Yúdice, who further explains testimonial writing as a way of using narrative discourse that has a pragmatic function of self-defense and survival and an aesthetic function that allows its subjects to rework their identity through an aesthetic that usually challenges definitions of the literary as legitimized by dominant structures and institutions (1991, 19). In Poèmes, the reader is able to see how Menebhi reworks her identity from an activist primarily committed to the achievement of a socialist revolution to a feminist Marxist-Leninist for whom capitalism, neo-imperialism, and patriarchy exist within a continuum of oppressive structures and which turn women into double victims of exploitation. Equally important, Menebhi’s reader is able to foresee a future in which women’s situation ceases to illustrate oppression and, instead, women become leaders and agents of change. In a poem composed on April 6, 1977 (44–45), Menebhi asks suffering women to stop crying and reserve their tears for the day of their future victory. In the same poem, she also urges women to join the rebellion and armed insurgency in the mountains in order to reconquer their homeland. In another powerful poem addressing a child, Menebhi entrusts future generations with her history of resistance and sacrifice for the nation and the revolution: You know my child I made a poem for you but don’t blame me for writing it in this language that you don’t understand yet it is nothing my child when you are older you will grasp this dream that I dreamt in the middle of the day

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Revisionary Narratives It will be your turn to tell the story of this woman an Arab prisoner in her own country. (63)38

Menebhi’s poetry, projecting women as agents of change, is a foundational contribution to testimonial literature by Moroccan women. Despite the lacunae mentioned above and others that will be addressed in subsequent chapters, Menebhi’s writings represent an important model for the construction of a Moroccan feminine testimonial voice and feminist aesthetics. Her choice to write poetry in particular and her stylization of violence and political resistance allow her to carve an uncontrollable space in which she can, even if only momentarily, escape patriarchal discourses because, as Cixous claims, ‘poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and because the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as [E. T. A.] Hoffman would say, fairies’ (1976, 879–880). The instability, ambiguity, and radicalism of Menebhi’s writing is crucial to the understanding of the intersection of gender, political violence, and political resistance in Morocco. Menebhi’s struggle to reclaim women’s lived experiences and use them to articulate a feminine and feminist vision left indelible imprints on Moroccan women’s narrative strategies in the testimonial writings of the 1990s and 2000s. Her influence is also palpable in the themes and aesthetics of Moroccan and Moroccan-born women’s cultural production in diverse media and languages. Notes 1 Saïda Menebhi, Poèmes, lettres, écrits de prison (Paris: Comité de lutte contre la répression au Maroc, 1978), p. 125. All translations from French to English from Poèmes are mine. Original French text: ‘Ma mère, il faut que tu sois sûre que le fait que je sois en prison ne signifie pas que je sois privée de vie, car ma vie a plusieurs sens et passe en prenant l’un ou l’autre. La prison est une école et elle est un complément d’éducation.’ 2 See also Marguerite Rollinde, Le mouvement marocain pour les droits de l’Homme, entre consensus national et engagement citoyen (Paris: Karthala, 2002), p. 175. 3 Susan Gilson Miller, A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 166–171. 4 Soumia Boutkhil, ‘“The evil eye”: Re/presenting Woman in Moroccan

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Literature in French,’ in Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil (eds), Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 56–63, 58. 5 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–893, 877. 6 On the predominance of the autobiographical and testimonial modes in Francophone literature by Moroccan women, see Déjeux (1994), Gontard (2005), Zekri (2006), Rachida Saïgh Bousta, Romancières marocaines: épreuves d’écriture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), and Valérie K. Orlando (1999; 2009). 7 Brahim El Guabli notes that the ‘publication frenzy of this period generated a couple of hundred memoirs, poetry anthologies, and a few novels, which were written or co-written in Arabic and French.’ Brahim El Guabli, ‘Cette aveuglante absence de lumière: The Politics of Novelizing Human Rights Violations in the Former Colonizer’s Language,’ Francosphères, 5.1 (2016), pp. 59–80, 61. In addition, testimonies by victims and their family members were depicted in numerous newspaper articles and televised programs in Morocco and abroad. 8 See, for instance, Déjeux (1994), Gontard (2005), Saigh Bousta (2005), Zekri (2006), Orlando (1999, 2009), and Suellen Diaconoff, The Myth of the Silent Woman: Moroccan Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 9 Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 1. 10 Original French text: Il était exactement six heures du soir lorsque deux dragons noirs deux flics de la police politique ont brouillé les eaux de mon pacifique dans ma maison et la tienne les murs ont blêmi de haine la haine pour tous les fascistes elles ont un cœur les choses les dragons noirs ont tant fait souffrir notre chaise sur laquelle toi et moi nous nous sommes si souvent assis tu te rappelles? tu m’appelais ma belle et nous commencions notre travail la lecture de notre journal Le soir les dragons noirs

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viennent ombrager notre souvenir avec leurs ailes ils viennent déchiqueter notre avenir avec leurs serres mais leurs yeux morts tisons calcinés par la force de notre amour par l’étoile rouge sont aveuglés. 11 Natalie Edwards, Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 11. 12 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4. 13 Original French: Cette femme n’est pas seule Elle est comme tant d’autres victime de l’exploitation du pouvoir des laquais de New York et de Paris […] et elle est là gisante et souffrante réclamant justice à mille dieux mais les assassins veulent l’achever car elle est du peuple qui demain prendra l’arme pour la libérer. 14 Original French: ‘Ce livre constitue le triple témoignage de Saïda, dans sa sensibilité de sœur, de fille, d’amie; dans sa conscience de femme, à travers la réalité et celle des détenues de droit commun qu’elle a côtoyées quotidiennement à la prison; dans son engagement politique radical comme marxiste-léniniste.’ 15 Some Moroccan political prisoners such as the fifty-eight men sent to Tazmamart, an underground prison inside an isolated military camp in the Atlas Mountains in southeastern Morocco, were disappeared by the authorities and secretly detained without anyone knowing their whereabouts. Some were never heard from again, and many cases remained unresolved even after the 1999 Independent Arbitration Commission and the 2004 IER, the two statecontrolled commissions established to address and determine financial and other forms of reparations for past violations of human rights. 16 In Islamic law, the word shahada has two meanings: ‘The word shahada means “testimony” in two senses: the first religious, the second legal. In

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the first sense, it refers to the “bearing witness” (al-shahada) to the central beliefs of Islam in a daily act of religious obligation required of every Muslim […]. In its legal sense, shahada is the statement of an eyewitness (shahid) in cases where a civil contract between parties is being arranged (for example, a marriage) or where an infringement of the law is under investigation (for example, a case of suspected adultery).’ Marin Whittingham, ‘Profession of Faith, Islamic (Al-shahada),’ in Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilisation and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 514–515. 17 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, ‘Witness or False Witness? Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony,’ Biography, 35.4 (2012), pp. 590–625, 595. 18 Shoshana Felman argues that the discrepancy between the urge to testify and the demand for testimony after the Holocaust on the one hand and, on the other, the difficulty to testify constitute a crisis of witnessing. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 19 Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 2–3. 20 Abdessalam El Ouazzani, Le récit carcéral marocain, ou, Le paradigme de l’humain (Rabat: Imprimerie La Capitale, 2004), p. 96. 21 Barbara Harlow, ‘From the Women’s Prison: Third World Women’s Narratives of Prison,’ Feminist Studies, 12.3 (Autumn 1986), pp. 501–524, 506–507. 22 Original French: Dans ta dernière lettre tu me disais: je sens notre amour fort plus fort que la répression que l’épaisse obscurité de la prison ces mots font jaillir mon sang arrosent mon corps assoiffé et me remplissent d’une force invincible […] Je suis communiste ma perséverance, la tienne celle de tous dans le sang nous l’avons du peuple nous la tenons d’Abdelkrim ‘héros’ des montagnes de Zeroual martyr inoubliable.

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23 Ahmed Benchemsi, ‘Morocco: Outfoxing the Opposition,’ Journal of Democracy, 23.1 (January 2012), pp. 57–69, 59. 24 My translation. Original French: ‘Saïda vit et parle en arabe, lutte pour l’arabisation, mais ne peut qu’écrire en français.’ 25 See, for instance, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s relationship to French as he describes it in Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages) (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1983) and La mémoire tatouée: autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Tattooed Memory: Autobiography of a Decolonized Subject) (Paris: Denoël, 1971). In these two autobiographical essays, Khatibi claims that the fusion of the narrator’s experience in Arabic with the French language amounts to a process of decolonization of both. 26 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 272. 27 Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 50–51. 28 Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, ‘Translators’ Introduction,’ in Fatna El Bouih, Talk of Darkness (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), pp. x–xi. 29 See, for instance, Fatna El Bouih’s and Malika Oufkir’s testimonies, analyzed in Chapter 2. 30 See Abdelkader Cheref, Gender and identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and Feminism in Maghrebi Women’s Literature (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010), pp. 36–37. 31 Valérie K. Orlando, ‘Feminine Spaces and Places in the Dark Recesses of Morocco’s Past: The Prison Testimonials in Poetry and Prose of Saïda Menebhi and Fatna El Bouih,’ The Journal of North African Studies, 15.3 (2010), pp. 273–288, 279. 32 Original French: dans cette prison dans cette enceinte dans les yeux de chacune je vois la haine la haine pour vous tortionnaires de mon peuple et l’amour pour la vie pour le pain, pour la paix. 33 Original French: Tu parlais d’un monde merveilleux qui viendrait car nous le voulons Dans ce monde disais-tu les enfants ne connaîtront plus la misère les mamans n’abandonnerons plus les bébés

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les femmes ne seront plus battues méprisés, avilies. 34 Original French: ‘Dans ce climat que nous pouvons qualifier de fasciste, nous ne pouvons oublier la double exploitation que subit la femme dans ce pays sous-développé et suiviste. Cette réalité particulière de la femme marocaine qui regroupe deux aspects d’exploitation (exploitation par le système au même titre que l’homme et exploitation par l’homme lui-même) est un phénomène social engendré forcément et également par la nature des structures économico-politiques et sociales existantes. Il est évident que la femme sous le système patriarcal reste considérée comme un être subalterne, ne pouvant ni posséder la terre, ni choisir son mari ou s’en séparer. Elle a un statut de mineure partant d’hypothèses qui relient sa situation de tutelle a sa supposée infériorité physique et intellectuelle ou qui font intervenir des facteurs idéologiques ou culturels.’ 35 My translation. Original French: mère tu m’as enfantée mais ma patrie aussi et c’est pour la sauver que je suis loin de toi que je suis en prison. 36 Philip F. Williams, ‘The Repercussion of Thought Remolding and Forced Labor on Chinese Writers: Introduction,’ in Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu (eds), Remolding and Resistance among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp: Disciplined and Published (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–12, 5. 37 George Yúdice, ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism,’ Latin American Perspectives, 18.3 (Summer 1991), pp. 15–31, 21. 38 Original French: Tu sais mon enfant j’avais fait un poème pour toi mais ne m’en veux pas si je l’ai écrit en cette langue qu’encore tu ne comprends pas ce n’est rien mon enfant lorsque tu seras grand tu saisiras ce rêve que j’ai fait en plein jour tu raconteras à ton tour l’histoire de cette femme prisonnière arabe dans son propre pays.

chapter two

(Re)writing the Woman Resister Violence, Gender, and Legitimacy in Fatna El Bouih’s and Malika Oufkir’s Testimonies (Re)writing the Woman Resister

Modern-Day Scheherazades In the preface to Stolen Lives (2001), originally published in French as La prisonnière (1999), Malika Oufkir’s co-author, renowned French novelist and journalist Michèle Fitoussi, writes, ‘Malika is a remarkable storyteller. A Scheherazade. She has a thoroughly oriental narrative style’ (3). This introduction to a rather controversial prison and political memoir is a skillful marketing strategy. Scheherazade, the legendary heroine of Alf Layla wa Layla (A Thousand and One Nights), conjures images of an exotic ‘Orient’ for the French public to whom Oufkir’s testimony was initially addressed.1 In the classic tales, Scheherazade stops King Shahrayar from continuing to marry and then execute virgins to avenge his first wife’s infidelity. After offering herself as Shahrayar’s next bride and victim, Scheherazade postpones her death for a thousand nights and eventually survives thanks to her captivating storytelling skills. Oufkir’s story fits well this framework of patriarchal cruelty, feminine resistance and survival, and shocking reversals. Indeed, after living a life of luxury and excess amongst the Moroccan bourgeoisie and royal family, Oufkir was kidnapped and arbitrarily detained for two decades in horrendous conditions. Oufkir, her mother, and five siblings were targeted by the authorities, allegedly in response to direct orders from Oufkir’s former adoptive father, King Hassan II.  The introduction turns the reader’s attention away from the Oufkirs’ family history. General Mohamed Oufkir, Malika’s biological father and

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a towering figure who held some of the highest positions in the Moroccan government, was well known by the French and Moroccan publics as one of the chief architects of the brutal repressive sociopolitical system that fashioned postcolonial Morocco. 2 The Nights’s reference offers the authors of Stolen Lives a method to rework Malika Oufkir’s biography into literature, and to recast her as a victim of political violence, rather than an insider whose family fully benefited from a brutal system before it turned against them. Stolen Lives’s narrative strategies yielded mixed responses. The book was recognized for its captivating storytelling devices; however, this also led scholars and commentators to question Oufkir’s sincerity and the testimonial quality of her account. As a result, Stolen Lives has generally been excluded from Morocco’s resistance literature, as well as from studies of women’s testimonies relating gendered political violence. For instance, in The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005), a leading study on human rights abuses during the Years of Lead and their memorialization, Susan Slyomovics emphasizes gender as a major factor in the infliction of political violence. Yet she separates Stolen Lives from testimonies by other women political prisoners and places it instead in the section on kinship. This distinction is found in other studies of Moroccan women’s testimonies, such as those by Valérie K. Orlando (2009; 2010), Suellen Diaconoff (2009), Laura Menin (2014), Jeanne Fouet-Fauvernier (2009), Catherine Perry (2000), and Touria Khannous (2013). These scholars either focus on the writings of Saïda Menebhi and Fatna El Bouih, the two former members of Moroccan leftist opposition movements, or on Oufkir’s testimony, without ever comparing all three. Yet a closer look at the three best-known testimonies by Moroccan women not only shows that all are crucial to the understanding of gendered sociopolitical violence, but also that they share many themes and narrative strategies. For instance, Stolen Lives’s introduction echoes the beginning of El Bouih’s Hadith al-‘Atama (2001), which was first published in Arabic and translated into French as Une femme nommée Rachid (2002) and in English as Talk of Darkness (2008). El Bouih, too, introduces her testimony with a reference to the heroine who told stories to avert her death by a tyrant king: I recalled what my father used to tell me whenever I woke up as a little girl terrified by a nightmare, about the many tales from A Thousand and One Nights that he would recount in the evenings when he felt relaxed, stories of kidnappings and abducted women and girls. My father would

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Similar to Fitoussi, El  Bouih evokes the Nights to challenge the perceptions of political violence and its victims. The analogy between her experience and Scheherazade’s establishes El Bouih’s kidnapping by police officers in 1977 as an archaic and patriarchal practice of violence. El Bouih reminds her readers that, contrary to official discourses and the public’s perception, violence against women as described in Scheherazade’s stories is neither fictional nor a thing of the past. El Bouih and Oufkir are not the only Moroccan authors of prison narratives who evoke Scheherazade. 3 Scholars of the Years of Lead have also used the heroine of the Nights to describe political prisoners, especially Menebhi and El Bouih.4 Yet no study has considered the commonalities between El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s framing of gendered sociopolitical violence and women’s resistance. The present study, using the connective figure of Scheherazade as a starting point, interrupts the consensus that separates and hierarchizes Moroccan women’s testimonies from the Years of Lead. It argues that, despite major differences in the authors’ socioeconomic backgrounds and in the structure of their narratives, El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s identification with Scheherazade calls for a comparative literary and political analysis of their testimonies. Both women ultimately use Scheherazade and the Nights to validate their stories of gendered political violence and resistance. They also appropriate the figure of Scheherazade to advance gender as a key component for understanding the circumstances that led to the excesses of the Years of Lead and their impacts in shaping contemporary Morocco. In addition, the allusion to Scheherazade posits El Bouih and Oufkir as a part of an important corpus by and about women in the Arab world who refer to Scheherazade, the archetypical figure of the woman storyteller to underline the connection between the act of storytelling and the preservation of women’s lives. Similar to other authors originating from the Middle East and North Africa such as the Egyptians Nawal El Saadawi and Leila Ahmed, the Algerian Assia Djebar, or the Moroccans Fatima Mernissi and Leila Abouzeid, El Bouih and Oufkir also use autobiography, Scheherazade, and the model of the Nights to recover women’s marginalized stories and to assert their life narratives within a transnational reception context. 5

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Storytelling, Autobiography, and Testimony In Stolen Lives, the evocation of Scheherazade thus draws readers’ attention to the intersection between gender and sociopolitical violence in postcolonial Morocco, and in so doing, anticipates and counteracts attempts to exclude Oufkir’s testimony from women’s literature of resistance. Aware of the heterogeneity as well as the commonalities that exist in Moroccan, and more broadly, in Arab women’s experiences, Fitoussi and Oufkir use the legendary heroine and the frame of her stories to pose Stolen Lives as an act of resistance against the historical marginalization of women in Arab societies. Within the framework of the Nights, the narrator, Oufkir, embodies the figure of the woman storyteller who, because she witnesses patriarchal violence, becomes a brilliant political strategist and a feminist. At the same time, with notable differences in its narrative structure, Stolen Lives also presents itself as a mirror of its author-narrator’s exceptional destiny and her ability to provide a unique point of view on the madness and the arbitrariness that transformed thousands of Moroccans into victims of political violence during the Years of Lead. Because of General Oufkir’s and his wife’s connections to the palace, Malika was adopted by King Mohammed V to be his youngest daughter’s playmate. From the age of five to fifteen, she lived in the royal palace where she was educated with Princess Amina and, after King Mohammed V’s death in 1961, his son and successor King Hassan II became a father figure to both. However, Malika’s life took a drastic turn following her father’s alleged involvement in the second attempt to overthrow the king on August 16, 1972. After fighter jets attacked the king’s plane as it returned from France, General Oufkir was summoned to the Skhirat Palace the same day, where he died, officially by suicide (Miller 2013, 174–175). Soon afterwards, his wife, six children, and two of his wife’s female adult cousins were kidnapped and put in various secret detention centers scattered all over Morocco. In 1987, the incredible escape of four of the children—Malika, Raouf, Maria, and Abdellatif—brought international attention to the family’s fate and forced the regime to release them into house arrest and better living conditions. Although officially released in 1991, they remained under surveillance and were not allowed to leave the country until 1996, the year in which Maria, Malika’s younger sister, escaped to France through Spain. Stolen Lives’s authors exploit the ever-changing tales of

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Scheherazade to tell this history from Malika’s perspective as a victim of political violence and a resister to the monarchy and patriarchy. The book’s narrative strategies contributed to its commercial success. According to the English edition, when the book was first published in France, it sold a hundred thousand copies and reached number one on the bestseller lists. Stolen Lives was also awarded the Maison de Presse Document Prize. In addition, since its publication, the book has been translated into several languages besides English, including Arabic, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.6 In 2001, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured Malika Oufkir and Stolen Lives was named an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also made the list of New York Times nonfiction bestsellers. Oufkir appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, the Rosie O’Donnell Show, and NPR.7 Stolen Lives’s popularity testifies to its authors’ ability to divert the international public’s attention from General Oufkir’s cruel legacy, comprising decades of brutality against political dissenters and presenting Malika Oufkir as a victim of political and patriarchal violence. Offering an alternative history of the Years of Lead, through the use of Scheherazade and the Nights, Oufkir and Fitoussi inscribe the book within a literary history that evokes resistance beyond the Moroccan context. Susan Gauch explains that the ‘intermediate origins and instability not just of the stories in her repertoire but of Shahrazad herself have made it very easy for translators, compilers and copyists to place words in her mouth over the years’ (2007, 2). These characteristics have offered women originating from Arab cultures an inexhaustible resource and a model for writing their experiences into history. The evocation of Scheherazade and the appropriation of her narrative framing devices make Stolen Lives an irreducible and unfixable narrative. Similar to Scheherazade, who uses her storytelling skills to seduce King Shahrayar and tell him subversive political stories, Fitoussi and Oufkir exploit various connections to seduce their readers. The book satisfies Western readers’ appetite for exotic tales, shaped by the ubiquity of Orientalist imagery representing sequestered harem beauties, while also borrowing the themes and narrative strategies of Maghrebi and Middle  Eastern feminist literature of resistance. The analogy with Scheherazade and the Nights thus brings about a multitude of reading directions, associations, and digressions that contribute to (mis)understandings of the complexity of testimonial literature of the Years of Lead. As Touria Kahnnous claims, Stolen Lives ‘can be situated not only among Moroccan women’s prison narratives […], but also among Arab women’s autobiography in general and the genre of Arab women’s

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prison narratives in particular’ (2013, 64–65). The book takes the form of a testimony within an autobiography. Like other testimonies written by the Oufkirs, 8 Malika Oufkir views hers as a broader historical document that provides valuable insights into the country’s politics, institutions, and mores. This perception is reflected in the structure of the narrative. The first part, entitled ‘Allées des Princesses’9 (‘Princesses Alleys’) is devoted to the Oufkirs’ family history, the narrator’s life in the royal palace, and her family’s relationship to kings Mohammed V and Hassan II. The second part, entitled ‘Vingt ans de prison’ (‘Twenty Years in Prison’), covers the narrator’s experience of imprisonment, liberation, and departure for France. Both sections are given equal importance and stand in sharp contrast with one another, a narrative strategy that underlines the idea of a ‘fairy tale in reverse’ (Stolen Lives, 106), which originally gave the book its international appeal. For Khannous, the form of Stolen Lives, its international success, and the widespread publicity it received in France and in the United States give the book its dual status as an important work in the genre of Arab women’s autobiography and a Moroccan prison memoir, as well as its literary historical value (2013, 65). However, the autobiography’s ability to provide biographical information that gives access, for the first time, to the intimate life and family of an Arab king from the perspective of an Arab woman also distinguishes Oufkir’s testimony from autobiographies written by other well-known victims of the Years of Lead such as El Bouih. Like Menebhi, El Bouih is one of a small group of women who were targeted by the state for their political activities in Marxist-Leninist movements in the 1970s.10 Born in 1955 in Ben Ahmed, El Bouih moved to Casablanca in 1971 to study at the Lycée Chawqi, a prestigious girls’ high school. She was briefly arrested in 1974 for her role in the organization of a students’ strike. In 1977, in similar conditions to Menebhi, El Bouih was kidnapped, secretly detained, and tortured for seven months in the secret detention center Derb Moulay Cherif for her membership in the Marxist group March 23. She was later transferred to Meknes Prison, where she was held for two years without trial. In 1980, she was finally presented to a judge and sentenced to five years for ‘conspiring against the security of the state’ (Talk of Darkness, xiii). She completed her sentence in Kenitra Civil Prison, during which time she earned a degree in sociology. After her release in 1982, El Bouih became a high school teacher and remained active in women’s movements (Slyomovics 2005b, 133–144). Since Morocco started examining its dark national

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past in the late 1990s, El Bouih has become one of the most renowned women activists. In addition to Talk of Darkness, El Bouih produced a significant body of oral and written testimonies, including books and articles in Arabic and French, interviews with journalists and academics, and television appearances in Morocco and abroad.11 In contrast with Stolen Lives, the testimonial narratives of Poèmes and Talk of Darkness are set in motion by their authors’ arrests, disappearances, and torture experiences. These events are inscribed as moments of rupture that distinguish between before and after the experience of state-sponsored violence.12 Because of these characteristics, the two testimonies are easily assimilable into the corpus of testimonial writing and ‘resistance literature’ from non-Western societies that influential scholars have traditionally used to define the genre. For instance, Doris Sommer sees a ‘departure’ from the conventions of the autobiographical genre in testimonial writings by political activists and victims of political violence, such as those of the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchù (Sommer 1991, 41).13 In particular, Sommer highlights the ‘plural subject’ of testimony in women’s writings as an important distinguishing feature between testimony and autobiography (39). In contrast with these descriptions, Stolen Lives’s style and form conform to traditional autobiographies, which are usually retrospective prose narratives in which authors chronologically record their lives up to the time of writing.14 Oufkir and Fitoussi’s narrative is told through a defined first-person perspective, focusing on intimate and singular events that highlight the narrator’s unique, subjective experience. The narrative’s narrow point of view aligns Oufkir with the autobiographers Sommer describes, who ‘write about themselves precisely because they are convinced of their singularity, a conviction that spills over the page, so that readers of a relentless “I” can fantasize that the pronoun refers to them’ (39). Even though testimony can be integrated into the overarching genre of autobiography, definitions such as Sommer’s suggest a subgenre that creates a different relationship to the reader. When compared to testimonial literature by Moroccan women or to the transnational corpus of testimonials from which scholars like Sommer draw their definitions, Stolen Lives does not fit readily into the genre of testimonial writing. For instance, John Beverley further limits the definition of testimonio when he distinguishes it from the testimonial novel or what he calls the ‘non-fiction novel.’ Beverley describes the latter category as containing ‘narrative texts in which an “author” in the conventional

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sense has either invented a testimonio-like story or […] extensively reworked, with explicitly literary goals (greater figurative density, tighter narrative form, elimination of digressions and interruptions, and so on), a testimonial account that is no longer present except in its simulacrum’ (2004, 49). Sommer further advances that the difference between autobiography and testimonial writing is not merely an aesthetic one; the testimonial’s subversion of conventional autobiography represents an important political statement as well (41). Barbara Harlow, too, describes ‘testimonial composition’ as a project that ‘reworks the hierarchical structures of power implicit in literature as a cultural institution’ (1991,  11). When read against Stolen Lives, Talk of Darkness—a collaborative project that moves between first- and third-person perspectives—more easily evokes the collective subjectivity of the testimonial as a political act that aims to instigate sociopolitical change. Indeed, even though El Bouih’s name on the cover suggests a traditional autobiography by a single author, the structure of the narrative belies the conventions of the genre. Not only does El Bouih include two chapters written by former co-detainees Widad Bouab and Latifa Jbabdi, she also dedicates several chapters to telling the stories of her fellow female prison inmates. Moreover, although published many years after the authors’ release from prison, Talk of Darkness provides very little information about their lives before and after their incarceration. In this regard, Talk of Darkness remains similar to Menebhi’s eclectic testimony; written in prison, the narrative offers little personal information about the author. In contrast to Stolen Lives’s focus on the narrator’s exceptional journey, Talk of Darkness, like Poèmes, situates its individual narrators in relation to Moroccan and transnational Marxist-Leninist resisters on the one hand and, on the other, to a community of women victimized by violent sociopolitical patriarchal structures. Yet the figure of Scheherazade troubles attempts to radically distinguish between Stolen Lives and other testimonial narratives such as Talk of Darkness. In her memoir, El Bouih evokes Scheherazade to underline Moroccan women’s sacrifices to the nation and their precarious situation. The brevity of El Bouih’s introductory chapter, ‘Derb, the Secret Prison: Or the Narrative of Suffering,’ its rapid succession of images, its spasmodic final paragraph, and its brutal end evoke the endangered woman and storyteller. ‘I was considered a dangerous element,’ writes El Bouih. ‘Orders came down to isolate me from all contact. They were all men. The kidnappers were men. They

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had occupied the house of Khadija, my friend from college’ (2). As the narrator relates her violent kidnapping and disappearance within the secret detention center where well-known political activists died under torture,15 her voice comes to a halt for a brief moment. The captivated reader takes a few seconds to move to the next chapter and realize that El Bouih survived to tell her story. El Bouih’s reference to the Nights also brings to mind other Maghrebi women writers’ redeployment of Scheherazade for similar purposes. For instance, in her short story collection Oran Langue Morte (1997), Algerian author and feminist Assia Djebar draws from the Nights to tell the story of the extreme violence that took place during Algeria’s Civil War throughout the 1990s. In one of the short stories, ‘La femme en morceaux’ (‘The Dismembered Woman’), Atyka, a young Algerian teacher of French, enthusiastically introduces her students to the Nights tale ‘L’histoire des trois pommes’ (‘Tale of the Three Apples’), in which a man kills and dismembers his wife, believing her to be unfaithful. In Djebar’s version, the reference to the classic tale foreshadows Atyka’s later execution by Islamist terrorists in front of her young students. Though Atyka meets a violent end, Omar, one of her young and attentive students, continues to hear her voice. Even after the teacher is dismembered, her story cannot be silenced: ‘Atyka, her head severed, a new storyteller, Atyka speaks in a firm voice. A pool of blood spreads across the table, around her neck. Atyka continues to tell the story.’16 The message in El Bouih’s introductory chapter is similar to Djebar’s: the narrative continues (and must continue) despite the violence against women. Atyka’s voice remains with Omar, who symbolizes Algeria’s future generation of men. It tells the story of a man, the caliph, crying over the death of another woman, killed by another enraged man. Djebar’s short story suggests that the end of this gendered violence depends on how future (male) generations respond to history. Similarly, in Talk of Darkness’s second chapter, El Bouih awakes from a series of torture-induced fainting spells to tell her story; yet El Bouih’s evocation of Scheherazade suggests that women’s sacrifices will be recognized only if they find the right words to convey their stories to the right interlocutors. El Bouih thus re-enacts Scheherazade’s performance but warns her readers of the patriarchal violence that looms large in Arab societies and which threatens women’s voices and lives. Thus, through their evocation of Scheherazade, both Stolen Lives and Talk of Darkness inscribe themselves within Arab women’s history of sociopolitical violence and their oral and written literary acts of

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resistance. Like other Maghrebi authors and activists who frequently recycle the Nights, El Bouih and Oufkir do so to express the impossibility of silencing women and to underline their courage, intelligence, and resistance to patriarchal violence. Indeed, Fatima Mernissi explains: Despite her powerlessness, Scheherazade manages through an accurate reading of a complex situation to change the balance of power and reach the top. This is why, even today, many women like myself who feel helpless in politics admire Scheherazade […] if you situate her accurately in her political context, her pertinence as a role model becomes quite clear. She saves not only herself but also an entire kingdom by slowly changing the mind of the chief decision maker, the King.17

Oufkir’s and El Bouih’s reference to Scheherazade marks the irreducibility of their experiences of gendered violence and the perception of themselves as both victims of and resisters to Moroccan patriarchal society, despite differences in their identities and politics. Ultimately, as George Yúdice puts it in his enlightening article ‘Testimonio and Postmodernism,’ ‘testimonial writing is quite heterogeneous’ (1991, 16). Talk of Darkness and Stolen Lives illustrate this affirmation. Despite formal and content-based differences, El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s references to Scheherazade, a fictional character and a cultural symbol, complicate neat divisions between literature, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary. El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s deployment of Scheherazade and the frame of her stories suggests that, for women who were arbitrarily detained and tortured under King Hassan II’s reign, literary mastery and storytelling skills are tools that prove necessary for the transformation of life narratives into testimonies and feminist manifestoes to fight patriarchal sociopolitical norms that survived the Years of Lead. Reading Oufkir’s and El Bouih’s testimonies side by side and in a comparative framework is thus a deliberate choice that seeks to destabilize the idea that testimonial writing is ‘an extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse,’ corresponding to an authentic trace of reality rather than an interpretation (Beverley 2004, 42). Indeed, Beverley contends that subsuming testimonial writing under the category of fiction deprives it from its subversive potential as a form of social action (40). However, as Robert Carr notes in response to Beverley’s analysis of Menchù’s testimony I, Rigoberta Menchù (1984), reading testimonials without considering literary styles is an impossible task.18 A comparative analysis of Talk of Darkness and Stolen Lives

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shows that both testimonies use specific literary devices to minimize socioeconomic differences between women and highlight gender as the primary factor in how the state inflicts political violence. Oufkir’s and El Bouih’s narrative strategies are also political strategies that seek to foster solidarity and alliances between women from various backgrounds. Additionally, a close reading of El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s testimonies shows that Talk of Darkness and Stolen Lives also significantly depart from Poèmes. The three testimonies are impacted by the need to report political violence and transform its narrativization into political discourse. However, written in different contexts—in prison and in secrecy during the Years of Lead for Poèmes and post-detention and during Morocco’s relative political liberalization for Talk of Darkness and Stolen Lives—they also differ in their depictions of women’s resistance and modes of political engagement. As Chapter 1 shows, Menebhi’s feminism remains rooted in the socialist project and the belief that a classless society will put an end to corruption and women’s exploitation. In contrast, El Bouih’s and Oufkir’s testimonies advance a radical feminist agenda that specifically focuses on women’s rights and reflects the emergence of women’s movements and organizations in the 1980s that sought to voice women’s issues outside traditional political parties dominated by men. This aspect is visible in their valorization of the woman political resister’s sacrifice and the exposition of the specificities of her experience of gendered political violence. Writing the Woman Resister in Talk of Darkness The Moroccan public became aware of El Bouih’s and her co-detainees Bouab and Jbabdi’s experience of state-sponsored violence in 1994 when the newspaper Al-Itihad Al-Ishtiraki published their memoirs in Arabic. Years later, El Bouih claims, she decided to edit and publish notes she wrote while in prison as a response to the erasure of women’s resistance and suffering in Morocco’s history and in the memorialization of the Years of Lead. She explains: I decided to testify in a country where only men can legally be witnesses. I noticed that the written history of this country was a man’s history. Testimony was masculine and so was political detention. But it was not true because I witnessed women’s participation in politics […] Hadith

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al-‘Atama is also a painful process of unveiling that cannot be mere writing. Talking about state-sponsored violence is another form of resistance.19

El Bouih’s writings, in which she testifies about her experience of political violence and collects testimonies by other women who were targeted by the state, as with Atlasiyate (Women of the Atlas) (2006), form an essential part of her activism in the post-Years of Lead era. To force the state and the Moroccan public to examine the country’s dark era, El Bouih, like many former political prisoners, continued her pre-incarceration and in-cell resistance through writing on the outside. However, even though both men and women suffered from gendered political violence (Menin 2014, 50–60), El Bouih, as her declaration suggests, writes against a legal, religious, and cultural system of exclusion that minimizes women’s role in nation-building and Morocco’s democratization. For El Bouih, a woman who was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for her direct involvement in opposition movements in the 1970s, testifying publicly inscribes women’s acts of resistance in collective memory. It further aims to challenge legal, religious, and sociocultural limitations that, in some Muslim-majority societies like Morocco, bar women from testifying in certain cases or do not count them as witnesses of equal value to men. Indeed, in her provocative declaration, El Bouih alludes to the following Quranic verses, used by Islamist legists to rule on women’s shahada (testimony): ‘And call to witness from among your men two witnesses; but if there are not two men, then one man and two women from among those whom you choose to be witnesses, so that if one of the two commits an error, the one may remind the other’ (Quran, Surat Al-Baqara, 282). 20 El Bouih does not call men to testify in her place or to corroborate her testimony. In the structure of Talk of Darkness, she formally affirms the validity and the legitimacy of women’s shahada. El Bouih’s, Jbabdi’s, and Bouab’s testimonies corroborate one another and assert the importance of women’s voices in the process of memorializing the Years of Lead. To inscribe their feminism within a broad movement of opposition to the Moroccan regime, El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab include in their testimonies passages that attempt to capture the full extent of the extreme violence the authorities waged against political opponents during the Years of Lead. El Bouih (6–7; 10–11), Bouab (80), and Jbabdi (87) briefly list practices of physical and mental torture to which state representatives subjected both men and women. Their testimonies

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also point to the great pain experienced by political prisoners and the difficulty for both men and women to testify within the legal definition of shahada, which consists of relating events and facts. El Bouih accounts for the difficulties of articulating pain in the textual space when she writes: The time? No time, no difference between day and night. Everything was the same here, even torture had no time. It could happen any time and in all shapes and colors. To them, there was no difference in time and gender here, no difference at all. They intended the destruction of self and the soul by means of the body, whether male or female. (6)

This elusive description, which serves as an introduction to El Bouih’s very short third chapter in which she names practices of torture she underwent while in Derb Moulay Cherif, alerts the reader to the idea that testimony always remains haunted by that which cannot be remembered or expressed in words. While a testimony exclusively constituted by women’s voices redefines gendered legal and religious understandings of shahada in the Moroccan context, descriptions of torture in Talk of Darkness assert alternative theaters of testimony, such as literature, and their ability to bear witness to that which resists knowledge and comprehension. 21 In contrast with Menebhi’s testimony, Talk of Darkness includes lengthy descriptions of forms of punishment that the patriarchal state apparatus specifically used on women. One such practice was the re-gendering of women political prisoners. Upon her arrival at Derb Moulay Cherif, El Bouih recalls, ‘[t]hey gave me a number and a name: “From now on your name is Rashid […].” That was the beginning of the destruction of my identity. My kidnapping, my arbitrary imprisonment, and now the erasure of my femininity by treating me like a man’ (5). Male jailers’ practice of renaming female prisoners recounted by El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab is particularly traumatic and symbolic of women’s double victimization as both political opponents and women. Slyomovics explains that, in the context of Moroccan political repression, ‘the purpose of disappearance and torture is to make the fact of torture disappear’ (2005a, 84). Talk of Darkness shows that disappearance and torture also aim to erase women from politics and to punish them for transgressing written and unwritten patriarchal norms that prohibit them from venturing out into the public sphere of decision-making. Jbabdi interprets the renaming process more clearly as a violent denial of women’s political agency; she explains that using men’s names to address

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women was meant to ‘mask the women’s presence in the detention center’ reserved for political opponents (86). The narration of gendered political violence underscores the fact that, despite similarities in the state’s treatment of political opponents, women’s experiences of political violence are fundamentally different from men’s. It also exposes the authorities’ efforts to conceal women’s presence within resistance movements and to violently impose women’s participation in politics as a deviation from acceptable societal norms. For instance, El Bouih inserts literal transcriptions of her male jailors’ misogynistic discourse: There were also many more policemen than prisoners. One of them put handcuffs on her thin wrists. Surprised, she looked at him and remarked, ‘You are breaking the law by doing this. I have never seen women handcuffed in a courtroom before. Aren’t the other restrictions enough?’ He answered sarcastically, ‘As far as we’re concerned, you are now a man. Therefore, we treat you the way we treat men […] there is no room for you in the women’s world […].’ ‘You want to change the world, strip woman of her natural skin, erase differences,’ so said one of their men, addressing her. ‘A woman belongs in the harem, and only in the harem. The woman belongs in the home and her role is to reproduce life. Anything else is an aberration, a deviation from nature.’ (37–38)

El Bouih uses direct discourse to shed light on the pervasiveness of patriarchal values within Moroccan society and to show how they materialize in systemic oppression of women. Through gendered forms of punishment, the torture room, the prison, and the court become new harems. The state becomes a substitute for or an extension of the patriarchal family unit that seeks to re-educate women and symbolically re-domesticate them. Narrating women’s re-gendering bears witness to the ways in which the state manufactures and validates patriarchal sociopolitical norms that exclude women from the public sphere of politics. At the same time, the inscription of re-gendering is a narrative act of resistance that, first, performs the state’s failure to suppress women’s presence in politics and the politicization of women’s issues and, second, challenges normative visions of political dissidents in the history and memorialization of the Years of Lead. Describing how Moroccans remember the Years of Lead, Ahmed Herzenni, chairman of the former Conseil consultatif des droits de l’Homme (Consultative Council on Human Rights), created in 1990, notes that ‘[i]n the collective psyche, the victim [of the Years of Lead] is undoubtedly the male gender par excellence’ (Guessous 2009, 10).

