In 2006, the Community Museum of Ben M’Sik opened in the Casablanca neighborhood of Ben M’Sik in order to document life in the rapidly changing urban space through oral interviews. The museum sought to offer new narratives of what it meant to live in Morocco’s formerly largest shantytown that went beyond accepted stories of dissidence and crime. In 2010, Moroccan writer and painter Mahi Binebine published the novel, Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen (The Stars of Sidi Moumen) which was praised by critics for describing the life conditions of another Casablanca shantytown. In describing the path to terrorism taken by a group of young men, the novel sought to humanize and change the terms through which terrorism and its roots are seen. In this paper, I compare Binebine’s novel to the public history project in the Community Museum in Ben M’Sik, and explore the politics of narrating and memorializing sites of urban poverty in Morocco. I argue that by focusing on suffering and lack as the sole lens of understanding for Sidi Moumen, Binebine produces a reductive vision of life in an informal settlement, and all the while attempting to critique the state, caters to state security discourses about terrorism. I argue that the participatory approach adopted by the community museum of Ben M’Sik offers a more nuanced and rich description of life in the neighborhood that upends the stereotypical depictions of poverty present both in Binebine’s novel and in state discourses about urban renewal and crime.