Contemporary Moroccan social and political realities have become an important field of postcolonial inquiry. In this paper I critically review the experience of political prison writing published in the 1960s, with a focus on the work of ʻAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb, Sab ‘at Abwāb (1965) [Seven Doors]. I also explore his relation to other Moroccan writers’ prison writing. This novel testifies to the author’s life and prison experience in the post-independence Moroccan prison and entails a debate associated with political imprisonment, a rethinking of the effect of incarceration and a reflection and a reevaluation of how this process has informed the project of nation-building. I argue that prison writing has become more foregrounded in Moroccan contemporary novels, whereby authors reevaluate their experience in a socially, economically, culturally and politically changing nation. I discuss how the experience of Ghallab’s political incarceration and his representation of the Moroccan intellectual struggle for cultural and political agency provides a point of reference for understanding the Moroccan activism of 1960s and the transition to what later came to be known as the ‘years of lead.’