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El Bouih’s, Bouab’s, and Jbabdi’s narratives challenge this masculinization of history and collective memory by extending their activism for social justice and gender equality into their writing. Thus, in addition to bearing witness to state-sponsored violations of women’s human rights and their political rights as full citizens, El Bouih’s, Bouab’s, and Jbabdi’s narratives transgress patriarchal norms and attitudes that marginalize women. Valérie K. Orlando explains that ‘former female prisoners are also viewed, because of their gender, as martyrs and, therefore, their stories are considered virtually untouchable by the public. The pervasive societal belief is that female testimonials are still too horrific to be imparted to the general public in Morocco’ (2010, 277). Like the state, which transforms torture centers and prisons into harems, the public’s refusal to validate women’s suffering and histories of resistance to violence preserves and perpetuates traditional definitions of womanhood and gender roles. Orlando further explains that for a woman to publicly ‘admit that she was tortured, “spoiled,” and for her to reveal that some of her sisters were even killed by men who were supposed to cherish and protect them, would mean that Moroccans themselves had sought to annihilate their own being— their own mothers—and the life blood of the nation’ (277). Together, the state’s oppression and the public’s repression thus consolidate one another, enforcing gendered violence and ensuring the perpetuation of discrimination against women. Testimonies by women like El Bouih popularize the figure of the woman resister to counteract the public’s and the state’s denial of women’s participation in the democratization process aimed at building a ‘new Morocco.’22 Indeed, El Bouih explains that she decided to turn to writing after she realized, in 1994, that only two minutes out of a half-hour interview about her experience of violence were broadcast on Moroccan television (Slyomovics 2012, 45). Writing newspaper articles or books is thus, for women, a strategy to counteract state-controlled media that attempts to regulate the dissemination of the history of the Years of Lead. Literary testimonies, though they are also mediated by the conventions of literary and publishing institutions, remain flexible enough that women can use them not only to redefine the legal and religious meanings of shahada but also to expand its functions. Testimonies thus become sites in which restrictive gender constructs that limit women’s speech and influence in public matters are revised. Defying state-controlled channels of communication and memorialization, as well as the public’s refusal to see or hear them, El Bouih,

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Bouab, and Jbabdi offer copious examples that expose physical, mental, and sexualized violence against women. For instance, El Bouih writes that, in Derb Moulay Cherif, women ‘suffered violent assaults, even worse because [they] were women’ (11). She, Bouab, and Jbabdi also describe constant threats of rape against female detainees (9, 10, 88). Jbabdi further indicates that in Derb Moulay Cherif, despite the practice of re-gendering, women regained their feminine names and identities during interrogation and torture sessions (86). With these descriptions, El Bouih, Bouab, and Jbabdi illustrate what Slyomovics describes as the male torturer’s demand for ‘absolute domination’ and control over female prisoners’ bodies (2005b, 83). In doing so, the three authors violate rules of propriety and transform gendered violence against women into a matter of national reflection and debate, thus forcing the Moroccan public to revise its perception of women and its complicity with the patriarchal state. Even though, like Menebhi, El Bouih expresses solidarity with men who were arrested and tortured for their activism, she views her life narrative as an exemplary gendered act of resistance. She claims: ‘[i]n Morocco, we’ve known political detention as male. I wanted to show that political detention is female as well. Even torture: torture is always male. Men are tortured. I showed that torture is also female and how women reacted to torture’ (Menin 2014, 55). El Bouih further warns against equating women’s experiences of state-sponsored political violence to men’s, explaining: ‘[v]iolence against men aimed to undermine a feeling of strength; in contrast, violence against women aimed to negate the woman in society. This was something we struggled against’ (Menin 2014, 55). In their testimonies, El Bouih, Bouab, and Jbabdi instill new ideals of Moroccan womanhood that participate in rehabilitating women’s sacrifices to the nation while also inserting a gendered dimension into Morocco’s democratizing process. They not only expose gendered violence against women, they also memorialize women’s acts of courage. Talk of Darkness is replete with examples in which the narrators challenge their male jailers’ demands. For example, El Bouih writes: I never retained any of their rules. I tried to speak although it was forbidden. I moved in spite of their tough orders and strict instructions. I never learned to hear my number or my new name. I did not perfect the art of silence, obedience, or calling them Hajj. I paid dearly for all of this, especially in the beginning. I recall that it was my luck to receive lots of kicks and beatings. (9)

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Throughout Talk of Darkness, the authors refer to other political prisoners as ‘comrades’ and transcribe moments of resistance against their jailers and torturers. For instance, they proudly describe how they organized to defend one another from abuse (10), how they obtained special privileges in prison after a twenty-day hunger strike (81–82), and how they refused to obey orders when they were treated like common-law prisoners (44–49). Descriptions of women’s torture, courage, and their political determination constitute a counter-narrative to ideals of womanhood and manhood prevalent in Moroccan culture and politics. Menebhi’s prison writings, produced in-cell at the pinnacle of the Years of Lead, took the form of political slogans meant to unify and inspire Marxist-Leninist resisters. A martyr who died as a result of a hunger strike in 1977, Menebhi’s sacrifice and writings imprinted the imaginations of Moroccan activists and cultural producers. 23 She also left women writers with an aesthetic model of how to politicize violence against women and inscribe gender equality as a necessary component for the achievement of a Marxist-Leninist revolution in Morocco. However, despite her advocacy for women’s rights and gender equality, she neglected the figure of the women resister. In contrast, El Bouih’s, Jbabdi’s, and Bouab’s narratives, authorized by the regime and first published more than a decade after their liberation, use their past experiences of resistance and gendered violence to educate the Moroccan and international publics about visible and invisible limitations that marginalize Moroccan women. Departing from Menebhi’s predominantly genderless narrator/resister, El Bouih, Bouab, and Jbabdi make room for the construction of new models of womanhood and political discourse. Their testimonies reflect and, at the same time, represent an alternative to feminist movements and discourses that became increasingly visible in the late 1990s and which mostly focused on the improvement of women’s status through the reform of the Mudawana. 24 In contrast, Talk of Darkness advocates for a radical transformation of gender relations and for women’s full participation in politics. The memoir also promotes the image of women as agents of change and implicitly rejects the paternalist top-down approach to women’s rights often favored by Morocco’s elites and governing parties. 25

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A Daughter of the System Turned Political Resister In Stolen Lives, the narrator repeatedly states her perplexity and refusal to understand the logic behind her family’s imprisonment, which she attributes to ‘the realm of the irrational, the arbitrary’ (103). Yet she also writes: ‘I had made [my father] a gift of my resistance to the King. The name that the monarch wanted to exterminate had to be upheld as an example of courage’ (168). Even more importantly, Stolen Lives dates Oufkir’s political opposition to the regime prior to her disappearance and arbitrary detention. When the narrator evokes the 1971 attempted coup against King Hassan II in Skhirat, she describes her sentiments at the time: ‘I no longer supported the monarchy, the ruling authorities. I was no longer on their side’ (81). These statements turn Oufkir into an exemplary victim of political violence and her case into a perfect illustration of the arbitrariness of the Moroccan regime during the Years of Lead. At the same time, they also depict her as a resister to the monarchy and the social and political culture the institution legitimizes and promotes. While critics have rarely challenged Talk of Darkness’s depiction of former female members of Marxist-Leninist opposition movements as the quintessential figures of women’s resistance, perhaps the most debated aspects of Stolen Lives are its characterization of Malika Oufkir as a resister to the monarchy and her rehabilitation of her father. The description of Stolen Lives’s narrator as a political resister—rather than a mere victim of brutal and arbitrary political violence—has indeed represented a persistent problem for the Moroccan public and critics of Moroccan testimonial literature. The authors’ failure to address General Mohamed Oufkir’s role in political violence and the way in which Malika and her family took full advantage of a ruthless system before it turned against them have been read as inconsistencies and a sign of the testimony’s lack of sincerity.26 Khannous notes that despite the book’s international acclaim, Oufkir’s omissions made it ‘impossible for her to make Moroccan audiences, haunted by memories of the crimes committed by her father, understand the extent of her suffering’ (2013, 60). More controversially, some of Stolen Lives’s critics, like Mokhtar Ghambou, cite Fitoussi and Oufkir’s omissions and chronological inaccuracies to deny the narrative any testimonial or historical value. Considering Stolen Lives’s popularity in the United States, Ghambou interprets the book’s inconsistencies as a literary and political strategy meant to dupe international publics into disregarding the larger Moroccan

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historical and political context of the Years of Lead. After recognizing the autobiography’s literary achievements and success, he advocates for a ‘critical reading’ that challenges what he views as Oufkir’s dishonest political analysis of Morocco’s violent past. 27 In regard to the authors’ depiction of General Oufkir as a hero and an opponent of the monarchy, Ghambou explains that Malika Oufkir could not ignore that her father had ‘absolute power over the Moroccan secret service, security forces, home affairs, the army, and the Royal Air Force. Most importantly, by the time Malika conceived and wrote down her story she was a mature woman and a responsible public figure that could no longer hide the truth under the excuse of naivete’ (2014, 8). Unlike other critics who underline conflicts that arise from the confrontation of different memories and interpretations of historical events, Ghambou denounces a malicious and irresponsible effort on the part of Stolen Lives’s authors to omit and distort facts that incriminate General Oufkir. Ghambou’s criticism of Stolen Lives and Malika Oufkir is unique in its vehemence. However, his reading of Stolen Lives and its reception is symptomatic of the general uneasiness found in the criticism of Oufkir’s testimony and its place within testimonial literature by Moroccan women. For instance, in her review of the English translation, Slyomovics (2002) also explains that, in the United States, the book’s reception is affected by the public’s lack of the necessary historical and cultural knowledge to understand North African experiences of human rights abuse in ‘real times and spaces.’ Further reflecting on the ‘troubling’ success of the novel, Slyomovics (2002) remarks that the ‘bloody family drama of a man who built a system of secret prisons and torture centers—only to have it consume his own family—lies outside our common collective imagination and interest, as does his daughter’s steadfast loyalty and love for her father.’ Unlike Perry and Ghambou, Slyomovics does not situate the problem at the level of the authors’ sincerity or of the testimony’s authenticity. Instead, she explains that Malika Oufkir’s struggle ‘is deeply political and patriotic.’ She further adds that, for Oufkir, her American media blitz is part of a struggle for democracy in Morocco: ‘Oufkir sees her own book as belonging to the tradition of the literature of witness, in which personal testimony provides the principal narrative and political strategy for presenting demands for truth, accountability, and social transformation’ (Slyomovics 2002). Slyomovics’s remarks draw attention to the peculiar conditions of what she calls elsewhere Morocco’s ‘era of the witness’ (2012, 42). Slyomovics’s expression describes the extraordinary

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wave of oral and written testimonies that followed Morocco’s political liberalization, especially after the death of King Hassan II. 28 The expression also captures the restoration of the victim’s voice insomuch as it becomes the major resource not only for truth finding, but also an important component in reparative processes, such as within the 1999 IAI and the 2004 IER, state-controlled commissions established to address and account for past violations of human rights. Even though Slyomovics warns against the dangers of centering the analysis of testimonial writing around notions of authenticity, truthfulness, sincerity, and responsibility, reading Malika Oufkir’s testimony exclusively or principally against the backdrop of her father’s bloody crimes is just as reductive. It insidiously minimizes her status as a victim of political violence. Perhaps more problematically, criticism that includes General Oufkir’s crimes in the assessment of his daughter’s testimony perpetuates state-sponsored gendered violence against women and violence against children. The overwhelming majority of women targeted by the regime were, like Malika Oufkir, ‘indirect victims,’ a terminology that, in the state-sponsored commissions’ jargon, describes victims, mostly women and children, who were targeted not for their political activities but in retaliation against the activities of male relatives (Guessous 2009, 15). When General Oufkir’s wife and children were kidnapped and disappeared in secret prisons, Malika was nineteen, and the youngest of her siblings, Abdellatif, was only three. The family’s cruel punishment has always been understood by commentators as vengeance against the general’s disloyalty to the king, rather than the result of the political affiliations or political activities of his wife and children. Discounting Malika Oufkir’s testimony because of her father’s crimes also turns attention away from informative and subversive aspects of her autobiographical narrative. Stolen Lives sheds light on a case of state-sponsored violation of human rights involving women and children, exposing the regime’s excesses and cruelty during the Years of Lead. Because of this, Stolen Lives represents an exemplary testimony: the author’s notoriety gave visibility, nationally and internationally, to forms of political violence in Morocco that were otherwise invisible. Indeed, though the number of women targeted by the regime in relation to other family members’ political activities is significantly much higher than the number of women who were targeted for their direct involvement in activism, 29 at the time of Stolen Lives’s publication in French, the fate of women and children at the hands of a ruthless regime was largely ignored. 30 Oufkir’s testimony exposes the hypocrisy

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of dominant patriarchal discourses that espouse family values and the need to protect women as reasons to keep women outside of politics and the public sphere. Because of her identity, Oufkir’s story is also a valuable testimonial document. Her family’s experience shows the paranoia that characterized Moroccan politics and social relations during the Years of Lead. The story of the Oufkirs, like those of the Bourequat brothers (Ali, Bayazid, and Midhat), who were forcibly disappeared and sent to the infamous extermination camp Tazmamart in 1981, expose the vulnerability of Moroccans across social classes and the instability of sociopolitical alliances with the monarchy. Like the Oufkirs, the Bourequat brothers claim familial ties with the monarchy and, before their arrest, which happened after they allegedly informed the king about another coup in progress, were regular guests of the palace. 31 However, this did not save them from spending a decade in the most horrendous conditions in Tazmamart. Similarly to the Oufkirs, after their liberation, the Bourequat brothers used their status to expose the regime’s excesses. For instance, Midhat René Bourequat’s Mort Vivant! (1992) is one of the first accounts of Tazmamart written by a survivor. The Bourequats also used access to publication under the protection of the French government to directly accuse King Hassan II and other officials, such as Ahmed Dlimi, a high figure in the state security apparatus, of politically motivated atrocities. 32 Unlike testimonies published in Morocco by former political prisoners, such as El Bouih’s for instance, Oufkir’s and the Bourequats’ explicitly hold the king and the monarchy responsible for the atrocities that took place during the Years of Lead. Even the stories of members of the Moroccan elite who fully benefited from Morocco’s authoritarian rule before it turned against them are subversive. Like the majority of testimonies produced during or after the Years of Lead, these accounts constitute de facto transgressive sites and voices, structured by the victims’ transformative experiences of political violence and strategies of survival. For instance, Oufkir, by directly pointing out the king’s responsibility, transgresses Morocco’s sociopolitical red lines, which hold the monarchy as a sacred and untouchable institution. Indeed, historically, monarchs belonging to the Alawite dynasty, which has ruled over Morocco for the last 350 years, have claimed direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed and used it to garner absolute power in religious and political matters. 33 The king’s sacredness was inscribed in Morocco’s constitution until 2011, and the current constitution still holds the monarchy as ‘inviolable’ (Benchemsi

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2012, 6–62). Because of its direct language at the time of its publication, and perhaps more than any other testimony, Stolen Lives pointed out the limits of Morocco’s liberalization and the regime’s attempt to, in King Hassan II’s words, ‘turn the page definitively’ on human rights abuse, without fully recognizing past state crimes. 34 Almost two decades after its publication, Stolen Lives remains a testimonial and political document that undermines the narrative of Morocco’s democratizing process, based on a change within the regime rather than a change of regime. This is especially true as many well-known and outspoken former political detainees, like Ahmed Herzenni and Latifa Jbabdi, have joined in the state’s efforts to redress past violations, thus practically legitimizing Morocco’s political continuity and semi-authoritarian rule, which never renounced violent practices against activists and political opponents. 35 Stolen Lives further represents a unique gendered critique of the monarchy as an institution and guardian of a set of archaic practices. Malika Oufkir uses her life experience to show parallels in the treatment of women political prisoners and women in the royal palace to underscore structural and widespread gendered violence legitimized and perpetuated by the monarchy. Because of its two-part structure, Stolen Lives acquires a split narrator who is both an insider—part of the ruling elites and the palace culture—and a young girl and woman who is the victim of political and cultural systems primarily governed by authoritarianism, arbitrariness, and archaic patriarchal mores. Details of the narrator’s childhood are carefully interrupted by anecdotes and language that associate her experience in the palace with those of vulnerable and silenced women. For instance, even though the narrator indicates that ‘[n]obody escaped the royal punishment when the king thought that they deserved it’ (2001, 53), she clearly distinguishes between those who enjoy power under the auspices of the king and those who always remain in precarious situations. Among the latter group, women always remain vulnerable, even when they hold tenuous positions of power. Stolen Lives’s structure, with Part I dealing with the narrator’s life in the palace and Part II recounting her life in the king’s secret prisons, minimizes socioeconomic differences between women victims of political violence. The physical and psychological trauma caused by young Malika’s adoption by King Mohammed V and life in the palace are described using vocabulary and images that evoke forced disappearance, incarceration, and torture. For instance, the narrator equates her feelings when taken to the palace to those of a ‘victim of a kidnapping’ (2001, 20).

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She also recalls that she ‘was given a special punishment called falakha’ (2001, 51), 36 and indicates that she has scars left from a whipping on her buttocks that made her cry for weeks (2001, 53). The narrator further informs the reader that her situation in the palace drove her to attempt suicide twice (2001, 57). Descriptions such as these, recalling physical and mental abuse endured by political prisoners, narrow the gap between the narrator’s life in the palace and her life in secret camps, where she experienced malnourishment, isolation, and lack of medical treatment. These conditions pushed her family to conduct numerous hunger strikes and to a number of suicide attempts. Linking women’s collective suffering to gender inequality, Oufkir infuses her autobiography with a feminine testimonial voice that bridges formal and political differences between her narrative and other Moroccan women’s prison and testimonial writings. Her discussions of the women from the harems of kings Mohammed V and Hassan II echo those of common-law prisoners by Menebhi and El Bouih. Both authors incorporate anonymous or semi-anonymous women’s stories of violence to legitimize the need for a revolution and show that gendered political violence is an extension of structural sociocultural violence. Identifying with some eighty concubines who lived in the palace at the same time as her, Stolen Lives’s narrator affirms that the ‘cruelty and humiliation of her treatment’ in the palace was similar to the experiences of these women from less privileged backgrounds (2001, 56). Treated like the palace’s slaves (2001, 39), the harem women ‘were beaten, repudiated, banished, and disappeared in the depths of the prison-palaces’ (2001, 59). Parallels such as these focus the narrative on the rise of the narrator’s gender and political consciousness. Even though Oufkir and Fitoussi’s storytelling talents have been interpreted as sensationalism or as signs of dishonesty by critics such as Ghambou, the two authors powerfully evoke the narrator’s transformation into a feminist advocate for women’s rights. Oufkir’s irreducible experience of violence, her solidarity with other women, and her sharp critique of the monarchy as a patriarchal institution that ensures the perpetuation of women’s marginality convincingly allow the narrator to reinvent herself as a patriot and a daughter of the people. She concludes her memoir and her transformation by declaring: ‘I deeply love my country, its history, its language and its customs. I love the ordinary people who are poor and oppressed, but proud, funny and generous. There are no barriers between them and me. People often tell me I am shahbia—of the people’ (2001, 288).

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Using shahbia, a word in Moroccan colloquial Arabic, Darija, in the midst of a refined French text, Oufkir and Fitoussi symbolically dissolve the class boundary between the narrator and the Moroccan people. Identifying with the Moroccan people on the one hand and appropriating Scheherazade on the other, Stolen Lives’s narrator recasts herself as a dissident feminine voice. The amalgamation of French and Darija mirrors the overall structure of Stolen Lives, collapsing the boundaries between Western conventional autobiography and Moroccan women’s prison narratives. With a prison narrative within an autobiography, Oufkir and Fitoussi replicate the frame of the Nights and its use of mise en abyme, as each tale contains another tale. In doing so, they deconstruct the divide between autobiography and testimony, as well as between fiction and testimony, further aligning Stolen Lives’s aesthetic and political framing of gendered political violence with those in other women’s testimonials. Indeed, in her analysis of prison writings by women originating from non-Western societies in the 1980s, Barbara Harlow claims that testimonial writings are disruptive because they ‘defy traditional categories and distinctions and combine fictional forms with documentary record’ (1986, 503). These narrative and thematic strategies allow Fitoussi and Oufkir to inscribe Stolen Lives as part of Moroccan women’s testimonial production, as well as a part of a literary tradition in which Maghrebi and Arab women authors take up the figure of Scheherazade and storytelling to reaffirm popular culture and to signify alternative forms of agency. Stolen Lives’s reception, especially in the United States, demonstrates that it is possible to blur the boundaries between lived experience and its literary representation and that both play a role in shaping the memorialization of foundational periods, such as the Years of Lead. Regarding the specificities of the Moroccan context, French historian and scholar of North Africa Benjamin Stora notes that the publication frenzy in Morocco—including testimonies, newspaper investigations, and alternative historical narratives—following the official end of the Years of Lead in 1999 caused the state to progressively lose its monopoly on the writing of history. 37 The Moroccan regime, which imposed a ban on Oufkir’s book and enforced censorship against newspapers that published interviews with the author (Khannous 2013, 67), was well aware of Stolen Lives’s potential to disrupt and reshape public discourse around the Oufkirs’ family history and the history of the Years of Lead.

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Alternative Stories and Uterine Spaces In his discussion of political violence and torture in the context of Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman explains that the ‘performance of torture does not apply power; rather, it manufactures it from the “raw” ingredient of the captive’s body.’38 For Feldman, the torture room is ‘a uterine space where the state considers and ensures its reproduction’ (1991, 115). With specific narrative techniques and cultural associations, Moroccan women like Oufkir, El Bouih, Menebhi, and also Maria Charaf, who wrote Etre au féminin (Being in the Feminine) (1997), 39 produce tales of sociopolitical violence and resistance that interrupt the reproduction of patriarchal norms and envision change in the perception of women, gender roles, and politics. In doing so, women victims of political violence use their life experiences to produce alternative uterine spaces that feminize the history of the Years of Lead and participate in a dynamic of change in which the ‘Moroccan human rights discourse extends the legally binding, political term shahadah outside the court to public space and beyond male-female inequities to gender neutral acts of narration by men and women’ (Slyomovics 2005b, 146). Asserting and performing the right of women to publicly testify, El Bouih and Oufkir were able to produce narratives that generate new ideals of womanhood and models of female resistance, which, according to El Bouih, women lacked in the 1970s and 1980s (El Guabli 2013). Decades after their publications, Stolen Lives and Talk of Darkness continue to constitute alternative documents that gender the memorialization of the Years of Lead and undermine official history and dominant discourses on gender roles. Notes 1 Europeans were first introduced to A Thousand and One Nights between 1703 and 1717, when French Orientalist scholar Antoine Galland published Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français, a translation and adaptation of a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript. See Susan Gauch, Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. x. 2 Born in 1920 to a Berber family in southern Morocco, General Oufkir served in the French army and fought with the French forces in Indochina from 1947 to 1949. After independence, the general was named Minster of the Interior in 1961 and again in 1964. He played a key role in the suppression

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of the opposition. His brutal repression of the Rif (1957–1959), during which entire villages where wiped out, won him the title of the ‘Butcher of the Rif.’ (Miller 2013, 166–157). He was also in charge of the suppression of the 1965 Casablanca riots. Additionally, a French court convicted him of the murder of exiled Union Nationale des Forces Populaires leader Mehdi Ben Barka, who was kidnapped in Paris and disappeared in 1965. After the failed military coup of July 1971, Oufkir was appointed chief of staff and Minister of Defense by the king, thus occupying one of the highest positions in government and the closest to the palace. As for his wife, Fatéma Chenna, she belonged to a prominent Berber family whose ties to the royal family preceded her marriage. For a short biography of General Mohammed Oufkir, see Thomas K. Park and Aomar Boum, Historical Dictionary of Morocco (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2006), pp. 271–272. 3 See, for instance, Abdellatif Laâbi, Le chemin des ordalies (Paris: Denoël, 1982). 4 See Susan Slyomovics, ‘The Argument from Silence: Morocco’s Truth Commission and Women Political Prisoners,’ Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 1.3 (Fall 2005), pp. 73–95, 80–81; Slyomovics (2005b, 147–149); Menin (2014, 54–55). 5 For the use of Scheherazade and the Nights in autobiography and political memoirs by North African and Middle Eastern women, see Vinson (2008) and Melissa Matthes, ‘Shahrazad’s Sisters: Storytelling and Politics in the Memoirs of Mernissi, El Saadawi, and Ashrawi,’ Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 19 (1999), pp. 68–96. 6 Touria Khannous, ‘National Reconciliation through Narrative: Malika Oufkir Stolen Lives,’ in Touria Khannous, African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse (Lanham: Lexington, 2013), pp. 59–77, 66. 7 Susan Slyomovics, ‘Review of Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail, by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi,’ Boston Review, 26.6 (December 2001–January 2002) [accessed September 28, 2014]. 8 See, for instance, Fatema Oufkir, Les jardins du Roi (Paris: Michel Lafon, 2000) and Raouf Oufkir, Les invités: vingt ans dans les prisons du roi (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 9 The title also refers to a neighborhood where the Moroccan elites lived, including members of king’s family. 10 The group includes Saïda Menebhi, Maria Zouini, Widad Baouab, Latifa Jbabdi, Nguia Boudaa, Khadija El-Boukhari, Fatna El-Bouih, and Maria Charaf. 11 El Bouih’s publications are Le tortionnaire en déroute (Destabilized Torturers) (Rabat: Synergie Civique, 2001), a text in French about perpetrators of political violence and Atlasiyate (Women of the Atlas) (Casablanca: le

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Fennec, 2006), a text in Arabic in which she transcribes the testimonies of women from the Middle Atlas region who were victim of state-sponsored abuse, torture, and disappearance in the 1970s. 12 Such a characteristic is also described by Guessous as common in oral testimonials by women victims of the Years of Lead. She notes: ‘From their accounts, it is clear that political violence was lived and experienced as a moment of rupture and uncertainty, a moment which profoundly re-organized and redefined the lives and self-conceptions of women victims. All the women we spoke to tended to say little about their lives prior to the events. They had to be encouraged to describe their lives prior to their encounter with the violence of the state […] their inclination was to speak first about the violence and its aftermaths and not about what came before.’ Nadia Guessous, Women and Political Violence during the Years of Lead in Morocco (Rabat: The Moroccan Advisory Council on Human Rights in partnership with the United Nations Development Fund for Women, 2009), 38 [accessed October 2015]. 13 Rigoberta Menchú is a political activist from Guatemala. Her testimony was internationally acclaimed and she received the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature in 1992. However, she was criticized for lack of accuracy and authorship as she did not write I, Rigoberta Menchú but instead dictated her story to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Anthropologist David Stoll was especially critical in Rigoberta Menchú and the History of All Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). For an overview of the controversy, see Kathryn M. Smith, ‘Female Voice and Feminist Text: Testimonio as a Form of Resistance in Latin America,’ Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies Journal, 12.1 (2010–2011), pp. 21–38. 14 See Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography: ‘Retrospective narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (1989, 4; italics in original). 15 For instance, Abdellatif Zeroual died of torture at Derb Moulay Cherif on November 14, 1974, nine days after he was arrested (Rollinde 2002, 190). 16 Assia Djebar, ‘La Femme en morceaux,’ in Assia Djebar, Oran, Langue morte (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), pp. 163–215. My translation. Original French: ‘Atyka, tête coupée, nouvelle conteuse. Atyka parle de sa voix ferme. Une mare de sang s’étale sur le bois de la table, autour de sa nuque. Atyka continue le conte. Atyka, femme en morceaux’ (211). 17 Fatima Mernissi, Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 49. 18 See Robert Carr, ‘Crossing the First World/Third World Divides: Testimonial, Transnational Feminisms, and the Postmodern Condition,’ in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity

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and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), pp. 153–172, 156. 19 My translation, original French: ‘Mais j’ai décidé après de témoigner dans un pays où seuls les hommes peuvent juridiquement être témoins. J’ai remarqué que l’histoire écrite de ce pays est une histoire d’hommes. Le témoignage se conjuguait au masculin, la détention politique aussi. Ce n’était pas vrai car j’ai vécu la participation des femmes à la politique […]. Hadīth Al’atama c’est aussi la douleur d’un processus de dénudement qui n’est pas une simple écriture. Une parole sur la violence de l’État … c’est un autre combat.’ Brahim El Guabli, ‘De la détention politique à la société civile: Entretien avec Fatna El Bouih’ (July 26, 2013) [accessed December 2013]. 20 English Translation of the Holy Quran: With Explanatory Notes, trans. Maulana Muhammad Ali, ed. Zahid Aziz (Wembley: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Lahore, 2010), pp. 68–69. 21 This idea that literature, fictional and non-fictional, has the potential to bear witness to that which resists knowledge and comprehension has largely been explored in trauma studies by scholars such as Shoshana Felman. See for instance, Felman and Laub (1992) and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 22 This expression is commonly used to describe post-Years of Lead Morocco and the social, economic, and political changes that began in the late 1990s. 23 For instance, Abdellatif Laâbi transforms Menebhi into a folk-tale heroine named Saida in his Rue du retour (1982), a text in which he tells his experience of political violence using second-person narration and a combination of narratives of his arrest and torture, poems, and dialogues with his wife and children. Novelist Houria Bousserjra pays homage to Menebhi by making her the victim of torture and rape of one of the characters in her novel Les Impunis: ou les obsessions interdites (2004). 24 The Mudawana, Morocco’s family code, was created in 1958. It has been edited numerous times. The last version of the Mudawana was approved in February 2004 as a result of a significant mobilization of various feminist groups. On a brief history of feminism in Morocco and the importance of the Mudawana in shaping it, see Fatima Sadiqi, ‘The Central Role of the Family Law in the Moroccan Feminist Movement,’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35.3 (2008), pp. 325–337. 25 For instance, the 2004 Mudawana was drafted by a committee nominated by the king and the final documents left many Moroccans unsatisfied, both among secularist feminists and conservative groups. A similar approach was adopted for previous revisions of the Mudawana. The state’s attitude towards

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the memorialization of the Years of Lead and especially the lack of accountability and prosecution of the perpetrators of political violence shows a continuity in how the regime controls sociopolitical change. 26 Catherine Perry, ‘L’innommable dans La Prisonnière de Malika Oufkir et Michèle Fitoussi,’ La revue française, 10 (2000), pp. 77–102, 85. 27 Mokhtar Ghambou, ‘Malika Oufkir and the American Making of a Moroccan Star’ (n.d.), p. 3 [accessed November 2015]. Page numbers refer to text in PDF available at same location. 28 In addition to these written testimonies, victims of the Years of Lead and their family members testified in numerous newspapers and television programs in Morocco and abroad. Victims and their families also testified before the various committees of the IER and these proceedings were televised and archived online. 29 Women constitute fifteen percent of the dossiers received by the IER from ‘direct victims’ and forty-six percent of those filed by ‘indirect victims’ (Guessous 2009, 15). 30 Atlasyate (2006), by Fatna El Bouih and Youssef Maddad, contains direct testimonies in Arabic by women from the Atlas region who were arrested, tortured, and arbitrarily detained in relation to their husbands’ alleged activities during the 1973 uprisings. In 2007, Nadia Guessous’s study marked a turning point in the understanding of Moroccan women’s experiences of political violence (Guessous, ‘Femmes et violence politique (1956–1999): Les silences de l’histoire,’ Confluences Méditerranée, 3.62 (2007), pp. 39–60). Published online in Arabic and in English in 2009, it is one of the first easily accessible documents to shed light on the fate of women ‘indirect victims.’ 31 Midhat René Bourequat, Mort Vivant! Témoignage, Rabat 1973–Paris 1992 [1992] (Paris: Pygmalion, 2000), p. 52. 32 The early publication date and free tone in the Bourequat brothers’ accounts of Tazmamart—Mort Vivant! (1992) by Midhat René Bourequat and Dix-huit ans de solitude, Tazmamart (1993) by Ali Bourequat—are a result of the brothers’ French citizenship, which allowed them to leave Morocco and tell their stories soon after their liberation. 33 See Andrew R. Smith and Fadoua Loudiy, ‘Testing the Red Lines: On the Liberalization of Speech in Morocco,’ Human Rights Quarterly, 27.3 (August 2005), pp. 1069–1119. 34 Susan Slyomovics, ‘A Truth Commission for Morocco,’ Middle East Report, 218 (Spring 2001), pp. 18–21, 18. 35 On this subject, see Slyomovics (2005b), particularly the chapter entitled ‘Islamist Political Prisoners’ (165–194). Violence against and detention of political activists is a current state of affairs since the beginning of the Rif uprisings in October 2016 following the death of Mouhcine Fikri, a fish vendor who was crushed to death in a garbage compactor after police and port officials confiscated his out-of-season swordfish catch. Since the beginning of the

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protests, the authorities have arrested many leaders of the Hirak, a movement that formed in Al Hoceima, demanding justice for Mr. Fikri and further calling for the end of corruption and for more investment in their marginalized region. 36 Stolen Lives’s narrator describes the punishment: ‘Two fire slaves slung each of us across their shoulders, our heads and legs dangling on either side, while the king thrashed the soles of our bare feet with a whip’ (51). 37 Benjamin Stora, ‘Maroc, le traitement des histoires proche,’ Esprit, 266–267 (August–September 2000), pp. 88–102, 91. 38 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 115; italics in the original. 39 Maria Charaf, Etre au féminin (Casablanca: Editions La Voie démocratique, 1997).

chapter three

Speaking for the Voiceless Political and Ethical Considerations of Moroccan Women’s ‘Collective Testimonial Self’ Speaking for the Voiceless

Collective Voices in Individual Testimonies El Bouih believes that neither her words nor her writings are purely autobiographical. She narrates her individual history but at the same time situates what she says and what she writes as part of a collective endeavor. To account for the experiences of generations of Moroccan women as voiceless and powerless, as well as the particularity of the lives of educated women like herself, she constructs a first-person narrator (what critic Doris Sommer calls ‘the testimonials’ collective self’ to stand for the collective experience of her intellectual and activist women comrades, many too traumatized to tell their stories. (Slyomovics 2005b, 144)

Scholars of the Years of Lead have overemphasized the collective dimension of Moroccan women’s testimonies (Slyomovics 2005a, 81; Slyomovics 2005b, 144; Slyomovics 2012, 42; Orlando 2009, 88; Orlando 2010, 283–284; Dennerlein 2014, 24; Menin 2014, 58). Their studies often draw on the well-established criticism of testimonial writing in the context of Latin America, advancing that individual testimonials represent the experience of and/or can speak for exploited and oppressed communities (Beverley [1989] 2004; Yúdice 1991; Sommer 1991; Harlow 1986; Harlow 1991). Slyomovics’s above statement refers to narrative and political strategies that women developed to counteract ways in which state repression and social stigma collude in Morocco to silence women and undermine their experiences of violence. Slyomovics underlines this reality in the title of the book chapter she dedicates to women: ‘Rani nimhik: Women and Testimony.’ Rani nimhik, Moroccan Darija for

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‘I will erase you,’ is a phrase that Youssfi Kaddour, police chief and torturer, said to Fatna El Bouih while she was held in custody in secret after she was kidnapped by the authorities. From a gender perspective, Kaddour’s phrase is also symbolic of the authorities’ attempts to erase women from the political sphere. Juxtaposing this brutal statement with women’s testimonies, Slyomovics illustrates how women used testimony, literally and figuratively, to wrestle their way back, after they were forcibly removed by the state, into the public sphere of politics and into Morocco’s history of resistance. Generally, for political prisoners, writing for public consumption is a transgression of the state’s attempt to isolate opponents and contain their opinions within controlled and regulated spaces such as the torture room, the prison cell, or secret camps. However, for Moroccan women, writing during and after prison has also been a means to challenge patriarchal sociocultural norms that marginalize them. Indeed, as Slyomovics and other scholars point out, in Morocco, shame and social stigma were and remain strong inhibitors that hinder women’s public testimonial endeavors (Slyomovics 2005b, 145; Orlando 2010, 184; Menin 2014, 47). As a result, women’s testimonies are haunted by the ideals of Moroccan womanhood and the gendered norms they resist. For instance, El Bouih explains: the model for all Moroccan females is the woman who lowers her eyes, never raises her voice, whose tongue ‘does not go out of her mouth,’ as in the Moroccan proverb ‘ilfum mesdud ma duxluh dbana’ (into a closed mouth no flies can enter) […]. This was the way I, my colleagues and friends were raised and I revolted against this situation. In my own case, I was interviewed in 1994 by Malika Malek for Moroccan television. A half hour interview about my experiences as a former political prisoner was cut and only two minutes were broadcast. So I began writing about other women political prisoners and their amazing courage that should be part of Moroccan history. At first, I could not write about myself because that was ‘hshumah’ (dishonor).1

El Bouih’s testimonial works are examples of the various ways in which she fuses her experience and story of violence with other Moroccans’ in an attempt to circumvent restrictive laws, written and unwritten, regulating women’s speech. Atlasiyate (2006), co-authored in Arabic with Youssef Maddad, contains copies of official documents in French and Arabic and direct testimonies by female victims from the Atlas region. In this multifaceted testimonial document, El Bouih is an author but also an historian/archivist who sheds light on anonymous women’s

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stories of political violence. However, Atlasiyate and other lesser-known works by El Bouih, such as Le tortionnaire en déroute (2001), are rarely the main object of analysis in studies that explore the idea of collective testimony. Instead, these studies primarily refer to El Bouih’s memoir Talk of Darkness (2008), which first appeared in Arabic in 1994. El Bouih’s memoir certainly fits Slyomovics’s description of ‘collective authorship’ by Moroccan women, an enterprise that undermines ‘powerful restraints shaped by history and gender’ and which disempower women (2005b, 144). Talk of Darkness includes two chapters by Latifa Jbabdi and Widad Bouab, El Bouih’s former co-detainees and political prisoners. In addition, it dedicates six other chapters to stories of common-law prisoners and their experience of violence within their respective communities and in prison. This structural plurality mirrors a plurality at the level of narration in El Bouih’s autobiographical chapters in which she constantly and unexpectedly switches from firstto third-person narration and back again, thus formally inscribing the distance that exists between the narrator as subject and the narrator as object of the story. The plurality of stories and voices emphasizes solidarity between women while the instability of the narration testifies to their alienation. Both undermine the idea of the individual author of testimony and narrator of sociopolitical violence. The memoir’s structure and literary devices further impose gender as a major factor in the infliction of sociopolitical violence against women. Yet to suggest that El Bouih’s memoir is a collective testimony—one that accounts for the experience of powerless and voiceless women as well as women unable to work through their trauma or through social inhibitions—is highly problematic. Such a definition implies that El Bouih’s testimonial endeavor accounts for the experiences of women from the various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds that form the heterogeneous and highly hierarchical Moroccan society. For the memoir, this would also mean that it collapses the hierarchies that exist between the various protagonists, including the main narrator and editor (El Bouih), other subjects and narrators (Jbabdi and Bouab), and, especially, others deprived of direct speech (common-law prisoners whose stories are reported in the form of fragments by El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab). In fact, reading Talk of Darkness alongside Saïda Menebhi’s and Malika Oufkir’s testimonial writings further reveals narrative patterns and power relations that complicate the idea of collective authorship and, by extension, the idea of representativeness in/of testimonies written by individual authors. Though scholars often read Menebhi’s and El Bouih’s

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works as collective testimonials, a close literary analysis shows, without undermining their collective appeal and their achievement as resistant documents against authoritarianism and against oppressive gender norms, that the construction of a plural testimonial voice often reiterates hierarchies based on class, ethnicity, geographic origin, linguistic identity, education level, and access to public platforms of communication. By analyzing power relations in testimonial narratives, whether single- or multi-authored, this chapter rethinks the meaning of ‘collective testimony’ and addresses the ethical and sociopolitical implications of such a concept, especially in relation to the idea of speaking for the voiceless. Looking at alternative testimonies and studies relating women’s experience of violence during the Years of Lead, the chapter further demonstrates that the voices of star witnesses such as El Bouih and Oufkir, whose works have been translated into numerous languages, and the focus of scholars of the Years of Lead on their stories undermine the experiences of thousands of victims of political violence whose testimonies are only accessible in Arabic or in fragments and are rarely cited and analyzed. The Prostitute: The Myth of the Perfect Victim in Saïda Menebhi’s Testimony Menebhi’s unfinished essay on female prostitution in Poèmes (1978) reveals some of the contradictions that arise from testimonies in which stories of individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds are made to from a single overarching testimony of oppression. Menebhi presents her text as an ethnographic study of prison, a space she views as a microcosm that encapsulates the sources and consequences of Moroccan women’s exploitation. Her methodology explicates the various steps she undertook to realize what she presents as a collaborative testimony, including interviews and discussions with female common-law prisoners serving prison terms after they were charged with prostitution. Unlike her elusive poetry, published in the same edition and in which women— sex workers and others—remain anonymous and universal, Menebhi’s essay contains first names and provides sketched biographies of the protagonists. The text also includes many direct quotes. The author explains that the offering of such information was not prompted by specific questions but was the result of spontaneous dialogues. She also affirms that underprivileged women, eager for their voices to be heard, often volunteered information about the circumstances that led them to

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prostitution and to prison. Finally, Menebhi insists that her text is an authentic transcription of the women’s oral stories (87). Menebhi’s essay constitutes a plural and female-gendered testimony, marked by the author’s efforts to inscribe women’s collective experience of violence as the result of a corrupt capitalist and patriarchal society. The text calls out the hypocrisy of the authorities and social actors who marginalize sex workers in order to exploit them. Noting that women accused of practicing prostitution constituted up to seventy percent of the female prison population at the time of her incarceration (88), Menebhi restores these women’s social and familial identities, describing them also as daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives rather than merely criminals or transgressors. However, in doing so, Menebhi never completely departs from the patriarchal and capitalist norms she so vehemently denounces. Her normative descriptions, confining women to traditional gender roles, do not empower sex workers in a way that undoes the sociocultural norms that enable their exploitation. Consequently, within the literary testimony, Menebhi too re-enacts their exploitation. In her heavily edited essay, her voice overrides theirs and the economy between their testimonies and her comments reveal an unequal and hierarchical power relation. Menebhi’s long introduction, exposing some of the socioeconomic characteristics she associates with Moroccan women’s ‘double exploitation’ (84), mediates the women’s fragmented testimonies and puts them within a specific ideological framework. The various stories are often composed of no more than three or four short sentences including the women’s age and a quote describing their background: Fatima, nineteen: ‘My parents are very poor. My father is a tailor. My sisters are household servants who work for wealthy people.’ Aïcha, nineteen: ‘My parents are deceased. I was left alone with my seven younger brothers. I was a virgin when I started prostitution. I had a child with a boy who knew what was going on.’ Najat, seventeen: ‘My parents are poor and divorced. I never see them. I was raised by a very poor aunt. When I was fifteen, I was raped by a boy whom I left and, ever since then, I have been living alone.’ (85) Chama, twenty: ‘I come from a well-off family. My father has a job. At home, we don’t need anything. All my brothers go to school. I too completed primary school but I had to quit after that because of my illness. My father forced me to marry an older man I didn’t love. I ran away. He still refuses to grant me a divorce.’ (91)2

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The testimonies are separated into two categories. The first consists of girls who originate from poor families, often illiterate, and who became sex workers at an early age. The second category presents women who belong to middle-class families. Some of these women went to school and fell into prostitution after a divorce or because they ran away from an unsatisfying family life. However, despite these major differences, Menebhi ultimately concludes that the way these women came into prostitution is irrelevant for its understanding as the symbol of women’s exploitation and marginalization by a corrupt regime and a society governed by archaic patriarchal norms (95). Menebhi further interrupts the women’s voices, interjecting her opinion and interpreting their stories and prostitution as ‘one of the hardest and most degrading conditions’ (88). This textual arrangement and Menebhi’s analysis of prostitution turns sex workers’ testimonies into illustrations that strengthen a preexisting political message rooted in the author’s espousal of the socialist ideology and cause. Ultimately, the women’s short direct quotes are subsumed into Menebhi’s view of prostitution as the ultimate symbol of a failing society governed by corrupt leaders who perpetuate a socioeconomic system the country inherited from European colonialism (84). The specificities of the protagonists’ voices are further muted when Menebhi disregards major differences and holds up the sex worker as a symbol of Moroccan women’s exploitation across socioeconomic backgrounds: If the prostitute sells her body and undergoes the worst abuses and moral tortures, the woman worker sells her labor to the Capitalists. Her salary is ridiculously low and is never equal to her male comrade’s. Social security is not an option for her. When pregnant or ill, her job is not guaranteed […]. Even when they are economically independent, women are not free. The handling of the household and material decisions regarding it are the men’s responsibility. In the home, women bring up children alone and provide non-compensated and alienating work. Society does not recognize the value of this work, which it deems obligatory. (86)3

Rather than empowering Moroccan women, omissions of critical factors that variably impact their lives and place in society reiterate their domination as perpetuated through the silencing of their experiences. Menebhi’s interpretation of prostitution and her incorporation of direct quotes from common-law prisoners within a hybrid narrative that is both a testimony and a political manifesto, simplify women’s varied experiences. Common-law prisoners’ experiences are marginalized

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when they do not fit the author’s ideological view of prostitution and political agenda, based on the presumption that the oppressed masses for whom she speaks, like her, aspire to a classless societal organization. Ironically, the strength and the testimonial power of Menebhi’s text lies in the stubbornness of the voices of the women she and some scholars depict as powerless and voiceless. Despite her narrow-minded interpretation of prostitution and women, in the few direct quotes she transcribes, women reveal a variety of reasons that led them to prostitution. Even though most evoke either poverty or lack of other opportunities, a significant number of the women explain that they deliberately chose prostitution to improve their financial situation, escape oppressive familial settings such as forced marriages or disagreements with their husbands, or to offer their children a better life and education. Some of the women, who are educated and speak French and English, even left other jobs for sex work as it offered greater financial advantage (90–91). When Menebhi reduces all the sex workers she interviews to a symbol of the oppressed and silent woman, she not only elides the complexities that characterize Moroccan women’s life experiences, she also shows her own bias and inability to accommodate in her narrative sociopolitical views and practices that do not illustrate the superiority of socialism. Menebhi’s essay and testimonial poetry show that the collective can take many forms that cohabit and compete with one another. The author’s prominent use of ‘nous’ and ‘on’ (us) instead of ‘je’ (I) and the frequent effacement of the identity of the narrator of her poems effectively construct an image of the Moroccan people as a group united in its fight against authoritarianism and corruption. Her feminization of the people, through the use of numerous examples of women to illustrate its suffering, convincingly projects women as agents of a future revolution. As Valérie K. Orlando notes, this narration powerfully ‘captures the spirit of resisters against all forms of torture and abuse who suffered not only in Morocco but across the globe’ (2010, 279). For Orlando, this dimension not only makes Menebhi’s testimony collective but also timeless because it ‘remains an example of Moroccan women’s continuing struggle to rectify historical memory’ (2010, 281). Yet these narrative strategies also lead to the erasure of important differences amongst Moroccans, which shows that the collective is always based on the exclusion of aspects that have the potential to undermine unity and uniformity. Minimizing the identity of the narrator of her poems, Menebhi elides the power relation that exists between political activists

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who, like herself, are often educated and live in urban centers, and the oppressed masses for whom they speak and which are, as Menebhi often reminds her readers, constituted of uneducated peasants and workers. Similarly, in her essay, she undermines the significance of her text as a collective testimony by minimizing the voices and the agency of her interlocutors, presenting them merely as victims. Malika Oufkir’s Concubines: The Harem within the Autobiography Malika Oufkir’s autobiography, co-authored with professional writer Michèle Fitoussi, is another example of an autobiographical prison narrative by a Moroccan woman that can be read as a plural narrative of women’s oppression. Stolen Lives (2001) is replete with examples of women’s subjugation, mostly in the form of snippets of information about the women who formed the harems of King Mohammed V and King Hassan II and with whom Oukfir spent her childhood in the royal palace. Early on in the narrative, the narrator dismisses the advantages of belonging to an extremely privileged background and identifies with these women, who mostly belong to the lower classes and are treated as possessions in the palace. She claims: ‘I knew all those women well. I was admitted into their private sphere, I shared their confidences’ (36). She then uses this connection to give herself permission to narrate their stories. For instance, she evokes the formation of King Hassan II’s harem after his father’s death and explains how women from underprivileged backgrounds are transformed into palace concubines: Hassan II’s concubines were very young girls, chosen from all over the country for their beauty. The eldest were not yet seventeen. They were clumsy, awkward, and uncertain, not knowing how to behave […]. They were immediately taken in hand by the older women, who taught them about Palace life, etiquette, tradition and habits. They prepared them for their lives as women, for the sexuality as a concubine is not like that of ordinary mortals. Jealously guarded secrets were passed on from harem to harem. Their names were changed. Fatihas and Khadijas, often daughters of the lower classes, became Noor Sbah, ‘light of dawn,’ or Shem’s Doha ‘setting sun.’ After their training, they were married to the King in groups of three or four, in his palace at Fez, amid sumptuous festivities […]. The most highly regarded concubines had the status of childless wife, for as a rule they were not allowed to have children. Only the king’s wife can give him heirs. (36–37)

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This passage shows the concubines’ commodification and sexual objectification, a condition that clearly contrasts with that of the narrator, who enjoyed the status of special adoptee whose parents frequented King Hassan II’s court and who was educated like a princess. However, Malika nonetheless compares her strict education and feeling of confinement to their objectification and lack of power and further explains: At the Palace, they were intent on making us women as soon as we reached puberty. Etiquette was dinned into us […]. The emphasis was on obedience and on the most superficial aspects of femininity. We were nothing compared to our elders, and as women, we were less than nothing. (58)

The narrator’s use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ reinforces her identification with the concubines. In the pages dedicated to them, it also emerges as a form of appropriation in which the narrator cannibalizes their stories to turn them into illustrations of her own personal suffering and nascent feminism. Indeed, throughout the narrative, the narrator occupies a paradoxical position: she is a member of the harem and, at the same time, a special insider/observer who exposes women’s subjugation. For instance, she writes: ‘I lived in a harem, surrounded by slaves, in a feminine world ruled by that one man […]. But, deep down inside, I was a European. I was often shocked by what went on within the palace walls, by the cruelty and the severity of the sentences and punishments [of the concubines]’ (58). This position not only contrasts with the concubines, who are represented as passive and silent objects, it also expresses a retrospective gender and political consciousness formed out of the experiences in the palace and in prison as well as their narration. The narrator conflates perspectives of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as well as the positionalities of a full member of the palace and a former member of the court who was violently repudiated. Her multi-positionality and the narration’s multi-perspectival approach show that the inclusion of the concubines’ stories is a gesture of sympathy as well as a political strategy meant to expose the link between patriarchal violence and the institution of the monarchy. The description of practices the narrator deems ‘medieval’ (42) establishes an ideological basis for her to inscribe her family’s imprisonment as a patriarchal punishment rather than a politically motivated decision linked to the great sociopolitical power the Oufkirs enjoyed before the second military coup attempt against the monarchy in 1972. Instead, the execution of General Mohamed Oufkir and the imprisonment of his wife and children are

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described as a form of repudiation similar to those experienced by some of the concubines who fell from of the king’s grace and who were mercilessly beaten and disappeared in the palace prisons (59). The inclusion of concubines’ stories is thus a literary and political act that participates in making Oufkir’s autobiography a transformative narrative, akin to the autobiographies by Arab women described by Miriam Cooke, in which the reader can ‘most clearly see the individual creating alternative realities’ and reimagining foundational narratives.4 Cooke clarifies: ‘[a]lternative does not mean separate or irrelevant. These reflections on personal experience and forays into fiction may provide the blueprint for the future’ (2001, x). Readers of Stolen Lives witness Oukfir’s transformation into, among many other things, a feminist. Oufkir’s fusion of autobiography and sociopolitical criticism and the insistence on the narrator’s double belonging, as an individual ‘permanently torn between East and West’ and between Arabic and French (57), emerges as a sign of a particular brand of feminism that further locates Stolen Lives within Arab women’s writings. Indeed, Anastasia Valassopoulos, who underlines the link between Arab feminism and Arab women’s writings, explains that ‘local and Western discourses are ever present when we speak of Arab feminism because they cannot be discursively separated.’5 Stolen Lives’s narrative construction thus situates it within various regional literary practices that exceed the specificities of testimonial and prison literature. For instance, with a narrator who is at once an adoptee who knows she belongs to a powerful and progressive family who loves her (56), a daughter of the king (49), and one of the anonymous women who populate the palace and are ‘subject to the power of an absolute monarch who rule[s] by divine right’ (58), Stolen Lives also contains literary constructions and representations found in the writings of Francophone and Maghrebi women authors. A narrator, occupying and speaking from a variety of positions indeed evokes the plural self-representations and non-unitary subjects that Natalie Edwards sees in the writings of authors such as Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous.6 At the same time, Stolen Lives also presents structural features that specifically pertain to testimonial literature by Moroccan women and raises ethical concerns around the meaning of collective authorship and collective testimonial voices that are similar to those raised by Menebhi’s writings. Stolen Lives’s plurality is limited by the comprehensive history of the narrator and main character, including a lengthy family history and

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a large collection of events, descriptions of emotions, and anecdotes that show Malika’s evolution from the age of five to the time of writing. This construction of a full-fleshed character contrasts strikingly with the inscription of the concubines. The stories of anonymous or semi-anonymous women—without a name or merely designated by their first names, not unlike the stories of Menebhi’s sex workers—appear in fragments and illustrate Oufkir’s feelings at the time of writing and her revulsion at the monarchy and the mores it perpetuates. The narrator provides little information about how the women viewed their situation, the monarchy, or other sociopolitical issues. As a result, Oufkir emerges as the subject of her autobiographical narrative while the concubines remain merely objects who never access direct speech or provide input on Morocco’s sociocultural foundations and practices. As Chapter Two discusses, various critics of Stolen Lives have pointed out the narrator’s problematic omissions of her father’s role in Moroccan politics and especially the violence that took place during the Years of Lead, as well as her lack of contextualization and her opportunism (Perry 2000; Slyomovics 2002; Ghambou n.d.; Khannous 2013). However, the autobiography’s content and style have not been considered in the context of collective authorship and collective testimony of Moroccan women’s prison narratives. Situating Fitoussi and Oufkir’s recycling of the palace concubines’ stories within Moroccan women’s testimonial literature shows that Stolen Lives’s gendered aesthetics of solidarity also recycles narrative and political patterns found in Menebhi’s and El Bouih’s testimonies, particularly their incorporation of common-law prisoners’ stories. As is the case with Menebhi’s sex workers, the concubines’ stories in Stolen Lives are inherently political and functional. The primary goal of the narrative is not to give a voice to the concubines but to show that the institution of the monarchy and the palace culture validate and reaffirm the patriarchal and violent foundations of Moroccan politics. Ultimately, these stories, in the form of anecdotes and fragments, form an echo that supports Oufkir’s literary reinvention as a daughter of the people and a resister. They also serve to inscribe the controversial imprisonment of the Oufkirs as an example of ordinary state-sponsored gendered violence. Trauma studies has long established the difficulty and even the impossibility for victims of communicating their traumatic experiences to others.7 These findings complicate ideas of authenticity and sincerity in a testimonial narrative of political violence. However, this doesn’t preclude the analysis of the literary inscription of the parallel that

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Oufkir and Fitoussi establish between Stolen Lives’s narrator and women belonging to the lower classes, which, as is the case for Menebhi, elides power relations between the authors/narrator and anonymous and semi-anonymous women. Oufkir and Fitoussi appropriate the concubines’ stories for political and ideological purposes. In doing so, they successfully communicate the importance of gender in the infliction of political violence during the Years of Lead and draw attention to the similarities that exist between Oufkir’s experience and those of scores of other women targeted by the regime for their links to men allegedly involved in the opposition to the makhzen (the ruling elite). However, the importance they give to Oufkir’s family history and their attempts to rehabilitate her father undermine the narrator’s reinvention as a daughter of the people and her claimed solidarity with marginalized and silenced women. The profusion of biographical details, the elaborate descriptions of the narrator’s feeling and emotions, and the constant insertion of her sociopolitical comments decisively distinguishes her from the concubines. Like Menebhi, Oufkir controls the narrative and puts forward an ideology rooted in her personal, and exceptional, history. Though Stolen Lives’s narrator claims that her gender made her a ‘commodity,’ just like the concubines (26), she does not account for her subsequent transformation from a subaltern to a speaking subject who has a public platform to tell her story on her own terms. In contrast, the concubines remain anonymous, silenced, objectified, and sexualized in a narrative that does little to empower them. Matilde Mésavage claims that Stolen Lives’s feminist depiction of imprisonment and confinement is influenced by Oufkir’s experience amongst the concubines (186). However, the narrator’s self-representation and reinvention through the mode of autobiography perpetuates hierarchies between women based on religion, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background that contradict this idea. In her analysis of Stolen Lives, Catherine Perry too suggests that the narrative is contaminated by Oufkir’s education in the palace. However, in contrast with Mésavage, Perry underlines the narrator’s use of religion and her alleged filiation to the Prophet Mohammed to legitimize her family’s presence within the Moroccan political system, something the Moroccan monarchy has done for centuries (83). Thus, even though Malika Oufkir rejects Islam—which she expresses through her conversion to Christianity—and the institution of the monarchy she deems illegitimate and archaic, she nonetheless relies on a sociocultural belief system that validates the influence of both in the organization of the Moroccan society and politics.

