Since the 1950’s Morocco has steadily undergone the process of transformation from a primarily rural to an essentially urban country. In 1950, less than 25 percent of the population resided in a city; by 2000, Morocco’s urban population represented nearly 57 percent of the country’s inhabitants. With this rapid urbanization, the shantytowns (bidonvilles in French, l-brarik in Moroccan Arabic) that first began to appear in the 1920’s have come to house more than 8 percent of the city-dwelling population. As Lamia Zaki argues in her article, “Transforming the City From Below,” the shantytown is something that inherently develops in opposition to both the State authority and the “regular urban fabric.” The State itself employs a kind of administration that Zaki refers to as “management by absence,” the objective of which is “to fix the shantytown dweller in an infra-legal situation, a ‘pseudo-clandestineness,’ never formally recognizing his (her) rights as a city-dweller.” As a space, the shantytown has been similarly underrepresented in contemporary Moroccan literature, with the notable exception of the novelist Muhammad Zifzaf. Though Muhammad Zifzaf is one of Morocco’s most important modern novelists, he remains little discussed in European languages. This paper will look at Zifzaf’s novel "Muhawilat ‘aysh" and the way in which it represents the space of Casablanca’s bidonvilles. The novel attempts to remove Casablanca’s shantytown dwellers from the pseudo-clandestineness mentioned above by both restoring them to the largely socially selective landscape of Moroccan literature and granting them visibility within the larger intellectual/cultural discourse. James C. Scott has suggested that the public performance required of subordinates by elites produces a discourse that he has termed the “public transcript.” In contrast, there is another discourse that takes place backstage among subordinates beyond the gaze of those in power, inaccessible to them. As a deliberately obscured discourse, this “hidden transcript” is often lost to the historical record. Zifzaf’s novel, then, serves the double of function of figuring the shantytown into Moroccan cultural discourse and writing this “hidden transcript” of the oppressed into the public record. Here, I will examine the aesthetics of this project and the ways in which Zifzaf both succeeds and fails in his execution.