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The narrator’s extremely hierarchical vision of society and social organization undermines the potential of Stolen Lives to become a site of collective authorship and voicing of Moroccan women’s experiences. Instead, the hierarchization of society is reiterated in the representation of the concubines, whose identity and stories are truncated in such a way that they become a homogeneous mass. Rather than a feminist act that empowers women, this inscription, in sharp contrast with the individualization of the narrator, turns the exposition of the royal harem to a transnational audience into an exercise in voyeurism. The narrator, who constantly affirms her difference, foreignness, and identification with Western and European cultures, replicates literary motifs and power relations that characterize the depiction of veiled Maghrebi and Arab-Muslim women as victims of cruel patriarchal systems in European Orientalist literature. The anonymity and the fragmentation of the concubines’ stories emerge as a symbolic veil that deprives these women from access to public recognition and public speech. Talk of Darkness’s Supporting Stories: Creating Powerless and Voiceless Women El Bouih’s memoir, Talk of Darkness, has been hailed as a quintessential collective testimony that speaks for the voiceless and bears witness to their suffering. Yet this description overlooks how, as in Stolen Lives, the main narrative, depicting the history of the women political prisoners, uneasily cohabits with secondary narratives that relate decontextualized fragments of anonymous and semi-anonymous women’s stories. Talk of Darkness’s association of stories of different kinds suffers from a contradictory objective: writing in Morocco’s collective memory the incredible courage, singularity, and sacrifice of a small number of educated women who were targeted by the Moroccan regime for their political activism while also engendering a collective voice that attests to sociopolitical violence that touches all Moroccan women. As in Menebhi’s text, the testimonies of El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab incorporate stories of common-law prisoners. These women are depicted as powerless and voiceless, characteristics that emerge as deeply linked to the rehabilitation of the woman political prisoner, the affirmation of her role as a resister, and her conversion into an outspoken feminist. The dual inscription of Moroccan women’s oppression, made of master stories depicting resisters on the one hand and minoritized

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stories depicting victims on the other, simplifies Moroccan women’s history and experience of the Years of Lead. It also complicates the definition of collective testimonial authorship and the assumption that it accounts for the experience of those who do not have direct access to public speech. Formally and thematically, Talk of Darkness departs from collective and ‘female-gendered’ testimonies described by Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney as testimonials in which ‘the “protagonist” who gives testimony is a speaker who does not conceive of him/herself as extraordinary but instead as an allegory of the many, the people.’8 Like Barbara Harlow (1986; 1991), Doris Sommer (1991), George Yúdice (1991), and John Beverley ([1989] 2004), Gugelberger and Kearney define the collective dimension of the testimonio in a framework of comparison to Western conventions of authorship, especially autobiography. They explain that autobiographies ‘are writings by selves which are impressed by their own feelings of unique significance. In contrast, testimonials such as Rigoberta [Menchú]’s show that the self cannot be defined in individual terms but only as a collective self engaged in a common struggle’ (9). In the context of Latin America, both the idea of collective testimony and the shift in the narration of the self are often discussed in relation to testimonials involving witnesses/speakers (individuals belonging to marginalized and oppressed communities or groups) and compilers (individuals, European/American professional writers or academics or members of the educated intelligentsia, who can write and have access to national and international channels of communication). Both are also linked to the testimonial’s ability to provoke sociopolitical change and promote social justice. Indeed, Gugelberger and Kearney further explain that the ‘erosion of the central authority of the firstperson author who is replaced by a collective “we” effects a displacement from the bourgeois individual toward the community of the witness, and as such is consistent with a more democratic and socialist political project’ (9). In an article published in the second volume of the same issue of Latin American Perspectives, Barbara Harlow writes: Crucial to the testimonio is the antiauthoritarian relationship between the narrator and the compiler or ‘activator’ of the narrator-protagonist’s account of the events to which she or he bears witness. This counterhegemonic relationship in turn implicates the reader, both in the events and in their retelling. […] the collaborative nature of the project reworks the hierarchical structures of power implicit in literature as a cultural institution.9

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The creation of two distinct categories of women—on the one hand, political prisoners, depicted as victims and resisters, and, on the other, the majority of Moroccan women, symbolized by common-law prisoners and described as impotent victims of a violent patriarchal society— clashes with the collective testimonial and its political potential as a literature of resistance as described by Harlow. Although the construction of a plural narrative voice in Talk of Darkness distinguishes it from traditional autobiography, the lionization of the woman political activist/prisoner and author of the testimony reiterates the narrator of traditional autobiography’s ‘feelings of unique significance.’ El Bouih and her co-authors constantly remind their readers of their special status in prison and the privileges they earned after great acts of resistance and courage (45–47). The superior status of the political prisoner is structurally maintained throughout the narrative with the authors’ control of the main story and the images of Moroccan women it promotes. The way the authors narrate life in prison and the type of assaults on women that take place inside and outside is one area where the testimonial narrative replicates the hierarchical relation that exists between political prisoners and common-law prisoners. The events they select and the way they narrate them fashions an image of Moroccan women in which hierarchies based on class, political ideology, education level, geographical origin, and ethnicity remain intact. One such event is the attempted rape of Khadija Boukhari, another political prisoner, by a prison guard and which both El Bouih and Jbabdi evoke in their testimonies. El Bouih inscribes the event as a spontaneous manifestation of collective resistance amongst women political prisoners. She describes ‘a memorable night: perhaps for the first time in the history of that prison, its walls knew screams of protest and, even more unusual, they were screams of women’ (10). In a similar fashion, Jbabdi politicizes the event: ‘we all rebelled, disregarding every prohibition until the incident was investigated and our comrade was vindicated’ (88). Neither El Bouih nor Jbabdi provides concrete details about the actual assault and its physical and psychological consequences for the victim. Instead, they convert the attempted rape of Khadija into political action and transform it into the symbol of women political prisoners’ first successful revolt against their jailers. The event further marks the reappropriation of the female body and its use as a political tool for building resistance and solidarity between women political activists. The screams that stop Khadija’s rape are followed by women

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political prisoners’ ‘tears and anthems’ that pay tribute to Menebhi and protest her death (18); then tears and screams turn into more organized use of the body as a site of protest with the description of a hunger strike launched by El Bouih and her five comrades to denounce their arbitrary detention without trial (18). The description of the attempted rape is typical of how El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab relate gendered violence against women political prisoners, turning its narration into an illustration of their resistance and courage. When El Bouih writes about women’s re-gendering, she also emphasizes her refusal to respond when the guards call her Rashid (9); when she writes about the pain and savagery of torture sessions, she makes the narration an opportunity to demonstrate her inner strength, which allows her soul to remain ‘pure’ (11); when she writes about the degrading conditions of life in prison, she insists on how political prisoners transformed the prison into ‘another site of struggle’ (23) and won many battles (28). This construction of the written testimony, Khalid Zekri argues, ‘aims at rehabilitating women’s role in the establishment of the rule of the law in Morocco’ (2006, 205). El Bouih’s, Jbabdi’s, and Bouab’s literary representation of the woman political prisoner thus achieves a much-needed affirmation of women’s presence in politics and resistance. At the same time, her representation as national heroine rests on important omissions. For instance, the authors hint at how women in politics are associated with prostitutes, a way for the authorities to legitimize full access to their bodies. After her kidnapping, El Bouih recalls that her jailers call her ‘a slut, the daughter of a slut, a prostitute, the daughter of a prostitute, a whore, and the daughter of a whore’ (5). Yet, as is the case in Poèmes, concrete descriptions of gendered physical and sexualized violence against women political prisoners are absent, which, as will be discussed in detail below, contrasts with research on the Years of Lead that shows that women (and also men) targeted by the state for their direct or indirect participation in politics were sexually assaulted and raped. Reasons for omitting sexualized violence in the Moroccan context are numerous as Slyomivics’s and El Bouih’s above-mentioned comments suggest. However, the partial omission of physical and sexualized violence in Talk of Darkness is problematic because it contrasts strikingly with the author’s description of abuse against common-law prisoners. While the narration shelters the female body of the political resister from public exposure and from forms of violence that are considered taboo in Morocco, in passages depicting violence against

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common-law prisoners, presumably based on oral accounts the narrators heard or events they witnessed, women emerge as vulnerable bodies: beaten, tortured, subjected to forced labor, sexually assaulted, raped, and deprived of basic care. The omission of concrete descriptions of gendered physical and sexualized violence against political prisoners and the dual description of a female body, as a site of resistance on the one hand and a site of abuse on the other, erodes the solidarity between political prisoners and common-law prisoners that Talk of Darkness’s authors put forward. Unlike political prisoners’, the bodies of the common-law prisoners are also physically and socially sexed and gendered. Even though she gives very little biographical information about herself beyond her political resistance, El Bouih dedicates six chapters to the stories of common-law prisoners and female guards in which she describes them as wives, sisters, and mothers. She also describes how these social statuses are defined by violent gender norms. For instance, she tells the ‘extremely bizarre story’ of a ‘brown-skinned young woman who had been arrested on a morals charge, although she was recently married.’ The narrator explains that even though the woman was nine months pregnant, she was sentenced to a prison term because, long before she was married, she had ‘filed a complaint against a man whom she accused of raping her when she was a virgin’ (58). El Bouih describes how the unnamed woman gave birth alone in prison without uttering a sound. At the end of the story, the narrator suggests, though ambiguously, that mother and child were left to die after the guards refused to assist them or let other prisoners assist them. For the narrator, the story illustrates the prison for women as a place ‘without compassion, pitiless, unjust and prejudiced’ (59). Readers also learn about F. L., a woman who murdered her two children for fear of scandal after they witnessed her committing an act of adultery. F. L., too, was pregnant and gave birth to a daughter in prison. Although born in prison, the little girl yearns for life outside, thus illustrating the universal and natural aspiration to freedom (60–62). El Bouih also mentions Old Fatima, a woman who is afraid of leaving prison and being reunited with her two sons after seventeen years of incarceration. Old Fatima’s story illustrates the alienation and isolation of prisoners who are cut off from the outside world (73). El Bouih also includes a graphic description of how an unnamed woman accused of adultery was humiliated by ‘the expert,’ a female guard who put hot pepper in her vagina, causing her pain that left her bedridden for a long time (78). This particular story illustrates commonplace sexualized

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violence as well as a dehumanizing sociopolitical system that transforms ordinary people into torturers. The construction of Bouih’s testimony, which creates two distinct categories of bodies and women, is reproduced by her co-authors. In her short testimony, Bouab, too, chooses to devote a few lines to the stories of three women from the common-law prisoner population. First, she tells the story of a mother whose baby boy, born in prison, was subjected to the same conditions as adult prisoners. She then tells the story of a woman who lost her mind but was treated exactly like other prisoners. Finally, Bouab cites the example of a pregnant woman who was viciously beaten by female guards and had a miscarriage as a result (82–83). Bouab’s descriptions confirm the divide between silenced victims and women endowed with speech and agency. In striking contrast with fragments of common-law prisoners’ life stories, passages relating political prisoners’ suffering inscribe the female body as almost completely severed from its social and biological attributes and functions. El Bouih, Jbabdi, and Bouab limit their life narratives to carefully selected aspects of political violence and political resistance that leave the body of the woman political prisoner largely unmarked by gender-specific bodily experiences such as menstruation, pregnancy, and motherhood. Although they insist on the existence and the importance of gendered political violence specifically targeting women, the authors of Talk of Darkness omit its social and physical consequences beyond the torture room and the prison space. Omissions of details about violent assaults and certain experiences linked to the female body are easily explained by notions of shame, honor, and modesty that define sociocultural conventions of Moroccan society, as well as the difficulty of narrating traumatic events. However, this glaring absence in a narrative that is rich in examples of the abuse and marginalization of ordinary Moroccan women further isolates women political prisoners from a community of women for whom they claim to speak. More problematically, as is the case in Poèmes, the stories of common-law prisoners in Talk of Darkness seem at times to serve primarily to advance a specific sociopolitical and feminist agenda. They broaden the testimony’s scope by introducing important issues such as women’s place and role within the clan as well as women’s sexuality through the inscriptions of physical and social experiences of childbirth, motherhood, miscarriage, infanticide, and adultery. The accumulation of stories of abuse underlines the idea that women’s oppression is paramount in an unforgiving patriarchal society. Politically, common-law prisoners’

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stories ground the testimonials in a sociocultural and corporeal reality beyond the official circles of the resistance where only a few educated women were involved in activist groups. As a result, they not only give the testimonial a greater social and political significance, they also legitimize feminism and the presence of women in politics. The depiction of common-law prisoners as symbols of women’s victimization empowers political activists, who emerge as agents of resistance and change. Such a narrative reflects and reinforces El Bouih’s, Jbabdi’s, and Bouab’s role as important sociopolitical actors in the era of transition from authoritarianism to semi-authoritarianism. However, as shown by the alternative accounts discussed below, it also simplifies Moroccan women’s history of resistance as well as notions of victimhood and resistance. Alternative Stories In an article in which she analyzes the rape of women as a form of gendered political violence and silencing, Slyomovics contrasts the pride El Bouih takes in Talk of Darkness in recounting the women’s success in stopping Khadija’s rape in the secret torture center, Derb Moulay Cherif, with her silence about her own rape in 1974 in a police station. Slyomovics uncovers three texts that were published, respectively, in 1980, 1984, and 2002, in which El Bouih is quoted telling her story of rape when she was a high school student (2005a, 89–90). While the 1984 and 2000 texts omit the victim’s name, a 1980s report by human rights activists of the France-based Comité de lutte contre la représsion au Maroc identifies the victim as El Bouih. Slyomovics problematizes El Bouih’s and other victims’ silence with a question mark in the title of the essay’s section that deals with the subject: ‘The right to remain silent?’ (2005b, 89), thus opening El Bouih’s choice to a multitude of interpretations. Another way to problematize El Bouih’s silence would be to ask: Does El Bouih have the right to remain silent about her rape in her memoir even as she exposes unnamed and marginalized women’s stories of sexualized violence? Slyomovics interprets the ‘unusual documentation’ of El Bouih’s rape as a sign of the ‘difficulties in transforming women’s experiences of rape into proof of the governmental role in its perpetration,’ which, for her, is codependent with women’s silence (2005b, 89). Slyomovics further explains that El Bouih’s alternation

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between silence and speech about her rape in various testimonial performances is dependent on ‘the audience, the reader, and the framing context of testimony’ (2005b, 89). However, Slyomovics does not problematize these factors’ relationship to issues of class, ethnicity, language, level of education, and other elements that play a role in women’s access to power and public speech. The particular circumstances of the documentation or, more particularly, the non-documentation of El Bouih’s rape in Talk of Darkness, reflect Moroccan women’s unequal access to power and the ability to choose between silence and speech and what events to feature in different framing contexts of testimony. El Bouih’s choice to remain silent in her memoir about a form of violence that is considered taboo in the Moroccan sociocultural context is indeed a privilege that many Moroccan women, including the common-law prisoners whose stories she divulges in her memoir, did not and still do not have. The fact that Talk of Darkness’s authors omit the circumstances in which they collected common-law prisoners’ stories and whether the women featured in the testimonies consented to have their experience of sexualized violence printed or had a say in the form in which it was reported, is a sign of internalized unequal power relations. El Bouih’s silence can further be problematized with another question: What are the sociocultural, political, and ethical implications of choosing to remain silent about one’s own experience of rape in a testimony about gendered and sexualized violence? El Bouih’s silence, in contrast with her accounts of the sexual abuse of other women, results in the impression that only marginalized, illiterate, and silenced or silent women are subject to rape, forced miscarriages, torture of their children, and social stigma. It also gives the impression that these forms of violence are foreign to gendered state-sponsored political violence. This rendering of the history of the Years of Lead does not reflect the data found in alternative sources. It is particularly at odds with documents based on a two-month research project sponsored by Morocco’s truth commission the IER in the summer of 2005, which was conducted by six women researchers trained in sociological and anthropological research. The team conducted individual interviews and focus groups involving a total of eighty women from Figuig, Nador, El Hoceima, Khenifra, Imilchil, Laayoune, Rabat, Casablanca, and Mohammédia, regions of Morocco known to have been affected by political violence between 1956 and 1994. Their work was presented to the IER in 2005 and resulted in the publication in Arabic of Women Who Broke Down the Wall of Silence (2005),10 a document that contains the testimonies of five

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women victim of political violence, and Women and Political Violence during the Years of Lead in Morocco, a report by anthropologist Nadia Guessous, first published in French in 2007, then in Arabic in 2008 and in English in 2009. Despite the inaccessibility of state archives, which makes it impossible to do quantitative studies of sexualized violence, in her qualitative study, Guessous identifies patterns of abuse that point to the widespread use of these types of violence against women targeted by the state. She explains that ‘women’s bodies were systematically abused for the purpose of intimidation, torture, and humiliation, and the fact that a broad range of sexualized forms of violence were routinely used to torture and intimidate women, made it possible for sexual violence to take place’ (2009, 63). Guessous’s study contains two chapters describing practices of political violence perpetrated against women and supported by numerous quotes from women telling their stories of rape and sexual assaults in their homes, prison, and public hospitals.11 Her research shows the institutionalization and the ritualization of gendered and sexualized physical violence as a common form of retaliation against women suspected of having direct or indirect links with opposition movements. Unlike widely distributed and cited autobiographical prison narratives, Guessous’s study exposes the sociocultural significance and impact of rape and other forms of sexualized violence on women. She explains that, because rape and other forms of sexualized violence were so widespread, female victims of political violence faced a double punishment because they had to ‘work harder to prove their respectability and morality’ after imprisonment and torture (87). Many of the women her team interviewed had to keep silent about rape and other sexual assaults. Some did not even talk about their arrests or encounters with the authorities because political violence against women was commonly associated with rape, and victims were often shunned by their families and communities. Women testifying anonymously in Guessous’s study tell stories of rape by police officers, soldiers, and male nurses. They also tell the suffering and loneliness of women who had to live with the knowledge of what happened to them and other women and not being able to talk about it because of fear of divorce, loss of the custody of their children, or the inability to find a husband. It is important to note that former political prisoners and activists have played a key role in the construction of an important archive on women’s experience of gendered political violence. For instance,

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El Bouih, Bouab, and Jbabdi, beyond Talk of Darkness, participated in different ways in the broadening of the understanding of the intersection of gender and political violence. In addition to El Bouih’s Atlasiyate, Jbabdi, who was the only woman amongst the sixteen commissioners of the IER, was instrumental in the constitution and supervision of the team that conducted research on the experience of women during the Years of Lead and which resulted in Women and Guessous’s study. Bouab collaborated in the realization of an important report written by Julie Guillerot for the International Center for Transitional Justice entitled Morocco: Gender and the Transitional Justice Process (2011).12 Thus, El Bouih, Bouab, and Jbabdi indirectly addressed, and partly redressed, the limits of their depiction of gendered sociopolitical violence against women in Talk of Darkness. Also indirectly or, perhaps, even inadvertently, their work complicates the idea of collective authorship and testimony that continues to define Talk of Darkness in the scholarship of the Years of Lead. The recovery of a broader history of violence against women by a variety of sociopolitical actors demands a rethinking of the intersection of violence, gender, and testimony. The ideas of collective authorship and collective testimony in Poèmes, Talk of Darkness, and Stolen Lives lose some of their cogency and potency in the context of an ethical literary reading and a cross-analysis of Moroccan women’s testimonial and life narratives of different kinds. For instance, the availability of alternative documents shows that, in a society that highly values virginity and women’s modesty,13 the way in which prominent and powerful women like Menebhi, El Bouih, Jbabdi, Bouab, and Oufkir circumvented the rules and restrictions that regulate women’s firstperson narration of sexualized violence and the female body is crucial. The representation of sexualized violence should be included in the understanding of the collective dimension of individual testimonies, especially in the evaluation of the testimony’s potential to transgress and change dominant definitions of gender roles and norms. Testimonies by women from different socioeconomic and political backgrounds published since 2005 show a different understanding of women’s marginalization during and after the Years of Lead. For instance, the testimonies in Women give alternative illustrations of the idea of the ‘double victim’ than those advanced by the authors of Talk of Darkness—being punished as political activists and as women—and by Menebhi—being the victim of the capitalist system and Moroccan men. The stories of Hafida, Yeza, Khadija, Omi Halima, and Touda show

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that women suffered as a result of their husbands’ imprisonment and as a result of their husbands’ decision to abandon them after their release and to keep the state’s financial compensation for themselves; they suffered from being political prisoners and from being women in prison without protection; they suffered from being deprived of their rights and from witnessing their children’s torture and social marginalization as a form of retaliation; they suffered from being victims of political violence and from a lack of recognition of their suffering; they suffered from gendered violence and from isolation as a result. Each singular story exacerbates the incommensurability of women’s diverse experiences with ready-made and generic definitions. Women, Guessous’s report, and journalist Hicham Houdaïfa’s Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet: les Oubliées du Maroc Profond (A Woman’s Back Is Like a Mule’s) (2015)14 also challenge the recurring depiction of Moroccan women as voiceless and powerless. When they have a platform to tell their stories, women from various regions and various socioeconomic backgrounds seize the opportunity to offer insightful and varied depictions of how they were affected by the violence and the arbitrariness of power in the Years of Lead. Their everyday acts of resistance and resilience expose testimonies by prominent women like Menebhi, El Bouih, Bouab, Jbabdi, and Oufkir as lacking despite their historical and literary importance. They also show the definitions of collective testimony in scholarship of the Years of Lead to be incongruous and disconnected from local realities. In Women, Khadija, who was arrested in obscure circumstances after the authorities linked her and her mother to two rebels who hired the women to wash their clothes, explains that she was a victim of torture during interrogation sessions, which caused chronic health problems as well as the loss of sight in one eye. Like the other prisoners, she suffered greatly from hunger, thirst, and cold while performing strenuous forced labor for long hours in fields owned by the state. As a woman, she explains that her life was destroyed after she was raped by at least three or four different soldiers every night for two weeks without anyone intervening to stop them: ‘My body was full of scars, scratches, and wounds. It no longer belonged to me. They stole it from me and turned it into public property’ (16). Khadija’s testimony undermines the idea of the silent woman unable to tell her story of sexualized violence because of social stigma. Unlike the laconic, metaphoric, and evasive descriptions of torture given by women political prisoners in Talk of Darkness and Poèmes, Khadija evokes in minute detail the repeated assaults she suffered and the pain caused by

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the men’s violence as well as by vaginal irritations resulting from a lack of hygiene and the impossibility of cleaning herself after each assault. Even though Khadija explains that she comes from a very poor family and, as a result, never went to school, she provides a trenchant analysis of the events she experienced and the way in which they illustrate abasement in the form of a violent dispossession of one’s body as well as the loss of one’s human rights and rights as a Moroccan citizen. Like Hafida, Yeza, and Touda, Khadija evokes the loneliness of ordinary women whose lives were interrupted by violent and illegal state practices without ever receiving any type of recognition or reparation. Yet, throughout her testimony, Khadija implicitly disputes the representation of poor and illiterate women as mere victims, voiceless and powerless. Unlike the anonymous women in Talk of Darkness whose voices and protests are muted, Khadija mentions several times that she screamed and protested her rapes every night, which resulted in more injuries. She also tells how, despite the shame she felt, she found the courage to complain to one of the prison’s superiors, which resulted in the end of the nightly rapes. Similarly, Hafida and Yeza describe at length how hard they worked to feed their children and keep their families together during the long absences of their husbands. Yeza’s husband, one of the soldiers held in the secret camp of Tazmamart after the 1971 and 1972 coups against the monarchy, spent twenty-two years in detention. During these years, Yeza was left alone to take care of her five children. At the end of her testimony, she evokes the great sadness and bitterness she feels as a result of her loneliness, the harsh life she lived, and her husband’s betrayal, in which he abandoned her and their children to marry another woman after he received financial compensation from the state. However, Yeza also evokes the great joy she feels and the pride she takes in the fact that, despite the incredible hardships caused by the state’s and her husband’s betrayals and by the family’s marginalization by other Moroccans, she worked hard and was able to feed her children and keep them in school (13). Alternative testimonies thus question the division between victims and resisters in prominent political prisoners’ depictions of Moroccan women. For instance, Omi Halima, an illiterate mother, describes how she became an ardent activist after her son was disappeared, tortured for six months in Derb Moulay Cherif, and then imprisoned before his death in obscure circumstances. Despite the great pain she expresses at the loss of her son, she takes pride in her and her son’s fight against authoritarianism and injustice and directly links their sacrifice to the

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political changes that have occurred in Morocco since 1999. Alternative testimonies also defy the state taxonomy in recording and memorializing abuse during the Years of Lead. The IER classified victims as ‘direct,’ a category that describes those targeted by the regime for their political activities, and ‘indirect,’ those targeted because of their familial and social links to political activists, often men. The descriptions by Hafida, Yeza, Khadija, Omi Halima, and Touda of their and their children’s pain undermine the state’s hierarchizing of pain and dissolves the distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ victims. Women’s stories in Women, especially Omi Halima’s, conform to Slyomovics’s findings on the ground. Indeed, in the chapter she devotes to women’s testimonies, Slyomovics also dedicates a section to what she considers a ‘less-known history’ of Moroccan women, especially mothers. She insists that ‘among the pioneers of human rights are the mothers, sisters, and wives who advocated on behalf of imprisoned family members’ (2005a, 154). She also notes the resilience and courage of women who, though not involved in politics, remained silent under torture to protect family members (157). These alternative narratives also confirm the conclusion reached by the authors of Morocco: Gender and the Transitional Justice Process, who insist on the role of women as ‘agents of change,’ including those from underprivileged backgrounds. They explain that women had to occupy roles typically reserved for men, thus reinforcing their position as social actors in the public sphere and within their communities. To them, women have not been merely victims because they have also played a dynamic role in the struggle for the truth as to the fate of their loved ones who were detained or disappeared, and for human rights, which is another reason they have experienced violations […]. They have organized among themselves, forming solidarity and action groups; they have secretly transported and circulated letters written by detainees; they have drafted letters and petitions; they have confronted the authorities; they have organized demonstrations and sit-ins; they have informed national and international public opinion […] the mothers above all have been pioneers in the movement for the rights of political prisoners and the disappeared. The vast majority were women who did not have basic education, whose mother tongue was not always Arabic, who had scant resources, and who had to reach out to the public and interact with new actors. (13)

Slyomovics’s and Guillerot’s studies account for how women revised their role in the family and society in response to sociopolitical violence

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during King Hassan II’s reign. However, their narration of women’s experience of the Years of Lead maintains the distinction made by women political prisoners and the IER between Moroccan women. In the same way that she separates Oufkir from other women political prisoners, Slyomovics carefully distinguishes between the testimony of prominent political prisoners such as Menebhi, El Bouih, and Jbabdi, and those by lesser known or unknown women. Both Slyomovics’s and Guillerot’s studies also insist on the recognition of women’s roles as mothers or relatives of male activists, thus creating a new hierarchy between leftist activism and other forms of women’s activism. In contrast, more recent studies, and more particularly, studies that distance themselves from both academic studies of the Years of Lead and documents resulting from or based on the IER’s activities and findings, more firmly show the superficiality of such distinctions and hierarchies. For instance, Houdaïfa’s Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet contains a chapter that includes testimonies by women who were targeted in retaliation for their male relatives’ activities as well as by women who willingly participated in the resistance and were tortured and sexually abused as a result. Based on interviews conducted with women and their relatives in isolated areas of the high Atlas Mountains, Houdaïfa’s chapter on women’s experience of political violence during the Years of Lead and its legacies in the present shows that categories such as ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ victims and distinctions between resisters and victims do not correspond to women’s experiences on the ground. By including a chapter on political violence within an investigation of different forms of women’s marginalization in Morocco, Houdaïfa implicitly denounces the perpetuation of women’s marginalization in the memorialization and historicizing of the Years of Lead, both in the framework of statesponsored mechanisms and in academic research, which continues to privilege accounts by prominent political prisoners and state archives. When the Voiceless Speak … Alternative testimonies such as those in Women and studies such as Guessous’s and Houdaïfa’s, despite limits dictated by literary, disciplinary, and institutional conventions, call for different paradigms in the study of the intersection of gender and violence. They also urge us to rethink our understanding of the relationship between individual and collective acts of construction and affirmation of subjectivity in testimonial writing and

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beyond. In depicting women in geographical areas and sometimes from social and ethnic backgrounds traditionally marginalized by mainstream media and academic studies, which are often more urban-centric and more concerned with the stories of educated and prominent women, such as Menebhi, El Bouih, and Oufkir, these studies call our attention to the dangers of the common uncritical merging of individual women’s experiences with Moroccan women’s collective experience. The women who testify in Women are only designated by their first names and the document contains various incursions reminding the reader of the IER’s protocols and limitations—a one-page foreword by Ahmed Herzenni, chairman of the former Conseil consultatif des droits de l’homme (the National Human Rights Council, CNDH), a short accompanying paragraph linking each story to the larger history of violence against women, another containing biographical information or describing the circumstances in which the testimony was collected, and very short comments interrupting the testimonies at different points. In addition, as is the case with testimonies in Guessous’s report, Women omits the names of the perpetrators, an important rule of the IER and a condition set down for the opportunity to testify publicly and/or to file a claim. Yet, despite official framing, Women still marks an important shift in the production of testimonial literature in Morocco. Consisting almost exclusively of stories by Hafida, Yeza, Khadija, Omi Halima, and Touda, presumably reported as they told them to the IER facilitators, the document introduces new subjects, themes, and styles that give the public a broader sense of the uneven effects of state-sponsored violence. They also shed a different light on the literary, philosophical, and political construction of a collective testimonial voice in single- and multi-authored testimonial narratives by well-known activists, especially the power relation that exists between the authors and other women victims of political and social violence. The testimonies contained in Women and other alternative documents are counter-narratives to the prominent memoirs and prison writings, such as Talk of Darkness and Poèmes, on which academic studies continue to rely for their analysis of women’s victimology and resistance. They also reveal unexplored political conflicts and important ideological differences amongst women that are elided by the idea of collective authorship and testimony. For instance, some of the testimonies contained in Women explicitly challenge the state-sponsored reconciliation process. In the concluding paragraph of her testimony, Khadija lists the physical and mental consequences of the tortures and

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the rapes she suffered and asks her interlocutors—members of the IER commission—if they believe the suffering and injustice she and other women in Khenifra experienced can be quantified and repaired. Her question gestures to the incommensurability of women’s suffering and the very idea of reparation, either through testimony or in the form of a potential financial compensation. Similarly, Touda, who was tortured at the age of three in front of her mother and sisters to force her mother to divulge information about her father’s political activities, suggests a similar idea. She evokes the premature deaths of her father, mother, and sister as a result of torture, marginalization, and poverty. These losses and the physical disability resulting from her childhood torture are presented as irreparable, thus creating an unbridgeable gap between the victim and her audience. Khadija’s and Touda’s testimonies, which insist on the individual, intimate, un-sharable, and irreparable experiences of suffering, present a serious challenge to the ideas of speaking for or accounting for the experiences of others. They also challenge the voices of prominent women like El Bouih and Jbabdi, not only because they tell political violence differently, but because they question the legitimacy of the state-sponsored reconciliation process, in which a large number of prominent political prisoners, such as Jbabdi, one of the IER’s sixteen commissioners, and Driss Benzekri, the IER’s president, participated. Finally, women’s life stories of different kinds also challenge secular feminist movements and ideologies, still largely controlled and shaped by women who were former activists in leftist movements and who often create alliances with the monarchy in an effort to marginalize popular ideologies, especially Islamist ideologies. This is not to say that testimonies by ordinary Moroccan women promote or support Islamist visions of society but, rather, that they contest state paternalism, dominant ideologies that claim to represent their interests, and top-down reform and memorializing processes. Notes 1 Susan Slyomovics, ‘“This Time I Choose When to Leave”: An Interview with Fatna El Bouih,’ Middle East Report, 218.31 (Spring 2001) [accessed October 2014]. 2 All translations from Menebhi are mine. Original French: Fatima, 19 ans: ‘Mes parents sont très pauvres. Mon père est tailleur. Mes sœurs sont employées comme bonnes chez des riches.’

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Aïcha, 19 ans: ‘Mes parents sont morts (e). Je suis restée seule avec mes sept petits frères. J’étais vierge quand j’ai commencé à sortir. J’ai eu un enfant avec un garçon qui savait tout.’ Najat, 17 ans: ‘Mes parents sont pauvres et divorcés. Je ne les vois jamais. J’ai été élevée par une tante très pauvre. J’ai été violée à 15 ans par un garçon que j’ai abandonné. Depuis je vis seule.’ Chama, 20 ans: ‘Je suis d’une famille aisée. Mon père travaille. Nous n’avons besoin de rien à la maison. Tous mes frères sont scolarisés. Moi j’ai fréquenté toutes les classes du primaire mais je n’ai pas continué à cause de ma maladie. Mon père m’a obligée à me marier avec un homme âgé que je n’aime pas. Je me suis enfuie. Il ne veut toujours pas divorcer.’ 3 My translation. Original French: ‘Si la prostituée vend sa chair et subit les pires sévices et tortures morales, l’ouvrière, elle, vend sa force de travail aux capitalistes. Son salaire dérisoire n’est jamais égal à celui de son camarade ouvrier. La sécurité sociale ne lui est pas assurée: qu’elle soit en période de grossesse ou de maladie, sa place dans l’usine n’est plus garantie […]. Mais la femme même économiquement indépendante n’est pas libre. L’administration de la maison, les décisions matérielles sont le domaine de l’homme. Au foyer, la femme élève seule ses enfants et fournit un travail aliénant et non rémunéré. La société ne lui reconnaît pas la valeur de ce travail jugé comme obligatoire.’  4 Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism through Literature (New York, Routledge: 2001), p. x. 5 See Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 16. 6 See Edwards (2011). 7 See for instance Jean François Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983); Scarry (1985), and Felman and Laub (1992). 8 Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney, ‘Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America,’ Latin American Perspectives, 18.3 (1991), pp. 3–14, 8. 9 Barbara Harlow, ‘Testimonio and Survival: Roque Dalton’s Miguel Marmol,’ Latin American Perspectives, 18.4 (1991), pp. 9–21; Gugelberger and Kearney (1991). 10 Women Who Broke Down the Wall of Silence is accessible at the CNDH website, [accessed December 2016]. Original in Arabic. All quotations from the document are presented in my translation. 11 See sections entitled ‘Gendered and Sexualized Violence’ (54–58) and ‘Rape and Sexual Assault’ (58–63). 12 Julie Guillerot, Naima Benwakrim, Maria Ezzaouini, and Widad Bouab, Morocco: Gender and the Transitional Justice Process, International Center for Transitional Justice and Foundation for the Future (September 2011)

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[accessed November 2015]. 13 For instance, Laura Menin writes: ‘Rape, in itself a traumatic experience and intimate violation, was all the more shameful because the view prevailing in Morocco regards virginity as embodying honour, values and respectability not only of the girl in question, but also of her family’ (2014, 55). 14 Hicham Houdaïfa, Dos de Femme, Dos de Mulet: les Oubliées du Maroc Profond (Casablanca: Editions en Toutes Lettres, 2015).

part two

Trans-Acting Moroccan Identity and Femininity: Auto/Biography, Testimony, and Subjectivity in the Transglobal Age

chapter four

Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds in Lalla Essaydi’s Depiction of Moroccan Women Visual, Cultural, and Geopolitical Thresholds

Art and Femininity at a Crossroads In Les Femmes du Maroc #1 [Figure 1] (2005), a photograph from the series Les Femmes du Maroc (2005–2007), renowned Moroccan-born multimedia artist Lalla Essaydi restages prominent Orientalist French painter Eugène Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment) (1834; Louvre). When juxtaposed, as is often the case in exhibitions of Essaydi’s works, which include a miniature of Femmes D’Alger placed side by side with her photograph, the contrast between the two images is striking. Even though Essaydi maintains the postures of the four women in Delacroix’s painting, she immediately transports the viewer to a different atmosphere. In Essaydi’s photograph, Delcroix’s lush color technique and harem interior disappear behind an off-white cloth covered with calligraphy written in henna, which is used both as background and for the women’s clothes. Instead of exotic objects and opulent colors, the viewer is left with a monochromatic color palette dominated by a continuum of beige and brown. The juxtaposition of Orientalist tropes, Arab-Islamic cultural signs, and photography evokes a site of plurality, interaction, and negotiation that situates Moroccan women’s identity in between Arab-Muslim and Amazighen (Berber) traditions and Western and global influences. At the same time, the monotony of repetitive patterns and the fabric’s resemblance to standard hospital

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Figure 1.  Lalla Essaydi, Les Femmes du Maroc #1

linens, evoking a sterile room, reminds viewers of a constructed space and, thus, ideas of revision and invention. Essaydi’s conversation with and contestation of the tropes and codes of nineteenth-century European Orientalist painting is the subject of this chapter. The goal is to highlight the long-lasting effects of the colonial gaze on Maghrebi women’s self- and collective representation and how their works participate in reconfiguring the postcolonial canon. As her images of Moroccan women circulate through prestigious institutions worldwide and are easily accessible to a global audience through the Internet, Essaydi’s photography urges us to rethink the intersection of the postcolonial condition and gender in the context of the mass circulation of images in the age of globalization. Like many women artists originating from North Africa and the Middle East working in the West, Essaydi occupies the paradoxical position of cultural interpreter and insider/resister. The visual hybridity, ambiguity, and indeterminacy that result from this positioning places Essaydi’s aesthetics in dialogue with prominent postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said,

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Homi K. Bhabha, and Moroccan essayist Abdelkébir Khatibi, whose creative and critical works destabilize hegemonic perceptions of identity and culture. Her reference to Moroccan women’s confinement as a result of Western and Arab-Islamic patriarchies also allows her to form formal and ideological connections with Arab-Muslim and Maghrebi feminists and artists such as Francophone author and filmmaker Assia Djebar, Egyptian author Nawal El Saadawi, Moroccan sociologist and author Fatima Mernissi, Algerian-born visual artist Houria Niati, and IranianAmerican multimedia artist Shirin Neshat. The various linkages and connections that Essaydi mobilizes in her staged photographs turn each image into a transnational space of translation, transformation, and transcreation of Arab-Muslim identity and femininity. Les Femmes du Maroc #1 exemplifies Essaydi’s photography, aesthetically and in terms of sociopolitical content. In Les Femmes du Maroc as well as in Converging Territories (2002–2004) and Harem (2009), the two other series considered for this chapter, Essaydi’s photographs depict Moroccan women within the framework of a dialogue with Orientalist artists. The artist quotes from or restages scenes from canonical paintings such as Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, but also Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814) and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Marché d’esclaves (Slave Market) (1866). Essaydi recycles male European painters’ motifs of the odalisque, the veil, and the harem. At the same time, introducing spatial, temporal, technological, cultural, and gender difference, she disorients this basic vocabulary. The recurrent motifs of the female body, the veil, the harem, Arabic calligraphy, and henna turn the photograph into a nationally, ethnically, culturally, and religiously marked site, disrupting the homogeneity of the Orient imagined and constructed by European painters. Orientalist artists used elaborate painting techniques to conceal the fact that their images were a ‘representation of the West to itself by way of a detour through the other.’1 In contrast, in Essaydi’s photographs, traces of Orientalist tropes, the women’s skin tones and clothes, the ubiquitous calligraphy in henna, and the photographic medium itself allude to a plural site of reflection that is at once Moroccan, Arab-Islamic, Western, diasporic, and transnational. Thus, the plurality of Essaydi’s ‘photographic tableaux’2 exhibits and mobilizes the process through which the images produce meaning within a cross-cultural framework. For instance, some of Essaydi’s photographs, like Les Femmes du Maroc #1, were shot in her studio in Boston using Moroccan women who live in the United States as models. The photographs from Converging

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Territories were set and shot in one of the artist’s family homes outside Marrakesh and the models are family members or acquaintances. Other photographs, like those in the Harem series, were shot in Moroccan architectural landmarks such as the Dar Al Basha Palace in Marrakesh. With the incorporation of her experience of migration, Moroccan women’s collective experience, and rituals and architecture in Arab-Islamic cultures, Essaydi engages with and questions the collusion of Western and Arab-Islamic patriarchies as perpetuated in the representation of Eastern women and gendered divisions of space. Essaydi’s transnational and gendered ‘double critique’3 reflects and is intimately inspired by her unique journey in various national and cultural spaces. Born in 1956 to a small city leader with four wives and eleven children, Essaydi spent her childhood in a traditional Moroccan harem in Marrakesh before she was sent to France to attend high school when she was sixteen. At twenty, she returned to Morocco where she met and married her husband and both moved to Saudi Arabia, where she lived for thirteen years. In the early 1990s, Essaydi moved back to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1996 she relocated to Boston, where she continued her studies and received an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2003.4 Reflecting on the link between her personal experience and her art, Essaydi has stated: As an Arab artist living in the West, I have been granted an extraordinary perspective from which to observe both cultures, and I have also been imprinted by these cultures. In a sense, I feel I inhabit (and perhaps even embody) a ‘crossroads,’ where the cultures come together—merge, interweave, and sometimes clash. 5

Essaydi transposes her positioning at a crossroads onto her images through the redeployment of family homes and rituals that shaped her girlhood in Morocco and womanhood in Saudi Arabia on the one hand and, on the other, the Western painting and photography techniques she acquired through her training in the arts in France and the United States. The fusion of Orientalist imagery, Arab-Islamic artistic and cultural motifs, and photography made Essaydi a prominent artist on the international scene and a champion of Arab-Muslim women’s issues in Western media and academic discourse. In the last two decades, her work, particularly her photography depicting women, has been exhibited in major outlets in the United States, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East,

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and the Gulf Arab states. In 2012, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art featured a retrospective of her work entitled Lalla Essaydi: Revisions. Her photography is currently represented in the collections of numerous museums, including the Williams College Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fries Museum in the Netherlands, and The Kodak Museum of Art. In most art reviews of her work in the West, especially in the United States, Essaydi is hailed as a feminist who deconstructs stereotypes that pervade the representation of Arab-Muslim women and translates the struggles of North African and Middle Eastern women to a transnational audience. This chapter analyzes Essaydi’s images as well as their reception in a way that captures the interaction between the local, transnational, and global discourses the artist deploys in her photographs. In particular, the chapter focuses on the economy between individual and collective identity by examining the implications of assigning artists like Essaydi, who enjoy great visibility and mobility, the role of representatives and spokespersons for Arab and Muslim women. It does so by examining hybridity and ambiguity in Essaydi’s photographs as well as the narrow line that separates disruption from reiteration of stereotypical r­ epresentations of the Arab-Muslim woman and culture and their reification. Interrupting the Orientalist and Imperial Gaze Restaging an image that has become the quintessential representation of Oriental women and European imperial expansion, Les Femmes du Maroc #1 is one of Essaydi’s images that most explicitly invites viewers to reflect on the gendered inscription of the Other in Western art. Exhibited at the Salon of 1834 and purchased the same year by King Louis-Philippe, who donated it to the Musée du Luxembourg, Femmes d’Alger has inspired many enthusiastic comments praising Delacroix’s artistic mastery as well as his ability to bring a taste of the Orient to Paris. For instance, leading French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) exclaimed: Naturally, I am drawn to Delacroix. No other painting is as beautiful as Femmes d’Alger. These women are really Oriental; the one with a rose in the hair; and the Negress! Her movement is so typical of a Negress! This painting smells like seraglio incense. When I look at it, I imagine myself in Algiers.6

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Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), who copied Femmes d’Alger, commenting on Delacroix’s dynamic use of colors, explicitly evokes the idea of consumption: These pale pinks, these rough cushions, this slipper, all this limpid light somehow enters your eye the way a glass of wine slides down your throat, and suddenly you’re drunk. No one knows how, but you feel much lighter. These hues lighten and purify. One color passes into the next, like silks.7

Les Femmes du Maroc #1, with its many layers of actual and symbolic veils and its opacity, obstructing the view of the women and the Orient, deprives Femmes d’Alger of the very elements that made it so fascinating for its viewers: tactile experience and easy accessibility to the Orient and Oriental women’s bodies. In Femmes d’Alger, the surrealistic light turns the female bodies into magnets and immediately shows how Oriental women became fetishized objects of the colonial and the male gaze. By incorporating his gaze into the composition of his painting and surrounding the female bodies with exotic objects in luxurious colors, Delacroix renders the Algerian women as commodities, ready to be consumed with impunity. His depiction of Algerian women inside a family home, a space traditionally forbidden to foreigners, produced only a few years after the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, normalizes European imperialism. In contrast, Les Femmes du Maroc #1 interrupts Delacroix’s sexualized and Orientalist visual vocabulary as fabric and calligraphy cover most of the photograph’s surface. In her image, Essaydi, too, puts the focus on the four women by stripping the space of decorative objects. However, she uses calligraphy, henna, and the veil to write over nineteenthcentury European imperialism and ideals of eroticism. In doing so, she complicates the experience of voyeurism and penetration into a domestic, feminine, and forbidden space. Further, Essaydi obstructs fantasies of penetration and possession by redefining the space. The astounding continuity between the female bodies and their surroundings in her photograph rehabilitates the sort of harmony that exists between the harem as a family space and its inhabitants, both called harem in Islamic societies.8 At the same time, with the fusion of calligraphy, an art traditionally associated with men and the public and sacred spheres in Islamic cultures, and henna, a form of body adornment traditionally applied by women, Essaydi creates an undetermined space. She further uses the curtain and two types of veils and clothes to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior space.

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Even if the four women in the photograph are barefoot, the curtain separates the space into two distinct parts. The two women placed behind the curtain are wearing kaftans (full-length tunics traditionally worn by Moroccan women in interior spaces) and veils that only cover their hair, which are typical traditional Moroccan clothing for women inside the household. The two women outside the curtain are wearing djellabas (loose hooded cloaks worn by Moroccan men and women) and veils that cover the hair and part of the face, which, by contrast, are traditionally worn by women outside the household, in public space. Placing miniature images of nineteenth-century paintings next to her images, Essaydi also optically and symbolically disrupts the power relation implied by Orientalist European male painters. This display of competing images shifts the relationship between the Western gazer and the Oriental woman, who becomes a respondent and the main narrator. In her statements and interviews, Essaydi explains that studying Western art traditions made her realize that images of the odalisque, the harem, and the veil signal a ‘Western male fascination and a fantasy’ that has left indelible marks on the perception of Arab and Muslim men and women in the West and within their local societies.9 To her, colonialism and Orientalism physically and symbolically dissolved ‘boundaries between the public and the private,’ leading Arabs to reinstate ‘these boundaries in a clear and visible way.’10 She uses the display of her photographs and miniatures of Orientalist paintings to prompt the audience to question their relationship to familiar imagery of the Orient and Oriental women and to make room for alternative stories. Appropriating Delacroix’s gesture, Essaydi, too, incorporates her gaze into her photographs and into the relationship created by the juxtaposition of her photographs and Orientalist paintings. Doing so, she adopts narrative strategies similar to those that Moroccan author and feminist Fatima Mernissi uses in her fictional memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Childhood (1994). Addressing a Western audience in English, Mernissi reconstructs her childhood in a Moroccan harem in the 1940s, employing Orientalist tropes of voyeurism. However, instead of depicting idle and naked women, she presents female characters that embody a wide range of opinions about colonialism and women’s place in the struggle for independence and the future of the country. Essaydi claims that she uses her art to ‘convey [her] own experience as an Arab woman in Islamic culture,’11 thus implicitly emulating Mernissi’s and other North African women’s appropriation of the Orientalist discourse. Like Mernissi, who blurs boundaries between different genres

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(history, autobiography, and fiction), Essaydi, mobilizing Moroccan women’s common experience and her personal history, creates visual life narratives that project Oriental women as co-agents in the construction of meaning. In Les Femmes du Maroc #1, the female subjects are no longer mere objects that satisfy expectations shaped by Orientalist imagery, but also actors in an image and scene that explicitly exhibits itself as a site of cross-cultural interaction and negotiation. Essaydi’s image also disrupts Orientalism and the patriarchal and imperial ideology it normalizes through cultural performance. Les Femmes du Maroc #1 combines actual Moroccan female bodies with traces of Delacroix’s visual codes to suggest disguise and performance. The ethnically and culturally marked female bodies, with brown skin tones common in North Africa, and common Moroccan clothing (kaftans, djellabas, and veils), transposed to a nineteenth-century imaginary harem, transform the photograph into a theatrical space. These elements change the meaning of the curtain from a powerful symbol of the penetration into the private and prohibited space of the Orient to a symbol of a theatrical scene where alternative scripts can be performed. Even though the women’s clothes and veils introduce religious, cultural, and gender markers, their uniform-like appearance, a result of the continuity created by the invasive calligraphy and a singlecolor palette, accentuate the idea of spectacle. Theatricality symbolizes women’s agency and interrupts the sense of languor and passivity Delacroix suggests in his painting. Essaydi further draws attention to women’s agency in public comments explaining her creative and artistic process. For instance, she insists on the collaboration that exists between her and the models, whom she considers ‘partners in the creation of [the] photographs’ (Waterhouse 2009, 146).12 This collaboration, henna application, and calligraphy, common practices across North Africa, also transform Essaydi’s images into a collective life narrative. Even though the female bodies in Les Femmes du Maroc #1 remain aesthetic objects to be looked at, the contextualization Essaydi provides in her statements restores the women’s agency. Her comments draw attention to the traces of painstaking collaborative labor that resists the interpretation of henna application and calligraphy as a reproduction of the idea of cultural primitivism found in Orientalist paintings and literature. Indeed, each one of Essaydi’s images requires a long preparation that starts up to six months before the day of the shoot. The writing in henna can take up to nine uninterrupted hours, during which the models and the artist are unable to rest (Essaydi

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2015, 11). Generally, henna is applied in rituals that signal major transitions in North African women’s lives such as puberty, weddings, and motherhood. The elaborate process to which Essaydi subjects herself and her models makes the application of henna and calligraphy in her art symbols and enactments of important transitions in Moroccan women’s socialization. Despite the fictional and purely aesthetic dimensions of the images, the creative process situates women within a sociocultural context that interrupts Orientalist and colonial fantasies. Actual and symbolic veils—the curtain, henna, and calligraphy—and the unrealistic uniformity they create also emerge as a rejection of what Edward Said calls ‘radical realism’ in Orientalist political, cultural, and academic discourses. For he explains that ‘anyone employing Orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about, with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality.’13 Essaydi counteracts Delacroix’s realism, his illusion of authenticity, and his simplification of class, race, and ethnic relations. For instance, she erases Femmes d’Alger’s approximate socialization of women, which merely rests on the contrast between the black servant and the three other women. Instead, Essaydi opts for uniformity amongst women in her image, which results in the unreadability of socio-ethnic and racial difference. Though this erasure is also problematic because it could be read as a way of masking uncomfortable relations between various racial and ethnic groups in the Maghreb, it also inscribes the idea of solidarity between women from various national, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. The idea of solidarity also appears with the transformation of the painting’s Algerian women into Moroccan women and the use of pan-Arab-Islamic practices of henna and calligraphy. Essaydi’s image evokes common experiences amongst North African women that exceed aspects of identity favored by Orientalist artists and the European colonial administration’s imperial feminism and its obsession with unveiling Muslim women. Essaydi’s deconstruction of Delacroix’s illusion of realism reminds viewers that Orientalist images ‘cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the particular power structure in which these works came to being.’14 In her analysis of Orientalist paintings of the same period as Femmes d’Alger, art historian Linda Nochlin puts the purported ability to define ‘realism’ on a continuum with other methods of enforcing Western domination, along with technological, military, economic, and

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cultural power in the context of the European colonial presence in the so-called ‘Orient’ (1983, 291). Essaydi, relying on the aesthetics of North African women’s everyday life, imprinted upon their bodies and their practices through the performance of specific rituals, challenges the traces of the colonial relation. Essaydi’s aesthetics contextualize the painting’s imagery within the history of colonialism that Orientalist paintings representing harems and women often omit, purposefully or not. In her reproduction of Femmes d’Alger, she does this by alluding to the conditions of the painting’s production, which Delacroix carefully excludes from his image of the Algerian harem. Indeed, the French painter’s presence in North Africa was linked to a diplomatic mission in Morocco led by statesman Charles de Mornay on behalf of King Louis-Philippe in 1832. The purpose of the mission was to seek an agreement with the Moroccan sultan in an effort to bring peace and secure the frontiers of recently invaded Algeria.15 Delacroix’s painting is supposedly based on a brief visit paid to a harem in Algeria on his return trip from Tangiers to Toulon. The circumstances of this visit remain unclear. However, Delacroix’s sketchbooks and notes report the lack of access to Muslim private spaces and women in Morocco.16 The contrast between his sketches and Femmes d’Alger suggests that his entry into a harem is either fictitious or was linked to Algeria’s colonial status, as suggested by recent scholarship.17 Delacroix’s realist rendering of his penetration into a space traditionally forbidden to foreign men in North African societies, whether actual or a work of fantasy, makes Femmes d’Alger an expression of ‘French colonial power by exposing the hidden private spaces of the Orient to the colonizing gaze.’18 Nochlin suggests a similar idea when she explains that the connection between imperialist ideologies and Orientalist aesthetics lies in concealing what she calls the ‘bringing into being’ process used by painters as a strategy to convince their viewers that the images they present are ‘simply “reflections,” scientific in their exactitude, of a pre-existing oriental reality’ (1983, 291). Exposing the spaces in Delacroix and her own photograph as constructed, Essaydi demystifies Orientalist realism.

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Dialogue, Contestation, and the Formation of Alternative Genealogies Commenting on Femmes d’Alger, art historian and specialist of nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture Michelle Facos notes: These Algerian women appear to possess three desirable female characteristics divided among three different groups in the West in response to bourgeois notions of propriety and status: pleasure-giving prostitutes, obedient servants, and faithful wives […]. These women seem complacent in their captivity, disinterested in the opportunity for escape through the open door. The thick brushstrokes and jewel-like colors of Women of Algiers enhanced a sense of informal luxury. Delacroix’s technique was far looser than the academic standard set by David, reverting to painterliness that in the eighteenth century was associated with femininity. This departure from academic practice suggested a privileging of tactility and sensation over reason.19

Facos also reminds her readers that, unlike other artists who relied solely on their imagination to depict the Orient, Delacroix also used sketches from his four-month journey in North Africa, which resulted in ‘an imaginary composition with ethnographically accurate details’ (2011, 161). Facos’s description highlights how Delacroix fuses ethnographic accuracy, imagination, and painting technique to make his depiction of Oriental women conform to Western expectations of femininity on the one hand and, on the other, to imprint the colonial power relation and European domination over the Orient. In her image, using photography’s realism and other ethnographically accurate details such as clothes and rituals, Essaydi appropriates femininity while challenging the submissiveness of North African women and the feminization of North Africa. With theatricality, movement across cultural spaces and gender roles, and opacity, Essaydi complicates the ‘scopophilic access to Eastern women’ enabled by male Western artists such as Delacroix, Ingres, Gérôme, and others ‘who reveled in exposing the Oriental harem’ (Shaw 2003, 105). Complicating Delacroix and his audience’s experience of voyeurism and pleasure, Essaydi’s gesture dismisses the separation between art and ideology and the focus on aesthetics privileged in Western art history prior to Said’s seminal work in Orientalism (1978) and its influence on art historians such as Nochlin. It also participates in the construction of her public persona as artist/critic and associates her with prominent twentieth-century thinkers originating from former colonial peripheries,

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such as Said, Bhabha, and Khatibi, whose works represent major contributions to postcolonial and anti-imperial thought. Said defines Orientalism partly as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (1978, 3). His various analyses expose Orientalism in politics, art, literature, and ethnology as a discourse that reaffirms and enables Western cultural and patriarchal domination over the Middle East. Redeploying his modes of analysis, Essaydi’s hybrid visual language exposes the techniques and ideologies that ensure the Orientalization of Arab-Muslim subjects and cultures—by conforming their representation to Western aesthetics, sociocultural ideals, and imperial ideology—and, at the same time, de-Orientalizes them. Recycling Orientalist tropes and, therefore, in a way valorizing them, Essaydi inscribes her desire to transform her experience of the crossroads into a ‘bridge’ while creating alternative visions of ‘the Orient’ (Cheers 2012). This particular positioning engages Bhabha’s political dimension of hybridity, which he defines as a ‘mode of appropriation and of resistance’ in situations of confrontation and asymmetrical relations of power.20 Bhabha considers hybridity to be a process constructed around ‘an ambivalence’ that produces ‘excess,’ ‘slippage,’ and ‘difference’ and threatens the colonial discourse and authority (1994, 124). Essaydi’s photography and discourse are typical of postcolonial cultural productions, described by Bhabha as sites in which ‘the problem of identity returns as a persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image—missing person, invisible eye, Oriental stereotype—is confronted with its difference, its Other’ (1994, 66). In Essaydi’s images, nineteenth-century Orientalist tropes vie with other visuals, disorienting colonialism’s legacies and neo-imperial relations between north and south and between the West and the Arab-Islamic world. Claiming the position of the crossroads and simultaneously reclaiming and rejecting Orientalism, Essaydi also appropriates Khatibi’s concept of the ‘double critique.’ In Maghreb Pluriel (1983), Khatibi positions the West in opposition to Islamic culture only to dismiss this dichotomy and bring about ‘une pensée autre’ (another way of thinking), which allows him to question both cultural and geopolitical locales and to promote difference as a form of liberation (21). However, because she relies on the difference of the female bodies staged in her photographs and on practices and knowledge that women transmit through the performance of specific rituals such as henna application, Essaydi performs a femalegendered ‘double critique,’ making her photographs the site of a critique of Orientalism as well as a critique of patriarchal systems and structures

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that marginalize women in Arab-Muslim societies. In so doing, Essaydi relies on her life experience as an Arab-Muslim woman who lives and works in the West as the main source of inspiration for her art and criticism. She explicitly associates her work with the approaches of North African and Middle Eastern feminists and activists such as Mernissi, who wrote the introduction to Les Femmes du Maroc (2009), 21 and El Saadawi, who contributed an essay to Lalla Essaydi: Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (2015). 22 Thus, Essaydi interrogates Orientalism from the position of a formerly colonized subject whose ‘lived experience spans divergent locations, cultures, and ideologies.’23 She also does so from the position of a woman, ethnically and culturally situated as Arab-Muslim. While the male sociologist and author Khatibi relies on Western thinkers of difference such as Goethe and Nietzsche to engage Orientalist scholars, such as Jacques Berque (Khatibi 1983, 113–146), Essaydi inscribes herself into a significant tradition of criticism and interpretation by women originating from the Arab-Muslim cultural sphere and who resort to the auto/biographical mode to subvert patriarchal discourses. Like Mernissi, Djebar, Neshat, and other women cultural producers who share a similar background, Essaydi recycles Orientalist tropes to challenge the imperialist and neo-imperialist gaze. At the same time, she uses Orientalism as a pretext or a detour to open a window on gender and women’s issues in Arab-Islamic postcolonial societies and in transnational and diasporic spaces, actual and imaginary. Essaydi’s direct dialogue and contestation of Orientalism is thus not unique. For instance, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Delacroix and his canonical painting became ideal interlocutors for North African male and female authors and artists. One of the most well-known responses is Algerian-born Francophone author Assia Djebar’s short story collection, also entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980). Djebar’s work, in particular the short story entitled ‘Regard interdit, son coupé’ (‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’), 24 is explicitly inspired by Delacroix’s own reproduction of his 1834 painting entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur intérieur (Women of Algiers in an Interior) (1849)25 and Pablo Picasso’s series Les Femmes d’Alger (Women of Algiers) (1955). For Djebar, Delacroix’s second painting captures Algerian women’s confinement, whereas Picasso’s captures their contribution to the country’s resistance to colonialism and to the war of liberation (1955–1962). However, Djebar still sees Delacroix’s and Picasso’s representations of Algerian women as manifestations of

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the Western male gaze, and in her short story she uses this dimension of their paintings as documents to support her feminist double critique, one that rejects both the French colonial and Algerian patriarchies. If Djebar’s interpretation of Delacroix’s and Picasso’s paintings results in a feminist critique, it is because she believes in the work of art’s testimonial ability, which can transcend the ideology of its creators. She interprets the difference she sees between Delacroix’s paintings and between Delacroix’s and Picasso’s as the (unintentional) inscription of an alternative history of Algerian women. Djebar’s reading of cultural Orientalism echoes Bhabha’s reading of the colonial discourse and its ‘ambivalence,’ ‘excess,’ and ‘slippage,’ which can turn into ‘a double articulation’ and ‘representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal’ (Bhabha 1994, 122). Even though she recognizes their gender and cultural bias, especially Delacroix’s, Djebar does not view their images as mere distortions but also as inscriptions of Algerian women that call for interpretation and cultural translation. Djebar then appropriates the partly unconscious feminist aesthetics of Delacroix and Picasso and transforms them into a textual narrative that captures a dual set of oppressive gender norms. She produces a subjective interpretation, from a woman’s perspective, of historical events and cultural artifacts that point out the neglect of women’s role in the historiography of Algeria’s resistance and their removal from contemporary spheres of authority. In ‘Regard interdit, son coupé’ and in the other short stories of her collection, Delacroix’s and Picasso’s paintings are points of departure for Djebar to tell an unrecorded oral history of Algerian women’s struggles against both French colonialism and masculinist post-independence nationalism. In attempts to construct a masculinist history of the Algerian Revolution, these postcolonial narratives excluded women’s contributions from politics and nation-building. As she interprets the paintings, Djebar restores the muted voices of Algerian women and liberates the movement of their bodies within a dynamic narrative structure and style that revives their laments, songs, conversations, and sacrifice as bomb carriers during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). Djebar is not the only Algerian woman who entered into a dialogue with Delacroix’s paintings. Two years after the publication of Djebar’s short stories, Algerian-born and London-based artist Houria Niati produced another, albeit lesser known, response to Delacroix in her painting No to Torture (1982), part of her series of the same title (1982–1983). In Niati’s image, even though the female figures occupy

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the same positions as in Delacroix’s painting, they are stripped of the harem’s lush clothes, jewelry, and décor. Instead, they seem to sit in a pool of blood, their faces obscured and heads turned into masks that recall mummified bodies. The three seated women are each defaced in different ways, which evokes multiple and violent erasures: one face is obscured with double green and red crosses; the second face is framed inside a cage-like structure that resembles melting metal; and the third is blacked out under dark cross-hatching. The fourth body, which represents the servant figure in Femmes d’Alger, is standing and remains the only one in movement. However, with its muscular stature— accentuated and dehumanized with the use of different shades of blue, black, and green—the naked body no longer evokes an accomplice of the erotic gaze but instead a gender-neutral torturer. Even though the source of the palpable violence and torture of Algerian women is not clearly situated in Niati’s image, its allusion to Delacroix’s painting denounces the painter’s erasure of French colonial violence in Algeria. Comparing No To Torture to other works by Niati, Lindsey Moore sees in the painting ‘a degree of reticence about “unveiling” Algerian women’s testimonies to European audiences […], suggesting a narrative that can only imperfectly be accessed by a non-Algerian’ audience. 26 The many obstacles that obstruct the audience’s view of the women’s faces certainly suggest a form of concealment. However, one can argue that, on the contrary, like Djebar, Niati uses Delacroix’s painting as a point of departure to expose the history of violence against Algerian women to a transnational audience. Moreover, given the pattern of citation that exists within the works of North African and Arab-Muslim women, one can further argue that the multiple erasures and instruments of torture that disfigure, mutilate, and muzzle the female bodies in Niati’s painting are an inscription of a multidirectional critique against gender-based violence. The violence against women in Niati’s image can be read as a reference to colonialism and postcolonial violence in Algeria as well as in inhospitable diasporic and transnational space. The photographic series Les Femmes du Maroc, with its title, reproductions of Orientalist paintings, and inscription of spaces and rituals that shape the socialization of Moroccan women, places Essaydi’s photography in a complex and rich genealogy of North African, female-gendered, and transnational double critiques. In Les Femmes du Maroc #1, the image’s hybridity also draws attention to the domination of women as embedded in Moroccan sociocultural structures and patterns. Indeed, the veil, the harem, and calligraphy, associated with the female

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body, are also signs of visible and invisible laws and structures that limit women’s movement and control their bodies. As Essaydi and many of her critics remind us, calligraphy has traditionally been associated with men and the public sphere in opposition to women and the private and domestic spheres. Because of this, the ubiquitous script from Converging Territories and Les Femmes du Maroc can alternatively be interpreted as a sign of far-reaching patriarchal social structures in which men control both the public and private spheres and where the harem’s rules are transferred to the public space, leaving no sites of freedom for women. This idea is supported by the Moroccan scholar of linguistics and gender studies Fatima Sadiqi, who explains that, even though women have some control in the private sphere in Arab-Muslim societies, ‘men are “inserted” in the private space to satisfy their needs (food, rest, procreation) and some of men’s most important life experiences, such as circumcision and marriage, take place in the private space. Thus, Moroccan men have “official” power over both the public and private spaces which they direct and control’ (Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006, 90). Essaydi therefore depicts Moroccan women from the perspective of an artist trained in Western art history and painting techniques and also from the perspective of an Arab-Muslim woman who spent her girlhood in a harem in Morocco and life as an adult woman in Saudi Arabia. In her artist’s statement for her publication Les Femmes du Maroc (2009), she explains the gendered space division in Arab-Islamic cultures that shaped her creations depicting the harem and female bodies: Traditionally, the presence of men has defined public spaces: the streets, the meeting places, the places of work. Women, on the other hand, have been confined to private spaces, the architecture of the home. Physical thresholds define cultural ones; hidden hierarchies dictate patterns of habitation. Thus, crossing a permissible, cultural threshold into prohibited ‘space’ in the metaphorical sense can result in literal confinement in an actual space. Many Arab women today may feel the space of confinement to be a more psychological one, but its origins are, I think, embedded in architecture itself. (16)27

Despite great differences, the harem imagined by some Orientalist artists like Delacroix and the highly regulated family space, such as that in which Essaydi grew up in urban Morocco, share many characteristics, not because of Orientalism’s authenticity but because of continuities between various patriarchal systems. For this reason, when addressing a transnational audience, a significant number of women with similar

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backgrounds to Essaydi’s evoke Orientalism to increase the visibility of their works. In the photographs of the series Les Femmes du Maroc and Converging Territories, Essaydi plays on the similitude between the Orientalist harem and the harem of her experience and imagination. These photographs, set and taken either in the artist’s studio in Boston or in a family home in Morocco, have a similar background made of a beige cloth covered with calligraphy in henna. Aside from obvious reproductions like Les Femmes du Maroc #1 and La Grande Odalisque, Essaydi’s other images make it impossible for the viewer to determine whether or not a photograph is based on an Orientalist painting, thus creating fusion and confusion between European Orientalism and Moroccan and Arab-Muslim cultural patterns, especially in their evocation of the harem as a confining space for women. Essaydi’s choice to represent the space and confinement of Moroccan women through the harem can certainly be challenged by socioeconomic differences and by women’s gradual access to education, work, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 28 However, recent studies show that the use of space to enforce sex segregation and place authority still haunts gender roles in Morocco and other societies in North Africa and the Middle East. For instance, Sadiqi notes a ‘striking continuity’ in the use of space to perpetuate patriarchal societal norms in Morocco since the pre-Islamic era. 29 She explains that despite women’s gains in legal, social, and political rights, the understanding of space in relation to the body, especially the female body, still determines gender demarcations: Space as instrumentalized by patriarchy in Moroccan society has two main dimensions: physical and symbolic. Whereas physical manifestations are easily perceived, symbolic ones are less so. Physical space includes the body, dress, architecture, and language; and symbolic space includes the religious and social connotations of physical space. Space is indeed perceived as an extension of the body, itself part of the traditional patriarchal logic where the body is the starting point. (Sadiqi 2014, 89)

For Sadiqi, this understanding of space permeates through all sources of authority, including mosques, schools, and political and judicial institutions. The indeterminacy of space in Les Femmes du Maroc and Converging Territories testifies to the invisible and psychological effects of this understanding of the division of space and its relation to the female body.

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Figure 2.  Lalla Essaydi, Harem #1

The interrelation between space and gender can be grasped more easily in Harem. For this particular series, Essaydi physically and aesthetically returns to the space of her childhood and stages it metaphorically, but also literally. The photographs of Harem are set and shot in the Dar Al Basha Palace in Marrakesh, a prime example of traditional Moroccan architecture. In contrast with Les Femmes du Maroc and Converging Territories, Essaydi makes traditional Moroccan architecture and its bright colors the main décor and one of the main themes of Harem. The series explicitly interrogates metaphorical and literal thresholds, with many photographs depicting women by doors and windows and in ambiguous positions in regard to opposites such as action/immobility and inside/outside. Some photographs clearly evoke confinement. In this series, too, the artist embeds her women in the surrounding space, this time creating a dazzling continuity between their bodies and the architecture of the old palace. The models’ clothes in general replicate the patterns and colors of the mosaic and carved wood around them, creating an aesthetic continuity that clearly inscribes the women’s bodies as an extension of the architectural space and transforms them into surfaces regulated by the same patriarchal norms. The oppressive dimension of traditional Moroccan architecture for women is expressed in the composition and depth of Harem #1 [Figure 2]. The photograph shows a woman in the background, surrounded by a doorframe that, though open, accentuates the distance between her and the viewer. This distance is further emphasized by the sharp difference in size between the small room where the woman is positioned and the adjacent court, which is disproportionately magnified in the photograph.

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Figure 3.  Lalla Essaydi, Harem #16

The vertical depth highlights the height of the walls, and four pillars divide the court and evoke prison bars. The uneven proportion of the court in relation to the room accentuates the remoteness and vulnerability of the woman. The segmentation of the photograph, presented as a triptych, exacerbates the idea of her physical and mental confinement. The woman, placed at the bottom-center of the middle piece, surrounded by the impressive pillars, appears as if she were caged in. Harem #16 [Figure 3], a much closer shot of the same space and woman as in Harem #1, underscores the immobility of the female body as the viewer can see more clearly its fusion with the surroundings. The woman’s traditional dress, her shoes, the curtains, and the furniture replicate the motifs of the tiles covering part of the wall behind her. The brown tone of the calligraphy on her face, hands and feet mirrors the colors of the carved wood above the tiles. Essaydi’s uncropped print further restricts the space and metaphorically limits the body’s mobility. With the exaggerated black frame, the photographic medium accentuates the idea of women’s confinement as it puts the focus on the way in which

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photography flattens and freezes its subjects. These two photographs expose physical and symbolic boundaries that shape Moroccan women’s socialization, reinforcing Sadiqi’s observation that the historical use of space consolidates and fixes patriarchal authority (2014, 182). Essaydi plays on the common association between photography, realism, and documentary art to show that the history of women’s confinement survives in contemporary cultural patterns, laws, and attitudes that regulate women’s bodies and their participation in public matters. The Danger of Reifying Arab-Muslim Identity and Culture Like other women who redeploy Orientalist imagery to simultaneously expose its essentialism and frame gender and women’s issues in Arab-Muslim societies, Essaydi risks reiterating the misrepresentation of Arab-Muslim identity and culture. In his critique of the Les Femmes du Maroc series, art critic Benjamin Genocchio warns against the risks of attempting to deconstruct a dominant discourse while using its codes. He advances that ‘the visual elegance of [Essaydi’s] works is overwhelming,’ but further notices that ‘[t]oo often her photographs look like an exercise in voyeurism, replicating rather than revising the stereotypical imagery she is working with.’30 Genocchio writes that Les Femmes du Maroc #1 ‘still retains some of the languorous sensuality of the original Orientalist painting’ and concludes: ‘[i]nstead of changing the way in which we see Arab women, these photographs revive old-fashioned stereotypes’ (2010). Genocchio’s remarks raise the crucial question of the economy between subversion and reiteration that is inherent to any gesture of appropriation but which is elided in most art criticism and academic scholarship about Essaydi’s work, focusing on aspects that make her images a deconstruction of Orientalism and a dynamic and feminist depiction of historical and contemporary struggles of Arab-Muslim women. Essaydi’s art raises questions about whether it is possible to separate subversion from reiteration. Art critic Susannah Darrow interrogates the collaborative and collective storytelling supposedly embedded in Essaydi’s images, thus casting doubt on their potential power reversals between the European Orientalist painter and his Oriental models. Darrow analyzes the writing process and draws attention to the asymmetrical power relation between the artist and her models, advancing the idea that since the calligraphic script partly comes from the artist’s private journal, ‘the

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voice she gives to the models does not necessarily empower the women, but simply substitutes Essaydi’s voice for those of previous European males.’31 Darrow’s remarks can be extended to all Moroccan and, more broadly, Arab-Muslim women for whom Essaydi’s testimonial works are often purported to speak. Darrow’s observation further complicates the issues brought up by Genocchio because it implicitly suggests that Essaydi reworks gender and racial relations as inscribed in Orientalist paintings while normalizing other hierarchies. The most obvious one is the unequal relationship between artist and subject because the former chooses the modes and media of representation. For images like Les Femmes du Maroc #1, the substitution of Moroccan women for Algerian women signals solidarity and historical and sociocultural continuity within North African and Middle Eastern societies but also naturalizes the misrepresentation of Arab-Muslim women’s racial, ethnic, linguistic, and economic diversity. In the Moroccan context, Ibtissam Bouachrine raises the issue of representation in her book on women, Islam, and feminist critique. In a chapter on Essaydi, Bouachrine questions the artist’s ability to cross-read issues of gender and imperialism: ‘Is Essaydi, a relatively wealthy Muslim woman who has spent much of her adult life outside her native Morocco, more authentic, and therefore more deserving of respect than [male European Orientalist painters]?’32 Whether in her choice of Orientalist tropes or the Moroccan urban and highly marked upper-class architecture of the harem, Essaydi dilutes the diversity in socioeconomics and experience. Orientalism and the luxurious architecture of urban Moroccan harems reflect aspects of the artist’s life experience— her upbringing in a Moroccan upper-class household, her education in the West, and her double belonging to the East and the West—that are accessible to a very narrow minority of Moroccan women, especially those in Essaydi’s age group. The majority of Moroccan women born in the 1950s lived in rural areas where most did not have access to even a basic education and worked outside the home in the fields side by side with men. 33 As a fine critic of her own work, Essaydi’s emphasis on her privileged background in Crossing Boundaries (2015) is likely an attempt to undercut criticism addressing the lack of representation of women from different socioeconomic backgrounds. However, Essaydi’s disclosure about her socioeconomic background obviously does not free her from the accusation of bias inherited from her upper-class upbringing. This accusation is also implicitly raised by art historian and curator Murtaza Vali, who points to the limits of

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Essaydi’s critique of Arab-Muslim patriarchy and its perception in the West. Vali recognizes the beauty of a ‘stunning and affecting’34 image in Converging Territories #21—a photograph segmented into four pieces each representing a stage in the life of a woman, starting with an unveiled young girl and finishing with a fully veiled woman. However, he sees a failure in the artist’s ‘attempt to appropriate calligraphy’ (Vali 2005–2006, 244). To him, the illegibility and ubiquity of the script reduce ‘the women represented to the stereotype of veiled females oppressed by Arab and Muslim culture’ (244). The experience of psychological confinement may well be shared by Moroccan women across classes, but the inability to incorporate ethnic, linguistic, and economic diversity into how women negotiate patriarchal structures may simplify the representation of gender power relations within Morocco, and, more broadly, the Maghreb and the Middle East. For my part, I believe this issue of representation resides in how one interprets acts of ‘speaking for’ or ‘giving a voice to’ others, a problem that, as other chapters in this study show, is not only inseparable from collective narration of any kind but also potentially unsolvable. In relation to reiterating stereotypes, the ambiguity of Essaydi’s photography resides in the fact that she does not merely critique Orientalism but also testifies to her experience as an Arab-Muslim female artist producing art in the West for a Western audience. This is the case for almost all authors and artists who, like Neshat, Djebar, Niati, and Mernissi, address patriarchy in their home countries or in Islamic cultures via a dialogue with Orientalism. This is also true for many more whose works populate French and American bookshelves and are featured in exhibitions that promise the viewers an Arab and/or Muslim woman’s perspective on gender issues in Islamic societies. One has to wonder to what extent these women’s embrace of Orientalism, even as an approach, language, or tool to generate a cross-cultural critique of patriarchy, represents a real choice. Is Orientalism the most appropriate frame to discuss the above-mentioned issues or is the choice itself conditioned by neo-imperialism, the revival of Orientalist imagery, and a more positive academic criticism of Orientalist art and literature in recent years in the West? For women associated with Islamic culture producing art in the West for Western audiences, colonial and Oriental imagery—as recorded in paintings, postcards, literature, anthropology, and, more recently, in what can be described as neo-imperial and neo-Orientalist representations of otherness in Western art and media—seem to represent a

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necessary rite of passage in order to gain significant visibility. Miriam Cooke, a scholar of gender and Arab cultures, provocatively raises the issue in her article ‘Deploying the Muslimwoman’ (2008). Cooke explains that the obsession with Islam and the Muslim woman, veiled or not, as a symbol for the Muslim community worldwide has led to the formation of a discourse and a ‘singular religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity.’35 Emulating Islamicist Sherman Jackson’s use of the term Blackamerican, Cooke uses the term ‘Muslimwoman’ to call our attention to this compelling phenomenon and further explains: In Paris, Istanbul, Jakarta, Amsterdam, and Cairo, Muslim women are re-calling anxieties that go back to the colonial era, when Muslim fundamentalists, Orientalists, and Muslim and non-Muslim states were arguing about what was right or wrong for Muslim women. So extreme is the concern with Muslim women today that veiled, and even unveiled, women are no longer thought of as individuals: collectively they have become the Muslimwoman. (2008, 91)

Cooke’s remarks originate in the observation that in both the West and the Muslim world, the veil and the female body have been used since the colonial era as instruments to erase diversity among Muslim women for ideological purposes. However, Cooke historically situates the appearance of the Muslimwoman in contemporary political and cultural discourses and links it to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For Cooke, the globalized political, cultural, and economic conditions that made possible September 11, and the Islamophobia that followed it, created the Muslimwoman as a symbol and a new paradigm to consider transnational, translocal, and transmodern connections (2008, 97–98). Cooke also discusses various manifestations and/or responses to the phenomenon and notes that some Muslim women ‘are realizing that the Muslimwoman cage might provide a paradoxical platform for action’ (2008, 93). In the literary world, she distinguishes between two groups of authors: those who exploit the label of the Muslimwoman and buy into ‘the neo-Orientalist and Islamist gendered paradigm’ to feed the new wave of ‘insider stories,’ presenting themselves as the exception that proves the rule, and those who are writing ‘counter-stories to set right the record’ (2008, 94). However, as the reception of Essaydi and other artists’ work shows, and as the responses to Cooke’s article point out, the distinction between the various categories exploiting the Muslimwoman is not always neat.

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Cooke herself notes the complexity of the Muslimwoman when she admits that, in a context where ‘new networks blur the geographic, national, religious, and ideological boundaries that used to be so clear-cut,’ the Muslimwoman ‘represents simultaneously the boundary, the purity it preserves, and also a weapon in the war against the very line it serves to mark’ (2008, 97). In her response to Cooke, Margot Badran also reminds us that the ‘Muslimwoman is a composite identity constructed, not by Muslim women but by others, mainly neo-Orientalist Westerners and Islamists or proponents of political Islam.’36 Badran also historicizes the Muslimwoman prior to September  11, and in Muslim Africa and Asia, and argues that an earlier version of the contemporary concept was launched by Islamists in the 1970s and 1980s (2008, 102). Finally, Badran describes an alternative feminist response to the Muslimwoman. In the 1980s and 1990s, Muslim women advanced a radical gendered Islamic discourse in which they used the Islamic tradition of independent interpretation to articulate the principles of gender equality and social justice (2008, 103). Cooke’s and Badran’s contextualizations of the Muslimwoman provide a framework for addressing the thorny issue of the reification of culture, identity, and tradition. With its use of the Orientalist lexicon, the veil, and the female body, does Essaydi’s photography, initially catering to a Western audience, contribute to ‘new Muslim cosmopolitanism and global Islamic feminism’? Or does it add to ‘the reification of the Muslimwoman,’ which ‘lures one into the trap of allowing Islamophobes and their allies in the West to set the parameters of the debate: good Muslimwoman versus bad Muslimwoman’ (Bardan 2008, 103–104)? One way to look for answers is to consider Essaydi’s depiction of Moroccan women in relation to the criticism that her work generates. A quick reading of the essays included in Crossing Boundaries (2015) reveals that some of the limits of Essaydi’s deconstructive approach, and of most contemporary artists who redeploy Orientalist topoi and lexicon, lies in what curator-scholar Kinsey Katchka sees as the strength of Essaydi’s art: its ‘ambiguity’ and ‘deliberate subtlety,’ which invite responses that are ‘highly subjective, context specific, and likely culturally informed.’37 Katchka’s essay and the dialogue between the different essays included in Crossing Boundaries suggest that ambiguity is what makes Essaydi’s art appeal to international audiences. The artist’s statement and the five essays collected in the sumptuously illustrated edition show different, sometimes opposing, perspectives on the artist’s work. For instance,

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the first essay written by the specialist in nineteenth-century European Orientalist art Stéphane Guégan reads Essaydi’s work as an homage to European Orientalism (2015, 20–39). Guégan dismisses ‘the arrogance of post-colonial studies’ (2015, 23) and Edward Said’s critique as dogmatic and no longer operational ‘in the geographical and mental spaces of postmodern mobility’ (2015, 22). For Guégan, Essaydi borrows from Orientalist paintings and reproduces in her photographs their aesthetics as well as their approach to cultural difference, characterized by ‘distance’ and ‘respect’ (2015, 34). Yet, in the same volume, Maryam Ekhtiar recognizes Said’s insight and maintains that Essaydi’s photographs are a ‘personal protest against the tight grip of the Orientalist gaze on her native country and its collective psyche’ and that her art seeks to awaken her viewers ‘to the twisted realities of Orientalism as a projection of the Western male sexual fantasies of private impenetrable spaces reserved for women.’38 However, Guégan and Ekhtiar find common ground when the first describes Essaydi’s artistic approach as one that is ‘made up of subtle shifts and alliances’ (2015, 37) and the second evokes photographs that are ‘multilayered and complex in meaning’ (2015, 74). Yet, while Guégan finds subtlety and ambiguity ‘preferable to tension between communities’ (2015, 37), Katchka recognizes that it is also the reason why Essaydi’s ‘challenge to tradition and convention goes unrecognized by viewers’ (2015b, 87). This rather controversial and unusual statement confirms Jessica Winegar’s work on Islam and art in the West. Winegar critiques the universalist assumption that art creates bridges of understanding, especially in the context of the post-September  11 ‘War on Terror.’ Winegar’s research on exhibitions and works by Muslim artists or artists originating from Muslimmajority societies stands in contrast with the majority of the criticism and scholarship dedicated to Essaydi’s photography, which celebrates its ability to dispel stereotypes and myths about Arab-Muslim women. Winegar’s study demonstrates that responses to work like Essaydi’s, especially in the United States, are inherently political. 39 This is not surprising in a context where, as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod suggests, the presence of Muslim women in the American discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ relies on a cultural framing of complex geopolitical situations and global interconnections on the one hand, and the mobilization of female symbols within this cultural mode of explanation on the other. Like Cooke’s Muslimwoman, Abu-Lughod notes that this rhetoric has links to European colonial history where the woman question was used to justify military intervention and occupation.40

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Winegar’s and Abu-Lughod’s insights suggest that the promotion of artistic works by women such as Essaydi and Neshat, who originate from Muslim-majority societies, is bound to participate in cultural reification and misrepresentation as ‘neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives’ (Abu-Lughod 2002, 785). For instance, linking contemporary art by Muslim-Arab women and the geopolitical shifts that have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East since 2010, Guégan cites the example of She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World (which he erroneously calls She Who Tells the Story)—an exhibition curated by Kristen Gresh at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (August 27, 2013– January 12, 2014) that showcased the works of twelve women from the Middle East. Guégan writes: In light of the work of these twelve women artists from the ‘other world,’ a certain wind of liberty and dissent seemed to breathe through the exhibition, which the West had not taken enough into account. Photography confronts us, suddenly, with a reality that the medium—far from aiming for documentary neutrality—transmits through a game of appearances and references. (2015, 24)

To see the work of women like Essaydi and Neshat, artists who have been working in the West since the early 1990s, as testimonies to the recent and largely popular uprisings against dictatorships and economic inequality in North Africa and the Middle East seems disconnected from the sociopolitical and economic reality. This disconnection goes beyond Guégan’s commentary as none of the authors included in Crossing Boundaries (2015) clearly addresses the ‘reality’ of Arab women in general or Moroccan women in particular. The essays instead primarily focus on readings of the veil, the harem, the female body, and the division between private and public space in Islamic cultures in a way that is removed from pressing contemporary sociopolitical and economic issues and global interconnections that affect Muslim and non-Muslim women’s lives. In addition, the veil, the harem, and the female body are used as markers to create neat and sometimes imaginary categories such as East and West and veiled/oppressed and unveiled/liberated/ emancipated (Guégan 2015, 34–35). The ambiguity of Essaydi’s images certainly plays a role in their reception in a transnational environment. However, the play between resistance and complicity that characterizes the works of women like Essaydi, Mernissi, Djebar, and others is conditioned by the very politics

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and ideologies that facilitate their rise to prominence in the West. For instance, Amal Amireh explains that, despite Nawal El Saadawi’s protests in the early 1980s, Western media and, to a certain extent, academic writing, cast her as a victim of female excision and reduced all her work to a fight against clitoridectomy, thus focusing on what the Egyptian author viewed as marginal issues that do not convey the complexity of the problems women face in Arab and African countries.41 The focus on issues of sexuality and patriarchy, while isolating them from issues of class and neo-imperialism as well as the sensationalizing of arguably marginal issues such as clitoridectomy and the veil, testifies to a process of othering that consists in creating artificial and neat divisions between Western women and other women and between Western and Arab, Muslim, and African cultures and societies. Women like El Saadawi and Essaydi benefit from such a process and, at the same time, are subjected to it and partly silenced by it. Despite their visibility and access to speech, they are ‘inevitably caught in the net of power relations that govern interactions between first and third worlds’ (Amireh 2000, 219). Transnational Cultural Performance and Testimony The question remains: Should we dismiss Essaydi’s and other transnational artists’ and authors’ works as inherently flawed testimonial objects that are irrelevant in terms of sociopolitical significance? This raises larger questions. Despite the many studies linking postcolonial cultural production to history and testimony, are the sociopolitical testimonies of female authors originating from the global South bound to be silenced and made to feed into ready-made political and ideological discourses? Do transnational authors and artists go along with dominant discourses in their own personal economic and ideological interests while claiming to voice the history and the stories of men and women who do not have access to transnational platforms? Answering all these questions is beyond the scope of this study or of any single study. It is, however, important to note that the redeployment of Orientalism, and the lack of differentiation in loose categories such as East, West, and Arab-Muslim female identity to which it leads, may result in homogenizing, politicizing or de-politicizing, and de-historicizing the experiences of women originating from North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, when redeploying Orientalism, as Minoo Moallem reminds us in her

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response to Cooke, there will always be a risk for women who identify as Arab-Muslim of rising to the status of new ‘native informants’ who perpetuate the position of the Western gaze to depict their own culture and religion, thus reproducing ‘the axioms of imperialism either voluntarily or involuntarily.’42 Yet, as the arguments made throughout this chapter show, there is also much to learn from the work of women who, like Essaydi, implicitly or explicitly engage in a transnational work of testimony and interpretation in their cultural production, especially when situated in specific sociocultural and political contexts. For instance, in her article ‘Art, Self-censorship, and Public Discourse: Contemporary Moroccan Artists at the Crossroads’ (2009), Cynthia Becker shows that it is possible to read Essaydi’s work in relation to other contemporary Moroccan artists and recent history, especially the evolution of women’s situation since 1999. Becker advances that, in contrast to other internationally known Moroccan female artists, Essaydi ‘boldly confronts female oppression within Morocco and beyond.’43 She also contends that Essaydi ‘creates politically astute and culturally subversive works which allow for the deconstruction of stereotypes and the reworking of oppressive constructs of Moroccan womanhood’ (2009, 160). However, unlike other critics, Becker reads Essaydi’s ambiguous aesthetics as a reflection of a time of transition in which Moroccan women are demanding and gaining significant advances in the terrain of women’s rights; yet many Moroccans, male and female, oppose these changes and view them as a threat to Moroccan community and family values (2009, 163). Even though Becker mostly relies on Essaydi’s statements for her short analysis of the veil, henna, and calligraphy, her contextualized reading—albeit brief—remains one of the most original interpretations of ambiguity in Essaydi’s aesthetics. Becker’s reading is also in dialogue with major studies such as Valérie K. Orlando’s Francophone Voices of the ‘New’ Morocco in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition (2009), which examines contemporary cultural productions by Moroccan women and men and correlates significant changes in the Moroccan regime since 1999 with the emergence of new aesthetics and themes. Readings such as Becker’s may seem to undermine the edge that Essaydi and other artists gain from their ability to cross geopolitical and cultural boundaries, especially in terms of how they inform and record globalizing processes and how they make and unmake gender definitions and norms. Moreover, as Andrés Marion Zervigón

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notes, though artists like Essaydi are associated with one non-Western national context, their lives and working practices ‘challenge nationbased approaches to their art by refusing to remain confined to a single place.’44 However, Essaydi’s ‘itinerant photography’ (Zervigón 2014, 85) can be situated within practices of Moroccan and Maghrebi women who have been using translocal languages, aesthetics, narrative styles, and media. Because of the Maghreb’s cultural and linguistic polyphony and its position as a crossroads of populations and cultures, Maghrebi women’s cultural productions are the outcome of a multitude of circulations and transfers of people, goods, ideas, and symbols across geopolitical and cultural boundaries, which may or may not be transnational or global in scope. Women also mobilize these phenomena in their works to gain critical distance and generate expressions that can disrupt the patriarchy embedded in cultural practices and discourses of Maghrebi societies. Like some of the women authors and activists whose works are analyzed in other chapters of this study, such as Djebar, Essaydi’s work calls for another historiography and language in order to script— nationally, transnationally, and translocally—the life experiences of North African and Middle Eastern women. For instance, Essaydi’s use of henna, a form of adornment exclusively practiced by women, and its association with calligraphy, a form of art historically associated with men, Islam, and therefore authority, affirms the need to integrate the aesthetics of women’s everyday lives into the processes of recording history. It also calls attention to the processes of decision-making that usually take place in public spaces, excluding women, their experiences, and their desires. This localized form of hybridity in Essaydi’s work reiterates instances of Moroccan women’s history of dissidence and their adaptability. Indeed, Sadiqi advances that, for women, the use of henna is intimately linked to forms of feminine resistance and religious practices: abundant use of henna in Berber communities and Moroccan society at large, was initially an unconscious reaction to Islam’s condemnation of tattooing as a ‘Pagan’ practice. Women in a sense managed to ‘relocate’ their protective motifs in textiles, jewelry and henna, and associate them with the divine. However, Islam’s influence on the Berber women’s aesthetics was not merely one of constraint, but also one of celebration and devotion. For Berber women, creating objects of art is a tribute to Allah and thus an act of worship as Berber women often equate devotion in work with devotion to and faith in God. (2014, 181–182)

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Choosing to apply henna to the bodies and the surroundings of her models, Essaydi performs a visual narrative that re-enacts localized and gendered cultural practices. She also re-enacts gestures and languages of a popular and oral culture transmitted by women but which, according to Sadiqi, has been marginalized in official feminist discourses, even local ones in Morocco.45 Thus, Essaydi’s edgy intervention into the intersection of gender and cross-culturalism in transnational and diasporic spaces comes from the fact that a significant part of her photographic works consists of open-ended performance that values women’s bodies as well as their storytelling techniques and modes of resistance. The long preparation that each shoot requires—including months of research and long uninterrupted hours of henna/calligraphy application—can only transcend its intention to freeze some preexisting reality. Reminiscent of gestation and childbirth, the creative process and the painstaking labor required to produce the photographs make them not only feminine but also multidimensional and dynamic narratives. Moreover, depicting the body, or, in the case of Essaydi’s art, multiple bodies, reiterates the forces that shape identities and which bodies are constantly performing. At the same time, it also disrupts sociopolitical and cultural constructs of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Indeed, Judith Butler explains: The body is not a self-identical or merely factic materiality; it is a materiality that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic. By dramatic I mean only that the body is not merely matter but a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities. One is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well.46

Butler’s remarks on gender, performance, and the body have important ramifications for other identity categories. Advancing that gender is performance, Butler does not deny the reality of how gender is enforced through the body, which is made to perform and interpret performance, but she points out the instability of such a reality and the excess that each performance may bring about. In Essaydi’s process-oriented work, which relies on the body and performance, the re-enacting of the Orientalist and imperialist discourses as well as rituals embedded in Moroccan and Arab-Muslim patriarchies reiterates dominant discourses, but it also allows for new and disruptive meaning to be inscribed. In practice, Essaydi’s performative art situates her among a significant number of

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women artists originating from Arab- and/or Muslim-majority countries producing art in the West or for Western audiences. She reinvents art photography by appropriating the female body and the veil like artists such as Neshat but also Jordanian-born Tanya Habjouqa, Palestinian Rula Halawani, Libyan Arwa Abouon, Egyptian-German Susan Hefuna, and Yemeni Boushra Almutawakel. In recent decades, these female artists were able to draw renewed attention to what is traditionally broadly viewed as ‘Islamic’ art. They transformed the very tropes and figures that historically participated in reducing Arab-Muslim female identity to ideological discourse into a translocal feminism that accounts for human and cultural flows between different locales as well as the asymmetrical power relations that govern them. Essaydi and other women artists originating from Arab and Muslimmajority societies have thus been successful in gradually changing the perception of Islamic and Arab arts, showing that contemporary forms have evolved beyond the traditional forms of calligraphy, arabesque, and miniatures. Their increasing visibility in the global art markets is a testament to the fact that their works are products of their time that draw upon local and transnational realities. However, the impact of their works on their societies of origin remains largely unknown and difficult to measure. For instance, in 2011, Essaydi, at the height of her fame in the United States and Europe, returned to Morocco for several exhibitions in major Moroccan cities including Rabat, Casablanca, and Fes. Her work was also featured in the newly inaugurated Museum Mohammed VI of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2014. Her photographs are also part of King Mohammed VI’s and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi’s private collections (Brooks 2014, 24). However, this presence in museums in Morocco and other Arab countries such as Qatar and in the collections of the elites does not mean that Essaydi’s art represents an active part, in the form of a dialogue, in sociopolitical discourses that are taking place in Arab societies, especially those generated by grass-roots movements. As this chapter demonstrated, Essaydi’s works certainly reflect aspects of Arab societies and Arab women’s realities. However, only a few Moroccans know her works and engage with them. This is the result of the sociopolitical and structural realities that shape the public’s relationship to the arts, especially photography, in Morocco and other Arab societies. Essaydi explains that it took much longer for her work to be recognized at home by the fact that the ‘arts scene— maybe in the Middle East a little bit more than Morocco—is really quite young, and sometimes it’s chaotic and not organized’ (Brooks 2014, 24).

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The late Moroccan-French artist Leila Alaoui directly linked this lack of engagement with societies of origin to the political atmosphere and the fear of censorship: Moroccan society is undergoing a massive change. We’re caught between tradition and modernity, with freedom of opinion on one side and the fear of the authorities on the other […]. I’m convinced that artists’ lack of engagement is rather more to do with self-censorship than with actual censorship. There are no independent art institutions that could support artists in this and enable them to become part of the social discourse. And that, in turn, hinders the artistic process. For these reasons a lot of politically engaged artists have chosen to turn elsewhere, to look for international platforms.47

The insidious censorship that governs contemporary Morocco and other Arab societies could be a factor contributing to Essaydi’s ambiguous aesthetics that denounce patriarchy without clearly situating it in contemporary politics or without taking a clear stand against regimes and forms of government that perpetuate it. Besides the instability and fear inspired by Morocco’s long and still unpredictable transition out of authoritarianism, art consumption is further hindered by a still significantly high illiteracy rate and lack of structures that can boost the public’s sensitivity to the arts. My experience at the opening of ‘Lalla Essaydi: Revisions,’ at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on May 9, 2012 with Moroccan diplomats and members of the Moroccan community in Washington, DC, taught me that even educated Moroccans remain suspicious of contemporary art. However, the efforts led by the king and the government to reshape Morocco’s image and present the kingdom as a hub for culture and the arts and an enclave of political stability amidst Middle Eastern and North African chaos are bound to bring about a change in this domain. As art galleries and museums hosting the works of Moroccan and Moroccan-born artists continue to multiply in Morocco, one can expect a change in the public’s attitude towards photography and art in general. Notes 1 Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1. 2 The expression is used by Maureen G. Shanahan in ‘A Conversation

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with Lalla Essaydi,’ in Sarah T. Brooks (ed.), The Photography of Lalla Essaydi: Critiquing and Contextualizing Orientalism (Exhibition Catalogue, James Madison University, March–April 2014), pp. 16–41, 18. Even though Essaydi’s images are photographs and the photographic medium is important, ‘photographic tableaux’ evokes an important dimension of Essaydi’s creations which are the result of a sophisticated process including calligraphy and henna application. 3 See Introduction, note 33. 4 DeNeen Brown, ‘Lalla Essaydi: Revisions. Challenging the Fantasies of the Harem,’ The Washington Post (May 6, 2012) [accessed October 2012]. For an official biography of Lalla Essaydi, see also her website: [accessed 18 January 2013]. 5 Ray Waterhouse, ‘Lalla Essaydi: An Interview,’ Journal of Contemporary African Art, 24 (2009), pp. 144–149, 148. 6 My translation. Original French: ‘Par nature, évidemment, je suis porté vers Delacroix. Les Femmes d’Alger, il n’y a pas de plus beau tableau au monde. Comme ces femmes sont vraiment des Orientales, celle qui a une petite rose dans les cheveux … Et la négresse! C’est tellement un mouvement de négresse! Ce tableau sent la pastille du sérail; quand je suis devant ça, je m’imagine être à Alger.’ Ambroise Vollard, La vie & l’œuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Paris: Ambroise Vollard, 1919), p. 229. 7 Paul Cézanne in Susan Sidlauskas, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 82. 8 In one of its uses, the Arabic word harem (sacred, prohibited) has the dual meaning of women and the space they traditionally occupy in a Muslim household, which is restricted to family members. For more on the meaning and usage of harem, see Fatema Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 63–67. 9 Imani M. Cheers, ‘Q&A: Lalla Essaydi Challenges Muslim, Gender Stereotypes at Museum of African Art,’ PBS Newshour (May 9, 2012) [accessed September 2012]. 10 Nelida Nassar, ‘Lalla Essaydi SMFA 2012 Award Recipient Dispels Orientalists Western Prejudices,’ Berkshire Fine Arts (May 31, 2012) [accessed September 2012]. 11 Lalla Essaydi, ‘Introduction,’ in Dina Nasser-Khadivi and Ahmed Chaouki Rafif (eds), Lalla Essaydi: Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (Paris: ACR Édition Internationale, 2015), pp. 9–15, 15. 12 On the process, see Essaydi quoted in Shanahan (2014, 19). 13 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 72. 14 Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’ (1983), in Vanessa R. Schwartz

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and Jeannen M. Przyblyski (eds), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 289–298, 289. 15 Rose Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen, What Great Paintings Say, 2, trans. Karen Williams and Michael Husle (Cologne and London: Taschen, 2003), pp. 358–360. 16 Elisabeth Fraser, ‘Images of Uncertainty: Delacroix and the Art of Nineteenth-Century Expansionism (Delacroix’s Moroccan Sketchbooks),’ in Mary D. Sheriff (ed.), Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 123–151, 135. 17 See Stéphane Guégan, ‘The Space for Self,’ in Dina Nasser-Khadivi and Ahmed-Chaouki Rafif (eds), Lalla Essaydi: Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (Paris: ACR Edition Internationale, 2015), pp. 20–39, 29. 18 Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), p. 104. 19 Michelle Facos, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 161. 20 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 172. 21 Fatema Mernissi, ‘Lalla Essaydi: A Spinner of Scenarios More Dangerous than Scheherazade,’ in Lalla Essaydi, Les Femmes du Maroc (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2009), pp. 9–15. 22 Lalla Essaydi identifies Said, Linda Nochlin, Mernissi, and El Saadawi as her major influences (see Cheers 2012). 23 Kinsey Katchka, ‘Biography,’ in Dina Nasser-Khadivi and Ahmed-Chaouki Rafif (eds), Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (Paris: ACR Edition Internationale, 2015), pp. 16–19, 18. 24 ‘Regard interdit, son coupé,’ in Assia Djebar, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: Des femmes, 1980), pp. 237–263. 25 In 1849, fifteen years after Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1834), Delacroix painted Femmes d’Alger dans leur intérieur, a slightly different version where the light is more artificial and the women are farther away from the viewer. Between December 1954 and February 1955, Pablo Picasso painted a series of fifteen variations on Delacroix’s paintings, designated as version A through O. In her collections of short stories Djebar responds to the works of Delacroix and Picasso while inserting her own voice. In Peindre l’Orient (1996), Rachid Boudjedra also analyzes Delacroix’s painting and criticizes it for ignoring the context. More recently, Tahar Ben Jelloun pays tribute to Delacroix’s trip in North Africa and his works relating to Morocco in his Lettre à Delacroix (2010). 26 Lindsey Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 76.

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27 Lalla Essaydi, ‘Artist Statement,’ in Fatema Mernissi, Les Femmes du Maroc (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2009), pp. 16–18, 16. 28 Women in rural Morocco and in urban areas where the lower classes live have always worked outside the home and therefore circulated in the public space. Women’s access to education and their entrance into the workforce in recent decades have also represented a significant challenge to traditional divisions between public and private and domestic spaces across classes. 29 Fatima Sadiqi, Moroccan Feminist Discourses (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 88. 30 Benjamin Genocchio, ‘Reviving the Exotic to Critique Exoticism,’ The New York Times (March 5, 2010) [accessed September 2012]. 31 Susannah Darrow, ‘Lalla Essaydi Reimagines the Islamic Female Identity at Jackson,’ Burnaway (December 6, 2012) [accessed September 2012]. 32 Ibtissam Bouachrine, Women and Islam: Myths, Apologies, and the Limits of Feminist Critique (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), p. 42. 33 For more on women’s work outside the household, see Fatima Hajjarabi, Les Souks féminins du Rif central: anthropologie de l’échange féminin, unpublished thesis, University Paris VII, 1987; Alison Baker, Voices of Resistance: Oral Histories of Moroccan Women (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 34 Murtaza Vali, ‘Uncovering the Arab World: Photography and Self-Representation’ [review of the exhibition Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World and exhibition catalogue Nazar: Photographs From the Arab World by Wim Melis], Arab Studies Journal, 13–14 (2005–2006), pp. 241–246, 244. 35 Cooke (2008, p. 91). 36 Margot Bardan, ‘Between Muslim Women and the Muslimwoman,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 101–106, 101. 37 Kinsey Katchka, ‘A Delicate Balance,’ in Dina Nasser-Khadivi and Ahmed-Chaouki Rafif (eds), Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (Paris: ACR Edition, 2015), pp. 85–107, 106. 38 Maryam Ekhtiar, ‘Unspoken Words: The Narrative Photographs of Lalla Essaydi,’ in Dina Nasser-Khadivi and Ahmed-Chaouki Rafif (eds), Crossing Boundaries, Bridging Cultures (Paris: ACR Edition, 2015), pp. 64–75, 73. 39 See Jessica Winegar, ‘The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror,’ Anthropological Quarterly, 81.3 (Summer 2008), pp. 65–681. 40 Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,’ American Anthropologist, 104.3 (2002), pp. 783–790, 784. For an analysis of the use of Islam and women in the French colonial discourse in Algeria, see Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Le regard colonial: Islam, genre et identités dans la fabrication

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de l’Algérie française, 1830–1962,’ Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 25.1 (2006), pp. 25–40. 41 Amal Amireh, ‘Framing Nawal El Saadawi: Arab Feminism in a Transnational World,’ Signs, 26.1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 215–249, 221. 42 Minoo Moallem, ‘Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24.1 (Spring 2008), pp. 106–110, 109–110. 43 Cynthia Becker, ‘Art, Self-Censorship, and Public Discourse: Contemporary Moroccan Artists at the Crossroads,’ Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 3 (2009), pp. 143–66, 160. 44 Andrés Marion Zervigón, ‘Toward an Itinerant History of Photography: The Case of Lalla Essaydi,’ in Tanya Sheehan (ed.), Photography, History, Difference (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014), pp. 84–103, 85. 45 On this aspect, Sadiqi writes: ‘I realized how much history Moroccan women had and how little this history was reflected in the Moroccan feminist discourses. I thought that reflections of this ancient history were part and parcel of every Moroccan environment: they spoke loudly in the various symbols immortalized in Berber women’s carpet-weaving, textile-making, jewelry-designing, henna decorations, and so on, and yet these voices were muted in the feminist discourses’ (2014, 2). 46 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal, 40.4 (1988), pp. 519–531, 521. 47 Melanie Christina Mohr, ‘Interview with Leila Alaoui: Morocco’s Art Scene: A Coin with Two Faces,’ trans. Ruth Martin, Qintara.de (October 2015) [accessed December 2015].

chapter five

Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery Remembering, Reframing, Disfiguring, and Embellishing the Past Remembering, Reframing, Disfiguring, and Embellishing the Past

On (The Impossibility of) Autobiography La cicatrice (The Scar) [Figure 4], by French-Moroccan visual artist Carolle Bénitah, is an image based on a black-and-white photograph taken in Morocco in 1973 or 1974. It shows the artist as a young girl standing next to her older sister and their mother’s cousin. The photograph appears to have been damaged, maybe as a result of being carried around in a wallet. A bright red stitch-like needlepoint line, superimposed onto a light gray horizontal crack, divides the image into two parts and partially conceals the two girls’ faces. The embroidered line, added by Bénitah some forty years after the photograph was taken, emerges as an attempt to repair the crack and underlines the sentimental value of the family photograph. At the same time, the red thread highlights what seems to be an accidental mark on a biographical archive, thus throwing into relief the ambiguity of the very notion of the familial in family photography. It also draws attention to the ambiguity of the autobiographical enterprise that Bénitah’s gesture implies. The photo-embroidery is a kind of reversed mirror of the anonymity of the original photograph. Indeed, during our conversation in March 2015, after expressing her attachment to the photograph, Bénitah confessed that it was taken by an anonymous street photographer and that she does not remember the circumstances or the date of its shooting, nor the origin of the physical damage that appealed to her. La cicatrice is part of Photos Souvenirs (2009–2015), a series of mixed-media images that combines family photographs and needlework.

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Figure 4.  Carolle Bénitah, La cicatrice

The series’ hybridity associates Bénitah’s images with those by other women artists originating from Morocco who have risen to fame in the last two decades, using photography in juxtaposition with other media to produce hesitant, multilayered, fragmented, and unfinished life narratives. The content and the aesthetics of her images, as for those produced by Leila Alaoui, Yto Barrada, and Lalla Essaydi, for instance, mobilize and reflect the artist’s hyphenated identity—that of a woman born in Morocco and living elsewhere or in-between. Bénitah, Alaoui, Barrada, and Essaydi all use their experiences in various national and cultural spaces and photography to insert a gender perspective into the exploration of cross-culturalism, migration, and displacement. Their visual languages address a multitude of audiences, at home and abroad, from the position of women, minority members, and individuals affiliated with various national, religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Because of

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this, the images they produce not only reflect the fractured subjectivities of the postcolonial and the postmodern eras, they also exemplify ‘glocal’ cultural productions reflecting the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between the local, national, and global locales and positions. Born in 1965 in Casablanca to a Sephardic Jewish family, in 1982 Bénitah moved to France, where she graduated from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She then worked as a fashion designer till 2001. After a moment of crisis in her personal life, Bénitah turned to photography to document the passing of time, absence, and loss.1 After intensive training in photography, Bénitah produced several series consisting of mainly photo diaries. 2 In 2009, she started working on Photo Souvenirs, a series using needlework on family photographs. Based on photographs that were not shot by the artist, Photos Souvenirs marks an evolution in Bénitah’s artistic and documentary practices. It also relates and works through specific life experiences. Indeed, Photos Souvenirs was triggered by the momentary absence of the artist’s son, an event she deems ordinary but which caused her to experience sharp feelings of pain and abandonment. The discrepancy between the banality of the event and the artist’s strong emotional response pushed her to look into her past, via family photographs, as a way of understanding ‘the origin of [her] pain’ (personal conversation, 2015). In La cicatrice, as in other works from Photos Souvenirs, the issues of identity and memory in relation to the experience of migration and displacement are comprehended within the framework of an overarching interrogation concerning the very possibility of producing an autobiography as defined by German philologist Georg Misch: ‘the description (graphia) of an individual human life (bios) by the individual himself (auto-).’3 Photos Souvenirs is indeed the artist’s visual life narrative based on family photographs in which she appears alone or with relatives, friends, or classmates. She scans the photographs, reframes the copies, then starts a subjective work of interpretation. Bénitah uses embroidery and beading, skills she acquired during her ten-year training and career as a fashion designer in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, to highlight features that appeal to her or conceal others, to embellish or disfigure the original images; in short, to retrospectively turn family portraits into self-portraits of sorts. She further arranged her photo-embroideries into a seemingly chronological sequence with three different parts entitled L’enfance marocaine (Moroccan Childhood), L’adolescence, and L’âge adulte (Adulthood). Though not entirely in prose, Photos Souvenirs appropriates characteristics of conventional autobiography and is

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presented as a retrospective narrative ‘by a real person,’ focusing on an ‘individual life’ (Lejeune 1989, 4). At the same time, Bénitah undercuts the promise for an authoritative narrative voice not only by filling the sections representing stages of her individual life with embroidered photographs instead of a text, but also by undermining the authority of the narrative ‘I’ in the statement that accompanies exhibitions of her series: I started to be interested in my family pictures when I was leafing through the album of my childhood and found myself overwhelmed by an emotion whose origin I could not identify. These photographs had been taken forty years earlier and I could not even remember the moments in which they were shot, nor what preceded or followed those moments. But the photos reawakened an anguish of something both familiar and totally unknown, the kind of uncanny that Freud spoke about. Those moments, fixed on paper, represented me, spoke about me and my family, said things about my identity, my place in the world, my family history and its secrets, the fears that constructed me and everything that constitutes me today.4

Putting the focus on the at least partial anonymity of the archives she uses as the basis of her introspection, Bénitah’s artistic practice questions authorial agency and the very possibility for self-knowledge required by conventional autobiography as defined by Philippe Lejeune. Interrupting the illusion of familiarity and dramatizing the uncanny familiarity/anonymity of family photographs, Bénitah exhibits her discomfort to embody the authoritative producer of a traditional autobiography. At the same time, images like La cicatrice exhibit an urgent desire for the autobiographical. In addition to being based on a biographical fragment, La cicatrice magnifies the contradictory sentiment of simultaneous distance and proximity that is inherent to autobiographical narration of any kind. While the physical crack evokes distance and even the deterioration of memory, the embroidered line, conveying a fresh wound as well as a sense of immediacy and urgency, evokes that which cannot be forgotten. Bénitah further expresses her desire for autobiography in the way she organizes Photos Souvenirs, which explicitly recalls traditional autobiographies, ‘written life stories organized as narratives whose beginnings, middles and ends are held together through the telling of an ordered sequence of events.’5 When asked about the autobiographical dimension of her work, in a statement that recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opening page of The Confessions, the first

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secular autobiography in French, Bénitah further states: ‘I only work on the real. My life is exhibited as it is. Nothing is staged.’6 Thus, the structure of Bénitah’s visual narrative and the written narrative that accompanies it both offer a kind of ‘contract of identity’ that is crucial to Lejeune’s definition of autobiography (Lejeune 1989, 19). However, by defining the anonymous and the not-fully-known as the ‘real’ upon which the autobiographical subject is constructed, Bénitah revises both traditional autobiography and its contract. Photos Souvenirs, a narrative that, except for the titles and the rare inscriptions, is mostly visual, further exhibits its formal incompatibilities with linear autobiographies in its visible juxtaposition of different media, materials, and temporalities. Because of this, Photos Souvenirs seems to rather fit within what Annette Kuhn describes as ‘revisionist autobiography,’ a practice that deconstructs identity and its narration in traditional autobiographies ‘through other practices—most notably through stories of different lives, told differently’ ([1995] 2002, 147, 149). As the family photograph is her point of departure and main supporting material, Bénitah’s visual narrative is also an auto/biography, a term used here to indicate an autobiographical narrative that highlights the processes of interaction and negotiation between the individual and public/collective memories that constitute it. The juxtaposition of photography and embroidery participates in the construction of the non-unitary subject of auto/biography in Photo Souvenirs. For its revisionist dimension and for its preservation of the ‘real,’ the series relies on the technology of the photograph and its association with the intractable reality of a referent, something that has haunted influential reflections on photography such as those by André Bazin and Roland Barthes. For instance, in his foundational essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945), Bazin explains that photography fascinates the viewer because, on the one hand, it consists of an automatic reproduction that does not require human intervention, and, on the other, because it forces us to ‘accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.’ 7 For Barthes, a photograph is not a ‘copy’ of reality, but ‘an emanation of past reality.’8 Like Bazin, Barthes bases his remarks on the intractable nature of the referent, ‘the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph’ (1981, 78). Thus, as for Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), for Bénitah the family photograph triggers an intimate meditation

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as well as a work of grieving and mourning loss. The auto/biographical mode, the interpretation of the family photograph and photography’s uncanny realism, is the locus of important truths about the fabric of the self and one’s place in the world. At the same time, Bénitah’s hybrid images, also bearing witness to an untying process, emphasize the alienating distance inherent to the absence of context in still photographs. In the case of the family photograph, this distance yields a space for interrogation and emancipation from the reality and the politics of the family they perpetuate. Bénitah inscribes such distance into the auto/ biographical process. Indeed, she explains: ‘I never work on original photographs. I transpose their reality on a different paper. Sometimes I reframe a detail that appeals to me and I chose my format. Then I start the work of interpretation.’9 The simultaneous proximity and distance provided by the photograph and the technology behind it allows Bénitah to liberate herself from the narrative conventions of traditional autobiography. She also literally and symbolically liberates herself, at least momentarily, from the aura of the family photograph through the acts of copying the original prints and then editing and piercing them. The importance the artist gives to subjective interpretation and her use of the juxtaposition of family photography and embroidery evokes other narratives of the self mediated by photography. Photos Souvenirs’s structure and use of the image borrows from ‘individual mythologies,’ an expression used in 1972 by art curator Harald Szeemann to describe hybrid narratives of artists such as Jean Le Gac and Christian Boltanski, which are modeled after ‘mythologies’ of public personas.10 In her study of the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century autobiographical narratives, Magali Nachtergael explains that though ‘individual mythologies’ are connected to autobiography, their authors use photography and hybridity to conform the autobiographical narrative to the individual’s perception of the self and identity (2012, 12). For Nachtergael, this mythologizing of the self, a practice and an aesthetics that emerged in the 1970s, is linked to the individual’s grappling with what Jean-François Lyotard describes as the postmodern, a condition characterized by ‘the fragmentation of the subject and the subjective re-composing of history’ (2012, 11). Bénitah’s juxtaposition of family photographs and needlework, similarly to ‘individual mythologies’ of French artists in the 1970s, individualizes and internalizes identity and history. The fusion of the two media also seems to indicate that fragmentation is, at least in part, the result of the amalgamation of public and private history and memory

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characteristic of the postmodern moment. Indeed, as Patricia Holland explains, ‘[f]amily photographs are shaped by the public conventions of the image and rely on a public technology which is widely available […] the personal histories they record belong to narratives on a wider scale, those public narratives of community, religion, ethnicity and nation which make private identity possible.’11 Blurring the boundaries between personal, cultural, and historical narratives, Bénitah’s images dramatize the understanding of photography, particularly family photography, as a form of documentation with archival and affective qualities that reach beyond the individual and the familial group. Because of this, in Bénitah’s work, family photographs constitute objects that allow for the revision of the source materials of memory. As is the case in Kuhn’s ‘memory texts,’ in Bénitah’s images ‘[m] emory work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and ‘personal’ memory’ (Kuhn [1995] 2002, 5). This is especially true for L’enfance marocaine, a section that is based on photographs in which the artist is always accompanied by family and community members and which has a title that further ties it to a national identity and memory. Loss, Mourning, and Memorialization The double rift in La cicatrice asserts an undetermined, fragmented subjectivity. The ‘I’ of self-representation is in the process of making, shaped by the interconnectedness between personal, familial, communal, and national memories and identities. The image presents itself as a reading cue for Photo Souvenirs, especially L’enfance marocaine, the section on which the present study focuses particularly. It visually and affectively translates Holland’s reflections on family photographs: ‘Our memory is never fully “ours,” nor are the pictures ever unmediated representations of our past. Looking at them we both construct a fantastic past and set out on a detective trail to find other versions of a “real” one’ (1991, 14). Because the photographed past self is mediated by the intersections of the personal, the individual, the public, and the collective, looking at and interpreting family photographs can amount to an act of memorialization and testimony. For La cicatrice, the collective and public dimensions are exacerbated by the circumstances in which the original photograph came into being and are symbolized

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in the composition of the photo-embroidery by the validation of the accidental crack. Fragmentation and indeterminacy are inscribed in Photos Souvenirs’s overall structure. The three parts of the series are marked by visual and thematic continuities as well as discontinuities. L’enfance marocaine, L’adolescence, and L’âge adulte form a coherent whole, in the apparent linearity of the story they tell as well as in the use of family photographs, embroidery, and an aesthetics of hybridity. However, the three parts also clash in the use of different dominant colors—red for L’enfance marocaine, black for L’adolescence, and golden for L’âge adulte. L’enfance marocaine is further at odds with the two other sections, which refer to adolescence and adulthood and therefore to stages in the artist’s life rather than to national spaces. This difference emerges as the inscription of temporal and spatial distance between childhood and adulthood, and between the Morocco of Bénitah’s childhood and her adulthood in France. This irregularity is reproduced in the ambivalence and, sometimes, violence of images such as La cicatrice, and the simplicity of the artist’s laconic biographical note that usually accompanies her exhibitions: ‘Carolle Bénitah. Born in Casablanca, Morocco. She graduated from l’Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Paris, France. She lives and works in Marseille, France.’12 The present, yet overly simplified, demarcation of national and cultural spaces in the artist’s biography emerges as a testimony to the processes of geographical and cultural displacement and also, perhaps, to the difficulty of representing them. The biography’s basic style contrasts with the affecting images found in L’enfance marocaine. This discontinuity is reiterated in the contrast between the photo-embroideries and the original photographs’ banal iconography, containing universal features of family representation that have existed since the invention of the Kodak camera. These contrasts create a hybrid language which simultaneously offers visions of banal family scenes, in interior spaces or framed in such a way that nothing interferes with the focus on the family group, and vivid mental landscapes. Hybridity, beauty, and visual uneasiness, as well as simultaneous preservation and revision, signal complex processes that make the images sites of memory and memorialization that reach beyond the individual and yield a variety of readings and interpretative routes. In her analysis of the family institution and photography in the postmodern world, Marianne Hirsch explains that in the face of the ‘traumatic shifts that have shaped postmodern mentalities’ and which

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are mediated by the idea of the ‘family,’ ‘[p]hotography offers a prism through which to study the postmodern space of cultural memory composed of leftovers, debris, single items that are left to be collected and assembled in many ways, to tell a variety of stories, from a variety of often competing perspectives.’13 The hybridity in Bénitah’s Photos Souvenirs allows for its interpretation, in part, as a performance of Morocco’s traumatic colonial and postcolonial histories, particularly the history of its Jewish community. The juxtaposition of photography and embroidery attends to the way in which these histories have been mediated by familial and personal memories, at the level of the Jewish community, the Moroccan national community, and the Moroccan diaspora. L’enfance marocaine imposes Morocco as a fundamental space in the understanding of the artist’s identity and place in the world. Yet the photographs in the first section of Photos Souvenirs lack visuals specific to the country. The gap between Morocco’s presence in the title and its absence in the photographs’ content bears witness to the dramatic transformation of the Moroccan Jewish community in the twentieth century, including its cultural Westernization, its shrinking, and the emigration of a large number of its members to Israel, France, and other countries.14 As André Levy explains, the decline in size of the Moroccan Jewish community since the 1950s has progressively led to its concentration in Casablanca and its disengagement from the surrounding Muslim-majority society (2003, 370–371). The images in L’enfance marocaine, a section that characterizes the childhood as Moroccan while exposing the absence of the Moroccan culture surrounding the family group, eloquently express this dramatic evolution of Moroccan Jewish life and culture. The conceptualization of Photos Souvenirs and the aporetic inscription of national space in L’enfance marocaine memorialize, at the familial and individual levels, the ruptures and losses engendered by a history that saw the number of Moroccan Jews shrink from approximately two hundred and fifty thousand in the 1940s to less than five thousand today (Levy 2003, 370). Hybridity in images such as La cicatrice thus signal the intersection of personal, familial, and communal memories in the construction of the subject and auto/biographical narratives, which are bound to be structured by fragmentation and discontinuity. Anonymity in La cicatrice testifies to the loss of the world of the artist’s childhood, a loss that is exacerbated by the more permanent nature that has historically characterized the emigration of Moroccan Jews. It also testifies to

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aspects that make Jewish emigration a painful loss to the Moroccan national community and the embodiment of such loss by its members in Morocco and in the diaspora. Indeed, while Morocco remains unique among Arab and Muslim-majority countries due to its still comparatively significant indigenous Jewish population, the dramatic reduction of its size has had an impact on the nature and the scope of its cultural and social presence. Bénitah’s images, evoking typical Western family photographs and contrasting with precolonial and colonial images of Moroccan Jews in traditional Moroccan clothes,15 bear witness to this history. Bénitah’s exploration of her Moroccan past is part of recent examinations of the country’s Jewish history and culture by other Moroccan scholars and artists, such as the American-Moroccan anthropologist Aomar Boum and French-Moroccan historian and film director Kamal Hachkar, who sometimes feel ‘orphaned’ by the quasidisappearance of Moroccan Jewish culture and population, and with it the disappearance of a certain diversity within Moroccan society and culture.16 The language and aesthetics of L’enfance marocaine also formally testify to these losses and the inability to articulate them coherently in a linear, retrospective narrative that exhibits a unitary subject. The hybridity in Photos Souvenirs tells us that a narrative of the self, constituted by loss and displacement, can only be articulated at the margins of photography and autobiography. Because of this, the series’ structure and aesthetics recall ‘photobiography,’ a concept put forward by Gilles Mora in a 1983 manifesto to describe the possibility for new aesthetic forms of autobiography brought about by photography.17 Mora’s neologism stems from his belief that ‘the photographic device is inherently autobiographical’ (2004, 109),18 which, like Bazin and Barthes, he derives from the idea of a fundamental connection between the image and the real. Yet Mora believes that photography can only be truly autobiographical when accompanied by text.19 It is the combination of photography and text that Mora calls ‘photobiography.’ Similarly, Bénitah’s mixed-media pieces, combining photography, embroidery, and text—titles, inscriptions, and her statements—suggest that both photography and traditional autobiography in prose fall short when it comes to expressing a fragmented self shaped by a history of geographical and cultural displacement. Like a successful ‘photobiography’ as imagined by Mora, Bénitah’s photo-embroidery rests on the photographic image’s ‘biographical power’ (Mora 2004a, 109). At the same time, the artist appropriates the operator’s agency and performs

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a true introspection of the self through ‘an active and directed work of memory’ (Kuhn [1995] 2002, 3). The hybrid language that results from the juxtaposition of photography and embroidery functions as a reminder of how collective and personal memories are shaped by one another and only exist in relation to one another. The visual uneasiness produced by the sometimes incongruous association of the two media signals the affective uneasiness provoked by the realization of the inaccessibility of a coherent narrative produced by and producing a unitary subject. The formal and thematic hybridity in Bénitah’s images thus problematizes the connection between the personal and the collective and the shifting relations between the two that are characteristic of postmodern era and condition. This aspect also connects L’enfance marocaine to postcolonial cultural productions, which, for some scholars, memorialize histories of migration, cultural and geographical displacement, war, genocide, and racial and social oppression. For instance, reading postcolonial literary texts, Sam Durrant advances that ‘if we conceive of writing as a more or less voluntary or deliberate activity, then postcolonial narrative presents itself as a mode of mourning, as a way of consciously working through history’ (2004, 11). The iconography of Bénitah’s work certainly alludes to family secrets and personal traumas. However, the artist’s transformation of familial relics into an auto/ biographical narrative, conflating personal and collective histories and mobilizing specific local and national spaces and histories, turns her images into works of memory that are partly intended to come to terms with traumatic historical events. Bénitah’s transformation of family photographs into works of art intended for meditation and reflection in public spaces also make her photo-embroideries exemplary sites and acts that involve their viewers in the process of working through the history for which they are the locus. Bénitah’s mixed-media pieces represent narratives of the self that involve material and practices that make them plural auto/biographical narratives, testimonial narratives, and collective sites of mourning. La cicatrice, with its open wound, signals impossible mourning. At the same time, the sewing and stitching in the image evokes a reparative process that connects Bénitah’s photo-embroideries to the postcolonial cultural productions described by Mireille Rosello in her study of ‘reparative mourning.’ Rosello explains that a reparative narrative is one that bears witness to ‘what is irretrievably lost’ without being a mere ‘manifestation of trauma’ (2010, 3–4). In her comments too, Bénitah alludes

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to a reparative process, sometimes in literal terms. For instance, when describing her first encounter with the original photograph on which La cicatrice is based, Bénitah explains: ‘When I found the photograph, it was ripped. I don’t know why and, at the same time, I thought to myself that I would mend it with the thread and the needle […]. It is a scar and, at the same time, it forms a sort of spinal column.’20 Thus, though reparative, Bénitah’s auto/biography differs from narratives of the past described by Rosello (2010, 4), which are produced ‘from a position that has worked through the trauma.’ The images of Photos Souvenirs suggest that trauma is constitutive of postmodern and postcolonial subjects, who are bound to conflate practices, states, and stages and to express them through a conflation of media, genre, and discourse. Yet Bénitah’s images are especially poignant in the aspects that make them attempts to conform to specific stages, states, and genres. Indeed, Bénitah mimics autobiography. She literally and naïvely— through a lack of both sophistication and judgment—repairs broken things in the images of her childhood. Her transformation of family photographs into a seemingly linear autobiographical narrative shows a yearning for continuity and a desire to disguise the discontinuity inherent in snapshots. In contrast with her former series of photodiaries, Photos Souvenirs is haunted by the desire for a ‘complete and coherent expression’ of one’s entire destiny, which, according to Georges Gusdorf, distinguishes conventional autobiography from journals (1980, 35). In the series, similar to Gusdorf’s ideal autobiographer, Bénitah sets out ‘to reassemble the scattered elements of [her] individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch’ (Gusdorf 1980, 35). She further reiterates her longing for continuity within each image of L’enfance marocaine through her inclination to mend broken links. For instance, in Les cafards, she embroiders two children’s hands together into a visible red thread ball to recreate what she refers to as a ‘strong fraternal link.’21 The same motif is reproduced in La chute, an image in which the red thread keeps a little girl attached to her mother’s hand despite an enigmatic fall that transforms the child into both a corpse and a ghost. The idea of links that survive familial, historical, geographical, and cultural ruptures is present in other works in which threads encircle and connect family or community members together such as in La réunion, Le déguisement [Figure 7, below], and Pomblondin. Bénitah’s images, like La cicatrice for instance, are also poignant in their unsuccessful attempts to conceal the impossibility of mourning and the impossibility of producing autobiography in the traditional sense of

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the genre. It is precisely through its mimicking of autobiography and self-portraiture that Photos Souvenirs testifies to these failures. As Hirsch explains, ‘[a]utobiography and self-portraiture share with photography a presumed referential basis and proximate relationship to truth which disguises their mediated and constructed qualities.’ However, the self’s wholeness and the plenitude provided by the photographic medium and the autobiographical act can only be momentary or illusionary. Indeed, Hirsch adds that ‘photography and autobiography share, as well, a fragmentary structure and an incompleteness that can be only partially concealed by narrative and conventional connections’ (1997, 83–84). Because it conceals and exhibits at the same time, the hybridity in Bénitah’s narrative indicates that the subject of Photos Souvenirs is constructed not outside but, in auto/biographical photo-embroidery, ‘filtered through multiple cultural, ideological, and historical screens’ (Hirsch 1997, 84). The ambiguity of Bénitah’s images allows them to be multifaceted and to carry various functions. They simultaneously work through personal and public histories and memories. They represent reparative sites and practices while also expressing a fragmented subjectivity and a kind of mourning without closure. Because of this, Bénitah’s photoembroidery bears witness to the monumentality of twentieth-century history, including colonialism, the Holocaust, and postcolonialism, events and eras that have radically redefined the community into which the artist was born. Like the texts analyzed by Durrant, Bénitah’s art thus emerges as a ‘proportionate response to history, a way of bearing witness to losses that exceed the proportions of the individual subject’ (Durrant 2004, 11). However, even though Bénitah’s images resist the idea of offering closure and healing, they are not merely acting out of trauma. Juxtaposition and hybridity are also languages that positively express exile and exilic identity. Indeed, referring to the works of artists in political exile, Yana Meerzon isolates Homi K. Bhabha’s hybridity from the colonial context and writes that ‘the exilic artist undergoes a transformation of the clash of cultures to hybridity, a condition that becomes a cultural antonym to the state that originated it.’22 This remark not only applies to all forms of exile, it also indicates that hybridity brought about by the experience of exile can be an inaugural language. In Photos Souvenirs, hybridity functions as such a language, participating in the elaboration of an auto/biographical narrative that is simultaneously a memorial, a site of mourning, and the archive of loss and impossible mourning. Hybridity is also a language that allows

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Bénitah to situate her narrative historically and culturally while also transforming family photographs into gendered sites of contestation and self-invention. Red Hoods and Wolves in the Family Picture: A Feminist Critique In Chez le photographe (At the Photographer’s) (2009) [Figure 5], Bénitah disfigures the portrait of a happy family and transforms it into a scene of extreme violence. The viewer can still see the original photograph showing Bénitah as a child surrounded by her siblings, posing as a miniature united and smiling family. Her brother is standing alone behind the three girls, surrounding them with his arms and posing as a father figure and a protector. As is the case in many of the images of L’enfance marocaine, Bénitah uses a bright red thread to decorate and revive the old black-and-white photograph. Embroidery also inserts a feminist script that immediately highlights and clashes with the photograph’s patriarchal content. The red thread covers the boy’s face almost entirely, leaving out just his mouth and chin, which makes them disproportionately imposing. The artist uses the same thread to sew the little girls’ mouths, turning the brother into an anonymous figure of patriarchy endowed with speech, a privilege that rests on the silence forced upon the female members of the family. The boy’s protective hands, placed on his sisters’ shoulders in the original photograph, become a symbol of the strong hold of restrictive gender norms that continue to haunt the family members beyond childhood. The blood-like thread in Chez le photographe unleashes the violence that family photography is supposed to neutralize and domesticate. The image’s hybrid language undoes the fixity and naturalization of violent gender norms. By contrast to the original photograph, the artist’s photoembroidery exhumes the hierarchical gender relations obscured by codified symbols of the happy family portrait. Thus, the superimposition of photography and embroidery not only exposes gender roles in 1960s and 1970s Morocco, it also makes incongruous the complicity existent between photography and the patriarchal family. In the transformed image, Bénitah eerily embodies the expectations projected on her as a child. She is pretty, silent, and accepting of her role within the family hierarchy, thus contributing to the homogeneity and unity of a perfect family portrait. She also masters embroidery, a woman’s activity deeply linked to the milieu in which she grew up and where such a skill was

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Figure 5.  Carolle Bénitah, Chez le photographe

viewed as a sign of good education and perfect womanhood. 23 At the same time, the girls’ stitched and seemingly bloody mouths make the image unbearably violent. In her images, Bénitah reproduces the temporal distance she experiences as an adult looking at childhood photographs. She also reproduces a physical and affective distance as an individual inflected by geographical and cultural difference inherent to the experience of migration and displacement. Such a position allows the artist to distance herself emotionally from the family group and culture and to gain an interpretative edge that interrupts the benign viewing ensured by the ritualization of family photography. In doing so, Bénitah interrupts the use of the photographic medium to validate and perpetuate patriarchal projections of the family, gender, and sexuality. She literally and symbolically pierces some of the ‘particular social and cultural screens’ that inflect the familial gaze with ‘racial, ethnic, class, and sexual difference’ (Hirsch 1997, 117). As a result, she is able to unveil violent and gendered processes of inclusion and exclusion that preside over the framing and viewing of family photographs. As she activates the plurality of gazes that participate in the construction of each (family) photograph, Bénitah allows for multiple readings to

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emerge. In Chez le photographe, Bénitah gives a glimpse of what it means to be a little girl and a little boy within her family mythology and shows that family and gender are inseparable constructs. In so doing, she demonstrates that family photography can be used to identify and reframe normative narratives and familial and social relations. Bénitah’s reading of her family photographs also suggests that individual and personal memories and narratives can be exemplary because they are constructed by dynamics that are shared by uncountable others. Indeed, as Kuhn indicates, ‘[t]here is little that is really personal or private about either family photographs or the memories they evoke: they can mean only culturally’ ([1995] 2002, 14). Despite its domesticity and unprofessionalism, Kuhn explains that ‘family photography is an industry, too, and the makers of the various paraphernalia of family photography— cameras, films, processing, albums to keep the pictures in—all have a stake in our memories’ ([1995] 2002, 22). This is all the more true in the case of Chez le photographe, as the original image is likely to have been shot at a studio by a professional photographer rather than by a family member. By turning her family photograph into a work of art destined for public viewing, Bénitah restores the public and collective dimensions that shape the familial group’s attempt to produce itself as a family through the family album. Chez le photographe is thus also a tale of the potential for emancipation that pertains to the interpretation of images and their production. Bénitah’s transformation of family photographs into works of art opens them to alternative interpretations outside the context reserved for them by the familial group and the family photography industry. The artist’s hybrid language signals women’s agency, which exists alongside and despite patriarchal familial and social regulations. The little girls’ sewn mouths do not simply symbolize silence; they are also a visual language of contestation. They tell the viewer that, no matter how culturally circumscribed the family group and album are, there is always room for marginalized individuals or groups to subvert the rules. In Chez le photographe, Bénitah’s photo-embroidery expresses the failure of the artist’s patriarchal education. Because of this, it amounts to an emancipatory performance. Combined with photography, embroidery— a skill mastered by Bénitah’s seamstress grandmother and her mother, who sewed her own trousseau (personal conversation, 2015)—produces a hybrid feminine language and an expression of awareness raising that reaches beyond traditionally feminine spaces. Bénitah’s photoembroidery blurs the distinction between craft and art and between

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private and public spaces, thus dissolving gender, class, and generational boundaries. The mixed-media images also liberate family photography and embroidery from domesticity and transform them into tools for the contestation of restrictive gender definitions and their transmission from generation to generation. Like Lalla Essaydi, who returns to the harem of her childhood and adolescence in Morocco to express the roots of her gender and feminist consciousness and to produce emancipatory images, Bénitah symbolically returns to the spaces of her childhood, reclaiming the very ideological tools that are assumed to ensure marked out paths for women within her family and within Moroccan culture. She dislodges photography and embroidery from specific historical, national, social, cultural, ethnic, and religious contexts. Indeed, mediated by the artist’s geographical and cultural displacement, photography and embroidery become tools for the expression of a cross-cultural and cross-national critique of patriarchy. Le loup (The Wolf) (2009) [Figure 6] is the image that most potently evokes a cross-cultural and cross-national feminist consciousness. In it, Bénitah superimposes the tale of Little Red Riding Hood onto a family photograph, dramatizing temporal and cultural displacement as a productive practice of interpretation and resistance to the fixity of gender roles. The image shows the artist as a baby being fed by her mother. Her sister and brother are standing next to them. In the foreground, only the bodies (not the heads) of her father and grandfather can be seen. Bénitah doubly disturbs the original photograph’s composition and message: first by reframing it and partly expelling male figures; secondly, by embroidering new objects that force upon it a resolutely different narrative. She dresses the baby girl with a bright red cape, transforming her into Little Red Riding Hood. She also embroiders a black wolf in the bottom right-hand corner. The image contains the tale’s essential features: the mother and the grandmother (here merged together in the female character wearing a fichu) the little girl wearing the red cape, and the wolf. However, Le loup does not explicitly reference any of the written versions of this fairy tale that has been relentlessly reinterpreted and adapted to different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. As such, the headless male bodies are either Charles Perrault’s seducers, evoked with the metaphor of the wolf, or the Grimm Brothers’ ideal good men, fathers and husbands, alluded to by the introduction of the savior hunter.24 In Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (2002), Catherine Orenstein demonstrates that even if Little Red Riding Hood’s tale, like all tales, has changed

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Figure 6.  Carolle Bénitah, Le loup

over the centuries to adapt to local contexts, one of its enduring themes remains gender roles and what it means to be a man and a woman. 25 Bénitah adopts the tale’s ‘remarkable mercurial properties’ (Orenstein 2002, 12) to offer her own take on the difference between the sexes, gender roles, and sexuality as they relate to her personal experience. Her choice of an infant instead of a young girl as the protagonist represents a major difference from the most famous versions of the tale, either by male authors such as Perrault and the Grimm Brothers, or by female authors such as Anne Thackeray Ritchie26 and Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton. 27 In her analysis of these and other texts, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas notes that the rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood ‘throw into high relief how the transformation of little girls into women undoubtedly worked in tandem with women’s acculturation and control of their natural bodies.’28 Bénitah’s version, staging an infant, exacerbates the violence of this conditioning and inscribes the commodification of women as part of family life and rites. In her image, the red cape alludes to the premature and violent gendering and sexualizing of girls that leaves very little room for experimentation with their ‘natural’ bodies. However, as is the case in Chez le photographe, despite predetermined scripts of womanhood and femininity which regulate women’s role within the family and in society, Bénitah suggests the existence of spaces

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of resistance. Writing her own version of Little Red Riding Hood shows the artist’s desire to question and transgress sociocultural norms of gender and sexuality. Indeed, in her reading of Perrault’s version of the tale, Talairach-Vielmas explains: The transformation of the young girl into a commodified woman luring man and provoking her own violation is thus twofold. On the one hand, it shows the standards of comportment that Perrault sought to instill into his fairy tales so as to limit the nature of children. On the other hand, it also suggests that such behavioral standards might be reappropriated and become a means for women to counteract gender roles and male domination. (2009, 261)

Bénitah exploits this ambiguity to create a visual version of Little Red Riding Hood that revises family mythologies as perpetuated by family photographs and fairy tales. Le Loup disrupts messages that appear self-evident, universal, and inflexible. Depicting a baby girl as a temptress, Bénitah underlines that women cannot escape the red cape, as a symbol of violence caused by sex and gender hierarchical binaries. At the same time, the artist embraces the cape and endows it with alternative meanings that destabilize the socialization of women as inscribed in impactful versions of Little Red Riding Hood written by male authors. The image of a playful wolf, lying on his back, potentially tamed by a seductress baby girl, confuses the message of the traditional tale, which equates women’s bodies, sexuality, and pleasure to danger. In the same vein, the paternal and authority figures are thrown into anonymity, thus denied the function of protectors and made into potential wolves, in the sense of the word popularized by Perrault’s tale. Recycling family photography and fairy tales, two media that have historically encoded, validated, and perpetuated a set of patriarchal norms, Bénitah’s artistic practice runs the risk of being outmaneuvered by the dominant discourse it attempts to interrupt. Indeed, in Recycling Red Riding Hood (2002), Sandra Beckett indicates that the ‘technique of inversion or reversal is particularly popular with feminist authors who see parody as a powerful agent for changing the conventional gender roles that fairy tales have mirrored back to us through several centuries of patriarchal culture.’29 However, she also warns against the limits of this technique, which ‘by recalling the conventions it seeks to subvert, actually perpetuates and authorizes them’ (Beckett 2002, 108). For Orenstein, too, fairy tales ‘permeate reality and resonate across generations […]. We think we outgrow them. In fact, we internalize

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them’ (2002, 11). Like Essaydi’s images, redeploying Orientalism as well as gendered understandings of henna tattooing and calligraphy, Bénitah’s are necessarily burdened by the artist’s inability to radically sever her art from the gendered dimension of photography and embroidery. Because of this, there remains a possibility of Le loup being read as a reaffirmation of the patriarchal and alienating distinction between a woman’s natural body and her acculturated body. When redeploying dominant discourses, women artists like Essaydi and Bénitah run the risk of reiterating these discourses. At the same time, the confrontation and negotiation of dominant discourses create space and opportunity for critique and the emergence of transformative knowledge. The power of Le loup, superimposing Little Red Riding Hood onto a family photograph, lies in its ability to inscribe both dimensions: the inevitable internalizing of the morals of patriarchal institutions and the existence of spaces of resistance that make it possible to disrupt them. Like Essaydi’s interaction with Orientalism, Bénitah relies on ambiguity and hybridity to create interstices that undermine discourses, media, languages, and practices that perpetuate patriarchal norms of femininity and masculinity. In Le loup, as in other images in which Bénitah (re)interprets her childhood, the family photograph emerges as a relic that links between the past and the present from a subjective point of view. This understanding of the photographs turns them into ‘points of memory’ as conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer. For Hirsch and Spitzer, ‘points of memory’ are similar to Barthes’s punctum, which the latter explains as a ‘detail, i.e, a partial object’ that defies codification and demands a subjective response from the viewer (Barthes 1981, 41). In Camera Lucida, Barthes defines the punctum in the context of a personal and affective description of a photograph of his mother as a child. Barthes does not reproduce the photograph, thus highlighting the importance of his affective link and interpretation of his mother’s image. In doing so, he distinguishes between two elements which, according to him, constitute the complex photograph: the studium and the punctum. The studium, present in every photograph, is an ‘average affect’ that inspires in the spectator only a ‘kind of general, enthusiastic commitment […], but without special acuity’ (Barthes 1981, 26–27). In contrast, the punctum is a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also the cast of a dice’ that ‘pricks,’ but also ‘bruises’ the spectator (Barthes 1981, 28). For Barthes, the studium is ‘always coded’ and in it the spectator experiences the photograph’s cultural context and photographer’s

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intention; in contrast, the punctum is constituted by the spectator’s gaze (1981, 51). Bénitah’s needlework reproduces, metaphorically and literally, the effect of the punctum that rhythms the studium of each one of her extremely conventional family photographs. Bénitah’s photo-embroidery not only makes visible the artist’s subjective interpretation of the past, it also multiplies the number of possible interpretations of her hybrid images, thus potentially allowing for marginalized positions to be articulated. Indeed, Hirsch and Spitzer advance that as ‘points multiply, they can convey the overlay of different temporalities and interpretive frames, resisting straightforward readings or any lure of authenticity.’30 Similarly, superimposing various temporalities, sociocultural positions, and experiences, Bénitah’s images transmit the past while acting upon it by creating opportunities for unexpected knowledge and positions to emerge. Similar to Hirsch and Spitzer’s ‘points of memory,’ Bénitah’s images exhibit an ‘acknowledged subjectivity and positionality, this vulnerability, and this focus on the detail and the ordinary and everyday—all these also belong to feminist reading practices’ (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006, 360). Choosing embroidery to underline the punctum of her family images, Bénitah thus genders her feminist practice and multiplies the possibilities for the unexpected to unsettle dominant gender positions. Embroidery, a skill that connects Bénitah to her childhood in Morocco as well as to her career as a fashion designer in France, when superimposed onto Little Red Riding Hood, allows the artist to participate in a transnational feminist discourse. Indeed, Le loup associates Bénitah’s artistic practice and visual tale with narratives by women around the globe that appropriate the discourse and symbols of fairy tales to transform them into a feminist discourse of contestation. For example, in her analysis of rewritings of Little Red Riding Hood by contemporary Argentinean women, Fiona Mackintosh notes that ‘the inscription of female desire and the attraction toward potentially dangerous and frightening places such as the wood’ and ‘the female character’s positive attraction to the wolf’ represent recurrent motivations behind women’s adaptations of the fairy tale. 31 Bénitah’s image similarly rejects the moralizing aspects of the fairy tale while valorizing female exploration and self-discovery within and outside the confines of patriarchal norms and restricted cultural spaces. Her choice of a tale which is also a Western cultural icon is counteracted by the very characteristics of fairy tales that make them unstable, perpetually changing narratives, adapting to reflect different, evolving visions of the world.

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A Diasporic Aesthetics for a Connected Self In Le déguisement (The Disguise) (2009) [Figure 7], also part of L’enfance marocaine, red thread covers the faces of a group of children. The children are wearing costumes and are standing in front of a blackboard with the inscription ‘Purim Holiday’ in Hebrew. The blackboard dominates the background and, together with the school tables, indicates a classroom environment. The position of the children, who are standing where the teacher usually stands, disturbs the classroom’s traditional hierarchy and indicates a momentary reversal brought about by the holiday celebration. As the analysis above shows, La cicatrice expresses eternalized loss. Chez le photographe and Le loup simultaneously underscore and rebel against patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexuality. Le déguisement brings together, in one plural gesture, ideas of memorialization, contestation, and self-invention. Because it generates a multitude of meanings, Le déguisement exemplifies the ambivalence that goes hand in hand with family photography. For instance, Geoffrey Batchen’s article ‘Snapshots’ (2008) is based on the premise that family and other vernacular snapshots are boring because they are ‘predictable in content and conservative in style.’32 Noting that family photographs and albums are in part shaped by the industry and the marketing of photographic cameras, Jo Spence and Rosy Martin argue that ‘the stories about ourselves which we can commonsensically construct from family albums probably say more about the histories of amateur and popular photography and their conventions than they do about the history of any given family or its individual members.’33 For her part, Hirsch notes a constant ‘tension between the photograph’s flatness and its illusion of depth, between the little a photograph reveals and all that it promises to reveal but cannot’ (1997, 119). Yet all these critics agree on the relevance of family photographs. For Batchen, vernacular snapshots are essential to any serious history of photography because, despite their repetitiveness, they are ‘capable of inducing a photographic experience that can be intensely individual, often emotional, sometimes even painful’ (2008, 133). For Hirsch, family photographs have the ability to reveal ‘fundamental aspects of subject-formation and familial interaction’ (1997, 129). Spence and Martin consider family albums and family snapshots to be important starting points in the process of redefining and reinventing the self in opposition to positions assigned to individuals by powerful family members and institutions (1988, 10). The aesthetics

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Figure 7.  Carolle Bénitah, Le déguisement

and symbolism of Le déguisement incorporate these various positions. It tells the spectator that, despite the many norms prescribed by school and family photography, the photograph and the photographic medium can be appropriated to engender a safe space and a language for the individual to renegotiate self-(re)definition in relation to family and community. In Le déguisement, Bénitah exploits the temporary and disruptive interval produced by the holiday celebration to insert within the original black-and-white photograph an individualized story about family, community, and identity. Her embroidery forms a striking red web that connects every other child to a smiling little girl, the artist herself. The web suggests a strong sense of belonging and, at the same time, emerges as a marker of difference. While the little girl’s face remains recognizable, red threads that seem to take root in her hair cover the other children’s faces. Behind identical meshes, evoking both masks and portable cages, the children become interchangeable. The visual language translates the artist’s ambiguous relation to the photograph: It is a class photograph, a photograph taken on a festival day during which children wear costumes. This photograph is compelling because all the faces are covered. For me, school represents molding. In this

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photograph, everybody is the same except for me. However, at the same time, I am connected to everyone else. 34

The transformation of the children into anonymous and interchangeable figures exposes school as an institution that, like the family, molds and curtails individual identities and aspirations. As is the case in her transformed family photographs, in Le déguisement, Bénitah underlines the features that make school photographs a symbol of homogenization because of their uniformity and their projection of a controlled group. The photograph’s content and presence in the family album underline the fact that school is not only similar to family, but can be an extension of it. However, by visually and symbolically setting herself apart from the other children in the classroom, Bénitah appropriates the role of the educator—absent from the photograph— and retrospectively restores difference and individual agency in a space of socialization par excellence. In doing so, she unsettles the hierarchies and norms of school as a space in which the individual’s socialization and control are ratified and ritualized. The embroidery alters the image’s composition and focus in a way that affirms an individual identity that opposes identity defined by/through the familial/social group. Bénitah’s subjective interpretation of the past in Le déguisement highlights a retrospective process of self-differentiation that is present in many images of L’enfance marocaine. For instance, in Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait (What I Have Done) (2009), the artist cuts out the other protagonists present with her in the original black-and-white photograph, literally turning a family portrait into a self-portrait. The new composition reverses the status of the little girl, who becomes the primary target despite her closed eyes and self-absorbed expression that would suggest otherwise. In Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, Bénitah further internalizes the family portrait by embroidering a meditative text, ‘What I have done,’ a sentence extracted from one of her therapy sessions (personal conversation, 2015). Unlike Essaydi’s calligraphy, which is intentionally unintelligible to preserve the reference to a universal feminine expression, Bénitah’s text is straightforwardly centered on herself and reminds viewers of her auto/biographical narrative’s intimate and personal dimensions. Sur le Canapé (On the Sofa) (2009) reveals a similar affirmation of the self through the effacement of group identity. The image shows the artist endowed with artificial and invasive black hair that flows across the photograph, obscuring the bodies and faces of her siblings who are sitting by her side. Left symbolically alone in the

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picture, the little girl is no longer a passive object but a real interlocutor who is looking back and shaping the viewers’ gaze. Le Bouquet (The Bouquet) (2009), in which the artist embroiders flowers on her family members’ faces, is another representation of this process of individualization. The seemingly carnivorous flowers, obstructing the other protagonists’ vision, symbolize the artist’s devouring of the familial gaze and familial looks. Left alone to look back at the camera, she erases the plurality of gazes that constitutes family photographs. She also deprives the image of the viewer’s future recognition, upon which rests its function as a family rite. Images presenting repetitive visuals that signal an appropriation of the gazes and the stories of family photographs, and transform them into visual auto/biographical statements, make L’enfance marocaine a rewriting of the self that reaffirms familial and community connections while opening them up to other networks so as to reflect identity as a construct and a process. In the same way that La cicatrice highlights L’enfance marocaine as a memorial and a process of memorializing loss, Le déguisement underlines the series’ status as a performative act and site of self-redefinition and self-invention. These functions account for and rely on photography’s ‘unconscious optics,’ an expression used by Walter Benjamin in A Short History of Photography (1931) and later in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Benjamin uses ‘unconscious optics’ to underline the importance of chance and detail in the meaning and vision engendered by the technology of photography. He turns to Freudian psychoanalysis and analogically explains how the work of the camera expands vision, yielding unpredictable visibility and meaning: By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action […]. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject […]. Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man […]. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. 35

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As with Barthes’s punctum, Benjamin’s ‘unconscious optics’ departs from the camera time and the photograph’s context to emphasize the viewer’s gaze over the photographer’s. In the case of family photography, both emphasize the viewer’s emotional and intellectual response over conventions of photography and family. Indeed, for Benjamin, photography’s ability to disturb conscious experience lies in the future of looking and in details that are outside conventional framing. Benjamin explains that no matter how skillful the photographer is, the spectator still feels compelled to look for the ‘tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture; to find that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it.’36 Framing, enlarging, refocusing, and piercing family photographs, Bénitah relies on the camera eye to expose her family’s and community’s ‘unconscious optics.’ Her photoembroideries transform commonplace images into a space that can host fractured subjectivities and, at the same time, become a medium of self-expression. In Bénitah’s remodeled family album, studium and punctum deliberately and constantly clash, making her images both narratives and counter-narratives of the self in which the individual is always situated from at least a double perspective. Le déguisement compellingly exposes this duality at many levels. The school photograph’s presence in the family album testifies to the continuity between familial and social groups. However, as Christine Charpentier-Boude explains, the intermediary position of the school photograph, linking the institutions of the family and the school, saves it from being monolithic and univocal, despite its apparent homogeneity. 37 Such a position also makes it possible for school photographs to be a space for self-detachment and self-redefinition through the photographic medium. Le déguisement, despite the artist’s description of it and its formal continuity with the images described above, offers a plurality of narration and interconnection that confirms and goes beyond the dynamics present in other images of L’enfance marocaine. Unlike images that contest family and social norms or affirm the self over group identity, in Le déguisement the embroidery can be read in two opposing ways. The red thread either indicates a mask in the making that foretells the little girl’s absorption by the group or the inscription of an individual agency with regard to the conditions of belonging to a given community which is shaped by its individuals as much as they are shaped by it. Both readings, though, underline the importance of family and community

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links, symbolically revived by the artist, even if only for the purpose of challenging them. Thus, despite Bénitah’s rejection of institutions and practices that discipline and mold bodies and individualities into roles and groups, her images also celebrate family and social links. In Le déguisement, the blackboard, a traditional symbol of indoctrination, with the untouched inscription referring to the festival of Purim, functions as a mnemonic background for the unity and solidarity of the Jewish community regardless of geographic and national location. Based on a photograph that memorializes Purim, Le déguisement thus affirmatively inscribes the auto/biographical at the intersection of the personal, the collective, and the historical. According to modern Jewish liturgy, Purim commemorates the salvation of the Jews in the Persian Empire by Esther, the Jewish wife of the king, and her cousin Mordecai. The Book of Esther recounts that the festival, a one-time event staged to celebrate the Jews’ victory over Haman, the king’s prime minister, becomes an annual holiday for Jews all over the world. 38 Purim’s carnival aspect, which grants the holiday its ‘characteristic loosening of restraints [and] its tone of riot and disorder,’39 mirrors the dialectics of the personal and the historical, as well as those of contestation and consolidation of family and community ties found in Bénitah’s L’enfance marocaine. Indeed, Jeffrey Rubenstein sees in Purim a liminal moment in Victor Turner’s sense of the term—a time during which ‘the web of normal social relationships, the structural elements, appear to dissolve.’40 Le déguisement re-enacts Purim’s ambivalence by referencing school as an institution that enforces conformity, especially a communal and religious school, as is the case here, as well as its potential for nurturing and liberating individualities. The ambivalence in Le déguisement infuses L’enfance marocaine with alternative meaning. The fusion of school and family spaces, mediated by the symbolism and the performativity of Purim, brings about a disruptive fusion between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. It more clearly superimposes and confronts distinct forces instrumental in subject-formation, thus opening up a controlled and safe space in which different positions on gender, race, ethnicity, and national belonging are articulated without causing further rupture and dislocation. For instance, talking about Le déguisement and what school meant for her, Bénitah has mentioned how she was affected by the separation of boys and girls, which she linked to a strict education meant to ensure the perpetuation of the hierarchical divisions between the sexes (personal conversation, 2015). In her image, she uses Purim to erase this separation between the

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sexes. Not only are boys and girls standing together, their costumes and the artist’s embroidered masks make it impossible to distinguish between them. The photo-embroidery highlights that it is possible to turn upside down the gender and generational hierarchies perpetuated by family, society, and religion by unveiling and reclaiming the ambivalence of these very institutions. With her embroidery, used as a disguise of sorts, the artist acquires exceptional agency and singularity in the ethnically, religiously, and socially regulated space of the Jewish school. The iconography of Le déguisement not only evokes Purim, it mirrors the performativity of minor and momentary reversals that occur during Purim celebrations. As Amy Shuman indicates, through various practices, including food preparation and gift exchange, Purim provides ‘an inversion of ordinary life through a series of binary oppositions’ and the festival’s ‘excesses create a space for women unlike any available in Jewish life.’41 Rubenstein too notes the limited status reversal between men and women and between children and adults. Women are allowed to wear the clothing of the opposite sex and are permitted greater access to the synagogue. In addition, adults are obliged to tolerate the wild behavior of children, who are allowed to wear masks and yell during religious ceremonies (Rubenstein 1992, 273). Le déguisement, an image highlighting the momentary interruption of gendered education and oppressive early gendering, infuses L’enfance marocaine with an aesthetics that appropriates and redefines localized and communal practices to transform them into tools of liberation. With Purim’s symbolism and the back and forth between reaffirmation and redefinition, Le déguisement signals simultaneous intergenerational conflict and longing for continuity that is characteristic of a state of being marked by dramatic change or displacement. For instance, in the context of Spain’s transformation, Allison Ribeiro de Menezes explains that the very notion of generation ‘points both at rupture and continuity.’42 She further indicates that ‘the impulse toward explicit generational differentiation’ comes from the experience of great moments of rupture that can take the form of violent and explicit events, such as the Spanish Civil War, as well as more subtle forms of change such as the changing socioeconomic landscape of mid-century Spain (Ribeiro de Menezes 2014, 45). The same could be said of Bénitah and her relationship to her birth community in Morocco and the Jewish community worldwide. The artist’s photo-embroidery, simultaneously contesting and re-enacting familial and community ties, recalls the two positions on cultural identity among diasporic communities exposed

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by cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Hall explains that the first position defines cultural identity ‘in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self,” hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed “selves,” which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.’43 The second position recognizes that cultural identity ‘is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being.” It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture’ (Hall 1990, 225). Bénitah’s reference to and re-enactment of Purim’s symbolism in Le déguisement inscribes these two positions. Indeed, as Jona Schellekens explains, despite its anti-normative behavior, Purim, like any religious festival, remains a set of rites that bring people together, reaffirming their common bonds and shared beliefs (2009, 33). Using the same thread and colors throughout L’enfance marocaine to express violent emotions, premature sexualization, boundaries, and family bonds, Bénitah merges together dynamics of adhesion and resistance in a way that mirrors Purim’s performativity and makes her art an expression and a poetics of exilic identities and diasporic cultures. However, her hybrid aesthetics, like Essaydi’s, are also a reference of localized experiences that are constitutive of diasporic and transnational identities. Le déguisement and in general L’enfance marocaine can be equated, symbolically and through their performative dimension, to local and family Purims, minor celebrations referred to as ‘special Purims,’ which represent concretizations of the meaning of Purim and serve to record local history.44 The Encyclopedia Judaica lists more than one hundred of these ‘special Purims,’ which are modeled on the story of Esther and are reminders of the same message, the victory of the Jews over their would-be destroyer (Miller 1991, 589). The Moroccan Jewish community has several ‘special Purims,’ including one in Bénitah’s birth city of Casablanca.45 Bénitah’s hybrid aesthetics and photo-embroidery represent a personal and localized experience that exists in relation to and is impacted by a larger history that exceeds national, ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries. Notes 1 Carolle Bénitah, personal conversation with the author, March 2015. 2 Some of Bénitah’s works prior to Photos Souvenirs include 2002 (2002), Twelve (2006), and Un parterre de roses (A Bed of Roses) (2001–2008).

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3 Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Routledge & Paul, 1950), p. 5. 4 Carolle Bénitah, ‘Artist Statement,’ Prix Virginia, n.d. [accessed June 18, 2019]. My translation. Original French: ‘J’ai commencé à m’intéresser à mes photographies de famille, lorsqu’en feuilletant l’album de mon enfance, je me suis retrouvée submergée par une émotion dont je n’arrivais pas à déterminer l’origine. Ces photographies prises il y a 40 ans et dont je ne me souvenais ni du moment de la prise de vue, ni de ce qui avait suivi ou précédé cet instant, réveillaient en moi une angoisse de quelque chose de familier et totalement inconnu à la fois, une sorte d’étrangeté inquiétante dont parle Freud. Ces moments fixés sur du papier me représentent, parlent de moi, de ma famille, et disent des choses sur la question de l’identité, de ma place dans le monde, mon histoire familiale et ses secrets, les peurs qui m’ont construites et tout ce qui me constitue aujourd’hui.’ 5 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination [1995] (London: Verso Books, 2002), p. 48. 6 Benoît Baume, ‘Carolle Bénitah: Enfance recousue,’ Images Magazine, 12 (Summer 2011): 26–28, p. 28. My translation. The original French text reads: ‘Je ne travaille que sur le réel. Ma vie est montrée comme elle se déroule. Rien n’est mis en scène.’ 7 André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly, 13.4 (Summer 1960), pp. 7–8. 8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [1980], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 88. 9 Bénitah, Féminité sans tabous, October 4–November 3, 2012, La Galerie Esther Woerdehoff, Dossier de Presse [accessed March 2014]. My translation. Original French text: ‘Je n’interviens pas directement sur la photographie originale. Je vais transposer cette réalité sur un papier différent, je recadre quelquefois un détail qui m’interpelle et je choisis mon format. Le travail d’interprétation commence par ces étapes-là.’ 10 Magali Nachtergael, Les Mythologies individuelles: Récit de soi et photographie au 20e siècle (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), p. 11. Translations from French to English are mine. 11 Patricia Holland, ‘Introduction: History, Memory and the Family Album,’ in Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (eds), Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography (London: Virago, 1991), p. 3. 12 See for instance ‘Carolle Bénitah: La vie (re)inventée,’ Exposition du 27 janvier au 20 mars 2015 (Exhibition), Arthothèque Antonin Arthaud, Cahier 60, January–March 2015. My translation. Original French text: ‘Née à Casablanca, Maroc, diplômée de l’Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, Paris, France. Vit et travaille à Marseille, France.’

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13 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 13. 14 See André Levy, ‘Notes on Jewish-Muslim Relationships: Revisiting the Vanishing Moroccan Jewish Community,’ Cultural Anthropology, 18.3 (2003), pp. 365–397. On the emigration of Moroccan Jews, see also Michael M. Laskier, ‘Jewish Emigration from Morocco to Israel: Government Policies and the Position of International Jewish Organizations, 1949–56,’ Middle Eastern Studies, 25.3 (July 1989), pp. 323–362. 15 See, for instance, images in Christelle Taraud, Mauresques: femmes orientales dans la photographie coloniale, 1860–1910 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003). 16 Kamal Hachkar, interview with the author, 2012. Also see Aomar Boum, Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013) and Hachkar’s films Tinghir-Jerusalem, les échos du Mellah (2011). 17 Gilles Mora and Claude Nori, L’Été dernier. Manifeste photobiographique (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile, 1983), p. 107. Mora later disavows photobiography for ‘l’étroitesse et la difficulté des limites et ambitions’ (the narrowness and difficulties of the limits and ambitions) initially intended for it. Gilles Mora, ‘Photobiographies,’ in Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vra (eds), Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2004a), p. 107. 18 My translation. Original French text: ‘le dispositif photographique [est] intrinsèquement autobiographique.’ 19 Gilles Mora, ‘Pour en finir avec la photographie,’ in Danièle Méaux and Jean-Bernard Vra (eds), Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2004b), 115. Translation from the French is mine. 20 Bénitah, personal conversation, March 2015. My translation. Original French: ‘J’ai trouvé la photographie déchirée, je ne sais pas pourquoi, et sur le moment, je me suis dit que j’allais la réparer avec le fil et l’aiguille […]. C’est une cicatrice et, dans le même temps, cela forme comme une colonne vertébrale.’ 21 Patrick Bertrand Bainson, ‘Photos Souvenirs,’ Le Buffet de la gare (June  9, 2011) [accessed September 2012]. 22 Yana Meerzon, Performing Exile, Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 9. 23 Bénitah, Photos Souvenirs, Galerie 127, n.d. [accessed June 2014]. 24 See Charles Perrault, ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ in Alan Dundes (ed.), Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

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1989), pp. 3–6. See also Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales (London and New York: Routledge, 1948). 25 Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 14. 26 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Bluebeard’s Keys and Other Stories (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1874). 27 Harriet Louisa Childe-Pemberton, ‘All My Doing; or Red Riding-Hood Over Again,’ in Jack Zipes (ed.), Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 209–248. 28 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood”: Victorian Fairy Tales and Mass Visual Culture,’ The Lion and the Unicorn, 33.3 (September 2009), p. 260. 29 Sandra L. Beckett, Recycling Red Riding Hood (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 108. 30 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission,’ Poetics Today, 27.2 (Summer 2006), p. 358. 31 Fiona Mackintosh, ‘Babes in the Bosque: Fairy Tales in TwentiethCentury Argentine Women’s Writing,’ in Donald Haase (ed.), Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), p. 159. 32 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Snapshots,’ Photographies, 1.2 (2008), p. 121. 33 Rosy Martin and Jo Spence, ‘Phototherapy: Psychic Realism as Healing Art?’, Ten8, 30 (October 1988), p. 10. 34 Siegfried Forster, ‘La Photographe Marocaine Carolle Bénitah Brode Sa Vie à Marseille,’ RFI, Les voix du Monde (June 14, 2011) [accessed April 2014]. My translation. Original French: ‘C’est une photo de classe, une photo lors d’une fête où tous les enfants se déguisent. Cette photo interpelle beaucoup, parce que tous les visages sont cachés. Pour moi, l’école est le formatage. Sur cette photo, tout le monde est pareil, sauf moi. Mais, en même temps, je suis reliée à tout le monde.’ 35 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936], in Hannah Arendt (ed.) and Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 236. 36 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography,’ trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen, 13.1 (Spring 1972), p. 7. 37 Christine Charpentier-Boude, La photo de classe: Palimpseste contemporain de l’institution scolaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), pp. 7–8. 38 See Jona Schellekens, ‘Accession Days and Holidays: The Origins of the Jewish Festival of Purim,’ Journal of Biblical Literature, 128.1 (Spring 2009), pp. 115–134.

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39 Harold Fisch, ‘Reading and Carnival: On the Semiotics of Purim,’ Poetics Today, 15.1 (Spring 1994), p. 59. 40 Jeffrey Rubenstein, ‘Purim, Liminality, and Communitas,’ Association for Jewish Studies Review, 17.2 (Autumn 1992), p. 251. 41 Amy Shuman, ‘Food Gifts: Ritual Exchange and the Production of Excess Meaning,’ The Journal of American Folklore, 113.450 (Autumn 2000), pp. 503–504. 42 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 45. 43 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora,’ in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 223. 44 Susan Gilson Miller, ‘Crisis and Community: The People of Tangier and the French Bombardment of 1844,’ Middle Eastern Studies, 2.7 (October 1991), p. 588. 45 The Jewish Casablanca community instituted ‘Purim Hitler’ on the second day of Kislev to commemorate November 11, 1942, the day that the Allied forces landed in Morocco and put an end to Vichy Government control, saving the Moroccan Jewish community from deportation. The Casablanca Jewish community celebrates the event by reading ‘Megillat Hitler,’ written by local scribe P. Hassine, now on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. See Rafael Medoff, ‘Megillat Hitler, FDR and the Jews,’ The Jewish Ledger (March 16, 2011) http://www. jewishledger.com/2011/03/megillat-hitler-fdr-and-the-jews/ [accessed December 2015]. See also David B. Green, ‘This Day in Jewish History // 1942: The Jews of Casablanca Celebrate Vichy Overthrow,’ Haaretz (November 11, 2012) [accessed June 2014].

chapter six

Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings Contemporary Discourses of Contestation in Naïma Zitan’s Play Dialy and Fedwa Misk’s Webzine Qandisha Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony

In March 2003, Morocco’s recently crowned King Mohammed VI, eager to turn the page on his father’s dark past and pressured by feminist groups, launched a significant reform of the Mudawana (family code). The process that led to the adoption of the revised personal status code in January 2004 was marked by unprecedented and heated debates between various political and social actors, including secularists, Islamists, theologians, and various feminist groups. These debates accelerated the feminization of public space that had already started with the proliferation of feminist movements and women’s nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the 1980s and 1990s (Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006; Salime 2011). In the same period, despite important economic and legislative reform in Morocco and neighboring countries, young people and marginalized groups continued to grow dissatisfied with sluggish and uneven economic development, the justice system’s lack of accountability, and official abuse and corruption enabled by the ruling elites. On December 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, took the radical step of setting himself on fire to protest the police confiscation of his vegetable cart and goods. Bouazizi

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and his action epitomized popular anger and despair caused by what has become known in colloquial North African Arabic dialects as the hogra, or humiliation and deprivation of dignity. The event, which sparked a series of uprisings that profoundly shook the Middle East and North Africa, also subsequently brought about an unprecedented liberalization of speech and expression of dissent. The protests taking place in the streets and on social media also made visible two crucial facts: women’s role as agents of change and the fact that they continued to suffer from multiple systems of oppression. In Morocco, this ambiguous position was inscribed in events and negotiations involving dissenting groups and the state. The strong presence of women in the protest movement forced leading actors such as the Mouvement du 20 février (February 20 Movement) to include gender issues in their agenda. It also prompted the state to inscribe gender equality in the 2011 constitution. Yet Morocco kept many articles in the reformed Mudawana and in the penal code that contradicted the new constitution’s inscription of gender equality. Even after the passage of the new constitution, women continued to be marginalized in the streets and public forums, and to see their representation constantly threatened. This chapter proposes to assess the impact of the Mudawana reform and the 2010–2011 Arab uprisings on women’s cultural productions in Morocco. It particularly looks at how the liberalization of speech on the one hand, and the continued fragility of women’s condition on the other, pushed women to invent novel modes of disseminating gendered discourses of contestation in the media and through cultural productions. To do so, I look at exemplars of women’s initiatives in the aftermath of Morocco’s version of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’: Qandisha: Magazwine collaboratif féminin (Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazwine), a webzine founded by Fedwa Misk in 2011, and Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan Arabic (Darija) written by Maha Sano and directed by Naïma Zitan, the title of which literally means ‘mine’ but implicitly expresses ‘my vagina.’ Focusing on the webzine’s and the play’s approaches to gender, space, sexuality, citizenship, individual freedoms, and religion, the chapter analyzes both as cultural transactions that bear witness to evolving strategies used by women to inscribe gender and women’s issues in their contemporary cultural expressions and how these inscriptions reflect and impact current sociocultural changes. The chapter demonstrates that the webzine and the play, capitalizing on public demand and digital spaces to sustain the liberalization of

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speech brought about the revolutionary period, represent alternative discursive spaces that seek to impress a more gender-conscious process on state-sponsored reforms and other ongoing top-down projects of social transformation. Dialy: Rewriting the Female Body in Public Space Utilizing a minimalist setting, composed of a black curtain and women’s underpants of different colors and sizes hanging from a washing line strung across the stage, Dialy presents an overview of different stages of a Moroccan woman’s life, including her early socializing as a woman during childhood, her first menstrual cycle, her first sexual experiences, marriage, and childbearing. During an uninterrupted forty-minute performance, the three actresses (Nouria Benbrahim, Amal Benhadou, and Farida Elbouazaoui), dressed in equally minimal black dresses and flat shoes, discuss the burden of traditions and practices that preside over women’s bodily, emotional, and social experiences. Except for the concluding lines, the play is rather grim and most of the monologues/ dialogues focus on exposing various forms of physical and symbolic violence against women, including denigration of the female body, rape, marital rape, and abuse in public spaces such as the street, hospitals, and schools. The play uses Darija, the everyday language in Morocco, and its relationships to women’s bodies and sexuality on the one hand, and black humor on the other, to question the deeply rooted patriarchal mindset of Moroccan society and institutions like the family, school, religion, and the law. The first lines set the rhythm and the tone for the remainder of the play: Woman 1: What is your name? Woman 2: What is your father’s name? Woman 1: What is your mother’s name? Woman 3: What is the name of your honor? Woman 2: What is your family name? Woman 1: Who are you? Woman 3: Who exactly are you? Woman 2: Why are you like this? Woman 3: I never see you! Woman 1: I never see you! Woman 2: I never see you! Woman 1: I can’t see you.

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Woman 3: You are always hiding. Woman 2: Must I always have a mirror in order to see you? Woman 3: No one speaks about you. No one hears anything about you until the wedding day. Woman 1: I can’t speak about you, and if I ever inquire about you, I get slapped. Woman 2: I get hit with a belt …1

Dialogues such as this emerge as a multi-voiced revelation that is meant to re-enact women’s words as they speak about the perception of their body and their experience of sexuality. The play was originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996). However, after the American author declined to authorize the format proposed by the Rabat-based theater company Théâtre Aquarium, the project morphed into an original script focused on local realities. The final text is inspired by discussions and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds telling stories and experiences related to their body and sexuality. The fluidity of the script, moving from one character to another without visible interruption in the progression of meaning, tone, storyline, and theme, suggests that there are strong commonalities in the ways Moroccan women experience their body and sexuality. The humorous and provocative beginning also establishes the main message of the play: the contradiction that exists between the quasilinguistic and symbolic erasure of the vagina and the simultaneous reduction of women to vaginas. Discussing the motivation behind the creation of the play, Zitan explains that when women ‘courageously decide to speak [about these issues], it is usually in restricted spaces, with female neighbors and friends, which restricts possibilities for their personal enrichment and openness to the world around them.’2 As the performance progresses, the dialogue in the form of micro-stories exposes how, from an early age, women are instructed that their bodies do not belong to them, but that they are the locus of the family’s honor: Woman 3: Pull your skirt down, you miserable being; you are not even wearing underwear! Woman 2: Shame. Woman 3: Shame. Woman 1: Taboo. […] Woman 3: Shut up, you miserable being! Don’t you ever touch it! Woman 2: Don’t you ever get close to it!

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Woman 1 (impersonating a man speaking to his wife): If your daughter ever brings shame on this family, I want you to know that I have a bullet for you, one for her, and the third goes into my head. Woman 1, Woman 2, and Woman 3: Keep your legs closed!

The numerous and fragmented stories highlight what Zitan views as a ‘cultural excision of words and expressions linked to women’s sexuality.’3 Women are repeatedly taught to ignore their body and their desires by pretending that their vagina doesn’t exist, while at the same time protecting it as their most precious possession. An intact hymen indicates an unspoiled body and determines a woman’s value within family and society. As a result, a woman’s body, belonging to her father, must be preserved until her wedding night, when it becomes the possession of another man. The play explains the idea that a ‘spoiled’ female body immediately becomes abject and the locus of the family’s shame and dishonor, which forces young girls to experience their body as shameful and cumbersome. Speaking about her script, Maha Sano explains that ‘the vocabulary [available to women to talk about their vagina or sexuality] is so violent that it incites them to make it a taboo and to not express it.’4 The play’s focus on Moroccan society’s refusal to celebrate the female body outside its social functions as a commodity at the center of a transaction between the father or another male guardian and the husband, or as a reproductive tool, can seem simplistic in the twentyfirst century. Even though Zitan affirms that the plays her company produces are rooted in Moroccan women’s social realities and aim at changing women’s situation, 5 the portrait of a society that still largely places women’s honor in their premarital virginity and their value in their achievements as wives and mothers can at first seem disconnected from rapidly changing attitudes towards family, workplace, couples’ relations, sex, sexuality, and marriage in Morocco, as well as from the significant differences that exist between various socioeconomic groups. Recent studies have noted radical changes in attitudes and practices among Moroccans, prompted by greater access to education and to the job market, as well as a significant increase in the mean age at marriage for both men and women.6 Yet, when I asked Zitan how she became interested in these themes and in the work of what she calls ‘social theater,’ she merely responded: ‘You can’t practice “art for art” when you live in a country that is plagued by poverty, child labor, polygamy, rape, and illiteracy. You first have to use art to zoom in on these issues. It is an obligation’ (personal

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conversation, May 2015). The idea that sociopolitical and economic conditions dictate the way Moroccans, especially women, produce art and demand socially engaged works, requires that Dialy be situated within the Moroccan context and in relation to practices of theater that seek to instigate and rehearse social change. Since its appearance in the 1920s, modern Moroccan theater has been used both as a tool of propaganda and of resistance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, theater represented a site of self-definition that coincided with the nationalist agenda’s efforts to reawaken Arabo-Islamic identities and express discontent with the French colonial power. Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson explain that as ‘a subversive terrain for voicing native pedagogies and regaining an agency lost to the violent colonial intervention, [Moroccan theater] foregrounded the political at the expense of the aesthetic.’ 7 As Moroccan theater practices continued to evolve in the postcolonial era, they remained deeply connected to the country’s sociopolitical situation and retained a commitment to shaping knowledge and public opinion. Created in a time of transition, marked by contestation and struggle for self-definition, Dialy reflects this tradition and is a response to ­contemporary sociopolitical pressures. The use of testimony and workshops also links Dialy to various other theatrical experiments that blur the distinction between representation and reality. Dialy redeploys strategies from various linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts to recycle and rework real events and social actualities in order to both reflect and instigate social change. Reflecting on other plays directed by Zitan and focusing on women’s issues and history, Cleo Jay likens Théâtre Aquarium’s practices to the ‘theater for development,’ drawing from influential Brazilian director Augusto Boal.8 Inspired by philosopher and adult educator Paolo Freire, Boal experimented in the 1960s and 1970s with forms of drama that invite the audience to participate and get involved in problem-solving at the community level. This form of participatory theater was used in Europe in the 1960s under the name ‘popular theater’ or ‘activist theater,’ designating the use of the performing arts to fight social and political oppression. Today, ‘theater for development’ refers to projects that support social change, including performances and workshops that explore issues directly linked to the living conditions of the targeted audience that favor exchange between actors/directors/playwrights and the public before, during, or after the performance.9 The team behind Dialy undertook an eight-month process of research, listening sessions, and collaboration with the local community.

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The finished play, through condensing stories and conflating different personal life experiences gathered during that process, makes use of a set of methods explored by Attilio Favorini in his historical review of ‘documentary theater.’ Favorini uses the term ‘documentary theater,’ coined by Bertolt Brecht in 1926, to designate ‘plays characterized by a central or exclusive reliance on actual rather than imaginary events, on dialogue, song and/or visual materials (photographs, films, pictorial documents) “found” in the historical record or gathered by the playwright/researcher, and by a disposition to set individual behaviour in an articulated political and/or social context.’10 Similarly to some of the plays described by Favorini, Dialy’s script is the result of a process in which women’s oral stories have been edited, condensed, and combined for dramatic economy. However, the play preserves Moroccan women’s reality, albeit from a particular political and ideological point of view. In exposing a gendered double standard that results in the objectification of the female body, Dialy addresses, through women’s stories and words, an issue that studies conducted on sexuality in Morocco in the last forty-odd years have consistently underlined. These studies show that major stages in a woman’s life are traditionally associated with shame; when young girls receive sex education, often from their mother and other female members of the family, it is reduced to a list of prohibitions that teach them to keep their bodies unspoiled and pure for future husbands.11 Even though sexuality is increasingly viewed amongst younger generations as a personal experience that is not necessarily linked to procreation, and more and more Moroccans are engaging in premarital sex, marriage is still important in the acquisition of social status for women (Bakass and Ferrand 2013, 38). These attitudes and perceptions are sanctioned and perpetuated by laws that criminalize sexual intercourse outside of marriage (Article 490 of the penal code), same-sex intercourse (Article 489), adultery (Article 491), and abortion (Article 499 and Article 58). Additionally, honor continues to be feminized and female virginity remains an important social currency in today’s Morocco, even if it is highly artificial amid an increasing number of hymen reconstruction products available on the informal market to help women simulate purity.12 Thus, the vision of blood-stained underpants, the songs evoking the defloration of Moroccan brides on their wedding nights, and the association of women with their family’s (particularly their father’s) honor, may well represent disappearing customs; however, Dialy’s performance stages practices that symbolically or actually normalize

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the commodification of the female body through laws and political decisions. It seeks to capture the contradiction and hypocrisy that characterize Moroccan norms and legal system. Indeed, the 2011 constitution, with Article 19, inscribes the equality of men and women before the law and emphasizes the importance of women’s participation in the country’s politics and welfare. However, observers, feminists, and human rights activists note that Article 19 remains unknown, especially in rural areas, and that more changes are needed for it to be implemented. A 2015 analysis of the state of gender equality and parity published by the CNDH, assessing the situation ten years after the 2004 family code reform and four years after the new constitution, maintains that ‘the constitutional promises have gradually evaporated.’13 The report points out the limits imposed by interpretative declarations on key articles affording men and women the same rights or condemning discrimination against women. It also highlights contradictions and inconsistencies between various legislative documents such as the constitution, the Moroccan penal code, and the family code. In addition to these organic limitations, the report notes the misinterpretation of certain provisions by judges regarding equal rights between men and women in marriage, divorce, children’s guardianship, and rights to land and inheritance. Finally, the report underlines the difficulties that women, especially poor women, face in accessing justice. These findings show that the Mudawana reform was insufficient to achieve women’s liberation. They also show the need for women to fully participate in current sociopolitical contestation with innovative feminist discourses. Within a context of political transition and the instrumentalization of women’s rights by the Moroccan regime, Dialy thus represents an alternative discourse that forces the public to confront contradictions and inconsistencies that hinder women’s access to social and political equality. Sano explains that the play was made possible by the liberalization of speech in Morocco during the Arab uprisings (Slimani 2017, 132). This is reflected in the way in which Dialy restores taboune, the word for ‘vagina’ in Moroccan Darija, which is usually reduced to a street insult and considered unacceptable in most other settings. The enumeration of some thirty words referring to the vagina breaks major taboos and exposes the glaring symbolic and physical violence against women that is perpetuated by the language Moroccans use in ordinary interactions. It also undercuts the impact of patriarchal traditions that limit discussion on the female body and sexuality to circumscribed spaces such as hammams. Women’s micro-stories of rape and domestic

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and institutional violence raise awareness of how the conspicuous absence of the vagina from socializing processes and rituals that simultaneously valorize and shame the body expose women to violence. Dialy’s dialogues and monologues show women’s vulnerability at every level by exposing the continuity that exists between sociocultural practices and attitudes and the lack of protection offered to women by the law. Dialy not only reflects the liberalization of speech that accompanied denunciations of authoritarianism, corruption, and lack of economic mobility during the Arab uprisings, it also acts out that liberalization and participates in its sustainability. Indeed, North African and Arab theater specialist Khalid Amine suggests that some plays like Dialy are re-enactments of the Arab revolutions that ‘challenge the existing archives and their logic in organizing and reflecting memory and history.’14 This assessment resonates with Sano’s claim that Dialy is meant to offer women an opportunity to reclaim their bodies by reworking ordinary language and vocabulary and therefore interrupting a conditioning that makes them internalize and act out their victimization (Slimani 2017, 133). The play also re-enacts the revolution and the act of raising gender consciousness because it unsettles dominant norms and hierarchies. Indeed, even though Moroccan audiences are rather familiar with the topics discussed in the sketches performed by the three actresses, they often associate them with private and intimate spheres as well as with shame and silence. The redeployment of women’s sexuality on the theatrical stage for mixed audiences disrupts gender definition that relies on the division between the private and the public and between the personal, the intimate, and the political. Dialy’s voicing of women’s stories thus preserves major gains brought about by spectacular acts of public speaking performed by thousands of Moroccans during 2010 and 2011 in widespread street demonstrations. It also reflects Théâtre Aquarium’s commitment to archiving, participating in, and instigating sociopolitical change, especially with regard to women’s rights and gender equality. Since its creation in 1994 by a group of young female graduates of the Institut Supérieur d’Art Dramatique et d’Animation Culturelle (Higher Institute of Dramatic Art and Cultural Animation, ISADAC), the company’s mission has emphasized using art to produce a social theater that raises awareness about gender issues and promotes equality of men and women. This mission has been visible in some fifteen plays directed by Zitan, one of its founders and current director. For instance, in 2000, Théâtre Aquarium produced Hikayat Nissaa (Women’s Stories), which enacts women’s history in postcolonial

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Morocco from women’s perspective, including their participation in the country’s fight for independence, resistance to the authoritarian regime during the Years of Lead, and the situation in the late 1990s. According to Zitan, Hikayat Nissaa, which toured all over Morocco, was instrumental in advancing the debate on the Moroccan family code in the early 2000s and its extensive reform in 2004 (Jay 2013, 313). Prior to the reform, women could not marry without the consent of a male guardian and after marriage they were legally bound to obey their husbands. Moreover, while men could repudiate their wives without cause and file for divorce, women had to have specific grounds and the approval of a court of law. The debate around the new family code led to significant changes in these areas. It also helped inform Moroccans about legal dispositions that maintain a hierarchy between the sexes. Zitan’s company actively participated in post-reform campaigns meant to make the family code’s new amendments better known to and understood by the public, especially women. The company produced a play, Chaqaiqou Annou’amane (Poppies), which they performed between 2004 and 2011 in theaters, souks, schools, universities, and prisons in Morocco and Spain. The play is composed of several short scenes that explain to the public the meaning of the eleven new amendments of the family code. Cleo Jay describes Chaqaiqou Annou’amane as a ‘performance’ of the Mudawana.15 Within the framework of the sociopolitical context during the Arab uprisings, Dialy can be described as a performance of the limits of the 2004 reform and as an articulation of the difficulties for women to fully benefit from the advances prescribed by the law. Studies conducted in the wake of the reform show that a majority of Moroccans, especially amongst those lacking formal education, do not know about the changes in the Mudawana or do not fully grasp what has actually changed. Additionally, the application of the new amendments proved difficult, considering resistance to the idea of sexual equality, both amongst the public and within judicial institutions where judges who may not take into account the reformed Mudawana continue to hold significant power.16 Finally, women’s rights continue to suffer from their instrumentalization by the Moroccan state and the monarchy. While the state officially commits itself to making women’s rights a priority, as part of a communication strategy to promote the image of a modern and democratic regime, the legal measures taken to that end remain insufficient. As a result, despite the advances it brought, the Mudawana is still being used by the state to ground national identity and promote gendered and patriarchal values of family and

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kinship.17 Dialy’s micro-stories aim at making the public mindful of women’s lived experiences with regard to gendered oppressive norms and practices embedded in every aspect of Moroccan society, including family life, school, religious and cultural rituals, and law enforcement. Zitan explains that the goal of the play is not to tell Moroccans what they should do or think about issues such as premarital sex, but rather to make women’s stories of violence accessible to the public (personal conversation, May 2015). Even though the reform of the Mudawana made it possible for women to enter marriage without the consent of a male guardian, to hold equal responsibilities and rights within a marriage, and to file for divorce, for many activists and social actors, the law did not go far enough to protect women from abuse and discrimination. During the protests that sprang from the Arab uprisings, individual women amongst the protesters and women’s organizations brought the issue of gender equality to the movement, even though women’s rights and equality between the sexes were not initially stressed by major actors such as the February 20 Movement. This activism caused women’s rights to be inscribed in the 2011’s constitution with Article 19.18 Affirming the importance of women’s self-empowerment through an active voicing of their issues, Dialy represents an example of the use of testimony, art, and cultural production to participate in the sociopolitical transformations Morocco has been undergoing since the 1990s. At the same time, the play represents an alternative sociocultural discourse that aims at introducing a gender perspective to legal and attitudinal changes regarding women’s issues and presence in the public sphere. Like many organizations in the arts, media, and civil society seeking to promote women’s rights in recent years, Théâtre Aquarium builds on strategies of resistance put in place by feminist groups since the early 2000s. Indeed, since the failure of Plan d’Action National pour l’Intégration de la Femme au Développement (Action Plan for the Integration of Women in Development, PANIFD), a comprehensive project sponsored by the World Bank and the Moroccan government launched in 1998 and withdrawn in 2000 after strong opposition from the Islamists and other political actors, secular feminists have favored direct contact with the population. According to Zakia Salime, the goal of this new strategy was to create opportunities for liberal feminists ‘to speak in their own voices, instead of being defined by Islamist preachers and activists in local mosques, markets, and schools’ (2011, 86–87). Primarily relying on testimony and reworking ordinary language, with

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Dialy, Sano and Zitan participate in invigorating new practices of Moroccan theater and Moroccan secular feminist discourses. The play’s focus on women’s sexuality and the script’s refusal to compromise in order to fit normative politics of reception in Morocco is part of the innovations that started in the 1990s and 2000s and which challenge ‘the hegemonic discursive structures that control theatre practice in Morocco’ and question the perception of ‘artistic expression as a luxury rather than being functional in the construction of cultural identity’ (Amine and Carlson 2012, 208). Sano and Zitan also distance themselves from secular feminist movements that favor an alliance with the monarchy and advocate top-down and state-controlled reform. The play’s implicit message stresses the limits of these reforms to bring about true liberation for women. Despite the notable advances brought about by the Mudawana reform and the new constitution, during the period of preparation for Dialy and at the time of its first performance, the Moroccan penal code still contained Article 475, allowing rapists to marry their victims to avoid prosecution and jail. Moreover, women’s increased visibility in government, in the economic sector, and in civil society, propelled by the political transition into a more democratic rule that began in 1999, was accompanied by new forms of exclusion and intimidation. Not only does the inclusion of women in local and national governing bodies and associations not necessarily translate into equality between the sexes (and may even reproduce discriminatory norms), the presence of women and women’s issues in the public sphere continues to be contested by political and cultural actors.19 The numerous assaults against women in public spaces in various Moroccan cities in recent years, publicized through social media, show that women continue to suffer from the perception that their bodies do not belong to them and that they are not free to occupy public space the same way men do. Similarly to women who are attacked because they are perceived as transgressors because of their presence in the public space, because of the way they dress, or because of voicing the need for women’s rights, Zitan and Dialy’s actresses were victims of a violent campaign of denigration by the media, politicians, cultural actors, and anonymous Moroccans. They even faced death threats, including a Facebook page that called for their murder and which received 5,000 likes. 20 The Islamist newspaper Attajdid claimed that the creators of works such as Dialy use provocation and licentiousness to undermine Islamic movements and to prevent them from expressing their viewpoints on art and creation (Jay 2013a, 315). When discussing these attacks,

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Zitan particularly emphasizes those coming from respected men in her own profession, such as renowned playwrights Abdelkarim Berchid and Abdelkader Badawi. According to Zitan, without having seen the play, Badawi claimed that Dialy, because it was sponsored by foreign institutions, was an attack on Moroccan culture and identity (personal conversation with Zitan, April 2015). Berchid, in a scolding review, condemned the play for immorality, pornography, and aesthetic impropriety. 21 As was the case in the mobilization against the PANIFD and attempts to change the family code in the late 1990s and early 2000s, men in the political and cultural establishment and conservative Islamists joined forces to block women’s efforts to challenge existing ways of representing women and women’s issues. Even though Dialy continues to be performed sporadically in Morocco and abroad, 22 the campaign against it proved effective. Not only did the play not receive any Moroccan funding (the company’s sole partner for the production is the Institut Français [French Institute] in Rabat), it never made it to major venues in Morocco. Dialy’s detractors, who deem the play’s style and content too provocative and licentious, mobilize a discourse and a history of marginalization that associates women’s public performance for male or mixed audiences with immoral behavior. Mona Kino notes that throughout history, ‘Arab female performers earned a respectable name and status when they took notice of the social boundaries which set the articulation of intimate artistic expressions in private spaces, and were treated as outsiders when their performances were made public for male or mixed audiences.’23 Within the Moroccan context, even though female performers have been part of cultural life and folklore since at least the late nineteenth century, they have occupied an ambiguous position and their situation has remained fragile. For instance, female popular singers designated by the term shikha (plural shikhat) perform for male and female audiences and their bodies, voices, and the themes of their songs about love, community, and politics transgress gender and space norms. They suffer from a great stigma associated with their profession. For the term shikha is also commonly used to refer to what society sees as a morally corrupt woman or a prostitute. This popular use of the term shikha extends to women who publicly assert their individual freedoms or engage in activities viewed by conservative members of society as reserved for men. As a result of the negative view of women in the performing arts, even though Moroccan women actively participated in the renewal of theater in the post-independence era, until recently,

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very few have enjoyed visibility or recognition either nationally or internationally. 24 More importantly, critics such as Berchid, who condemned the play while refusing to see it or engage with its message and the strategies it deploys to convey it, deprived Dialy of a complex and fair critique that highlights both its successes and failures in unsettling traditional representations of women. It is true that, in the last two decades, works like the plays produced by Théâtre Aquarium have participated in the promotion of an official discourse on women’s rights and issues largely controlled by the state and foreign NGOs who sometimes fund their shows and projects. However, all female theater companies and companies that focus on the representation of women and women’s issues such as Théâtre Aquarium and Takoon, another company created in 1993 and revived in 2003, have been instrumental in creating a space for women’s expression in theater and in the renewal of the performing arts in the last two decades. Even though the two companies predate the official end of the Years of Lead in 1999, they are the precursors of a number of young companies such as Dabateatr (2004), Théâtre Nomade (2006), Colokolo (2007), Spectacle pour tous (2010), and many others whose innovative practices contribute to modernizing the performing arts in Morocco and promoting socially committed works that tackle issues like poverty, corruption, and sociopolitical violence. In regard to issues of gender, these companies provide much-needed role models and diversity in cultural practices (Jay 2013a, 306). For Laura Chakravarty Box, their presence and the success of the plays they produce indicate that Morocco is ‘on the cusp of a new artistic period, one in which women and minorities will have the chance to participate’ (2008, 15). Thus, with its refusal to filter the language of women’s sexuality and their relationships to their bodies, Dialy, though it capitalizes on the Moroccan state’s and the monarchy’s promotion of women’s rights as a sign of democratization, transgresses the limits of regulated spaces and performances that are made available for women. In addition, the play’s mobilization of testimonial theater represents a challenge to dominant discourses imposed by Western funders who support the Moroccan establishment’s official commitment to women’s rights. The articulation of a script entirely inspired by stories lived by Moroccan women and the use of uncensored language communicate the gravity of the interconnection between violence and women’s socialization and sexuality while highlighting the specificities of the Moroccan context. This format incites Moroccan audiences to react differently to familiar subjects, appealing

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to their personal experiences, memories, and emotions, rather than imposing ready-made official discourses that often remain exclusionary. The fusion of testimony, drama, and sociopolitically relevant topics politicizes the processes of women’s socialization and invites the audience to re-evaluate their attitudes towards violent practices and beliefs that oppress women and which have become internalized and normalized. The play also enacts an indisputable emancipation of women who reclaim language, their bodies, and their stories and respond in the public sphere to dominant and oppressive discourses. As is the case for Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, actresses on stage rehabilitate the female body by naming the vagina. At the end of Dialy, they face the public and claim in a multi-voiced declaration: My vagina is a source of life, it is the language of my soul, it is my femininity … it is a woman’s second heart, it is mine, it belongs to me, it goes with me into the small room, into the big room, to the theater, to the hammam, even to the mosque …

Yet Dialy is also problematic in that it largely reiterates a discourse of victimization. The celebration of the female body and the allusion to pleasure is limited to a declaration that lasts less than a minute in a forty-minute performance. None of the stories in the play relate positive experiences of women’s sexuality. In her own testimony in Leila Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges: la vie sexuelle au Maroc (Sex and Lies: Sexual Life in Morocco) (2017), Sano indicates that the majority of the stories that emerged during the listening session were rather dramatic. She explains that she felt that for these women, ‘it seemed more legitimate to talk as victims. They probably fear that having pleasure and claiming it would lead to their association with prostitutes. Generally, we lock women in the role of victims’ (130). 25 Even though she claims that her adaptation of The Vagina Monologues is primarily motivated by a desire to reverse the conditioning of women as solely victims, her script does little to end the taboo on women’s sexual pleasure, which is largely linked to their subalternity in Morocco. From this perspective, the appropriation of the female body and sexuality, as well as of The Vagina Monologues implied in the word ‘dialy,’ remains incomplete and is a missed opportunity to articulate a Moroccan feminism that is grounded in the body. In relation to cultural borrowing and the universalization of feminist ideals, Dialy also reiterates Eve Ensler’s orientalizing of non-Western and minority female sexuality by generally associating different forms of violence with locations outside the United States. In a postcolonial reading of

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Ensler’s play, especially of the piece entitled ‘Under the Burqa’ featuring an Afghan woman, Srimati Basu explains that these ‘global locations serve to signify the terror that is used to hold the laughter in balance, to validate the seriousness of the enterprise, while the “vagina” pieces are more directly associated with pleasure and sexuality and set in the United States.’26 Similarly, in Dialy, the rare moments that allude to love and tenderness are in French and used ironically to contrast Western views with the violence that is paramount in relationships between men and women in Morocco. Dialy does not fail to firmly interrupt patriarchal and imperialist representations of Moroccan (and other non-Western) women because it is immoral or because it is not deeply rooted in local realities, but because it fails to represent women outside of hegemonic patriarchal and imperialist understandings of female sexuality. Digital Qandishates: Gender and Women’s Rights in the Age of Cyberactivism On November 14, 2012, one year after Qandisha, Magazwine collaboratif féminin appeared on the Moroccan electronic media landscape, the webzine’s founder, moderator, and coordinator, Fedwa Misk, wrote in a celebratory note: We were a dozen women on the lookout for the birth of a baby we conceived with a lot of love, faith, and hope. We wanted to create an offbeat, outrageously subjective space which would shed light on women’s real problems and interests, but which would also make them more aware of the politics of our country, which are at the origin of many of our troubles. 27

The above description puts the accent on the webzine’s aspiration to offer a discursive space for contributors and readers to share and discuss content that valorizes subjective interaction with sociopolitical issues that women encounter in contemporary Moroccan society. Such a description is consistent with the Qandisha’s objective to promote ‘independent over collective thinking.’28 It is also consistent with how youth in the MENA region have been using new media and new technologies to negotiate power in a region dominated by autocratic regimes and traditional sociopolitical views which they feel exclude them and other minoritized groups. The so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has revealed or inspired scores of cyber activists who use blogs, citizen

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journalism platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets to spark debate about issues that are overlooked or censured in official and traditional media. In Morocco, Qandisha and Mamfakinch (No Concessions), also created in 2011, exemplify the new collaborative and militant digital media publications that have been attempting to craft alternative sociopolitical discourses and promote reform through participatory journalism and citizenship in Morocco. Like Dialy, Qandisha was borne from the liberalization of speech brought about by the Arab uprisings and the protests organized by the February 20 Movement. It is also a response to another kind of cultural shift, that of women’s presence in public forums and spaces of political contestation. Misk, a journalist and blogger, created the webzine on November 14, 2011 to bring a gender lens to the socioeconomic and political transformations of Morocco and other Arab societies after the ‘Arab Spring.’ In an interview with French radio station France culture, broadcasted on August 9, 2014, Misk recalls February 20, 2011 as the date of the Moroccan revolution. Though the protests and changes in Morocco were far less dramatic than what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, Misk said she felt that Moroccans had undergone a revolutionary mental change, especially with the youth in the streets showing that they were no longer afraid of speaking out. 29 At the same time, despite these signs of liberalization, Misk also noticed an absence of women’s issues during these protests. A seasoned journalist and feminist, Misk observed the popular protests in the streets in Morocco and other Arab countries for months and realized that women were having a hard time expressing claims specific to their situation. Some women were verbally and physically assaulted for chanting feminist slogans. Misk also realized that Moroccan women’s reality was not reflected in influential women’s magazines in Morocco with their focus on the ‘typical beauty-fashion-cooking trio.’30 Like many women activists and groups promoting gender equality who were taking advantage of the momentum inherent in the demand for reform that shook the region, Misk and a few close friends turned to the internet to forge a womencentric space of contestation and collaboration that could generate a discourse able to undermine the mindset that normalizes and perpetuates gender-based violence. The group also favored the internet for its low cost and immediate national and international visibility, which proved to be an effective strategy. Qandisha encountered instant success and the website logged 10,000 visitors on the first day, including 7,000 unique visitors, and 150 mostly positive comments. 31 This initial enthusiasm for

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the webzine showed that Qandisha was able to respond to a demand for alternative spaces and tools among segments of the Moroccan population who were engaged in imagining new forms of participatory citizenship. Since its appearance, the webzine has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators from Morocco, Algeria, France, and Tunisia, who post their texts in French, Arabic, Darija, and English. Anonymity, easy access, and the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) afforded by the internet have provided women with endless possibilities for self- and collective representation. With testimonies and opinion pieces on current events as its main content, Qandisha primarily relies on writing to instigate debate. The webzine builds on strategies used previously by Moroccan feminist groups and media and is consistent with Moroccan women’s efforts to use writing as a tool to raise feminist and political consciousness and challenge the hegemonic patriarchal order. Indeed, since the early 1980s, academic and fiction texts in French and Arabic, such as those by Fatima Mernissi and Leila Abouzeid, have highlighted women’s visible and invisible participation in building the postcolonial Moroccan nation and the many obstacles they have faced as they seek their emancipation. In addition, a number of women’s magazines were created by activists committed to gender equality and used as platforms for the politicization of women’s oppression and the promotion of their civil rights. Periodicals whose format and content resonate with Qandisha’s include Arabic-language magazines Thamania Mars (March 8), founded in 1983 by Latifa Jbabdi, Aicha Lkhoumass, Khadija Amiti, Fatima Outaleb, and other women associated with the political party the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires (Socialist Union of Popular Forces, USFP), and Nisaa’ Al Maghrib (Women of Morocco), created in 1986 by the Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (Democratic Association of Moroccan Women, ADFM); and the French-language magazine Kalima, created in 1986 by businessman-activist Noureddine Ayouch and edited by feminist journalist Hinde Taarji. Even though they addressed different reading publics in different languages, these three magazines raised important issues such as women’s status, women’s right to education, the family code, women and labor, and violence against women. In doing so, they created new discursive spaces for women to counteract the failure of King Hassan II’s attempt at modest reform to improve women’s condition in the early 1980s and paved the way for twenty-first-century feminist publications. 32

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Loubna Skalli, a scholar of women’s writing in the MENA region, insists on the historical and political importance of the Moroccan feminist press and women’s use of the tool of writing in the 1980s: These early experiments in press writing have been, until fairly recently, either overlooked in research on Moroccan press or quickly dismissed as inconsequential. Yet, it is precisely in these early attempts that we can see the urgency with which women started to negotiate, as they still do today, an identity within the emerging nation and to carve out a space within it […] early women writers already recognized the potential benefit they could gain from using the press. Most important, perhaps, it is their realization that in the ‘culture of silence,’ to borrow Paulo Freire’s useful expression, the writing and the reading of the oppressed constitute a subversive force that is both transgressive and transforming. (2006, 60)

Qandisha is a reactivation of these earlier experiments that played a crucial role in the assertion of women as speaking and thinking subjects during another pivotal period in Moroccan history. In addition to writing and reading to position women as agents of change in their communities in times of transition, the webzine imagined by Misk further shares with the 1980s experiments in feminist activism the spirit of collaboration and the use of individual writers who are committed to women’s conditions but, for the most part, have little formal journalistic experience or training. Initially, the collaborative form of Qandisha was not a choice, but rather a creative response to the lack of funds necessary to hire a team of professional journalists. 33 Even though Misk has worked as a freelance journalist for several Moroccan and foreign publications, the majority of the nearly one hundred women and twenty men volunteers who were contributing to the webzine by 2014 had no formal journalistic expertise or experience. As a result, aside from the posts related to the topic of the day, the rest of the content of Qandisha is open, hence the large number of testimonial and opinion pieces. Trading professional journalism for activism and collaboration promotes independent thinking and a diversity of opinion in public space that renders previously silenced voices audible, leading to the fragmentation of authoritative discourses on issues such as equality between the sexes, sexuality, sexual orientation, and individual freedoms. Like Thamania Mars and Nisaa’ Al Maghrib, Qandisha relies on testimonials to valorize women’s and other groups’ experiences and to sensitize the public to the legitimacy of their claims. Some of the high-impact pieces published in Qandisha relate their authors’ personal

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experiences or personal engagement with current events. For instance, in 2012, in its rubric reserved for men and entitled ‘Qandil’homme’ (‘What the man has to say’), Qandisha published an open letter by a young gay man, ‘Oui, je suis homosexuel, mais pas que …’ (‘Yes, I am gay, but that’s not all I am’). The piece poignantly describes the sadness and anger of a young man who feels that his life doesn’t belong to him because most of his choices are dictated by his sexual orientation. ‘I live in paranoia and it’s very exhausting. I am only in my early twenties, but I’m already tired. I would have liked to experience the carelessness that comes with youth, but I constantly have to make decisions about things that are beyond my control and it exhausts me.’34 The letter inspired numerous comments from readers in Morocco and abroad, mostly containing supportive messages. However, some commenters also denounced what they view as an unnatural practice incompatible with Islam. Some even called for the eradication of people who engage in such practices. The fact that only a very small minority of comments in reaction to a piece that calls for the normalization of homosexual relationships were violent is not indicative of how Moroccan society and state view same-sex relations, but rather a sign of the fact that Qandisha’s audience is mostly composed of secular liberals. In Morocco, same-sex relations are criminalized by Article 489 of the penal code and are actively prosecuted. Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle explains that even if homosexuals are not systematically persecuted, ‘they live under the cover of silence, always in fear of being exposed to discourses of power: family honor, religious respectability, and state authority.’35 Yet the publication of ‘Oui, je suis homosexuel’ is a potent example of the use of the internet by marginalized groups to build community and find validation and support in a society where public space and discourse remain highly regulated and controlled by the state and conservative opinions. Like other alternative and recent activism, such as Woman Choufouch, 36 a group created in 2011 that combats street harassment, and the Mouvement alternatif pour les libertés individuelles (Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms, MALI), a secular group that fights for individual freedoms, Qandisha uses the relative freedom of expression offered by the internet to shed light on taboo issues and introduce them into public debate. However, unlike these groups which focus on specific issues, Qandisha also uses the internet to build bridges between various marginalized groups who seek to change the sociopolitical status quo in Morocco. In this sense, it is a product of the Arab

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uprisings in Morocco and the February 20 Movement, which attracted a wide variety of supporters with sometimes different agendas, including leftists, secularists, and Islamists. When compared to the Moroccan street and mainstream media, Qandisha emerges as a truly alternative space. In recent years, the Moroccan public and authorities became aware, mainly through videos posted on social media, of several cases of attacks against men and women accused of being homosexual by ordinary citizens in the street or in their homes. For instance, in June 2015, a young man was violently attacked by an enraged crowd in the streets of Fes after they accused him of being transgender and a homosexual. Even though he was beaten up and his belongings were stolen, the police took him, rather than his attackers, into custody for the night. 37 This happened only a few days after the public television channel Al Oula outed two men accused of being homosexual on the widely viewed evening news program while reporting on an unrelated subject, revealing their identity and exposing them to potential harm. 38 In May 2016, another video appeared showing two bloody men in Beni Mellal who were taken from their apartment and beaten up by a crowd accusing them of immoral behavior. Following the events, the two men were arrested and jailed for improper behavior. When a court finally decided to release them and jail some of their attackers, anti-gay protests erupted demanding their release. 39 The internet thus allows Qandisha to give a space and a voice to parts of the population that are often silenced and dehumanized by the authorities and their fellow citizens. It also offers its public a relatively safe space to react to current events and issues and re-examine policies that curb individual freedoms and the rights of marginalized groups. For instance, after a sixteen-year-old girl committed suicide to escape a marriage to a man who allegedly raped her (an event known as the Amina Filali scandal, after the victim), Qandisha launched a call inviting women to tell their stories of rape. According to Misk, the goal was to demonstrate that no woman who lives the ordeal of a rape would freely agree to marry her attacker.40 As such, the project was designed to offer a narrative to challenge Article 475 of the penal code, which allows rapists of under-age victims to escape prosecution if they marry them. Both the existence of the article and its application in courts testify to the patriarchal mindset of the legal and social systems. Indeed, as was the case for Filali, the decision to contract a marriage with the rapist of a minor is often decided by a judge and the family of the victim, who sacrifice the rights and the happiness of the girl to save the family’s

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honor.41 Under the heading ‘J’ai été violée …’ (‘I was raped …’), the webzine published in French nine testimonies of women who were raped and later translated them into English and Spanish. Despite the relatively low number of original testimonies, many more women posted their stories in the comments, thus constituting a significant archive that counteracts the official discourse claiming that Article 475 serves the interest of victims of rape. Most women who decided to share their stories anonymously wrote that they did not report the crime to the authorities or speak about it with family members and friends. This is not surprising, as the stories of those who spoke about their experience prior to writing it down shed light on an extremely violent culture of silence imposed on women by their families and the legal system. For instance, a poster identified as ‘FD’ writes that after announcing to her mother that one her cousins confided in her about being raped by an uncle, she found out that her own mother as well as at least two other cousins had been raped by the same man. In her testimony, FD expresses her disgust at this culture of silence: The whole family knows about it and nobody says anything, nobody does anything. I met [that man] at a wedding last year. I wanted to scream, to kill him! To spit in the face of all this family with supposedly such high values but which is so hypocritical. I am disgusted by my cowardice too.42

Magda, who was repeatedly raped between the age of five or six and sixteen by a maternal uncle, also explains that when, many years later, she finally had the courage to confront her uncle and report the rape, her mother stopped speaking to her and she could not find a lawyer willing to bring the perpetrator to justice. She concludes her story: I’m not afraid of a scandal. I did not do anything wrong!!! I am the victim! But justice and my ‘mother’ are Moroccan, they do not believe me, they reject me, they do not want justice for me. Yet it would change my life once again because I was punished all my life and not him …43

HM, a French woman living in Morocco, explains that she was raped by a man she considered a friend. After considering reporting the rape to the authorities, she decided against it because she knew she would be blamed for having invited a man into her home. FS and JK explain that they kept silent because they thought their parents would not be able to emotionally stand the news. Finally, SF explains that she was severely beaten by her father at the age of six when he found out that their neighborhood grocer had been molesting her.

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These testimonies, like the micro-stories of rape and other forms of violence against women in Dialy, are women-centered and charged with affect. They focus on women’s physical and psychological trauma, which brings to the public space a discourse that is often muted by dominant patriarchal institutions and traditional media. They also highlight an important shift in the way in which women’s bodies and rights are socially and legally discussed. For sociologist Zakia Salime, the proliferation of women’s micronarratives and individuated sentiments constitutes ‘an emergent discursive field through which public affect […] and new and contested forms of state legality were engaged, contested, and re-articulated’ (2016, 100). These testimonies and other narratives commenting on Filali’s and other women’s rapes expose the deeply rooted patriarchal mindset of Moroccan institutions despite the nationally and internationally praised 2004 reform of the family code and the 2011 constitution. Scholar of women’s and human rights in the MENA region Amy Young Evrard explains that court decisions in cases like Filali’s mean that the ‘Moroccan legal system has relegated rape to the realm of the family rather than making it a state crime, harkening back to a time before the “women’s human rights” frame was used to bring violence against women into the public sphere’ (2014, 271). The shame, helplessness, disbelief, outrage, and revolt expressed in testimonies, comments, and opinion pieces that circulate on the web produce archives that precipitate an alternative interpretation of these cases and events. Much of the literature on the twenty-first-century Arab uprisings shows that the internet and social media played an important role in the diffusion of the popular protest that led to the toppling of dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, as well as to the advent of a new constitution in Morocco.44 The internet was used as an effective tool to mobilize support for nascent dissident movements of all kinds and, in the aftermath of popular protests, it was used by platforms like Qandisha to sustain the momentum of demands for change and reform. The capacity of these alternative media outlets to challenge political, legal, and religious authority extends beyond virtual public spaces. For instance, Misk affirms that the webzine’s campaign against rape had a significant impact on the campaign to amend Article 475 in 2014. She also believes the debate played a significant role in provoking the retrial in 2015 of a rape case involving Hassan Arif, a member of Parliament who was acquitted in 2013 after he claimed he did not personally know his victim (Malika Slimani) and because the court refused to consider DNA tests proving the presence of his sperm

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on the victim’s underwear and his paternity of her child, born of a pregnancy that was the result of the alleged rape (Misk 2015, 246). Arif’s case received public attention after a young blogger, Marwa Belghazi, published an account of the trial on her blog as well as on several digital media sites including Qandisha and Yabiladi.45 Even though the 2015 court decision ruling in favor of the victim was repealed by the Court of Appeal of Casablanca in 2017, the publicity the case got on the internet inspired a film titled 475: Trêve de silence (475: Break the Silence) (2014) by Hind Bensari, a young Moroccan woman and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who used social media to publicize and fund her project (Salime 2016, 98). Belghazi’s text and Bensari’s film not only challenged Moroccan patriarchal institutions, they also utilized the internet and digital media to restore the voices and the stories of women dismissed by legal and social norms. Despite the many resemblances between Qandisha and activist women’s magazines of the 1980s, the webzine also marks novel ways of protest and resistance. Hosting pieces by a diverse community of men and women comprised of renowned writers and journalists, enthusiastic bloggers, and many anonymous citizens living in Morocco and elsewhere who write in French, English, literary Arabic, and Darija, Qandisha reflects improvements in education, literacy, and mobility achieved in the decade preceding its creation. Its ability to bend social, geographical, and sometimes ideological boundaries makes it a vibrant laboratory for imagining alternative realities and forms of citizenship. The diversity, accessibility, and openness of a platform that allows any reader to comment on any given publication leads to a creative unpredictability that can test Morocco’s sociopolitical red lines in radical ways. A piece written by novelist and journalist Bahaa Trabelsi and the thirty comments it received are a telling example of how digital media can escape the official censorship and self-censorship that maintain pervasive restrictions on freedom of speech in contemporary Morocco. ‘Demain, peut être …’ (‘Tomorrow, maybe …’) was published on August 3, 2013, in reaction to King Mohammed VI’s pardon of a Spanish pedophile, Daniel Galvan Viña, sixty-two, who was convicted by a Moroccan court of raping and filming eleven children between the ages of three and fourteen from 2003 to 2010. The piece expresses its author’s outrage and frustration: Our history speaks for us. We believed in change or we wanted to believe in it. We swallowed a new constitution without real freedom, without

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freedom of conscience, subject to the ‘national constants.’ We have accepted a polygamous Minister of Justice and Freedoms, a Minister of the Family and blah blah blah who is practically illiterate, the attempt to impose upon us a clean culture, the will to marry young girls to their rapists, a schizophrenic government composed of an improbable coalition, an opposition that impatiently awaits for its turn to take part in the masquerade, voices of protest that have been crushed, serious attacks on individual freedoms, homosexuals accused of being sick and imprisoned, people we judge and sentence to three months in prison because they eat during Ramadan, and today we must accept in silence the pardon of a child rapist for a fictional story evoking reasons of state […]. My indignation as an individual, a woman, a mother, and a citizen has no limits.46

The piece, though charged with affect, pragmatically conforms to implicit Moroccan standards of public speech that dictate well-understood red lines that are not to be crossed, such as questioning the legitimacy of the monarchy and its dominant role in the political system. However, some commenters such as Samya wrote direct attacks against the king, describing the pardon as a symbol of the corruption of the institution of the monarchy and its subjugation of the Moroccan people. She calls King Mohammed VI ‘un roi prédateur’ (a predator king), in reference to a 2012 book, Le Roi Prédateur (The Predator King), written by journalists Catherine Graciet and Eric Lauren and published in France, describing how the king has quintupled his wealth in his eleven years on the throne, and ‘un proxénète’ (a pimp). Samya’s full-throated and public criticism of the monarchy and the person of the king is a rare instance in Morocco, because journalists, singers, and newspapers who voice criticism of the makhzen often find themselves involved in lengthy trials leading to imprisonment or heavy fines. Qandisha has been hacked many times and its contributors have received death threats from people who disagree with the webzine’s content. However, its ability to bypass certain forms of censorship fosters a different kind of community building. Individuals with similar views and goals can share personal experiences and opinions and produce knowledge in a somewhat safe space. The website also allows for interaction between individuals with different world views, which promotes debate, something that is crucial in a country that is still grappling with its dark past of human rights violations and where a semi-authoritarian regime is still learning how to negotiate demands for individual freedoms and freedom of speech. From a gender perspective,

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though Qandisha claims to be a feminist webzine and its content focuses heavily on women’s issues and rights, its approach to feminism is also novel for Morocco. The site attracts feminists with different sensibilities, including committed secular feminists like Fedwa Misk or veiled women like Fatima Zohra Riad, one of the first contributors, who has written several pieces in Arabic on a variety of subjects. This openness contrasts with attitudes of traditional secular feminist organizations, such as the ADFM, who exclude veiled women or consider the veil to be a symbol of oppression of women (Salime 2011, 95). The inclusiveness of Qandisha reflects a changing reality in Morocco, where the veil has shifted from a strong marker of the boundaries of secularism and Islamism to a ‘means for blurring these boundaries and bridging gaps between women from various economic backgrounds and political sensibilities’ (Salime 2011, 135). Qandisha also gives a platform to men, who are invited to write and comment on the various pieces published on the website, which further inscribes women’s voices and issues within a broader societal context of protest and resistance. The Birth of a New Moroccan Feminist? In the above-cited note celebrating the one-year anniversary of Qandisha, Misk uses a childbearing metaphor to evoke the advent of an alternative space for feminism and public communication. The title of the webzine also evokes the birth a new kind of Moroccan feminist, a woman who, while deeply concerned with the local context, does not conform to Moroccan ideals of femininity. The name Qandisha is a reference to Aicha Kandicha, a well-known figure in Moroccan popular mythology and a spirit who can inhabit the bodies of women or take the shape of a woman to entice men and destroy them. Everywhere in Morocco and in parts of Algeria, Aicha Kandicha, a figure that occupies a place between the human and the animal, symbolizes the seductress and the castrating woman. The founders of the magazine chose the name Qandisha to immediately evoke the demonization of women in Morocco, especially those who speak out against patriarchal norms, as well as in anticipation of the attacks they knew would come from conservative members of Moroccan society (Ulrich 2013). In short, the woman who identifies as a Qandisha assumes and reclaims the part of femininity that is traditionally repressed in Moroccan society. Similarly, with its focus on reworking ordinary language and voicing topics surrounding women’s

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sexuality and relationships to their bodies, Dialy implicitly announces the birth of a new feminine/feminist speaking subject, one that dares to name the female body and express its language. The idea behind the play is thus to rework a Moroccan reality where women’s increased access to education and their participation in the political and economic spheres do not amount to their liberation from patriarchal diktats. Yet both Qandisha and Dialy have the potential to be interpreted as controlled expressions that also reinforce the dominant and patriarchal institutions leading the country. Digital protest, especially when it shifts to protest in the street or when it attracts the attention of international media, can force the regime to bend to popular demand and create important legal precedents. This was the case with the advent of the 2011 constitution and the amendment of Article 475 as a result of the campaign following Amina Filali’s suicide. It was also the case with the pardon of the Spanish pedophile, which became known as ‘Danielgate.’ Popular protest forced the Royal Cabinet into an unprecedented gesture, explaining the king’s decision by issuing two press releases, one announcing his decision to withdraw his pardon and another explaining that he had had no knowledge of the case prior to signing the pardon. However, most of these changes also testify to the ability of the regime, especially the monarchy, to co-opt popular protest and use it as a strategy to craft an image of progressive institutions without instigating profound change. As far as women’s issues are concerned, since the 2004 family code reform, most changes have been limited or even cosmetic without a reform process that looks at gender from a broad perspective and in relation to the many contradictions that exist between the various legislative documents. Innovative cultural productions such as Dialy and Qandisha also participate in promoting the image of a progressive nation where artists can freely express their creativity and produce socially engaged works. However, initiatives that fall outside what is considered acceptable by dominant norms remain contained and accessible to a limited public as a result of funding difficulties or public campaigns of denigration.47 Within this context, no matter how radical they may appear, Qandisha and Dialy are not purveyors of widespread change. They signal that women are important actors in Morocco’s politics of transition, producing important work that will gradually improve women’s situation, without radically destabilizing power centers. Analyzing the content and the dual reception of Dialy and Qandisha in this context illustrates women’s participation in the revolutionary imagination that has been taken out into Maghrebi streets in recent

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years. Most crucially, it has the advantage of doing so while showing profound divisions around women’s rights and sexuality and the uneasy cohabitation of contemporary Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies. Notes 1 Quotes from the play are transcribed from the first performance on June  15, 2012 at Théâtre Aquarium. Translations from Moroccan Darija to English are mine. 2 My translation. Original French: ‘Quand les femmes prennent leur courage à deux mains et se décident à parler, c’est principalement dans un cercle restreint, avec les voisines ou les copines. Ce qui restreint leurs possibilités d’enrichissement personnel et limite leurs perspectives d’ouverture.’ Nouhad Fathi, ‘Théâtre. Le Monologue du vagin … en darija.’ TelQuel (December 24, 2011) [accessed in September 2014]. 3 My translation. Original French: ‘excision culturelle des mots et des expressions liées à la sexualité féminine.’ Ayla Mrabet, ‘Aquarium. L’école des femmes,’ TelQuel (December 18, 2013) [accessed September 2014]. 4 My translation. Original French: ‘le vocabulaire [à la disposition de la femme pour parler de son vagin ou de sa sexualité] est tellement violent que cela l’incite à en faire un tabou, à ne pas le formuler.’ Maha Sano, ‘Appeler une chatte …,’ in Leila Slimani (ed.), Sexe et mensonges: la vie sexuelle au Maroc (Paris: Editions des Arènes, 2017), pp. 129–133, 131. 5 Personal conversation with Naïma Zitan (Paris, March 5, 2015 and Rabat, May 5, 2015). 6 See Fatima Bakass and Michèle Ferrand, ‘Sexual Debut in Rabat: New “Arrangements” between the Sexes,’ trans. Roger Depledge, Population, 68.1 (January–March 2013), pp. 41–65. 7 Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson, The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the Maghreb (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 98. 8 Cleo Jay, ‘Acting Up: Performance and the Politics of Womanhood in Contemporary Morocco,’ Journal of African Cultural Studies, 25.3 (2013), pp. 305–318, 313. 9 Kees Epskamp, Theatre for Development: An Introduction to Context, Applications and Training (London: Zed Books, 2006), pp. 9–11. 10 Attilio Favorini, ‘Representation and Reality: The Case of Documentary Theatre,’ Theatre Survey, 35.2 (November 1994), pp. 31–43, 32.

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11 Soumaya Naamane Guessous, Au-delà de Toute Pudeur: La Sexualité Féminine au Maroc (Casablanca: Eddif, 1997), pp. 22–23. 12 See Sanaa El Aji, Sexualité et célibat au Maroc: pratiques et verbalisation (Casablanca: Editions croisée des chemins, 2017). 13 ‘Gender Equality and Parity in Morocco: Preserving and Implementing the Aims and Objectives of the Constitution,’ The National Human Rights Council (CNDH), October 20, 2015 [accessed January 2018]. 14 Khalid Amine, ‘Re-enacting Revolution and the New Public Sphere in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco,’ Theatre Research International, 38.2 (2013), pp. 87–103, 88. 15 Cleo Jay, ‘Performing the Moudawana: Feminine Voices in Contemporary Moroccan Theatre,’ in Kene Igweonu and Osita Okagbue (eds), Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 2: Innovation, Creativity and Social Change (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 53–67. 16 See Kamal Mellakh, ‘De la Moudawwana au nouveau Code de la famille au Maroc: une réforme à l’épreuve des connaissances et perceptions “ordinaires,”’ L’Année du Maghreb, II (2007), pp. 35–54. 17 Zakia Salime, ‘Revisiting the Debate on Family Law in Morocco: Context, Actors and Discourses,’ in Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai (eds), Gender and Family Laws in a Changing Middle East and South Asia (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), pp. 145–162, 161–162. 18 Zaineb Touati, ‘The Struggle For Women’s Rights in Morocco: From Historical Feminism to 20 February 2011 Activism,’ in Muhamad Olimat (ed.), Arab Spring and Arab Women: Challenges and opportunities (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 121–132, 129–130. 19 See Yasmine Berriane, ‘Le Maroc au temps des femmes? La féminisation des associations locales en question,’ Année du Maghreb, VII (2011), pp. 332–342. 20 Emmanuelle Jardonnet, ‘Sur scène, des Marocaines osent parler du “leur,”’ Le Monde (April 10, 2015) [accessed August 2015]. 21 Abdelkarim Berchid, ‘If Some “Women” Have a Problem with Their Vagina, It Is Their Personal Issue’ [original text in Arabic], Hespress (July 4, 2012) [accessed September 10, 2017]. 22 The last two performances of Dialy took place on March 22, 2018 (Cinéma Realto, Casablanca, Morocco) and April 5, 2018 (Cinéma Ritz and Cinema Rialto, Casablanca, Morocco). 23 Mona Knio, ‘Women in the Performing Arts,’ Al-Raida, 122–123 (2008), pp. 3–6, 4.

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24 Laura Chakravarty Box, ‘North Africa’s Performing Women: Notes from the Field,’ Al-Raida, 122–123 (2008), pp. 8–16, 10. 25 My translation. Original French: ‘il leur apparaissait plus légitime de s’exprimer en tant que victimes. En prenant du plaisir et en le revendiquant, elles auraient sans doute craint d’être assimilées à des prostituées. De manière générale, on a tendance à enfermer les femmes dans ce rôle de victimes.’ 26 Srimati Basu, ‘V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism: Global Feminisms in The Vagina Monologues,’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 31.1 (2010), pp. 31–62, 32. 27 Fewda Misk, ‘Qandisha: un an de vie,’ Qandisha (November 14, 2012) [accessed September 2017]. My translation. Original French: ‘Nous étions une dizaine de femmes à guetter la naissance d’un bébé conçu avec beaucoup d’amour, de foi et d’espoir. Nous voulions créer cet espace décalé, outrageusement subjectif, qui apporterait la lumière sur les vraies problèmes et centres d’intérêt des femmes, mais qui permettrait également de les sensibiliser davantage à la politique du pays qui se trouve être à l’origine d’un grand nombre de nos déboires.’ 28 Fedwa Misk, ‘Quandisha,’ trans. Miriam Cooke and Frances Hasso, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 11.2 (July 2015), pp. 246–247, 246. 29 ‘Nasawiyat. 5ème étape, Maroc: témoigner,’ Chrolotte Bienaimé, Radio France Culture (August 9, 2014) [accessed February 2018]. 30 Claire Ulrich, ‘“Qandisha,” the Women’s Webzine that is Ruffling Feathers in Morocco,’ trans. Jea (June 20, 2013) [accessed August 2017]. 31 Fatma Louati, ‘Fedwa Misk, une Qandisha parmi d’autres,’ Revue d’analyse Femmes et Médias au Maghreb, 8, p. 3 [accessed November 2017]. 32 Eve Sandberg and Kenza Aqertit, Moroccan Women, Activists and Gender Politics: An Institutional Analysis (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), p. 69. 33 Fedwa Misk, ‘Maroc: les médias participatifs à la conquête de la liberté d’expression,’ Atelier des Medias/RFI (Radio France Internationale), Pierrick de Morel (June 27, 2013) [accessed August 2017]. 34 ‘Oui, je suis homosexuel, mais pas que …,’ Qandisha (May 29, 2013)

[accessed September 2017]. 35 Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Muslims (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2010), p. 29.

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36 The group’s name is a play on words that evokes the phrase manchoufouch, or ‘Can’t we see you?’, which is frequently used to catcall women. 37 Nizar Bennamate, ‘Choquant: Une horde d’excités a failli tuer un supposé gay à Fès,’ Telquel (June 30, 2015) [accessed August 2017]. 38 Youssef Roudaby, ‘Deux gays s’embrassent devant la tour Hassan, Al Aoula les “out” dans son JT,’ TelQuel (June 4, 2015) [accessed August 2017]. 39 ‘La justice marocaine “innocente” deux homosexuels,’ Le Monde (December 4, 2016) [accessed August 2017]. 40 ‘J’ai été violée (témoignages),’ Qandisha (March 12, 2012) [accessed September 2017]; Zakia Salime, ‘Gender, Legality, and Public Ethics in Morocco,’ in Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Shari’a Law and Modern Muslim Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 95–116, 98. 41 Hassan Hamdani, ‘Scandale. Amina, victime de la loi,’ TelQuel (March 26, 2012) [accessed March 2012]. 42 My translation. Original testimony in the Comments section in French: ‘Toute la famille le sait et personne ne dit rien, personne ne fait rien. Je croisé [cet homme] à un mariage l’an dernier. Je voulais crier, le tuers! Cracher au visage de toute cette supposée famille aux valeurs si hautes mais qui est si hypocrite. Je suis dégoûtée par ma lâcheté aussi.’ ‘J’ai été violée (témoignages)’ (2012). 43 My translation. Original testimony in the Comments section in French: ‘[J]e n’ai pas peur du scandale je n’ai rien fait moi !!! je suis sa victime !!! mais la justice et comme ma “mere” ils sont marocains, ils ne me croient pas, ils me repoussent, ils ne veulent pas rendre justice pourtant ca changerait encore une fois ma vie car moi j’ai été puni toute ma vie et pas lui…’ 44 Bouziane Zaid, ‘Internet and Democracy in Morocco: A Force for Change and an Instrument for Repression,’ Global Media and Communication, 12.1 (2016), pp. 49–66, 50. 45 Marwa Belghazi, ‘Procès Arif, quand la justice est un théâtre de l’absurde,’ Qandisha (January 18, 2013) [accessed September 2017]. 46 Bahaa Trabelsi, ‘Demain, peut être …,’ Qandisha (August 3, 2013) [accessed September 2017]. My translation. Original French: ‘Notre histoire parle pour nous. Nous

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avons cru aux changements ou nous avons voulu y croire. Nous avons avalé une nouvelle constitution sans réelle liberté, sans liberté de conscience, assujettie aux ‘constantes nationales.’ Nous avons accepté un ministre de la justice et des libertés polygame, une ministre de la famille et des blabla limite analphabète, la tentative d’imposer une culture propre, des jeunes filles violées que l’on veut marier à leurs violeurs, un gouvernement schizophrène, composé d’une coalition improbable, une opposition qui rapidement attend son tour pour participer à la mascarade, des velléités de protestation brimées, des atteintes graves aux libertés individuelles, des homosexuels taxés de malades que l’on emprisonne, des déjeuneurs que l’on juge et condamne à 3 mois de prison, et aujourd’hui, nous devons accepter en silence la grâce d’un violeur d’enfant pour une fictive histoire de raison d’Etat […]. Mon indignation n’a pas de limites en tant qu’individu, que femme, que mère, que citoyenne.’ 47 The recent disappearance in May 2019 of Qandisha from the web is a case in point. When I contacted Fedwa Misk, she explained that she has been doing most of the work practically alone while occupying a full time job and without any funding from national or international organizations. Although she was proud of having maintained the independence of the webzine for years, she further explained that despite her passion for the project, she was no longer able to ensure the quality of the contributions of volunteers and the regular maintenance the website required. However, Misk also reaffirmed the need for Qandisha in the face of growing misogynistic behavior by men and women in Morocco, the propagation of which has been greatly facilitated by the explosion of social media in the country in recent years. Misk also said that she still hopes to be able to resuscitate the project in the future and improve it by introducing video clips in Darija, something she feels will touch a larger public (personal communication, June 2019).

Conclusion The Future of Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biography and Testimony Conclusion

Auto/biography and testimony in Morocco have developed across media and languages and have been shaped by various encounters with transnational and global modes of identity and subjectivity formation. Former prisoners, writers, artists, filmmakers, journalists, bloggers, and activists have in recent decades produced a significant archive that bears witness to individual and collective attempts to inscribe personal, personalized, and marginalized voices in the public space. To be convinced of the importance of this trend, one need only consider cultural productions originating from Morocco and/or staging Morocco in the last decade. Despite an elaborate process of state-sponsored truth-seeking, reconciliation, and reparation conducted under the IER in 2004, former victims of the Years of Lead like Aziz Binebine, author of Tazmamort: Dix-huit ans dans le bagne d’Hassan II (Tazmamort: Eighteen Years in Hassan II’s Prisons) (2009), and Driss Chberreq, author of Le Train Fou: Mémoires d’un Rescapé de Tazmamart, 10 juillet 1971 au 29 octobre 1991 (The Mad Train: Memoirs of a Survivor of Tazmamart, July 10, 1971–October 29, 1991) (2014), continue to publish memoirs, sometimes more than twenty years after the end of their ordeal. Moroccan writers, filmmakers, and artists have also been using the stories of victims of the Years of Lead to produce an alternative archive and engage in modes of memorialization that depart from state-sponsored processes. This is the case for Leila Kilani’s Nos lieux interdits (Our Forbidden Places) (2009), a documentary that borrows many techniques from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) to relate the Years of Lead through the voices of the victims and their families, and their interactions

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with members of the IER. The conflation between auto/biography and testimony goes beyond the narration of the Years of Lead and is marked by its pervasiveness in the cultural milieu. Artists like late Leila Alaoui use their art to archive the lives of contemporary Moroccans. For instance, in 2008, Alaoui spent months traveling through Morocco and following migrants to Europe and the routes they take to get there, which resulted in a photographic series entitled No Pasara, meaning ‘entry denied,’ in which she captures the hopes and despair of the Moroccan youth who regularly risk their lives to illegally cross the Mediterranean. Other artists use their personal histories or their bodies to tell exemplary stories of Moroccan socialization processes and explore the tensions between collective and individual identities. Among these are Hicham Benohoud and Fatima Mazmouz, who have produced works, such as Inter-Version (2010) and Super Oum (Super Mom) (2009) respectively, in which they perform their own bodies to question identity and projections of femininity and masculinity. Rising author Leïla Slimani’s Sex and Lies: Sexual Life in Morocco, cited in Chapter 6, is a collection of Moroccan women’s testimonies on female sexuality that represents an example of the use of testimony and auto/ biography as a way to demystify taboo subjects and instigate dispassionate discussions of the mortifying limitations on individual freedoms. These are only a few examples that show that auto/biographical and testimonial narratives have been thriving in Morocco in recent years. The MENA region is currently experiencing a great deal of turmoil that affects Morocco’s political and economic stability. Morocco’s status as a country simultaneously importing and exporting migrants also makes it a major actor in the current migrant crisis. In addition, the country continues to experience growing social tensions in historically marginalized regions such as the Rif. In this context, personalized expressions voicing individual and collective experiences of Morocco on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, collaborative platforms on the Internet, or through writing, painting, photography, video, social theater, and street performance and art, will continue to mushroom and play an important role in defining public discourse and Moroccan identity. As has been the case since the country’s independence in 1956, women’s participation in the articulation of new modes of self and collective representation will continue to increase. This book’s goal has been to trace foundational and recent developments in Moroccan women’s auto/biographical and testimonial acts through the close analysis of eight specific works in various media as exemplars. The cultural

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productions considered originated from diverse contexts and show a variety of characteristics that are specific to certain modes of expression and/or influenced by the uneven socioeconomic experiences of their authors, as well as their belonging to different linguistic, ethnic, and religious communities. Thus, gathering them under one single category is necessarily reductive. However, it was also a necessary step to identify similar trends and patterns in Moroccan women’s auto/biography and testimony and to provide a methodology and models of inquiry for this under-researched and under-theorized area. A comparative perspective shows that the themes and forms of self- and collective representation chosen by women are rooted in the factors that shape the perception of gender and women’s issues in Morocco: a patriarchal and hierarchical social organization, the influence of Islam as a large majority religion and as religion of the state, the legacies of European colonialism, an authoritarian and later a semi-authoritarian political system dominated by the monarchy, a population that is linguistically and ethnically diverse, an emerging economy marked by great inequality, and the country’s situation as an emigration country with close links to a large diaspora living all over the world, especially in Europe. These factors have played a key role in the country’s colonial and postcolonial history and have impacted women’s access to education, work, and public discourse in significant ways. As a general rule, women’s cultural productions since the 1950s bear the traces—in their themes, structures, styles, and aesthetics—of how women have negotiated these elements in order to record experience and wrestle their way into a male-dominated public sphere of decision-making. One of the major points that Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women’s Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts advances is the historical and cultural importance of the emergence of testimonial literature during the most oppressive period of the Years of Lead in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as during the transition era that began in the 1990s and culminated with the death of King Hassan II in 1999. The explosion in the publication of testimonial and prison narratives at home and abroad has dramatically altered the way in which Moroccans approach storytelling, truth-telling, and the human rights discourse. Accounts of arbitrary arrests, the disappearing of political opponents, torture, and widespread intimidation have also gradually changed the relationship between Moroccan citizens and their ruling elites, the makhzen. For many authors of prison literature, testimony represents a way to come to terms with the unfathomable horrors in the torture

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room and secret prisons, a way to survive and subvert isolation and the exiguity of the prison cell, a way to alert and/or call out the indifference of the public, and a way to resist authoritarianism and imagine different communities and different forms of citizenship. For women, testimonial literature has been the site of a double resistance. In addition to counteracting the regime’s oppressive tactics and, later, its attempts to control the memorialization of the Years of Lead, women’s processes of telling and transmitting personal and collective stories of state-sponsored political violence are haunted by their efforts to challenge sociocultural and political constructs of gender that ensure the perpetuation of women’s subjugation. As a result, the emergence of women’s testimonial literature out of the experience of political violence during the Years of Lead coincides with the appearance of a feminist literature of resistance that openly attacks Moroccan society’s patriarchal foundations. This literature announces and articulates a political feminist discourse that materialized in the 1980s, for the first time primarily focusing on women’s rights and demanding equal rights between the sexes. Prison writings by women like Saïda Menebhi, Fatna El Bouih, Latifa Jbabdi, Widad Bouab, and Malika Oufkir are and have often been analyzed as a part of women’s testimonial literature writ large and understood as a production that is rooted in the social and in which the autobiographical dimension prevails, whether this prevalence is recognized by the authors or not. However, this classification often neglects the specificities of political auto/biographical narratives and their status as radical forms of activism. Most Moroccan women authors of prison memoirs and other writings were not only schooled in the ranks of the opposition movements during the Years of Lead and took tremendous risks to confront the regime, they were also founders, thinkers, and activists within feminist movements that have been playing important roles in Moroccan politics since the 1980s. Their writings are political manifestoes and transformative sites in which gender relations are contested and renegotiated. This facet of their work has yielded a specific feminist aesthetics in which writing is grounded in the suffering, sacrificed, and resistant body of the woman political activist and victim of political violence. In works like Poèmes, Talk of Darkness, and Stolen Lives, the auto/biographical ‘I’ constitutes a different form of civic and political engagement, even when it takes a plural form of self-representation. It also represents a transaction between author and reader that is politically and affectively different from those deriving from fictional and semi-fictional narratives. Women who write political testimonial

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auto/biographies expose themselves to public scrutiny and potential censorship or even retaliation in a way that is very similar to their engagement in activism in political parties and other organizations. The intrusion of the political into literature in this direct way has also had consequences in the way in which women approach testimony, gender, and cultural production. The deeply politicized nature of this literature is visible in the appropriation of testimony and auto/biography in the visual and performing arts, literature, cinema, and the media to make political claims or claims that can be interpreted as political because they question laws and practices that regulate women’s bodies, sexuality, and individual rights. By concentrating on uncovering the foundational nature of testimonial literature in the articulation and the politicization of recent Moroccan women’s self- and collective representation, Revisionary Narratives identifies themes, styles, and forms that further the understanding of the specificities of this body of literature. In particular, it shows how women’s testimonial literature is rooted in sociocultural and political conditions in Morocco, but is also shaped by global encounters and struggles that draw from different linguistic traditions, cultures, and histories. While the influence of Arab autobiographical and resistance literature, as well as traditions from France, are recognized and addressed in various contexts of academic scholarship, connections to ‘third world’ feminist resistance literature and Latin American testimonial literature and their theorization are rarely addressed, especially in studies that analyze women’s testimonial literature as a part of the larger corpus of women’s literature in French or in Arabic. By attending to these connections, this book establishes new modes of inquiry and comparative frameworks that encourage and offer different models for future exploration of Moroccan women’s testimonial literature as well as its affinities with other literatures. The book’s approach to major documents in the field—Poèmes, Talk of Darkness, and Stolen Lives—builds on previous research done by scholars in literature, anthropology, and sociology, but also offers the first close interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of all three works. It is also the first study to use other testimonies by Moroccan women that have been published in recent years as a result of research sponsored by the IER, in human rights reports, and in journalistic investigations to contextualize their representations of gendered violence and women’s resistance. In doing so, Revisionary Narratives accounts for major differences amongst Moroccan women in their access to public speech,

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thus problematizing the ideas and concepts of ‘collective testimonial voices’ and ‘speaking for the voiceless.’ This comprehensive approach to women’s testimonial literature underlines and further explicates the achievements and potential of these narratives in regard to social change and the destabilization of various systems that perpetuate women’s marginalization. However, unlike previous studies, it also addresses their limits and the limitations they face in attempting to formulate an aesthetics of solidarity and a political discourse that promotes the rights and individual freedom of all Moroccan women in a society where gender issues intersect in crucial ways with class, ethnicity, language, education level, and geographical location. The multisided analysis of testimonial literature aims at building better-informed connections with other forms of expression. The second part of this book, highlighting more recent developments in auto/ biography and testimony in the visual arts, performing arts, and cyber narratives, demonstrates the influence of prison and resistance narratives on other forms of cultural production by women visible in the growing politicization of individual and collective life narratives. However, it also moves beyond the Years of Lead and traditional understandings of autobiography and biography to include under-researched media and forms of life narratives. The exploration of works and public platforms that appeared between 2005 and 2012 shows that women continued to use their own and other women’s life stories to create images, texts, and performances that interrogate and act on sociocultural constructs of gendered identities. In doing so, women political activists and former prisoners, as well as prominent and rising Moroccan and Moroccan-born cultural actors and social activists, record, contest, and participate in the major transformations the country has undergone since its independence, especially in the last two decades. The selection of works and women featured in these chapters is, again, far from exhaustive. Rather than a survey of women’s cultural productions and a classification of them according to their media, language, or their author’s identities, my choice was dictated by themes and forms deployed within these life narratives. The goal was twofold: first, to uncover continuities and novelties in the deployment of auto/biography and testimony by women while also focusing on emerging media that are making an impact in the renewal of Morocco’s cultural productions but have been neglected in academic studies, which often focus on literature and cinema; second, to stress the importance of these media in archiving, reflecting, and instigating social change.

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A more inclusive approach to women’s cultural productions is essential in the face of major transformations in the production and consumption of culture, especially in relation to Morocco’s transition from authoritarianism and a closed economy to semi-authoritarianism and a liberal economy. Revisionary Narratives attends to the dynamics of a period and a process that remain unclearly defined and largely unpredictable as well as their impact on gender definitions and relations. It does so by highlighting formal and thematic innovations in women’s self- and collective representations as they testify to important events and conditions in a variety of media. It does so by accounting for the emergence of a significant experimental scene in photography and the visual arts in the last two decades in Morocco. The enthusiasm for these historically rather marginalized forms of expression is visible in the number of art galleries that continue to appear in the country, as well as the project of the Musée de la Photographie et des Arts Visuels de Marrakech (Marrakesh Museum for Photography and Visual Art, MMP+), conceived as a laboratory for a new generation of Moroccan artists, curators, and viewers, and one of the world’s largest photography museums. Even though the MMP+ announced in 2016 that it was temporarily closing its doors, only three years after its grand opening in 2013, the project, along with the Musée Mohammed VI d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, MMVI), which opened in 2014, shows an effort to capitalize on emerging forms in the arts to establish the kingdom as a hub for culture and strengthen its representation as an enclave of political stability, in contrast with the chaos that the larger region is currently undergoing. These new developments created an opportunity for many Moroccan-born women artists, like Lalla Essaydi and Carolle Bénitah, who were working abroad, to return to their country of birth to showcase their innovative life narratives. Bénitah’s work is currently represented by and hosted at Galerie 127 in Marrakesh, the Maghreb’s first photography gallery, which opened in 2006. In September 2013, the artist participated in the exhibition 10 Contemporary Moroccan Photographers, the first to be organized by the MMP+. As for Essaydi, her work is represented by the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston and the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City, and she has an art studio in Marrakesh. Both artists were included in the 2014 inaugural exhibition of the MMVI, Morocco’s first modern art museum. Entitled 1914–2014: 100 Years of Creation, the exhibition brought together some four hundred works of a hundred and fifty Moroccan artists.

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The two artists’ works also represent potent examples of women who mobilize their experiences in various national and cultural spaces to revisit their early socialization as women in Morocco. Originating from different ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds, Bénitah’s and Essaydi’s works reflect the diversity of Moroccan society. Yet their images capture patriarchal constructions of gender and womanhood that are imprinted in space, family dynamics and rituals, and the female body that cross ethnic, religious, and class boundaries. The presence of common patterns and themes in their works, their use of photography, henna, and embroidery, and their use of auto/biography and testimony as a way to revisit and revise oppressive gender norms, links their works to those by other women considered in this book. At the same time, Bénitah and Essaydi expose other perspectives on the construction of gendered subjectivities. Their itinerant aesthetics capture the transnationalization of Moroccan identity, shaped by the remnants of the country’s colonial past, twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury migration flows, and increasingly transnational and global art economies and practices. In attending to these important elements, this book promotes a methodology for the analysis of contemporary visual art produced by Moroccan women that mobilizes different theoretical and critical routes within various traditions including autobiography, photography, family photography, feminism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, translocality, and diaspora studies. Such a methodology is necessary for uncovering important patterns in the ways in which contemporary Moroccan women artists articulate women’s and gender issues in relation to flows, linkages, and identities shaped by historical and contemporary forms of transnationalism and globalization. This approach contributes to the growing field of transnational and migration studies, especially as it relates to the analysis of the increasing number of cultural producers originating from Arab and/or Muslim-majority societies and working and/or living elsewhere, who use their hyphenated identities and their in-between positionality as a lens to explore issues of identity, cross-culturalism, migration, and displacement from a gendered perspective. This book also looks at feminist modes of resistance directly linked to major sociopolitical events, like the Mudawana (family code) reform in 2004 and the Arab uprisings in 2010–2011, which significantly impacted public speech and the articulation of women’s experiences and rights. In doing so, again, the book features exemplars of women’s cultural productions that have had little to no presence in academic

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research. The focus on Dialy and Qandisha: Magazwine collaboratif féminin allows for the exploration of contemporary experimental uses of women’s life narratives to reinvigorate Moroccan feminism and sustain the legal advances obtained by women since the family code reform and the liberalization of speech brought about by the Arab revolutions. The analysis of Dialy in the framework of a comparative study of women’s auto/biographical and testimonial acts not only showcases women’s contributions to major innovations in Moroccan theater, it also highlights how Naïma Zitan and Maha Sano reclaim orality and storytelling to create a feminine social theater that is geared towards triggering change in the perception of women’s bodies, sexuality, and individual rights. The flow between voices—those of the women who testify in discussion forums; those of Zitan and Sano, who condense Moroccan women’s stories to create a multi-voiced narrative re-enacting major transitions in a woman’s life; and those of the actresses who perform the stories and transmit them to mixed and transnational audiences—advocates for a public discourse on gender and women’s issues that is grounded in the female body, local experiences of women, and secular and transnational ideals of feminism. Similarly, situating Qandisha within a history of women’s resistance shows how in less than two decades the use of cellular phones, the Internet, and social media has revolutionized public expression and contestation in Morocco and increased the visibility of sections of the population whose voices have traditionally been underrepresented in the public sphere. The aim behind the choice of these particular works and modes was to highlight the dialectic between continuity and innovation in women’s use of auto/ biography and testimony to occupy the public space and impact socioeconomic and political change, both chronologically and across various media. Another goal was to draw attention to future research on how women, especially young women, are innovating in established fields or using new media to redefine the agenda of secular feminism and build new alliances at the national and international level. In showing the pervasiveness of auto/biography and testimony in Moroccan women’s cultural production, as well as the underrepresentation of this topic in academic research, especially in comparative and interdisciplinary studies, Revisionary Narratives fills a gap in Moroccan studies and provides findings that are useful to a variety of academic disciplines. It also provides a model for the study of women’s cultural productions in other locations within the MENA region. Finally, it shows that the works that these women have been producing in the last

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few decades address issues and audiences that are simultaneously local, regional, translocal, and transnational. Their discussions of gender and women’s issues, reflecting societal transformations in a constantly changing and connected world, can no longer be apprehended within the traditional divides that have dominated the study of Maghrebi cultural productions in the past, especially as reflected in the Francophone and Arabic studies linguistic and academic categories. Morocco’s tumultuous history, which inspired the women’s life narratives analyzed in this book, is far from being over. Nearly twenty years after the official end of the Years of Lead and almost a decade after the popular uprisings that shook the MENA region and resulted in Morocco’s new constitution in 2011, a lot has changed. Yet, in some respects, nothing has changed. Morocco’s society remains deeply patriarchal and women’s voices, though they are becoming louder and louder, still often fall on deaf ears. As a result, women, especially young women, continue to seek more efficient strategies and technologies to voice their own and other women’s life experiences. I look forward to seeing analyses of life narratives that are currently making an impact but which are not the main focus of this study. For instance, the resurgence of interest in documentary film directed by young women such as Hind Bensari deserves scholarly attention. Her 475: Break the Silence, an entirely crowd-funded film, is part of a cultural movement that signals the revival of the documentary, a form of expression that had almost disappeared in Morocco. 475: Break the Silence’s bold themes—women’s sexuality, virginity, and Morocco’s rape culture—are reminiscent of Fatima Jebli Ouazzani’s Dans la maison de mon père (In My Father’s House) (1998), a documentary in which the director fuses fiction and intimate personal stories, including interviews with family members. However, Bensari’s documentary also signals new forms of interplay between documentary, auto/biography, and activism. The director’s use of the Internet and crowdfunding allowed her to circumvent forms of censorship that have a tendency to minimize the originality and impact of projects funded by the state or by foreign and/or private institutions, which often impose their own agendas. The documentary was also an important part of a civil society movement that ultimately succeeded in pressuring the Moroccan government into repealing the infamous Article 475 of the penal code that allowed male rapists to marry their underage victims to avoid prosecution and prison. In May 2018, Bensari’s second documentary, We Could Be Heroes, premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.

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Featuring the hopes and resilience of two disabled friends, Azzedine and Youssef, as they attempt to conquer the Rio Paralympic Games amid an environment that lacks support and opportunity for underprivileged youth, Bensari’s new documentary is a sign that this form of expression will continue to develop and have an impact, shedding light on the lives of marginalized groups. Some of Morocco’s other constants remain intact, such as the sacred nature of the institution of the monarchy, widespread corruption, one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the Arab world, a failing public education system, high unemployment, and a repressive makhzen. This reality is also bound to bring about new forms of life narratives. I write this conclusion as I learn of the shocking news of prison sentences of one to twenty years handed down to fifty-three individuals who participated in the largely nonviolent protests organized by the Hirak movement in 2017 in the Rif. Although I do not look forward to it, I anticipate the emergence of new stories of political violence. The makhzen’s treatment of Nasser Zafzafi, the thirty-nine-year-old leader of Hirak, and his companions already reveals the re-emergence of old, and the appearance of new, violent tactics to suppress dissent and break the Moroccan people’s will to challenge the status quo. Without a doubt, and as signaled by the fragmentary narratives of torture and intimidation appearing in the traditional media and social media, the experiences of violence of Zafzafi and other young men and women are the location of a trial of strength between them and the makhzen regarding the shaping of definitions of citizenship, freedom of expression, and protest, as well as the ideals of femininity and masculinity. This reality is also bound to produce pioneering life narratives that will deserve scholarly attention.

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Index Index

A Thousand and One Nights 60–62, 63, 68, 83, 84n1 Abdel Nasser, Tahia 11 Abouon, Arwa 153 Abouzeid, Leila 11, 62, 209 Abu Zayd, Layla 30 Abu-Lughod, Lila 147–148 Ahmed, Leila 62 Alaoui, Leila 154, 160 No Pasara 226 Almutawakel, Boushra 153 Amine, Khalid 197, 200 Amireh, Amal 149 Amiti, Khadija 209 Anishchenkova, Valerie 9, 32, 37 Arif, Hassan 214–215 auto/biographical works 1–22 ‘contract of identity’ 162–163 cultural power of truth-telling 14–16, 63 individual and collective narration 32–37, 92–93, 103–104, 225, 228–235 masculinization of history 73–74 transgressions of social order 37–45 Ayouch, Noureddine 209 Badawi, Abdelkader 204 Badran, Margot 146 Barrada, Yto 160 Barthes, Roland 19 Camera Lucida 163–164, 168, 178–179, 184

Basu, Srimati 207 Batchen, Geoffrey 180 Bazin, André 163, 168 Becker, Cynthia 150 Beckett, Sandra 177 Belghazi, Marwa 215 Benbrahim, Nouria 194 Benhadou, Amal 194 Bénitah, Carolle 5, 6–7, 16, 231–232 Chez le photographe 172–174, 176–177, 180 L’adolescence 161–162, 166 L’âge adulte 161–162, 166 Le Bouquet (The Bouquet) 183 Le Cicatrice (The Scar) 159–160, 161, 162, 165–167, 170–171, 180, 183 Le déguisement (The Disguise) 170, 180–187 Le loup (The Wolf) 175–179, 180 L’Enfance marocaine 19, 161–162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 180, 182, 183 Les cafards 170 photo-embroidery images 159–187 Photos Souvenirs 159–162, 166–167, 171–172 Sur le Canapé (On the Sofa) 182–183 Benjamin, Walter 183–184 Benohoud, Hicham 226

254

Revisionary Narratives

Bensari, Hind 215 475: Break the Silence 234 We Could Be Heroes 234–235 Bensmaïa, Réda 44 Benzekri, Driss 117 Berchid, Abdelkarim 204, 205 Berque, Jacques 135 Beverley, John 15, 16, 39, 66–67, 69, 103 Bhabha, Homi K. 124–125, 133–134, 136, 171 Binebine, Aziz 225 Boal, Augusto 197 Boltanski, Christian 164 Bouab, Widad 31, 52, 67, 70–76, 92, 102–108, 111, 228–229 Bouachrine, Ibtissam 143 Bouazizi, Mohammed 192–193 Boukhari, Khadija 104–105, 112–113, 116–117 Boum, Aomar 168 Bourequat, Ali 80, 88n32 Bourequat, Bayazid 80 Bourequat, Midhat René, Mort Vivant! 80, 88n32 Boutkhil, Soumia 29–30 Box, Laura Chakravarty 205 Brecht, Bertolt 198 Butler, Judith 152 Carlson, Marvin 197 Carr, Robert 69 Cézanne, Paul 128 Charaf, Maria 84 Charpentier-Boude, Christine 184 Chberreq, Driss 225 Cheref, Abdelkader 47 Childe-Pemberton, Louisa 176 Chimenti, Elisa 30 Cixous, Hèlène 29, 35–36, 54, 99 Cooke, Miriam 99, 145–146, 147, 149–150 Darrow, Susannah 142–143 Déjeux, Jean 7, 8, 30

Delacroix, Eugène 127–128, 129, 156n25 Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement 123–124, 125, 127–128, 131–132, 135–136 Deleuze, Gilles 44 Diaconoff, Suellen 7, 61 Djebar, Assia 30, 62, 68, 99, 135–136, 144, 148–149 Durrant, Sam 19, 169, 171 Edwards, Natalie 33, 99 Ekhtiar, Maryam 147 El Bouih, Fatna 2–3, 4, 6, 11–12, 14–15, 28, 31, 45, 50, 65–68, 84 Atlasiyate 71, 91–92, 111 Talk of Darkness (Hadith Al Atama) 17, 31, 46, 52, 61–62, 66, 67–70, 90–93, 102–108, 109, 111–112, 228–229 writing for voiceless victims 102–108, 110–111 writing the woman resister 70–76, 90–93, 113–114 El Khattabi, Abdelkrim 43, 49 El Ouazzani, Abdesselam 41 El Saadawi, Nawal 30, 62, 125, 135, 149 Elbouazaoui, Farida 194 Elliott, Katja Zvan 51 Ennaji, Moha 31 Ensler, Eve, The Vagina Monologues 5, 19, 195, 206–207 Essaydi, Lalla 4–5, 6–7, 16, 182, 231–232 accusation of bias due to upper-class upbringing 143–144 Converging Territories 125–126, 138–139, 144 Crossing Boundaries 143, 146 Harem 125–126, 140–142 La Grande Odalisque 139 Les Femmes du Maroc 123, 125–126, 126–132, 138–139 representation of Arab-Muslim identity and femininity 18, 123–154, 160, 175, 178 Evrard, Amy Young 214

Index Facos, Michelle 133 Fanon, Frantz 32 Favorini, Attilio 198 Feldman, Allen 84 femininity Arab Uprisings and women’s changing roles 193–194 importance of female testimonial narratives 2, 8–9, 18–20, 90–93, 226–227 representations in art 123–127 restricted freedom of speech and public spaces 195–196, 203–204, 228 shikha terminology 204–205 fictional works 14–16 Filali, Amina 212–213, 214, 218 Fitoussi, Michèle 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 77–78, 82, 97, 100–101 Fouet-Fauvernier, Jeanne 61 Freire, Paolo 197 Freitag, Ulrike 6 Ftouh, Rabea 27, 45 Gauch, Susan 64 Genocchio, Benjamin 142 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 133 Marché d’esclaves 125 Ghambou, Mokhtar 77–78 Gilmore, Leigh 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 135 Gontard, Marc 7, 8 Graciet, Catherine 216 Gresh, Kristen 148 Grimm Brothers 175, 176 Guattari, Félix 44 Guégan, Stéphane 147, 148 Guessous, Nadia 15, 110, 112, 115–116 Gugelberger, Georg 103 Guillerot, Julie 111, 114–115 Gusdorf, Georges 43–44, 170 Habjouqa, Tanya 153 Hachkar, Kamal 168

255

Halawani, Rula 153 Hall, Stuart 186–187 Harlow, Barbara 15, 42, 45, 47, 67, 83, 103–104 Hefuna, Susan 153 Herzenni, Ahmed 73, 81, 116 Higbee, Will 6–7 Hirsch, Marianne 19, 166–167, 171, 178, 179, 180 Holland, Patricia 19, 165 Homsi Vinson, Pauline 14 Houdaïfa, Hicham 112, 115–116 IER (Morocco’s Truth Commission) 111–117, 225–226, 229–230 Women Who Broke Down the Wall of Silence 109–110, 112–114, 115–117 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 133 La Grande Odalisque 125 Jay, Cleo 197 Jay, Paul 5–6 Jbabdi, Latifa 31, 45, 52, 67, 70–76, 92–93, 102–108, 111, 117, 209, 228–229 Kaddour, Youssfi 90–91 Kalima 209 Kamal, Mustapha 46 Katchka, Kinsey 146, 147 Kearney, Michael 103 Khannous, Touria 61, 64–65, 77 Khatibi, Abdelkébir 124–125, 133–134, 135 Kilani, Leila, Nos lieux interdits (Our Forbidden Places) 225–226 Kino, Mona 204 Kuhn, Annette 19, 163, 165, 174 Laâbi, Abdellatif 30 Lauren, Eric 216 Le Gac, Jean 164 Lejeune, Philippe 38, 43, 162, 163 Levy, André 167

256

Revisionary Narratives

Lkhoumass, Aicha 209 Lyotard, Jean-François 164 Mackintosh, Fiona 179 Maddad, Youssef 91 Maghrebi diaspora 6–7, 8 Mamfakinch (No Concessions) 208 Martin, Florence 7 Martin, Rosy 180–181 Mazmouz, Fatima 226 Meerzon, Yana 171 Mehta, Brinda 5 MENA (Middle East and North Africa) 207 autobiographical discourse 1–2, 9 Menchù, Rigoberta 66, 69, 86n13, 103 Menebhi, Abdelaziz 45–46 Menebhi, Saïda 2–3, 4, 6, 11–12, 14–15, 16–17, 228 analysis of prostitution as form of oppression 93–97 blurring of individual and collective narrative 32–41 erasing gender in socio-political narrative 45–49, 52–53, 70 feminist narrative in prison writings 27–54, 82, 84 plurality of narrative 92–93 Poèmes, lettres, écrits de prison 29–31, 32–45, 51–52, 61, 65, 66, 67, 93–97, 105, 107, 111, 228–229 reiteration of hierarchical power relationship 94–97 Menin, Laura 61 Mernissi, Fatima 10, 11–12, 30, 62, 69, 125, 135, 144, 148–149, 209 Dreams of Trespass 129–130 Mésavage, Matilde 101 Misch, Georg 161 Misk, Fedwa 16, 19, 193, 207–208, 210, 212, 214, 223n47 see also Qandisha Moallem, Minoo 149–150

Moore, Lindsey 137 Mora, Gilles 168–169 Morocco feminist discourse in transition period 2–4, 7–9, 10–13, 16–17, 28–31, 208, 227–228 importance of female testimonial narratives 2, 8–9, 18–20, 90–93, 213–215, 226–230 liberalization of speech following Arab Uprisings 193–194, 199–200, 213–215, 232–233 Mouvement du 20 février (February 20 Movement) 193–194, 202, 208 socio-political activism 9–13, 30–31, 40–41, 56n15 women’s cultural productions 9–13, 18–20, 231–235 women’s public testimony hindered by gendered norms 90–93, 105, 195–196, 226–227 Years of Lead (1961–1999) 2–3, 4, 11, 15, 17–18, 20n2, 27, 31, 34, 61, 226–228, 230 Mudawana (family code) 10, 19, 76, 87n24 attempts to reform 192–194, 199–200, 201–202, 232–233 ‘Muslimwoman’ representations 145–147 Nachtergael, Magali 164 Neshat, Shirin 125, 144, 148, 153 Niati, Houria 125, 144 No to Torture 136–137 Nietzsche, Friedrich 135 Nisaa’ Al Maghrib (Women of Morocco) 209, 210 Nnaemeka, Obioma 50–51 Nochlin, Linda 131–132, 133 Okacha, Fatima 45 Orenstein, Catherine, Little Red Riding Hood 175–176, 177–178

Index Orlando, Valérie K. 7, 31, 39, 47–48, 61, 74, 96, 150 Ouazzani, Fatima Jebli 234 Oufkir, Abdellatif 63, 79 Oufkir, Malika 2–3, 14–15, 28, 31, 84 criticism of representativeness of narrator 92–93, 98–102 failure to address family history 77–83, 100 plural narrative of women’s subjugation 97–102 Stolen Lives (La prisonnière) 17, 60–61, 62, 63–70, 77–83, 97–102, 111, 228–229 Oufkir, Maria 63–64 Oufkir, General Mohamed 60–61, 77–79, 84–85n2, 98–99, 100 Oufkir, Raouf 63 Oukacha, Fatima 27 Outaleb, Fatima 209 Perrault, Charles 175, 176, 177 Perry, Catherine 61, 78, 101 Picasso, Pablo 156n25 Les Femmes d’Alger 135–136 Plummer, Ken 13 postcolonial studies 1–2, 30 importance of Moroccan women’s auto/biography and testimony 2–3, 8–9, 30 Qandisha 5, 19–20, 207–217, 223n47, 233 alternative space for feminism 217–219 mode of disseminating gendered discourses of resistance 193–194, 210–212 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 127 Riad, Fatima Zohra 217 Ribeiro de Menezes, Allison 186 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray 176 Rosello, Mireille 19, 169–170

257

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions 162–163 Rubenstein, Jeffrey 185, 186 Sadiqi, Fatima 31, 138, 139, 142, 151–152 Said, Edward 124–125, 131, 147 Orientalism 133–134 Salime, Zakia 10, 202, 214 Sano, Maha 193, 196, 199, 200, 202–203, 206, 233 Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain 34–35 Schellekens, Jona 187 Serfaty, Abraham 27 shahada 3, 56n16, 71–72, 74 Shuman, Amy 186 Skalli, Loubna 210 Slimani, Leila 206, 226 Slimani, Malika 214–215 Slyomovics, Susan 15, 31, 34, 39, 51, 72, 105, 108–109 review of Stolen Lives 78–79 The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco 46, 61, 90–91, 114–115 Smith, Sidonie 8–9 Sommer, Doris 15, 44, 45, 66–67, 90, 103 Spence, Jo 180–181 Spitzer, Leo 178, 179 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 13 Stora, Benjamin 83 Szeemann, Harald 164 Taarji, Hinde 209 Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence 176, 177 Thamania Mars (March 8) 209, 210 Théâtre Aquarium 195, 197, 200–201, 202, 205 Chaqaiquo Annou’amane (Poppies) 201 Hikayat Nissaa (Women’s Stories) 200–201 Trabelsi, Bahaa 215–216 Turner, Victor 185

258

Revisionary Narratives

Valassopoulos, Anastasia 99 Vali, Murtaza 143–144 Viña, Daniel Galvan 215–216 Von Oppen, Achim 6 Watson, Julia 8–9 Whitlock, Gillian 32 Williams, Philip 52 Winegar, Jessica 147–148

Yúdice, George 15, 53, 69, 103 Zafzafi, Nasser 235 Zekri, Khalid 7, 8, 105 Zeroual, Abdellatif 43, 49, 86n15 Zervigón, Andrés Marion 150–151 Zitan, Naïma 4, 5, 16, 196–197, 200, 202 Dialy 4, 19–20, 193–207, 217–219, 233